We didn’t do much of anything on Friday, except drive up here. We did take a detour to The Good Post Office to collect the mail, as Mike usually does during his lunch hour on Fridays.

But it was kind of a waste, most of what was there was unsolicited junk…catalogs with cheesy stuff in them, solicitations for cable TV, insurance marketing, you know the drill.

Anyhoo, by the time we arrived in Portland, it had already gotten dark, and we both were tired.  We had been thinking about going to The Great Lost Bear, which is one of the world’s best beer bars…they have something like 65 different beers on tap.  It is so great, that Michael Jackson came to visit.  There is a big picture of him hanging over the bar, standing in front of a long row of beer taps.

No, not THAT Michael Jackson, the late King of Pop!  No, this Michael Jackson was a British writer and an authority on beer.  I have some of his books.  Now, that would be a dream job for me…getting paid tom travel all over the world, drink beer, and then write books and magazine articles about it!

Anyhoo, the only two things thee men have in common is sharing the same name, and that they are both dead.

But we didn’t go to the Bear on Friday night.  We just walked to the Pizza Villa joint across the street from tghe hotel and got some pizza, and brought it back to the room.

The next day, we went to the beer festival.  But first we had to buy our Sea Dogs tickets for 2010.  We’ve found that if we don’t buy them the day they go on sale, we get stuck with crappy seats.  I scored us some decent seats, for six games.

The beer festival was awesome.  More breweries than they had in the past, it was hard to decide which 12 we would taste.  They only let each person have 12 tasting tickets, for 4 ounce pours…some stupid Maine state law or something.  But we could taste more beers each if we got different ones, and sampled each others beers!

I met up with one of the organizers of the event, who had some free festival swag for me.  She appreciated my promoting this and next week’s New Hampshire Brewers Fest on Twitter and Facebook, plus she asked me some questions for promotional articles she was writing.  Anyhoo, free swag is always nice!

After the festival, we took the bus to the Old Port and had dinner at Fore Street.  This is our absolute favorite restaurant, and we hadn’t been there in ages.

The meal was wonderful, just two mildly annoying things.  The first was someone who thought that bringing an infant into a high end restaurant was a good idea.  The baby screamed almost the whole time, nobody took it out until they were ready to leave themselves.  At least this group as halfway across the restaurant from us…but still, I felt sorry for anyone who had to sit next to them.

The second thing was more weird than annoying.  We were seated at a table in a long row of two-tops, with a long bench on one side, and chairs on the other side of each table.  Mike was on the bench, I was on the chair.  At th next tqble was a younger couple, late 20’s/early 30’s, I guess.  The guy was on the chair and the girl was on the bench.  I couldn’t get a good look to see if they were wearing rings, so we could bnot tell if they were married or just dating.

We were already seated when they came in, they obviously had been waiting at the bar, as they were each carrying a glass of wine.  They seemed perfectly okay at first.  Then, we noticed that the girl had her head down on the table.  They guy was trying to make here get up, only to have her slump down on the bench, her head almost landing in Mike’s lap.

She sat back up, only to slump back down again several more times.  My first thought was that she was drunk…maybe they had gone to the beer festival, and drank more than she could handle.  For Mike and me, 12 4 ounce pours is enough to get a little buzz on, but not falling-down, passing out drunk.  Still enough of a buzz where driving would not have been a good idea, thus taking the bus and calling a cab to get back to the hotel, after the buses shut down for the evening.

Or maybe she was just sick.  Either way, the guy should have been concerned enough to take her home, but he insisted on ordering dessert.  She clearly wanted to leave, but he refused…at first.  Finally, in a pissed off tone of voice, he asked the server to pack up his dessert to go.  Then he made the girl pay the bill.  I have no idea what the real deal was with these people, but it was just kind of weird.

After dinner, I called a cab to take us back to the hotel.  If you are ever in Portland and need to take a cab, I highly recommend ASAP Taxi (207-971-2727).  They are polite, reliable, and they don’t try to rip you off by taking you on the scenic route of Portland.   Our hotel, the Inn at St. John, recommended them to me ages ago, and we’ve never had any problems with them.

For the second night in a row, I thought I would have to call the front desk to complain about annoying *neighbors*.  Friday night, the guests directly upstairs from us were stomping around, it sounded like there was a herd of elephants stampeding up there.  This went on until around midnight or so, then they finally settled down.  So far, it’s bee quiet up thee tonight.  I  just hope they didn’t go to the evening session of the beer festival, and then out to the bars afterward, as many people do.  The bars all close at 1AM, I think, so if they are coming back, it’s gonna be VERY soon.

However, we had to endure the loud family in the room next door, with a toddler who screamed incessantly.  The adults were banging on the walls, slamming doors, and otherwise making a ton of racket.  They’re lucky they all shut up before I called the front desk…if they got kicked out of the hotel, they’d have a hard time finding another place to stay.  With the beer fest in town, most of the decent hotels were fully booked weeks in advance.

I need to go to bed now, we have to check out of here by 11AM.  After we leave here, we want to go to the Shipyard store in Portland and get some bottles of some of the beers we tried at the fest.  Then we’ll have lunch somewhere, either at the aforementioned Great Lost Bear, or Federal Jack’s in Kennebunkport.

Whichever one we feel like, when the time comes!

He’s halfway tempted to check out a philadelphia job search, only we don’t want to move to Philly. It’s one thing to root for their baseball team, but we’re not about to move, at least not there.  It was awesome that the Phillies won, and will make it to Game Six of the World Series, though.  GOOOO PHILLIES!  Y*****S SUCK!

Well, if the boss chooses to be a jerk and won’t give Mike the time off on Friday, I don’t have to wait, I can always go up to Portland on the Downeaster.  And Mike can always drive up and join me whenever his ass gets sprung from work.  Maybe I should give him his beer fest ticket to carry in his wallet, in case I end up going in without him.

I like the Downeaster.  You might remember how, back in May, I was seriously stressed and needed to get away.  I went up to Maine alone on the train, and it was a great time.  I booked a room at the Inn at St. John, and bought tickets to a couple of Sea Dogs games.  The train not only has free WiFi, but electrical outlets by the window seats, so you don’t have to worry about batteries running out.  I did not have a laptop at the time, but I do now, so if I have to take the train, I’ll have plenty to do during the ride.

Speaking of the beer fest, I was asked some questions by someone who runs the event, for publicity to sell people on another beer festival, the New Hampshire Brewers Festival.  Yes, we’re going to that, as well.  I enjoy helping to promote these events, and I thought it was cool to have been asked.  Free brewfest swag doesn’t hurt, either…LOL!

Our hot water heater sprung a leak on Sunday…not the tank itself, but one of the pipes leading into it.  So now we’ve been without hot water for over 24 hours now.  I was expecting for the landladies to just call a plumber to fix the pipe, but they decided to just buy us a new heater, and that won’t get here until later on Tuesday.  It’s amazing how we take stuph like hot running water for granted, until something happens, and you don’t have it.

We’re getting our new stove on Wednesday, supposedly.  We never asked for one, we’re just getting one because the landladies felt like buying new ones.  Out of all of our big appliances, the stove is the only one they provide, but the only one that doesn’t crap out on us.  I wished that I knew they were buying us a new stove before they bought it, I’d rather have had a new fridge, instead.  But we’re on our own in that department, just as we are with the washer & dryer.

The new stove, I’m told, is one of those electric glass-top models.  I think I could like that, the heating controls are supposed to be as responsive as gas ones.  Better than those electric coil burners.  I’ll let you know how I like it after I’ve used it for a while.

Anyhoo, we have a nice weekend planned.  We’re going up to Portland on Friday, or at least I am (see aforementioned ranting about Mike’s boss possibly being a douchebag).  The beer festival is on Saturday, our tickets are for the afternoon session.  We have reservations for dinner at Fore Street on Saturday night.  And then we’ll do something on Sunday, don’t know what yet, before driving home.

I need to get away for a couple of days.  My head hurts, between Halloween, the hot water thing, and other dumb crap.

As I said before, our plan was to go to the Great Pumpkin Festival at the Cambridge Brewing Company.  And that is exactly what we did.  We drove to the Wellington MBTA station and parked there, and caught the train to Cambridge.  There isn’t really anywhere to park in Cambridge that doesn’t cost a squillion dollars, plus, since the event involved beer and lots of it, driving all the way there would not have been a good idea.  Mike stopped drinking before I did, and by the time we got back to Wellington, he was okay to drive the short distance home.  Beats the crap out of having to wait for the bus.

The festival was fun.  Lots of great pumpkin beers there, as well as tasty foods made with pumpkin.  Pumpkin ravioli is teh YUMMEH!  It came with a pesto sauce, that used toasted pumpkin seeds instead of the usual pine nuts, and was garnished with thin slices of apple.  I definitely plan to try to recreate this yummilicious wonder at home!

It was past 11:30 PM by the time we got home.  Trick-or-treat time was LONG over, thankfully.  Although, there was this one time when we went out, came home at around 11, and some kids beat on the door about five minutes later.  Sheesh, what kind of dumbassed parents let their kids go around knocking on strangers’ doors so late at night?  We did NOT answer the door.

This was the second annual Great Pumpkin Festival.  I did not know about the first one.  The only reason I knew about this one was because I’ve been getting into following more microbreweries on Twitter and Facebook, and that’s how I learned of this event.

The event was obviously a huge success, judging by the number of people who showed up.  The horror of it all…so many evil, bitter people, who didn’t know that Halloween is Just For The Kids, and were legally obligated to stay home and hand out candy.  The event was for those 21+, of course, being that it was primarily a beer festival.  Evil, evil, EVIL!  How DARE there be a Halloween party just for adults?

We didn’t go in costume, but a lot of people did.  We saw some really cool costumes, many more than we would have seen if we’d stayed home and gave out candy, as we get mostly teen thugs who can’t be arsed to wear costumes.  Sorry, but dressing in all black is NOT a costume!

One of my favorites at the Fest was this guy who went as the Joker, the Heath Ledger version.  Whoever did his makeup did a great job.  Another one I liked was the guy who went as A-Rod.  He had a pinstriped Y*****s jersey with A-Rod’s #13, and a Y***** hat.  We strongly suspected that he was NOT a Y***** fan.  But, as Mike said, it’s good for Halloween costumes to be scary.   LOL!

We also saw Popeye and Olive Oyl, very well done.  As was The Cat In The Hat, together with Thing #1 and Thing #2.

Maybe when we go to this next year, I can convince Mike to dress up.  Don’t know if he will, but it might be fun to come up with a couple’s costume for next year!

Halloween is not so bad, after all, as long as we can celebrate it on our terms, not anyone else’s!

If we weren’t spending the money on weekend trips to Portland for the Maine Brewers Festival the weekend after Halloween, and then to Manchester for the New Hampshire Brewers Festival the following weekend, I would SO plan for us to get the hell out of Dodge on Friday night, and not come back until late on Saturday.  We did this the last time Halloween fell on a weekend day, and it worked out quite well.  But I think that it coincided with the Maine Brewers Fest.

So I’m trying to figure out how to NOT be annoyed on Halloween.  We do have plans to go out for the evening…they are having a Great Pumpkin Ale Festival at the Cambridge Brewing Company.  This is a local event, doesn’t involve having to pay to stay at a hotel, as we do for Portland and Manchester, and we’ll be using public transit to gt there and back.

The only annoying thing about this event is that they are pushing people to come in costume.  I don’t do costumes, neither does Mike.  Especially not if we’ll be riding the T.  I don’t want people looking at us on the damned train, yanno?

I’m sure that we won’t be the only ones costume-less, though.  Nothing says that they won’t let us in sans costumes.  As long as we pay up, we’ll get in.

This ought to be interesting, though.  I used to work at this place, many years ago…in fact, it’s where I met Mike.  I was a cook, he was a customer.  I was getting off a day shift and was at the bar having a beer, and he was getting drunk after finishing his last final exam of the semester at nearby MIT.  We did go back there a few times after I quit that job, but not since we’ve been married, I don’t think.  It will be interesting to see what it’s like now; I doubt most of the people I worked with back then are still there.  As far as I can tell, the only ones still there are the guy who owns the place, and the head brewer.

The head chef, when I was there, was an asshole.  He was a big part of why I quit.  Also, there was this skeevy dishwasher named Remberto, who the head chef liked…mostly because he worked long hours on the cheap.  Remberto had the hots for me, was always hitting on me, he even offered me $100 to sleep with him.  Trust me, there is not enough money in the world to make me even think about it!

Once, he snuck up behind me while I was reaching for a pot on a high shelf, and grabbed my boobs.  The head chef asshole yelled at me for screaming!  The head chef dude was married, wonder how he’d react if this scumbag Remberto grabbed his wife’s boobs?

This sort of shit was why I ended up quitting.  I did think of filing a sexual harassment suit, but decided against it.  This was mostly because I truly liked the owner of the place, and didn’t want to hurt him.  I guess I should have gone to him and explained what was going on, but I didn’t.

Okay, so I KNOW that the chef asshole is long gone, and Remberto hopefully is gone, too.  Remberto was why we stopped coming in as customers after I quit; the asshat would see us at the bar, and come and hit on me, right in front of Mike.

Hopefully, the management FINALLY realized that Remberto is bad for business, that if he was sexually harassing me, he was likely doing it to others, too.  Eventually, it had to be *get rid of him or get sued*.  If I didn’t sue them, someone eventually would.

Well, we’ll find out soon enough.  Since I no longer work there, I’m not allowed back in the kitchen, but kitchen workers do have to come out to use the restrooms, they are the same ones that the customers use.

But I am looking forward to going there and tasting all of that wonderful pumpkin beer!  It will be a great way to get away from the trick-or-treat crap.

Still…I am tempted to put a sign in the door saying that the residents therein have teh Hamthrax (aka swine flu).  Would that keep kids from knocking?  Not only do I want to stop the knocking before we head out for the evening, but while we’re gone…the door-knocking also bothers the cats.

I hate Halloween.  I’ll be happy when it is over and done with for another year.

Also, he knocks things off the counter.  Every day, I have to pick stuph up off the floor.

And then there are the cats who have taken to sitting on top of the range hood…usually Pumpkin or Allegra.  I keep stuph up there, like plastic bags, wrap, aluminum foil, and they keep knocking them down.

This morning, someone knocked a whole stack of my cookbooks onto the floor.  Probably Sabby, because he’s so freakin’ HUGE.  I just hope he decides not to sit on the range hood, his weight might just pull the thing off the wall! Maybe I need to get some insurance quotes, just in case.

I’m getting really sick of this, sick of picking up stuph the cats knock over.  I had read that cats hate the scent of citrus, so I asked Mike to pick me up one of those orange cleaners, such as Orange Glo.  Maybe if I use it to clean surfaces I want to be cat-free, they will hate the smell and stay off.

It can’t hurt to try.

As much as I love paper books, I’m seriously thinking that I should purchase a Kindle.  I look around this apartment, and there are books and magazines piled up all over the place.  In every room except the bathroom!

They’re not all mine – Mike is equally guilty of buying lots of books and magazines.  I think he has more magazine subscriptions than I do!

But anyway, this apartment is small, and we’re running out of room to put stuph.  We will have to pack up stuph we no longer look at much and take it to our storage unit.

If you want an idea of how many books we have – I have over 500 cookbooks alone.  I stopped counting at 500, if I were to wager a guess, I’d say I have almost 700.  And I just got two new ones from Amazon yesterday.

Having a Kindle would be a good way to apply some diet pills to our book/magazine collection, that’s for sure.  I’m sure that pretty much anything we want to read would be available for download.

But now I hear that Barnes & Noble is getting into the act, with their own e-book reader, called the Nook.  It’s not out yet, but it’s available for pre-order.  It’s the same price as the basic Kindle, $259.  So in addition to deciding whether or not to buy one of these gadgets, I now have to decide which one.

I’ll check out both, read reviews, and decide.  Maybe Mike and I can give these to each other for Christmas!

Yeah, I’m at Mike’s work, too. I brought my little netbook to occupy my time, they have wireless internet for *guests*. I decided to tag along because I want to get my seasonal flu shot today, and the CVS Minute Clinic near his work does them. The CVS stores closer to home don’t have Minute Clinics, so they don’t offer flu shots. The Walgreen’s near us does, but, contrary to what the commercials say, this loacations requires an appointment. I just want to be able to walk in and have it done. I hate Walgreen’s, anyway, for other reasons.

So it would have been stupid for Mike to come to work, then have to go all the way back home to get me, and head back out this way again. Also, the CVS is in the same shopping center as the Market Basket, and we do need to go food shopping.

But first we’ll go someplace and get some lunch. Never go food shopping hungry, you buy way too much, and then you need to figure out how to lose belly fat, from eating all that food!

I wonder where we will go for lunch. Probably the 99.  The Piccadilly Pub down the road from the Market Basket is more convenient, but that particular location has gone way downhill, so we don’t go there anymore.

I had never been inside the building of Mike’s work before.  It’s pretty nice.  He has a good-sized cube with a bunch of computers, and pictures of us and the cats on the walls.  Right now it’s really quiet, as there’s nobody here but us and probably a security guard.

I’m getting hungry.  I hope Mike will finish whatever he’s doing soon, so we can get out of here!

NEITHER.  Mike has to friggin’ go into work.  Even if he didn’t leave early yesterday to get me to my boobie-squeezing appointment on time, he still would have been expected to come in, anyway.  So much for going anywhere cool today.

And, of course, neither one of these events will be taking place tomorrow.  But the weather will be nice, I’d like to get out and do something.  I called the Portsmouth Harbor Cruise place about taking the river foliage cruise tomorrow, but it’s fully booked.  Maybe we can do that next weekend, if the weather is decent.  I guess I should expect stuph to be busy, as it’s Columbus Day weekend and all.

Mike  doesn’t get Monday off, though.  In fact, he has to go to the infamous Boring Meeting In Rhode Island on Monday.  This is the first one he’s had to go to since before all those months of being in the hospital and on disability.  He hates having to go to these things.  But he does it because they pay him well to do so, and he’s grateful to even have a job after being out on disability for so long.
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We’re supposedly getting a new stove soon.  I am not sure why, because I haven’t complained about the old one, it still works just fine.  No, we’re not getting converted from electric to natural gas for the stove, but what we are getting is one of those glass-top ranges.  The obvious good thing about these is that they are wicked easy to clean…if something boils over, you don’t have to  worry about cleaning under the burners and all.

Also, I hear that the heat control is as responsive as a gas flame.  With the electric coil burners, it takes a while for them to heat up or cool down, with a gas flame, the change is immediate, if you know what I mean.  But it’s still an electric stove, so they won’t have to install a gas hook-up.

We are still going to be getting gas heat for this coming winter, though.  I figured that this wasn’t going to happen until next summer, being that nothing happened this past summer, even though the landladies kept talking about it.  But we were told NOT to have our oil tank filled, because the gas furnaces will be coming VERY soon.  They’d better, as it’s starting to get COLD around here!

Just as long as the work gets done earlier than later in whatever week…we have weekend trips coming up!  I do need to make it clear as to what days people can and can’t get in here, before any of this starts.

Okay, so our landladies are re-financing this house, something that I don’t think will end well.  So that had to have some inspector dude come in and, well, inspect.

It was originally supposed to be either Wednesday or Thursday.  Didn’t happen.  Then, one of the landladies saw Mike outside and told him that said inspection would be today, *sometime between 10-11 AM.*  Mike said that this would be fine.

Too bad that he forgot that I had a medical appointment at Lahey Clinic today.  And that I need to allow three hours to get there, since I have to use public transit.  Waiting for the inspector, well, that wasn’t going to work.  Especially since he came at the later end of the time frame.  Although he didn’t take long in here at all, by the time it was over, it was too late for me to catch the bus and make the long trek to Lahey.

I had already re-scheduled this appointment once, because I was sick and couldn’t make it.  They went to a lot of trouble to re-schedule both of the procedures on the same day, the mammogram and the bone density test.

So now I’m making Mike come home and drive me to the appointment!  The way I see it, he handed my time to the landlady and the inspector, now he needs to remedy this.  In the car, I can be there in less than 30 minutes.

So he is coming home to do so for me.  I think I’ll make him take me out to dinner at Legal Sea Foods in the Burlington Mall, after my poke & prod & boobie-squeezing fest is done.

This damned inspection thing has been stressful.  I don’t like strangers touching my stuph, and I wished I were at the hotel anaheim, with tickets to the Red Sox playoff games out there. Anywhere but here!

The inspector was a decent dude, didn’t touch anything, just looked and took a couple of pictures.  I am just glad it is all over with!

We’re set to head for Connecticut later, to Mystic Seaport, where they are having this beer talk/tasting event.  We’ve been wanting to visit Mystic Seaport for a while now, and here’s a perfect excuse.

I just hope that the Super 8 in Groton that I booked is not a rathole.  We stayed at the Super 8 in Sturbridge back in March, and it was fine.  My only problem with that place was that the free WiFi that they advertised didn’t work.  This location advertised it, as well, so we shall see.

The problem was that the only other hotels available were something like $300/night, or too far away from Mystic.  I really can’t spend that much on a hotel, not when we have the Maine Brewers Festival and the New Hampshire Brewers Festival coming up next month, when a hotel room in walking distance of the venue is a MUST.  Add to that the fact that we’ll be staying in Portland for TWO nights.  So, we have to budget for all of this stuph.  Hopefully, the Super 8 in Groton will be fine, and the WiFi working would be a plus.  I don’t expect it to be fancy, no expensive glass tiles in the bathroom or anything like that. But as long as it’s clean, and everything works as advertised, we’ll be happy!

It’s gonna be raining all day Saturday.  So no walking around the Mystic Seaport then…we’ll just go to the beer thing and then to dinner at the Seamen’s Inne, which I gather is on the museum grounds.  I have no idea how mobbed it may or may not be, so, to be on the safe side, I made reservations online.  The place is just a tad pricey…I mean, if they had Miller High Life beer, that guy from the commercials would come and take it all away, because they have a $12 hamburger on the menu!  See the *$11.50 for a hamburger* commercial.

So we won’t be getting burgers there, but a lot of the other stuph seems fairly reasonably priced.  And we’ll also get a discount because we became members of the museum when we bought the beer thingy tickets.

Sunday is supposed to be nice, though, so we can walk around and see the museum & village then.

Hopefully, the free WiFi works, and I can blog.  Otherwise, see you on Twitter and Facebook!