The Update

I’ve been asked a few times lately if I’m still blogging. Clearly I haven’t been, but I still want to. So here we are over three months since my last post. It’s not that we haven’t been busy. It’s that we haven’t done anything that I think you’d want to read about. Here’s the “short” version of what we’ve been up to…

*The House – We closed on the house in the end of October. It wasn’t fun. I managed to get through to close without punching anyone in the face, even though in that hour my religion was insulted, I got yelled at for initialing where I should have checked, and the sellers’ grandson practically cried that he didn’t want to move. The first thing we did after the close was head to Lowe’s and buy new locks. Then we went to the house and installed the locks. Then I promptly locked the keys inside the house. Somehow, Mr. Wonderful didn’t murder me.

*The Move – We moved the last weekend in October. It snowed. The first truckload had the love seat and a few other boxes. It took Mr. Wonderful and my Dad FOREVER to come back to the condo after bringing it over. “There’s bad news,” Mr. Wonderful tells me as they get back. “The love seat doesn’t fit.” It got in the house but couldn’t get passed the kitchen. We have a 26″ doorway and a 32″ love seat. They tried it every which way. Then Mr. Wonderful’s Dad came over and tried it every which way. Then his brother came over and tried it every which way. In then end, I had a love seat in my kitchen for a week. Then I had a hole in the dining room where they enlarged the doorway for about 6 weeks. We’re still painting and figuring out where everything goes. We’re also doing laundry at my Mom’s because our dryer that we ordered on November 18th isn’t in yet. Home ownership is a pain in the butt.

*Landlord City – We’re renting the condo. To a 23-year-old girl with a neck tattoo. She must be in some sort of Converse Chucks gang. First she wanted to adopt kittens. That stinks for me but I didn’t say no. Then she gave the kittens back and now she wants a dog. The latest is that she wants to become a foster parent. “I want a cat, just kidding, dog, just kidding, baby.” But she pays her rent on time, so we’re good.

*The Broken Hand – Turns out, Mr. Wonderful has a little anger management problem when it comes to heated dodgeball games and, well, when you punch a door, the door always wins. He spent all of December in a cast to his forearm. I discovered that his coworkers now call him “Rage Machine.” So at least we’re all making fun of him. One of his a-hole coworkers (who got herself fired for something else, but that’s another story) signed his fingers. As if his having a cast wasn’t bad enough. I cheered a little when they cut right through her name to get the cast off.

*Raleigh, NC – We just came back from a long weekend in Raleigh for Mr. Wonderful’s birthday. There was beer, more beer, a Bruins loss to the Hurricanes (of course), an outdoor flea market, wine and barbeque. All in all, it was a great weekend away. Between the holidays and the house, we really needed a change of scenery.

So that’s about it. It’s really been a blur. We’re so close to having an actual downstairs that we can maneuver around in. I hope things get better from there. I’ll let you know.

This Can Only Mean One Thing…

We’re moving.

Hopefully.

We found another house that we really like. So far, we’ve made it further in the process than we had with the last house, so we’re feeling pretty good. Our good friends, R & K, just moved in to a gorgeous house and, lucky us, gave us their moving boxes. We have 25ish days to pack up our condo. I tried packing up my desk the other night and failed miserably. Apparently, I have two interview folios and one of them was stuck to the bottom of my desk cubby. Who knew that was possible? It’s going to be a long few weeks. But in the end, we’ll have double the square footage to fill up with our crap. Yippee!

In other news, I’m really behind on the blog. You missed my birthday party and the end of the Brown Bag Challenge (I did it, by the way). It’s probably not going to get better any time soon, but I’ll try.

In the Bag

We’re teaming up with fellow food bloggers to host a Brown-Bag Challenge, a month-long initiative to eat consciously and save money by packing a lunch each weekday instead of eating out. Join us here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #brownbag.

So far, there have been six workdays in September and I’ve brought six lunches from home. I haven’t done this in months! I certainly haven’t done this, um, ever with fresh ingredients. But here we are.

I’ve been worried about not getting enough vegetables at lunch. With the diet I’m on, I’m supposed to have two cups of veggies at both lunch and dinner. For Tuesday’s lunch, I decided to try Ronzoni’s Garden Delight pasta, as it claims to be one serving of vegetables. That’s kind of a lie because you need to eat 4 oz of pasta to get the full serving of veggies, which is twice the size of a regular serving of pasta. It’s also nearly 400 calories. I’m only allowed 1300 calories a day, so that’s pretty steep. I made the 2 oz of pasta and called it a half serving. I also added a 1/4 cup of pasta sauce, which is also a half serving of vegetables. (What’s even worse is that a serving of vegetables is pretty much considered to be a half cup, so I’m technically supposed to have 4 servings per meal. Sometimes, like today, that just seems overboard.) I added some Butterball grilled chicken and a little bit of cheese and had myself a nice little Italian lunch.

When Tuesday night rolled around, I had absolutely no idea what to make for Wednesday’s lunch, so I had a repeat performance of the pasta and chicken. Fail. Right around this time, @healthyeats was retweeting what my fellow challengers were bringing for their lunches. These people are not messing around. It seemed like every post was more creative than the next. Also? I couldn’t believe the amount of people who had CSA veggies on hand. Is this something I need to look into next season? There’s no way I’m winning any awards for my lunches! But, that’s not what this is about anyway.

Wednesday was a cold and rainy day here in the Bay State. Something about the remnants of Hurricane Lee. I had a pound of grass-fed ground beef from Whole Foods sitting in the fridge, waiting to get cooked up. I bought it because it was on sale last week, not because I really had a plan for it. I was going to make meatballs, but then we got invited to my in-laws’ house for meatballs and sauce and that plan kind of went out the window. I thought about Shepard’s Pie, but that meal is kind of light on veggies. At the last minute, I found this recipe for Spinach & Meatball Soup. Score! When it came down to it, I barely used the recipe. I fresh spinach, a carton of beef stock, celery, garlic, Italian seasoning, cut spaghetti noodles and meatballs. Some of the complaints in the reviews were that the soup itself is kind of bland, so I wanted to spice it up. Mission accomplished. The soup was nice and filling, but it was really fatty. I don’t know if it’s the stock I used or what, but I was kind of grossed out by the oil slick on the top of the bowl. Nonetheless, there was enough left over for Mr. Wonderful and I to each bring some to work the next day.

While I was shopping for soup stuff Wednesday night, I did the smart thing and picked up sandwich meat. I also bought Thomas’s mini pitas. I’m only allowed two 80-calorie servings of grains/starches a day, so I have to be careful picking up bread. One slice alone is usually 80 calories. I got excited about the mini pitas because they’re only 70 calories. One thing I didn’t foresee? They’re freakin’ small! Two ounces of roast beef and some swiss cheese later and I had a blowout. The “pita” didn’t make it out of the kitchen in tact! It did, however, make for a delicious sandwich. I steamed some broccoli in the microwave at work so I could at least have some vegetables. I’m sure I didn’t have enough, but better than nothing.

I’m not sure if I can really quantify it, but I probably saved about $30 last week. It’s been difficult coming up with options that fit into my diet, but I’m learning. I did miss going out to lunch on Friday, but hey, it’s only a month, right?

Brown Bag Challenge: Week 1 Recap

We’re teaming up with fellow food bloggers to host a Brown-Bag Challenge, a month-long initiative to eat consciously and save money by packing a lunch each weekday instead of eating out. Join us here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #brownbag.

As part of the Brown Bag Challenge, Healthy Eats is rounding up all the blog posts related to the challenge in one convenient post. Looking at the other posts, I’m clearly out of my league!

http://blog.foodnetwork.com/healthyeats/2011/09/06/brown-bag-challenge-week-one-round-up/

Brown Baggin’ It

Source: Food Network

We’re teaming up with fellow food bloggers to host a Brown-Bag Challenge, a month-long initiative to eat consciously and save money by packing a lunch each weekday instead of eating out. Join us here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #brownbag.

Ever since I started my new job, I’ve been going out for lunch almost every day. In my past life, I used to bring my lunch almost every day, but I was sick of ending up with things looking like this. A girl can only eat so many reheated sodium nuggets. When I changed jobs, I started eating lunch at the local restaurants. I even found an awesome salad bar, which has quickly become my go-to lunch choice. Salads have been easy because I need to eat two cups of veggies at lunch anyway, but it’s been wearing on me. When I saw Healthy Eats’ Brown Bag Challenge advertised on Twitter, I knew that was my chance to break the cycle. The challenge is to not go out to eat during the workweek throughout the month of September. For me, this means coming up with healthy balanced lunches for the duration of the month.

September 1st was easy. I just brought my leftover steak from Wednesday night’s dinner at Crave. Since all I brought home was the steak, I threw in some broccoli florets and called it a lunch. I shocked my boss when he came into the kitchen and saw me standing at the microwave, since I never bring my lunch. A few minutes in the microwave and I was good to go. I was also hungry in about 45 minutes, but that’s neither here nor there. On Friday, I brought spinach pie from the grocery store, bought specifically for this occasion.

The hard part about Friday was not actually bringing my lunch. The hard part was resisting the peer pressure to go out to lunch. I’m always the one trying to convince people to go out to lunch on Fridays. It just seems like the right thing to do. You go out, get a delicious lunch and coast through the afternoon. One of my coworkers always tries to resist. So this Friday, when both my boss and my coworker are standing at my cube, they were floored to find that I stuck to my guns about my resolution to bring my lunch. There was about a minute where I thought I was going to cave. They took the opportunity to go to a restaurant I don’t particularly care for, which made me feel better about the whole thing.

Right now, I’ve got Garden Delight pasta and grilled chicken waiting for me in the fridge. I figured that’s probably a serving of veggies with the pasta and sauce. I just need to remember to bring it with me!

Not Crave-Worthy

I never intended this blog to be a space for reviews, but this experience we had at dinner is too funny not to share.

I am a frequent Groupon user. One of Groupon’s newest features is their Now! Deals, where business offer deals for use today. Unlike the usual buy-now-use-later type of deal, this one is buy-now-use-now. When I was looking for inspiration for my birthday dinner, I checked there first. I found $12 for $25 to Crave Brasserie and Wine Bar, a new restaurant in Amesbury. Every time I’m in downtown Amesbury, I always remark at how cute it is, but we never go there. So I figured we’d try it out.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I almost always include links to whatever I’m telling you about. I would do that here too, except that their “website” is a Facebook page. Instead I’ll give you this link and we can pretend that they have a website.

Crave is located right off of downtown Amesbury next to a huge parking lot. I’m nearly positive that there is more parking spaces than chairs. Most recently, this site was a coffee-house. Before that (but maybe not immediately) it was a train station. We were seated in the only table for two in the dining room area. They have high tops in the bar, but we didn’t venture back there. The dining room is small – only eight tables. Still, it took 10 minutes for our server to acknowledge us and another 10 minutes to get our drinks from the bar. A note about the drinks. “Brasserie” is french for “brewery”, which is kind of misleading when you consider what a “brasserie” has come to stand for in today’s restaurant speak. Still, we expected some more interesting choices on both the beer menu and the wine list. There were five beers on draft. Sam, Sam seasonal, Allagash and two Rapscallions. So yay, I guess, that they’re supporting a local brewery. But five beers? There’s a wider beer selection at Uno’s. I consider myself a fledgling wine snob. I almost always scan every wine list for varietals and location. I like to see if the wine is from any place I recognize from our honeymoon to Napa and Sonoma. If I go to a wine bar and I see Kendall Jackson and Cupcake on the wine list, I’m not going to take you seriously. If I can buy it at Shaw’s, why would I come to your establishment? If you’re not going to have note-worthy wines, don’t bother call yourself a wine bar.

The food came in average time and tasted okay. They made their overcooked dry french fries palatable by drowning them in gravy. There was some unidentified shreds on the top of my steak. They might have been potato peels. I thought they were onion straws, but no, so I just moved them to the side and forgot about them. Mr. Wonderful ordered potato crusted haddock that had a weird cream sauce. Not enough lemon to be a lemon sauce, but too much to just be an accent. We asked to see a dessert menu, but there wasn’t one. There were three things. I picked the chocolate mousse cake. Mr. Wonderful was disappointed that I didn’t pick the maple crème brûlée with candied bacon, but I’m kind of a purist when it comes to crème brûlée.

This is where things got funny. I took one bite of the cake and thought that maybe they burned it. Then I thought I tasted butane. After three or four bites, trying to figure out what was wrong with the cake, I decided I wasn’t going to eat it. It was gross. When our server came over to ask us how the cake was, I asked her if it had ever been on fire. Her response? “Does it taste like it? I’ll get you a new piece.” So wait, was it on fire? Because I kind of expected her to say, “On fire? No!” I didn’t think she’d agree with me. Mr. Wonderful couldn’t stop laughing because, out of all the ways I could have complained about the cake, I went straight to “Was this cake on fire?” Now we’re left speculating about all the ways that it could have been on fire. Did they microwave it too long? Did they burn the mousse? How is the second piece going to be different? It turns out that sometimes the chef likes to torch the cake to crisp up the sugar. HUH? It’s chocolate cake! You don’t need crispy sugar. If you’re looking to eat something crispy, you’re not going to order chocolate cake? So I’m guessing that the kitchen staff isn’t classically trained or anything.

My third favorite thing was trying to pay with the Groupon. If you’re going to offer a Groupon that’s only good for one night, you’d think you’d let the staff know when they started their shift. Every time I’ve used a Groupon, the server or cashier has known exactly what to do. It wasn’t really a big deal. By this point, we were already late for trivia, so what was another five minutes. But it was just funny to give my phone to the waitress, watch her walk over to another waitress, explain to that table what a Groupon is, disappear and then bring me back my phone. I hope she didn’t call China!

30.

For most of you, Wednesday was just another day. You probably remarked that August is over and how fast the summer had flown by. But not me. I was too busy turning 30.

Technically, I didn’t turn 30 until 12:57pm, in the fitting room at The Gap to be precise. I tried to hold on to every minute of my 20s, but the calls and texts came in pretty early! Because I’m my mother’s daughter, I took the day off from work. I went to the mall to cash in on all of the birthday coupons from my favorite retailers. Side note: Has anyone noticed that there are less birthday coupons this year? I didn’t get anything from Victoria’s Secret (aw shucks), Macy’s (kind of a bummer) or DSW (friggin’ jerks). Luckily, Express, Old Navy, Ann Taylor and Starbucks pulled through for me. Still, I rewarded bad behavior by getting new boots at DSW and jeans from Macy’s. Maybe the best birthday present was finding that I wear smaller pants now. I also bought my first pair of ladies’ Levi’s jeans. (I used to wear their men’s jeans in high school, but we’re not going there right now.)

There’s nothing like a birthday to make you feel all philosophical. You’d think I’d be fine turning 30 since I can never remember how old I am anyway. “Honey, how old are we?” is a very frequent question in our house. I was totally ready for 30. It was 25 that hit me really hard. I remember sitting in my boss’s office, freaking out about all the things I should have accomplished by then. I then went on to celebrate my birthday at the Olive Garden with my friends and their husbands and the guy I’d just started dating. He ended up leaving dinner to go pick up his friend whose car died 90 minutes away. Right. So turning 30 couldn’t be worse than that. I’m married now to the best guy I’ve ever dated (luckily for him, I set that bar really low). I’m in probably the best physical shape I’ve ever been in (again, I set the bar low there). I have an awesome job, an MBA and a fairly decent condo that we’ve totally outgrown but could be much worse. Things really fell into place in the last five years.

So even though the card from my parents with the big fat 30 on front jarred me a little, I think I’m going to come out okay. Like everything, it’s not what’s on the outside that matters. It’s the inside that counts.

See? That’s more like it.

Vegas Vacation – Day 5

The final day…

If you don’t do a champagne brunch in Vegas, you must not like food. Because the food at a champagne brunch is top notch. Omelet bar? Duh. Carving station? Of course. Pesto mashed potatoes? Absolutely. And the mimosas? Our server eventually gave up and brought us a carafe of orange juice and filled all of our glasses with champagne. That’s how we roll.

After breakfast and checkout, Mr. Wonderful and I took off for the shops. We like to get magnets and Christmas ornaments from everywhere we go and I had been slacking on this trip. We ended up at the Miracle Mile. It was a pretty nice mall that even had a rain storm show every half hour. It’s funny to be in a place that has to manufacture a thunderstorm.

Before we met up with the rest of the gang, who was losing the last of their money at Bill’s, we stopped back at the Flamingo to, um, see the flamingos.

Aren't they pretty?

Once we got to the airport, the fun began. We were scheduled to leave from Gate C1, right after a flight to Boise and a flight to St. Louis. Both of those flights were delayed, so we got pushed to Gate C3. Unfortunately, no one told our pilot, who landed at C1. So back we go. Honestly, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened, but it was annoying. We fared better than Kellie did; she ended up stranded in Vegas hours after we left. Too bad that timing didn’t work out!

Thankfully, we landed pretty close to on time. And that’s it!

Our first time in Sin City was sometimes crazy and chaotic but it was a lot of fun. We definitely saw a lot and yet barely broke the surface of what Vegas has to offer. We had some really awesome food and some really cheap drinks. We saw people of all walks of life. My parents are going for the first time in October. I think I’m going to live vicariously through them for a little while.

Vegas Vacation – Day 4

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!

Breakfast
Mr. Wonderful and I enjoyed breakfast on the roof deck at Margaritaville. Despite its name, they don’t serve margaritas at breakfast, so I had my first Bloody Mary with Patrón. And salt. I was pretty sure the salt was burning a hole in my throat. We also had huge omelets and yummy hash browns! I was fully liquoredgeared up for a day at the dodgeball courts. While we were on the roof deck, we experienced another Vegas first – a freakin’ rain storm! That’s right, we went to the desert in August and had rain. When you add the rain to the misters on the deck, we were getting pretty wet. It rained for at least a half hour, until we got to the dodgeball tournament.

Dodgeball

Through some weird coincidence, it was a Burgundy/Geoducks matchup in co-ed foam ball. The team was psyched to play a team that we actually liked. The game was a best out of five elimination. Long story short, Burgundy took the Geoducks to five games, but dropped the last one and got knocked out of the tournament. Then there was a lot of waiting, one run to Starbies by yours truly, and then Burgundy vs. the Canucketeers in open foam ball. After dropping all three games nice and early, we were done. Most of the team decided they were dodgeballed out and opted to leave. We hugged the Geoducks goodbye and made it back to the Flamingo and the Sin City Brewing Company. The team drowned their sorrows in beer while I tried the Sloth, which was delicious despite the lack of gummy worm that was in the description. While we were sitting at the bar, Mr. Wonderful managed to win himself $100 in video poker. Yippee!

Dinner

I was so excited about dinner. (You’re not surprised, right?) I had done some research before we left about the best places to eat in Vegas. One of my favorite Food Network shows is Best Thing I Ever Ate, where your favorite Food Network chefs show you delicious meals at various restaurants around the country. On Best Thing I Ever Ate With Chopsticks, Giada recommended the Drunken Noodles with Chicken at Wazuzu. I’ve never known Giada to lead me astray, so I pushed hard to take the group there for dinner. They didn’t take reservations, so it was a crap shoot (HA!) but at 6pm, we called ahead and found that there was no wait. We hadn’t ventured to The Wynn/Encore yet and it was easily the most gorgeous casino we visited. I’m sure the rooms are way outside my price range, but what a nice place to visit!

See, the Wynn is pretty! It has Christmas lights!

Dinner was wonderful. I really couldn’t decide what to order. I asked our server, Andy, for a recommendation, which wasn’t helpful at all since, of course, all their meals are equally wonderful. In the end, I let Giada down and ordered the Lo Mein. It was awesome. Mr. Wonderful got the Nasi Goreng, which he really liked but was a little too spicy for my taste. You get to pick your level of spiciness on your entrée, which I thought was pretty interesting. There were a few drunken noodle orders at our table, and everyone spoke highly of it. Our waiter overheard Erica say that her meal was spicy and offered to remake it. He was generally concerned, though Erica wasn’t complaining at all. Nonetheless, I thought that was really nice of him.

Check out this dragon! Awesome decor!

Ellis Island
or Why You Shouldn’t Get Casino Recommendations from a Game Show
or Why You Shouldn’t Leave the Strip
Several months ago, Mr. Wonderful and I were watching One Hundred Ways to Leave a Game Show, when the question came up about which one of these three is not a casino in Las Vegas: Atlantic City, Ellis Island or Casino Royale. We immediately thought Ellis Island would be a terrible name for a casino because, well, we’ve been to Ellis Island and it’s mostly full of despair. Sure, it’s the gateway to a world of opportunity, but in and of itself, it doesn’t look like any fun. It turns out, we were wrong. (It’s Atlantic City, in case you were wondering.) We immediately found Ellis Island’s website and learned that they are known for being an awesome brewery/casino/karaoke bar. That’s a winning combination if I’ve ever heard of one so we talked the team into taking a trip. That’s where it mostly went to hell.

The best thing about Ellis Island is that five beers and one So-Co and root beer were $13. After we lost lots of money at the craps tables, roulette and video poker (except Erica, who managed to get $60 for a full house), I really wanted to do karaoke. Before I met Mr. Wonderful, I was doing karaoke at least once a week at Oriental Gardens. A lot has changed between then and now and I don’t do karaoke nearly as often. But Ellis Island had my signature song in the books (Fergalicious, obviously) so I put it in and waited. There weren’t enough seats in the bar, so we stood by the door and waited. And waited. After about a half hour, I checked in with the DJ and found I was 16 people back. 16! Yikes! So we left. If you’ve ever been excited about something and then looked at your group of friends only to find that they look absolutely miserable, you know why. I couldn’t subject six other people to that when they clearly weren’t having any fun. But I was upset about it. When I got outside of the casino, I realized that we weren’t on the Strip, so there wouldn’t be cabs waiting to take us back to the hotel. So I started walking. It was just a bad end to what should have been a good night. Win some, lose some, I guess.

Vegas Vacation – Day 3

Friday was Dodgeball day. It started right after breakfast and lasted, um, all day.

It’s cute how eager they are!

If you’ve seen the Dodgeball movie, you’d be strongly disappointed when you got to the Tarkanian Basketball Academy. First of all, it’s a small space for a lot of people. The Basketball Academy has 4 courts. Dodgeball took up two courts and a basketball camp took up the other two. Holy crowded, Batman! Also, it was not aired on ESPN The Ocho and no, Cotton and Pepper weren’t announcing.

Friday was all about seeding. Each team gets about an hour to play two other teams and the amount of wins you get determines your seeding for the next tournament. Our team, Burgundy, was registered for two divisions – open foam ball and co-ed foam ball. There were plenty of other leagues, including all-female and rubber balls. In our case, the co-ed round robin was lackluster as the was some type of misunderstanding and we only had to play one team, the Geoducks from Washington State. You know how fun it is to watch an hour of dodgeball between the same two teams with no real outcome? Not very much fun, thanks for asking. I played a lot of cell phone games.

I should mention, these teams are intense. Our team just wore their regular league dodgeball shirt with last-minute numbers screen printed on the front. Other teams had full-out designer t-shirts, shorts, etc. The Geoducks had t-shirts, sweatshirts, backpacks and rally towels printed with their logos. The team names were pretty awesome. Sparkle Mafia, Canucketeers, Dodge Dolls, Pimp & Hand Strong were just a few of the teams we met. We were one of the few teams that weren’t wearing long socks and knee pads. We saw lots of elbow and wrist guards too. In case you were wondering exactly what we were up against:

Holy crap, huh?

When that was over, chaos ensued. They called it Last Dodgeballer Standing. From the non-player perspective, it looked like a crap-ton of people divided on two sides of a basketball court, throwing and screaming and barely moving because they’re packed like sardines. Apparently on the court, it wasn’t much better. There were no teams so you could get anyone out, including people two inches from you. After that, the recreation league started. Remember when you were at summer camp and you got to learn random field games? Yeah, it was like that.

By this point, I’m starving. The snack bar sold candy, Gatorades, popcorn, nachos and hot dogs. None of that is on the diet. When the open foam ball round robin started, I’d lost my patience. I crossed the street to Palace Station and went immediately to Starbucks. Being from Boston somehow got me an extra squirt of caramel. Thanks Armando! After I finished my parfait, I was faced with a decision. Go back to dodgeball or be the sketchy single girl at the craps tables. So, craps tables it is. My mere presence cleared out the first table, so I made my way to the other table. After a few ups and downs, I decided to cash out when Mr. Wonderful called. I think I played for an hour or so before the text message came in. I threw some chips on the table as a tip and bee-lined to the cashier. I was up $2 over what I put in. YAY me!

Friday night was the dodgeball banquet back at Palace Station. This is where the magic happens. It looks like every sports banquet you went to in high school, except with drink tickets. There was a slide show from earlier in the day and speeches from the board of directors. It was fun to see all the teams together. There were teams from everywhere – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, New York, etc. We were the furthest East team, but certainly not the furthest traveled. Also, the Palace Station has delicious meatballs. Who knew?

We clean up well! (Also, I’m wearing a bridesmaid dress after the wedding. Another first!)

Afterwards, we went back to Bill’s for more late night gambling. Since casinos are huge black holes for time, we stayed out far too late.