Stupid Starbucks conversation

I stopped at not-my-Starbucks this morning - I had to run some errands and my normal Starbusks ended up being out of the way.

The conversation went like this:
me: "I'd like a venti shaken black tea lemonade, unsweetened, in my personal cup."
staff: "Ok, that's $3.15"

Then I walked to the pickup area.
barista: "oh, we're out of lemonade. It's a summer drink."
me: "If it's a summer drink, why is it still on your menu?"
barista: "We still SERVE it, we just don't STOCK the supplies."
me: "That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."
barista: "Do you want just a regular iced tea then?"
me: "I guess."

Tomorrow, I'm going back to MY Starbucks. Where they don't make weird excuses.

Playing with Wordle

A few years ago, I did a project that I called "The ABC's of T" - I solicited words from friends that they felt described me. I made a neat scrapbook that I flip through every once in a while, but I've been playing with wordle for a work project. I decided to run the ABC list through wordle to see what happened. This is one of my favorite outputs!


Make your own!

Corson Building Dinner

My sweetie took me out to dinner at the Corson Building, (thecorsonbuilding.com) where Chef Matthew Dillon and Sommelier Marc Papineau made a wonderful, wonderful feast!

They were also kind enough to provide me with the wine list and notes for the evening, and with a hand-written menu from tonights meal, copied here. I have the notes and tasting notes on each wine as well, just not typing that much right now. Comment if you have questions! :-)

Aperfit: Kir Royale

Notes: Kir is named after Cannon Kir, who was the mayor of Dijon from 1945 to 1968 and who lived until the ripe age of 96. It is made with Creme de Cassis and the local white wine of the area - usually Aligote.

Appetizers Course:

• Pork Rillette with piemontese quince/apple condiment
• Raw beef with preserved meyer lemon, shaved porcini and pecorino
• House-cured anchovies with pickled carrots, sultanas, parsley & crumbled egg
• Wine Pairing: Domaine Roland Schmidt Riesling, Altenberg de Bergbieten Grand Cru, 2005 Alsace

Soup:

• Spot prawns and matsutake with leeks and celery in broth
• Wine Pairing: Cascina Degil Ulivi Filagnotti, 2006 Gavi

Not sure what to call the course between appetizers & soup and the main course:

• Squid & Bacon salad with cauliflower mushrooms
• Striped bass with kale & celery root
• Wine Pairing: The Evening Vineyards, Celebration, Gamay Noir, 2008, Eola-Amity Hills (Personal note, this was my favorite of the evening!)

Main Course:

• Roasted duck breast with poached quince
• Duck confit wtih butternut squash, chanterelles & hazelnuts
• Salad of wild watercress and winter density lettuces
• Wine Pairing: Hubert-Verdereau Volnay 2006

Dessert:

• Persimmon pudding with soft cream
• Wine pairing: Cave de Rasteau, Vin du Natureal, Rasteau (Note: They stopped the fermentation process on this one by fortifying it with brandy. YUM)

It was a fantastic evening!

Missing Mama

My mother always told me I was her miracle.

Mama’s birthday is November 4 and my birthday is November 6. When she was exactly my age (2 days before her 38^th birthday), she was hugely pregnant with me and I can’t help but wonder what was going through her mind? In 1971, having a baby at age 38 was not common. I am not her first child, but it seems I was her hardest child. She and my dad tried for almost 5 years to get pregnant, and the doctors were convinced she was entering early menopause when she finally did get pregnant with me.

Everyone had an opinion about someone so old having a baby. They filled her ears with stories of birth defects, of retardation, of spending the rest of her life taking care of a person that couldn’t take care of themselves. I’m sure those thoughts chased her around, but she never once told me that was her fear. It was simple. I was her miracle, and that was the end of that story. She drank through pregnancy, smoked through pregnancy, paid no attention to diet through pregnancy (or really for the rest of her life, which is part of another story), and after years of wishing and trying, she got her wish of a healthy baby with my father. I was supposed to be a boy, James Richard Jr., but it turns out healthy was enough of a miracle, and I ended up as Tanya Rae, named for Dr. Zhivago’s wife, and Alice Rae’s Intimate Apparel Shop in Kingston, NY.

Family legend is that I was born on a snowy Saturday afternoon. I have no idea when labor started, if it was hard or long, if there were false starts and restless nights, if it was perfectly normal or if there were problems – these aren’t the sort of things you talk about in my family. I just know the legend - it was a snowy Saturday afternoon, and the nurse said “Mr. Royer, you have a daughter.” And he said, “That’s nice. But you’re blocking the TV, and I’m watching roller derby”. As long as I can remember, my dad has sung Jim Croce’s “Roller Derby Queen” to me as a lullaby, in a tuneless soft voice. I’m sure there was more emotion than just “that’s nice” from both parents, although odds are good my mom was drugged out of her mind, and my dad was pacing the hallways and rattling his keys in his pocket – one eye on the roller derby, and one eye on the door where they’d taken my mom.

There are no pictures of Mama pregnant with me; there really aren’t many photos of her at all. There’s one Kewpie Doll photo of me from the hospital – proof that I arrived, and one of my dad holding me when I was a few days old. There’s the obligatory naked baby in the bathtub shot, and one or two from that first Christmas, but it seems my family was not really one of the picture-taking kind. I am my mom’s fifth baby and my dad’s only (3 from her first marriage, 1 from the second, then me) – maybe they didn’t have a camera, maybe they didn’t have money to develop pictures, maybe health issues made pictures the last thing on their minds, it’s hard to say. My dad brought me boxes (and boxes) of THINGS that had been my mom’s earlier this year, and I found a florist card in one of the boxes. It’s titled “It’s a Girl” with a note from my dad that says “I’m real proud of you. Love, Jim” When I found that card, I sat down on the floor of the shed where I was sorting boxes and cried and wondered. Was he proud of my mom for getting through the birth? Was he proud of ME for being born? What exactly did that single sentence mean? While there are no pictures, I have a certainty in the memory of her words “You are my miracle.”

A few days after I was born, my mom was back in the hospital for gall bladder removal, and when I was three months old she fell on the icy steps taking me to the car for a doctor visit, rupturing 3 discs in her back. She had back surgery within a month of that fall, and then an emergency hysterectomy 4 months after that. Most of my first year was spent with my mother in surgery or recuperating from surgery. I don’t really know how they got by, with 3 kids at home, including a newborn, and it’s not the sort of thing my Dad is willing to talk about. He tells me things like that I cried without stopping from 3 months until age 16, and that Roller Derby was the top priority for a Saturday afternoon. I think he thinks he’s being funny, and I’ve learned to listen through his words and take the comfort I can find from him, but it’s not exactly the same as the simple sentence from my mom.

Meanwhile, back at my own “newlywed, nearly 38, worried about my fertility, Sunday afternoon at the coffee-shop with a computer” self, I miss her. People ask me how when I lost her, and there are so many possible answers to that question. I lost my mom several times throughout my life but I’m lucky enough to have found her again, too. I lost her in a childhood where bad things happen to good people, and you don’t talk about the “dirty laundry”. I lost her when I was 16 and so angry and confused that all I could do was scream for help in 100 different ways without ever knowing how to say “help me”. I slammed the door shut when I was 17 and I moved out of their house. I found her again when I was 19 and she was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and had surgery to treat it. I remember the night before that surgery, I asked if she was scared, and she said “yes. But you’re not done growing up yet, you still need me, so I’m going to have this surgery so I can be around to see you finish growing up.” It hit me like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer; you only get so much time with people you love. My parents did the best they could with the tools they had, I could choose to be angry about their failures and cut them out of my life, or I could find away to put the past aside and do the best with what we had left to work with. Mama and I never had a week pass where we did not talk, we became friends, and she always reminded me of how much she loved me.

At 25, a few weeks after a bitter argument over the fact that I was not coming home for Christmas, she had a massive stroke, and I lost her again. The last years of mom’s life, she was still “here”, but that ferocious, funny, sad, intense woman was gone. Sometimes you’d see flashes in her eyes, but it was rare. With the stroke, she lost most of the ability to talk. If you started a word, she would sometimes spit it out. She could sing happy birthday and a few broken words of her favorite hymns. If I said “T”, she would sometimes spit out “Tanya”, and if I said “I”, she would always say “LOVE YOU!” In 2004, she went into kidney failure, and when I was 33, I sat with my mom for the last days of her life, holding her hand, singing songs to her, trying to express how much I loved her, and letting her know that she was my miracle, too, until she slipped into a coma. And I lost her for the last time when I kissed her good bye and told her I had to go back to Seattle, that I would always miss her, but that I would be ok. She had stayed long enough to see me grow up, and that I understood she was tired and ready to go. She died very quietly, when everyone was out of her room, she slipped away while I was at 30,000 feet, between Atlanta and Seattle.

There are many days where I think if I could just turn around fast enough; I’d catch sight of her standing right behind me. I see her in my eyes in the mirror, I hear her voice in certain expressions that come out of my mouth, and I wonder if I’m still her miracle. As Mark and I talk about trying to get pregnant in the coming months, I wonder about my own miracle. Who will that person be? Will I ever be able to give that baby even an idea of who their grandmother was? Have I done everything I can do to ensure a healthy baby? All I know for sure is that I will try to show our child, every day and without room for doubt, that he or she is my miracle.

Happy birthday, Mama. I miss you.

"some things never change...."

I got a facebook friend request from an old co-worker at Hasbro Interactive. It's great to reconnect with old friends, so of course I said "yes!"

I had a horrible time sleeping last night - lots going on, and I just couldn't get the brain to shut down. I was up in the middle of the night, and around 6 am I figured "what the heck, may as well go to work...." and posted this status: "feeling like a knotted up stress ball this morning. May as well get ready and head in, since I haven't been asleep in hours.", with a "some things never change" response from this old friend.

So, I thought about it. I don't have a diary that chronicles where I was 10 years ago on June 25. But I have a pretty good idea. Let's review June 25, 2009

1. I have a game in that critical stage between Beta and GM.
2. I'm waiting for approval from the IP holder
3. I'm listening to barbershop on my headphones while looking at bugs.
4. I ate pizza for dinner last night.
5. I am volunteering at work today for an event that involves bringing your kids to work.
6. I'm wearing a t-shirt that has branding for the game studio.
7. The shirt is bright orange.
8. I've got at least 5 big things going on outside my work life.
9. I'm a Senior Producer on the project.

When I think back to 10 years ago, here's my best guess list:
1. I have a game in that critical stage between Beta and GM. CHECK
2. I'm waiting for approval from the IP holder. CHECK.
3. I'm listening to barbershop on my headphones while looking at bugs. CHECK
4. I ate pizza for dinner last night. CHECK
5. I am volunteering at work today for an event that involves bringing your kids to work. POSSIBLE CHECK - Odds are good I was volunteering for something.....
6. I'm wearing a t-shirt that has branding for the game studio. CHECK
7. The shirt is bright orange. 10 YEARS AGO, MY ENTIRE WORKSPACE WAS ORANGE.
8. I've got at least 5 big things going on outside my work life. CHECK
9. I'm a Senior Producer on the project. 10 YEARS AGO, I WAS THE A Senior QA Lead on the project.

Yep. Some things never change!

Off to show games to the kiddies......................

South Park Sunday!

I'm working on my barbershop geek book. Sweetie is playing World of Warcraft at the dining room table. Our soundtrack for activity today is season 1 of South Park on DVD. I still enjoy South Park, but it's pretty rare for me to laugh out loud through an entire episode some 13 seasons later.

The first few seasons though, holy crap, that's funny stuff. It's like visiting with an old, funny friend.

Once I figure out how the heck I setup the barbershopgeekbook.com website last year, I'll update it, in case you're interested in what the heck I'm talking about. It falls firmly in the "niche product" category. ;-)

Oh, and BTW. I went to the grocery this morning and caught bits of A Prairie Home Companion. I take back every negative thought I've ever had about NPR. Garrison Keillor is awesome. I think I'm going to become a subscriber/patron type person.

NPR

Radio has become intolerable to me. I'm spoiled with Rhaspody and Pandora and my iTunes collection. I'm spoiled with playlists that are so finely tuned to my moods that I will listen without forwarding and say "Wow, that song is so perfect for how I feel right now!" If I hear the "Do you know the enemy" Greenday song one more time in the morning alarm sequence (or on Comedy Central as a commercial), I feel like my head will explode. Maybe I'm not "cool" anymore, maybe I'm used to instant gratification, but radio does not do it for me.

My Sweetie has a Sirius radio in his car - so when we drive in his car, it's Howard Stern, all the time. When we drive in my car, it's turned into NPR.

I hate to admit it. I've had a completely irrational (but at least I know what it is) dislike of NPR for the majority of my adult life. I've always been disdainful of it as "old people radio". But it seems to be the only thing I can stand for the 12 minute drive to work. And I'm enjoying it!

But I had a weird association the other day - the "All Things Considered" theme consistently reminds me of Eric Cartman singing the "Cheesy Poofs" in the "Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Food" episode from the second season of South Park? Listen closely the next time it comes on, I don't think you'll be able to un-hear it. It makes me laugh quietly every time it comes on.

Anyone? Am I nuts?