Now With 4.4% Less Nyet!!!

Skidding our way into July here, only six weeks until I re-re-restart my real life at grad school. I am completely typical in my balance of anticipation and anxiety - and beyond that, I am thoroughly eager to stop tutoring for a while. I don't know why - maybe it's just a bad string of kids - but work has been particularly torturous lately. Oh, well, nothing I can't tolerate for another month or so. A month that, according to the computer here, is going to feature highs of 109 every day until the apocalypse. So we have that going for us.

Beck has recovered from an unpleasant week - after the cat bite to the hand and the antibiotic / tetanus shots, she was sore and had some weird reactions that gave her achy joints. Better now - her hand's still sore, but she's walking / running normally, much better. We've been keeping things pretty low key of late - haven't been hiking because we like not dying of dehydration - and generally sticking to A/C-laden destinations or cooling off in the pool. Sometimes I feel I am not living the world's most exciting life. Ah.... well. No, seriously, we've been having fun times keeping it chill of late - finished the Deadwood series, have generally eaten like kings, watched a slew of terrible number-based movies - the hits just keep on coming.

Saturday we enjoyed the flesh-fest that is Ra Sushi - met up with Dan and Christina in North Scottsdale to observe the habits Peoplicus Beautifulis up close. The helium-voiced plasticine hostesses balked and then actually showed us to our tables, the low red light atmosphere of the joint reflecting just so off their artificiality. I openly questioned if we were pretty enough to eat at such a restaurant; perhaps coincidentally, we were put in a booth in the back. Dan openly questioned whether they were Russian Lit or Communications majors; he's judgmental, that one. We eventually enjoyed a delicious if stupidly expensive meal - I am admittedly not a sushi man and resorted to chicken teriyaki, so when I say "we" I mean "they," and when I say "stupidly expensive" I mean "stupidly expensive." Try to keep up. To cap things off, the waitress nickel and dimed us over some coupons that we had brought - turns out the definition of "free glass of wine" is up for debate, and rather than placate a customer, the management decided to debate the finer points of the fine print and charge us. Really? Let me tell you how much I love conversations with waitresses that involve pointing at tiny, coupon-sized pieces of paper and saying, "It says here..."

Barf. Screw you Ra and the rip-off horse you rode in on. Next time I want to see the pretties, I'll read People.

I had heard via Christastrophe that NBC was re-airing the original episode of Saturday Night Live (hosted by, RIP, George Carlin), so we came back to the condo to sip on beers and watch a comedic legend. And... hmmm. Decidedly unfunny, actually, or at least super campy. I mean, this is one of the best things EVER:

But the rest of the skits were pretty low-energy, one-joke numbers. And Carlin's contributions were little segments of his stand-up routine which largely involved a lot of mugging and trite observations. I appreciate historical comedy with the best of them - you can see that Carlin is setting the roots for the bulk of standup to come, and maybe this was just a bad sample of material - but wow, I felt pretty dumb for suggesting this as the night's activity. Oh, well. We did also get to see Billy Preston doing "Nothing From Nothing" (note: that's not the actual performance, SNL being the copyright-protecting jerks they are) and Janis Ian singing "At Seventeen." Solid 70s fare.

D&C left so they could go get the new Guitar Hero at midnight. You know, with all of the other 14 year olds in Phoenix. Use that information as you will.

Lots more low-keying on Sunday - I got up early to shoot some baskets and watch some pretty high quality pickup soccer down at the park, then came home and watched some of the highest-in-the-world quality soccer, the European Championship Finals. I watched a lot of the tournament, so it was good to see a fantastic end - and now Beck is in love with this guy:

How can a Nyet compete?

My athletic exploits of late: 7 miles on Thursday, 4 miles on Friday, 7 on Saturday, bringing me to 32 miles for week 2, 62 for the past two weeks. I also played Ultimate Sunday night and did another 5 miles on the treadmill Monday. WOOHA. Some other significant stats: Two weeks ago I weighed myself before and after running at the gym, and it was 204 and 198. This week it was 195 and 190. So things are headed in the right direction!

AS mandated by Beck, though, today i am doing NOTHING athletic for the first time in 15 days. So hopefully I'll come back rejuvenated for Wednesday. We'll see. Now it's off to Tutor Corps for a few hours and then back to hang out with the beck, who has today off - sweet!