friday we took my niece on her special day out. we met up with my sister at bill gray's (a rochester institution as far as burgers go) in the strong national museum of play. bill gray's is kind of your classic burger place - they do burgers and dog and chili dogs and chicken fingers and milkshakes and curly fries:
i can't resist curly fries which are exotic by virtue of their infrequent appearance on fast food menus, but overall the burgers weren't all that great. they were rough, shaggy patties but didn't have the beef flavour of a five guys burgers and fries. the strong museum is actually every child's dream of a kid's museum. it's heavily funded by private enterprise, which means that there's a whole mini-supermarket (wegmans) with everything to scale and barcodes that beep and that will produce a receipt. there's also an educational part where you can learn about magnets and velocity and there's a slanty house that you walk into and makes you feel like you're drunk stumbling around because the entire perspective of the room is off. super-fun. there's also a small version of sesame street, where you can do fun stuff like PUT YOURSELF INTO SESAME STREET:
i kind of thought my threshold for staying would be two hours max, but this is before we realized that the special exhibit, "mindbender mansion," which was actually supposed to open for realsies on saturday, was doing a SOFT OPEN on friday. this is when me and the dotytron pretty much lost our minds and our niece started having a medium amount of fun. the premise of "mindbender mansion" is that there are all these rooms set up and all the rooms have various sized like gifted/problem solving/puzzle/IQ type games. THE FUNNEST. stuff like reorganizing shapes into a triangle AND a hexagon, or making tetris blocks fit into two differently sized boxes, or having a grid and the numbers 1-9 and you have to make every LINE (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) add up to 15. BEYOND FUN! then the dotytron picked up this card thing where if you correctly answered specific puzzles within each room they would give you a key, which you then plugged into a machine that would give you another key. when you finished all the rooms you could plug all your final answer keys into the computer and you get to be on their wall of fame.me + competitiveness + wall of fame = we went buck in there. my sister got let off of work early and called me to find out where we were at and i basically screamed into the phone: "WE'RE STILL AT THE MINDBENDER MANSION, OMG IT'S THE BEST, WE NEED YOUR HELP, GET HERE NOW!!!" so she showed up with little ze and we finally finished but it took us like, 3 more hours. lol!
i wish i had the photos from our wall of fame but they were totally awesome. (sis: keep the photos and set them aside! i'm going to scan them)
the most obnoxious part was there was some dad and his daughter there in the most challenging room, the library (we had spent 30 minutes there, quit, and came back to finish it up) and he was working on this colour puzzle thing with his kid for FOREVER and DIDN'T FINISH. then, the dotytron solved this one puzzle where you had to get a bunch of shapes to fit into a T formation. he did it, undid it, then little ze (who is a puzzle master and btw is only FOUR) FIGURED IT OUT ON HIS OWN. he left the puzzle pieces in the correct placement, so then little girl shows up, sees the FINISHED PUZZLE, undoes it, and redoes it (which is obviously, the easiest thing in the world when you ALREADY SEE THE ANSWER) and starts crowing about how easy it was, and her dad is like, all smug, and "yeah, it WAS easy" and then goes and tries to give smug advice to my sister who is working on this number puzzle. he has nothing constructive which just got our goats. meanwhile, i finished the colour puzzle that he and his kid couldn't figure out. lame! we were so cheesed.
for dinner we went to delmonico's italian steakhouse (where we had our rehearsal dinner!) because i had some gift certificates to use up. it's kind of classic, jersey, new york, red sauce style italian food. veal marsala, linguine al vongole, type stuff. HUMONGOUS portions and actually really, really, delicious. we all shared their fried mozzarella in marinara sauce appetizer. i got the delmonico's steak which is $17.99 for a POUND AND A HALF of USDA prime rib eye. the dotytron got this veal mushroom escarole special (look at the size of that portion!!!) we split a tiramisu to finish:
then we headed home to rendezvous with my outlaw bro and s-dawg, who showed up after work on friday. s-dawg introduced us to the human centipede trailer, which is totally disgusting and scarred me for life (WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK - YOU'VE BEEN WARNED):this obviously meant we spent the rest of the weekend joking about it and being grossed out and thinking up ideas for the sequel and the third part. this also meant that i spent the whole night wondering aloud really stupid stuff like: "i just don't understand the guy's motivation for making the human centipede" and my siblings yelling back at me: "he's a DEMENTED SURGEON!" this seriously happened like, 9 times.
saturday we went to brian's u.s.a. diner for breakkie. this was the size of my breakfast (p.s. it was only $5.39):
the dotytron got the belt-buster, which is corned beef hash:
then we drove and hung out in letchworth gorge (the grand canyon of the west) and then went to the u.s. army corps of engineers doo-wop thing at mount morris dam which turned out to be kind of lame but also fun because we were all there together.
after that we went home and loafed around and napped and sat outside. for dinner we had sub-par chicken bbq from some church that wasn't prepared and didn't really know how to do a proper chicken bbq:
sunday we made breakfast and then loafed around outside. we filled up the kiddie pool and lounged around on the deck in our bathing suits and played whiffle ball baseball and napped and then i made a louisiana shrimp boil dinner, which we ate on newspaper and butcher paper on the patio table:
THE SHRIMP BOIL WAS AMAZING! corn, salt potatoes, shrimp, andouille sausage and clams boiled and then tossed with butter and old bay seasoning. we had it with a tuna mac salad my sister made, bread and butter, green salad, and for dessert, wegmans' memorial day cake with strawberries and whipped cream.more loafing and napping and then monday we woke up, the dotytron and i grabbed aunt cookies subs and then we all went to watch the memorial day parade. the parade started off with the war veterans, who were all really old and basically had me sobbing in like 10 seconds. too many old people all at once! and they're WAR VETERANS!!! aka basically the best people on earth.
main street geneseo was all done up with flags and it was really sweet - there was a middle school and high school marching band and all the little league teams were in the parade too - it was adorable, random classmates of my niece would be all like, "hey miss ramona!" when they walked past in the parade. freakin' adorable.notes on the weekend:
- how is it that there are a MILLION things to do in geneseo and surrounding area (in the county) on any given weekend and there's like, nothing to do in toronto? seriously! we had such a hard time deciding what to do on the weekend - the penny saver was chock full of stuff.
- s-dawg saw this weekend as an opportunity to unveil the best/the worst john lithgow impression of all time. it basically consists of him bugging out his eyes, doing a dramatic wave, and putting on a voice and saying the words: "WHAT? JOHN LITHGOW!" repeatedly. ha!
- we caught the latter half of "harry potter and the goblet of fire" on t.v. and they showed severus snape and i was all like, "severus snape is awesome!" and i was like, "what's the deal with harry potter's parents anyway, they weren't even that great" and my sister says, "um, james potter was an a**hole" and her face was totally indignant and it was hilarious. so we've decided that if we ever go to visit the harry potter experience at universal studios, our family t-shirts are going to read: "james potter was an a-hole"
- we're focusing our fatburger research not so much on birth but on what to expect the first year once the kid has already arrived - stuff like colic, and how to know when to feed, etc. so the dotytron has been plowing through "what to expect the first year" and i was like, "look up thrush!" and the dotytron read quietly for a bit and then says, "okay, i know all about it. it's basically an infection in the baby's mouth that it gets when it eats your vagine on the way out." LOL!!! i basically married the funniest guy in the world.
- yesterday, when we were out doing our grocery shopping after coming back from the states...we passed by the mark's work wearhouse on the danforth, and i saw a woman sitting on a bench outside of it, sobbing her eyes out.
me: "dude, i just saw a woman bawling her eyes out outside of mark's work wearhouse"
doty: "really? that's rough"
*two second pause*
doty: "especially if it's related to stock issues"
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ahahahahahahahaha!
tonight i made us spaghetti with white anchovies, chilies, and garlic breadcrumbs. with a salad. because i need to start eating healthy again.
fin.
