Recent Doings

This past Friday I found myself in a cool, dark tavern in the basement of one of the buildings of an ersatz German village smack in the middle of Huntington Beach. I happily imbibed a couple large glasses of Warsteiner Dunkel** while I chatted with this guy who worked as a mover for Boeing and another who knew a lot about good restaurants in the bay area. It was great; it felt just like being in a pub back east. The "DJ" showed up a little later--a short, chubby older gentleman in lederhosen. He played such crowd pleasers as Beer Barrel Polka and even got on the mic and sang along. It was wunderbar!

Later that evening I met up with some friends who had a room at the hotel accross the street. I got a little bored, went down to the Oktoberfest festival, listened to an oompah-pa band, grabbed a poster (pictured) and went home. I mostly grabbed it for the benefit of taking a snapshot for this post. My friend wants it and he can have it, though he'll undoubtedly display the reverse side of the poster which features a pretty blonde in a tight T-shirt. To be honest, neither the get-drunk-at-the-hotel nor the get-drunk-and-ogle-women scene at Oktoberfest were my cup of tea. I thought the tavern was great, though, but as usual I was the only one who thought so.


Sunday I went to the Taste of Encino, a street fair and traditional music festival. A taste is all I got. I came *this* close to being a contestant in the hotdog eating contest. I'm so disappointed too because I am absolutely confident I would have won the $500 first place prize! Mr. KABC, who does a show on KABC, did personally hand me a free chili dog from The Stand, though. I should have asked him to autograph the wrapper for me! Anyway, it was great fun. Good food and great music featuring more dulcimers and Irish flutes than you can shake a rain stick at! I wound up staying all day, not just for the contest.

Wednesday night I went to Knott's Halloween Haunt. It was tons of fun and definitely worth going. Monsters, monsters, everywhere and the scariest things were the rides! See, the rides are fun when you're a kid because you're still afraid of them. Then they get boring when you become a jaded teenager. Then you become a cautious adult and they're scary as heck and loads of fun all over again! The only downer for the night was that I wound up going on my own because the date thing didn't work out again, for the fourth time, maybe the fifth because the nice person I met didn't want to go after all.

It did occur to me that I was supposed to be here with Her tonight. I won't dwell on it except to say the hurt's still there. I put too many of my eggs in that one basket with the hole in the bottom and now I'm paying for it with the hunger pains from the eggs that fell and broke and didn't make it into my omelet this morning and...nevermind, I killed that metaphor, on purpose. Just trying to make light of a weighty topic (pun most certainly intended).

**A word about German beer: terrible. I'm no expert, but I have a pretty good pallet for beer. Every single German beer I've ever tasted has the same herbal/medicine/green taste like they ran out of hops and substituted fresh grass clippings. Am I the only one who thinks so? I don't get it. All I can conclude is that either Germans have a weird sense of taste or they have great marketers that have managed to convince the world that their swill is drinkable. Sorry guys. Good cars; bad beer.