New Friends, New Bike

Eirin and I spent a nice weekend hanging out around town this weekend. We decided to have a barbie (no, we did not have any shrimp to throw) for a bunch of my coworkers and that pretty much took up most of the weekend preparing for it. We chose to make all Mexican (or Mexican-inspired) dishes for people since that doesn't really exist here save for the occasional fast-food form. The menu included flank steak tacos and our usual yam taco (yam yaco) recipe.

Luckily we were able to find almost everything we needed at the farmer's market on Saturday including the meat for grilling. The only things that we were not able to find were chipotle peppers for the sauce and decent corn tortillas. They had a couple of packages of Mission at the store which worked in a pinch but they proved to be a little past their prime...tasted like chalk and disintegrated with the slightest human touch. Luckily Eirin's cooking skillz made up for that with excellent beans, guacamole, pico and sweet potatoes. We had a nice turnout...Brits, Poles, Hungarians, Taiwanese, Bangladeshis, South Africans. Even a couple of real live Australians made appearances!

Also on Saturday Eirin bought a bike that I am more than a little envious of. It is an old frame that was professionally sandblasted and repainted flat gray, with all new components and beautiful wheels that feel like you're riding on rails. We checked and it looks like you're allowed to make a bicycle one of your two checked items on Qantas so Eirin will soon have the coolest hipster bike on Capitol Hill. After riding it to the video store last night it became clear, however, that it is geared so high (there aren' really any significant hills in Brisbane) that she will never make it up the hills of Seattle. The bike shop said that they would switch anything out that she didn't like for the first month. I am seriously thinking about having them build one for me as well, but we'll see...Ricardo has served me well thus far.

One more thing we did that keep forgetting to mention was the Phoenix concert the night Eirin got here. She didn't fall asleep at all, which was more than I expected, and they put on a good show. I didn't quite realize until moments before they came on that they are the it band for sixteen year old girls, and en masse, they are one of the most ridiculous demographics that exists. The screaming, the hand flapping, the jumping up and down...I don't get it. Eirin swears that every teenage girl has an obsessive personality, which I suppose is true. Upon exiting it became painfully obvious that we were the oldest people there. I'm not sure weather the experience as a whole made me feel old for that reason, or young for choosing to go in the first place. Probably the former.