If I Can Waste Time There, I Can Waste Time Anywhere (Or, The Road-Ready Reillys)
Yet again, I am back at work after a busy weekend and very much need a few more days off. As I mentioned previously, I was in New York on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to meet with young alumni. The meetings were good, but what can get tiring is trying to kill time between meetings, especially since they are sometimes 2-3 hours apart. Since I seldom stay at hotels while on the road, I have to find cafes where I can sit and type on my computer; this usually works out fine, but sometimes baristas get a little steamed (pun intended) when you sit in their establishments drinking a small coffee for an hour and a half.
On this particular expedition, I stayed with my fellow blogger, former roommate, and feminine-looking sidekick Nathaniel "Nate out of Ten" Borgelt. I didn't get to spend as much time with him as I had hoped, but we did get to have lunch together on Friday at a new Mexican place near his building. For those of you that aren't acquainted with my pabular preferences, burritos are by far my favorite food (so much so that Mitch and I are thinking about opening a late-night Mexican food delivery place in New London called Vaya Con Burritos). That was actually my second burrito of the trip; I had eaten lunch the previous day at Chipotle, so needless to say I was muy satisfacado by the end of the trip....
....I rolled back to New London on Saturday after hitting almost no traffic, despite the fact that I took the FDR and went on 95 the whole way, which I seldom do because it is typically a recipe for delay. I decided to test out the Garmin that my mom got me for Christmas (love you, mama, and an early happy birthday (she turns 39 tomorrow)). If you don't know, a Garmin is a little GPS device that attaches to your car's windshield and gives you turn-by-turn directions in the language of your choice (my language of choice: Luxembourgish). Anyway, I decided to use it on a test run in which already knew where I was going in order to evaluate its effectiveness without risking getting lost; I was quite impressed! What struck me the most was that it displays your estimated arrival time, which it calculates based on the speed limits of each road, and despite driving 10-15 mph over the speed limit for most of the way (what can I say? I live and drive on the wild side), I only shaved about 4 minutes off of my total travel time! Seeing how negligible an amount of time speeding saves definitely made me rethink my driving habits. Thanks for helping me avoid future speeding tickets, Garmin!
On Saturday night, Mitch and I met up with a bunch of the Conn coaches for a few drinks at Hot Rod's, a sports bar in downtown New London (there aren't really any Admissions bars or Alumni Relations bars around here, so we figured we'd go where the coaches felt most at home). Hot Rod's isn't my favorite place in the universe, but we ended up having a great time. The highlight for me was when the topic of conversation turned to tattoos. The men's assistant rowing coach had just gotten a brand new tattoo and was eager to show it off, which of course set off a chain reaction of people comparing and contrasting their ink. Mitch kept things pretty tasteful; he has a small shoulder piece of the mascot from his college cross-country team (which, interestingly, happens to look A LOT like the Aussie shampoo logo, and Mitch's hair is always soft and luxurious. Coincidence?). The women's assistant rowing coach had a slightly more adventurous work, which was four lines of poetry from her favorite poet, whose name now escapes me (all I remember is that it wasn't Dr. Seuss, thank God). In the interest of common decency, I decided not to display my tattoo, which is the Chinese character for "fart" on my right butt cheek.
After things wrapped up at Rod's, Mitch and I made our way over to Oasis, another local bar. There was a pretty good turnout, even though the DJ was playing techno and house music at an eardrum-obliterating level approximately the same volume as getting your skull jackhammered open and having a firetruck siren installed inside your brain. I'm pretty sure that a large portion of the crowd was hanging around due mostly to the attractiveness of Oasis's new bartender, who was wearing the tightest pair of jeans I've ever seen (mine were a close second). Ordinarily, Mitch is wary of good-looking female bartenders because he spent the year after his college graduation pouring drinks in Austin, TX, during which time he felt the continual frustration of not being able to earn as much in tips as his bosomy yet butterfingered bartending babe buddies simply because of his gender (yet another victim of the infamous "shot glass ceiling"). In this case, however, the bartender was actually a great worker and very friendly, so his ire went unroused.
Sunday: beer, football, couch, didn't shave. Pretty much it.
Yesterday my brother Tim stopped by to have lunch, as New London was the first destination along his nascent transnational trek to San Francisco. Though he has plenty of stops to make along each coast, I expressed concern that he would have nowhere to visit while traveling through land-locked states (which, I'm pretty sure, are some of the bigger states). Fortunately, native Midwesterner Mitch "On the Cob" Herz was on hand to provide him with a list of all the noteworthy destinations throughout the Heartland (not surprisingly, the list was pretty brief). Hopefully he'll be able to find something interesting to see since he's planning on taking about 4 weeks to get to SF (did I mention he's walking?).
Tonight there is a Senior Giving bar night here on campus. It should be pretty well-attended since it will be the first night that the bar is open after Winter Break. I'll be sure to post again later this week to let everyone know how it goes!