Moving On.....

I'm bummed because my favorite daily column on ESPN.com had its final run today, The Daily Quickie. Dan Shanoff, its author, has recently joined blogspot, and I'm going to link him on the side. He does good work, and his column will be missed (by me, at least).

Moving

We're moving......


Work's negative--again. It's getting worse than before. Accusations of outright stealing, shirking the system, etc. It's enough to wear a guy down. This used to be a place that I thought I could work until I was 45--now I'll be lucky to hit 28 there. My hair (what's left of it) would be gray at that point. When I left Grizzly's I was a 25 year-old still acting as 21--now I'm almost 27 and feel 35. I found myself insanely jealous of a group of guys in their work duds hanging out until 7:30, just drinking beer and wondering aloud about accounts. Man, I should've went to real college.

The new house is going to rule--6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms. We'll have space, which is something that we're not used to. Plus, I can walk to Saturday afternoon Hamline football games.

A girl we work with got robbed at gunpoint tonight, along with a friend. They're okay, thankfully, but lost everything they had on them. That makes three separate instances in less than a year. How many times and how many terrified calls will it take to get some police presence around the bar? I have very colorful thoughts on this subject, but that's another time and another place.

Stacey's Birthday in Iowa

A simple camping trip was planned this past weekend for Stacey's birthday. We went down to Clear Lake State Park in Iowa, which is just outside of Mason City. Stacey, Pete, Myself and Mandy, and Stacey's parents were there initially, and we were joined by her sister and her boyfriend. Good times were had due to the amount of alcohol ingested-1 bottle of Jameson, 1 1/2 bottles of Crown Royal, 1/2 bottle of Stoli Blueberry, and 2 cases of Miller Lite between 6-8 people over the span of two days. I'm pretty sure that I still have catching up to do on sleep.

Mandy, Pete, Stacey, and Bryce
Tough-Guy Central
"It's a hefty-fuckin' fee..."
Freshly-tattooed knuckles (more on this to come)

There's way more pictures to come--these make everything look tame, but Pete took all the good ones. They're coming soon.

We'll Open Up a Restaurant In Sante Fe....

Sunday night was a lot of fun. Stacey and Pete let me in on the secret that the four of us (Mandy would round that group out) were going out for fancy cocktails (which is right in my wheelhouse) at the Downtowner Woodfire Grill and then off the Ordway to see Rent. The best part of the secret is that we all walk in to dinner looking rather nice, eat out good food, have nice cocktails (which for me means Heineken on tap), and leave. On the way out, the hostess says "are you guys attending Rent tonight?" All of us being terrible liars, we shout "NO" and leave. Mandy, of course, sees right through this and our cover was blown. A secret that had been kept by me and Stacey and a few others for over a week and a half was blown 10 minutes before the event was to go down. Awesome.

If you've never seen Rent, you should--even the movie does it some justice. It probably meant a lot more 6-7 years ago, but the music is very good and the characters are very believable and you can empathize with all of them. Very good all the way around. Enough about that.

Hands down, the highlight of the evening came after the show, when we went to Axel's Bonfire on Grand. Once, probably 4 years ago while hanging out at Chang O'Hara's, a friend's girlfriend told us that it was time for us to grow up and graduate to bars like Bonfire rather than hanging out at places like Chang's and Billy's. I still laugh every time that's brought up. Anyway, with Stacey and Mandy in the bathroom, Pete and I stand in the entryway and wait to be seated. To the right of the entryway is a small, open-air lobby, furnished with a couple of couches for people to sit on if they have to wait. On these couches were three blank blackboards, used for the daily specials, with a huge bucket of chalk right there. Harmlessly, Pete draws a small flower on the chalkboard. As he's finishing up his handiwork, a server with the most nasally voice ever heard approaches us and says: "Are you serious? How do you even do that?" And before we could reply, she says "table for two, boys?" So of course, I'm automatically put off by this woman and the bar itself. We sit down, Mandy and Stacey rejoin us, and we proceed to be fairly loud in a place that doesn't have very many people to beging with. We were kind of shit-talking the waitress for how she handled Flowergate, and the manager overheard us and came to apologize. We realized that it was time to let it go, so we're like "no big deal, our fault, etc." So the bill comes, Pete puts it on his card, and we leave a cash tip. On the line were one normally leaves a tip, Pete drew the same flower he drew on the chalkboard. It was awesome.

After that, we went to Fern's and I of course got sick. Because I'm good like that.

I've been to the Metrodome twice in the last week and a half or so--July 31, Silva vs. Texas Rangers (W, 14-2) and Aug. 11, Silva vs. Toronto Blue Jays (L, 5-0). Nothing like a little live baseball in the friendly confines of the Big Inflatable Toilet (thanks, Nick, even though I hate your show) to lighten your mood. Thanks to Angela for coming to meet me and watch the game. Granted, she was going anyway due to the fact that she went to high school with Eric Hinske, but still. It beat going by myself and buying a program to keep score (this time). I'm feeling especially cool since this photo was taken with my phone. I'm usually too lazy and irresponsible to carry the camera around.

Hey! Chad Johnson got a new haircut! Amazingly enough, he, his no-relation brother Rudi, TJ Houshmanzadeh, and Carson Palmer are the only Bengals not in jail. I think Bengals Management should make an offer to Maurice Clarett, just to take some of the glare off their regular players.


My sentiments, exactly. Thanks for stopping by, it was good to see both of you again.

"...Ask yourself, 'Is this good for the company?'"

Here's a list of just a couple of changes you can expect at what used to be a really cool bar:

• Uniforms: Gone are the days of individual expression, creativity, etc. Say hello to black shirts with no lettering. We'll look like The Liffey, only not nearly as cool because they at least get t-shirts from Finnegans. No more bar t-shirts, no more beer t-shirts, just sweet, sweet assimilation.
• Kid's meals. KIDS MEALS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have kids, they're great. THEY DON'T BELONG IN A BAR. One of the main selling points that this bar had for me was the lack of a kid's menu. Now we get to have them running around all over the place--but the 9 o'clock rule still stands, apparently.
• I have terrible memory, both short-and long-term. But one of the things I can do is take an order without writing it down and not fuck it up. I've worked long and hard over the course of seven years to perfect that craft, thinking it will increase my efficiency. Now? Spiral notebooks for everyone. I write really slow. And its borderline illegible. I'll fuck up worse now than ever before. And that's just me--everyone else will be able to adapt because they're pros.
• Expect a mild amount of pressure to sign up for our generic eClub--just like Friday's! According to Stuart, our presenter last night, "electronic marketing is the wave of the future--you won't see companies wasting money on $.39 junk mail anymore because with the push of a button, they can send it directly to your inbox! Isn't that exciting?" Well, actually, no--instead of tangible mail clogging my mailbox that I can physically throw away, I have spam slowing my computer down. Cool trade. And by the way, he should have made this pitch 10 years ago, when this was all new frontier. Now? Commonplace. And thanks for explaining the basic principals of email--never was quite able to figure that one out. So while we'll claim that we're "building a customer database to recognize birthdays" and such, what we'll really be doing is using target-market advertising via email that most people will automatically delete without second thought. Telemarketing, via email. Great.
• We have four signature items. From a menu that's been out for three weeks. Isn't that impossible? (For what it's worth, they are the Chicken Wings, Nachos, Chili, and Eggrolls. Three of the four are items that almost every restaurant in the country have. But ours are special.)
  

We learned all of this wonderful information at a staff meeting hosted at the bar, put on by a company cleverly named "4Remarkable Service". As mentioned before, our presenter was a man who used a Britney Spears-style over-the-ear microphone to talk to the 12 of us, openly stated that when he goes out to eat he brings a stopwatch, and will answer the question "how is everything?" with such clever answers like "well, gas prices are too high, my back is sore", etc. The kind of guy I would either a.) interrupt mid sentence to find out what he wants to drink, or b.) walk away and come back later to. We got to sit for 3 hours in the banquet room so we could find out that we're all doing a bad job and that things will change in corporate fashion. Less neighborhood bar, more Joe's Crab Shack. It was insulting. And the best part is, this coming Monday we all have to be back for 4Remakable Service II: The Sequel. Three more hours, baby.