Droid, LOTR, X-Mas Party, Etc.

I Got a Droid

Even though I thought I wouldn’t do it, I broke down and got my new Verizon phone last week. Seeing Lauren space out for 40 minutes at a time on her Droid on car rides home from work made me think she was on to something, so I got a refurbished version of the exact same phone she has, the Droid X, costing me just $49 after re-upping for two more years with Verizon. It’s way cooler than I expected, now that I am able to customize everything to my own settings. Before I just played with a couple apps of Lauren’s. My favorite app is definitely Foursquare. I like checking in everywhere I go and seeing who else is there. For instance, we were in Green Mill Sunday watching the Vikings game and I checked in on Foursquare and noticed there were 3 other Foursquare users there. I didn’t approach them and introduce myself, but I think that is one of the ideas behind that app… I could do it if I wanted.

LOTR = Hatred

The next movie in our Best Picture project is 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the third installment of the LOTR trilogy. So in order to make sense of that movie, we felt we needed to see the first two. I had attempted to watch the first movie, Fellowship of the Ring, once in college and almost instantly fell asleep. We watched it one night after work last week, and I thought it was decent, considering fantasy-type movies are definitely not my idea of entertainment. But then on Saturday night we watched Two Towers, and unfortunately it was the extended director’s cut version which put it at well over four hours. I HATED IT. I absolutely HATED every second of it. At one point I turned to Lauren and hollered “Just get to the f*$%ing place you’re going and throw that damn ring in! This is taking too loooooong!” It was nominated for many Academy Awards including Best Picture, but I have not one good thing to say about the storyline. I can respect the acting and directing and visual effects, but not the stupid story that just goes on and on and on and on. Okay, I have one good thing to say about it: I thought the Treebeard character was amusing. We’ll see what happens in the third LOTR movie which we plan to watch this week.

Company Christmas Party: Take 5

On Friday we had the company Christmas party after work. They couldn’t have picked a better day for it! With massive snowfall hammering the Twin Cities for the fourth time already this fall, traffic was at a complete standstill. So I got off work early, picked up Lauren, and headed back to the Eden Prairie Center to the classy Wildfire restaurant for the party. The highlight was definitely the food. We were treated to appetizers, salads, entrees, and desserts, plus drinks all night. My 10 oz. filet mignon was awesome. Afterwards the party spilled over to Redstone until about 2am. It was a good time overall, but in my book it was nowhere close to as much fun as last year’s Gasthof party.

Other Weekend Stuff

We slept late on Saturday, and later in the day I decided to go out on a liquor store run. As you may or may not know, tequila drinks are among my favorite, and there aren’t a whole lot of drinks with tequila in them, so I decided I wanted a margarita… and not just any margarita, but a pomegranate margarita which I had tried the night before at the party and thought was super tasty. Now I will be the first to admit this is far from a manly drink. First of all it is pink. Second of all it has a lime wedge on the glass rim. I posted the picture on Facebook just to see what kind of reaction I’d get, and of course the manly men of Facebook gave me crap. But dammit, I drank three of those in the comfort of our apartment that night and I enjoyed the hell out of them!

Sunday evening I had to DJ a wedding dance, which ended up being more of an extended cocktail hour. Only 50 people were on hand, most of them children, and not many were interested in dancing. I was scheduled till 1am, but was sent home around 9:30 when the attendance dwindled to single digits. That was okay with me, seeing how I could then get a good night’s sleep, but I lost out on an extra $100 I could have earned.

More Bar Fun

This weekend is the annual 12 Bars of Christmas charitable bar crawl put on by a group of guys that includes Brian Gioielli. We’ve attended twice before, and it’s always a blast. In addition to that, I was informed this morning that I had won a contest to be an amateur bartender at a bar in Northeast Minneapolis called Moose on Monroe’s on Saturday, January 29. I was told that I must bring at least ten guests, and we get a $200 bar tab! The only stipulation is I must go behind the bar and make everyone’s drinks. The tab increases for each additional person I bring, so come one, come all!