La Famiglia

This is my 200th post. I was going to name it “200” but that would too closely associate it with that computer generated turd, the movie “300”.

This was a family weekend. I went out to dinner with my wife, siblings and a few friends. We met at my sister's house early Saturday evening, where she was mixing some esoteric herb based cocktails. She's quite good at it. I stuck with a classic vodka martini and then we headed out to dinner.

During dinner, an arm wrestling match broke out. My sister took on my brother's friend and got her butt kicked. I'd like to remind you that we were not in some roadhouse deep in the outer East Bay. This was a nice place in Rockridge. When not hiding my face in embarrassment, I was scrambling to move stemware so the contestants would not get impaled. But the staff took it in stride as they placed bets on a winner.

The sight of two women at my table grunting as they tried to take each other down did not diminish my appetite. I ate every bit of my pan roasted half chicken. The rest of the crowd enjoyed their meal as well. I'd recommend The Wood Tavern if you are ever in that part of Oaktown.

http://woodtavern.net/

As usual, I pissed off my wife by suggesting we leave the restaurant within the first hour after finishing our meal. We headed back to my sister's house and spent the night. The same burst of energy that I had gotten on my last two trips to the mountains came over me upon our return. It must have been because we were in the Oakland Hills. I started doing my usual stand up routine. I was about to try a Chris Farley dive in their living room but the table had a marble top so I demurred. There was also a rematch and this time my sister won. I suspect someone took a dive.

My sister has four cats but they took off when they saw me tromping around. I think she said one of her cats is an Indian cat, but I have to check back with her for clarification on that. To be clear, my sister is not some old cat lady. She's firmly on her way to becoming one, but she's not there yet.

The next day we were served a great breakfast. My brother lives close by and came back to join us. He mentioned the blog and how he sometimes is embarrassed at the mention of the events at the end of my 8/11/07 post. C'est la vie. I can vouch for the fact that that turd was not computer generated.