Knowing When To Stop

This weekend a bunch of us went down to Atlantic City, and boy was it a fun weekend. Represented at the weekend were people from our New York delegation -me, Matt, Pat, Michelle, Roy, Brian Steve and Ashley our Boston delegation - Drapo, and our Philly delegation, Michelle, Misti, Jen and Steve. I will do the usual sum up of notable and funny moments:

-Matt showing up at my house on Saturday morning already decked out for Staurday night. Dark blue button down shirt, black velvet jacket, sunglasses. he was Brad Pitt in Ocean's Eleven, and I made him say "We're gonna knock over a casino"

Pat being in the middle of a sentence and stopping to stare at Drapo. All of us hang there, waiting for Pat to speak again when he says "That would be perfect!" Turns out that Pat is going to be Indiana Jones for Halloween, and Drapo was wearing a brown leather jacket that would complete the outfit perfectly. He broke out the brown fedora hat he bought and it did look good. Drapo awesomely loaned Pat his jacket on Sunday when we got home, and Pat gave Drapo a black one of his as "collateral".

-On the car ride down, Roy broke out his ipod and treated us to the wackiest road trip compilation of songs ever. We heard Christmas music, showtunes, kids music and I don't even know what else. Our favorites (and by that I mean the ones that generated the most laughs) were "C is for Cookie", "The Hokey-Pokey", "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and "Supercalifragalisticexpialadocious". Thanks for the awesome soundtrack Roy!

-I'd like to point out that in this group, we had two Matts, two Jens, two Michelles and two Steves. And since a lot of these people hadn't met everyone else before - it was confusing to say the least.

-For dinner, thirteen of us paraded up to the hostess and we asked to be seated together if possible. The woman asked how many we were and took my name. Pat said later that I should have said, "13" when she asked how many of us there were, but I should have said "Jesus" when she asked my name.

-Michelle's impression one of our trip friends posing for pictures. Too funny for words.

-Roy's roll at the craps table. I was told that he was rolling for about a half an hour. The table was chanting "Roy!" whenever he rolled, and everybody was making money. Nice.

-Pat and I managed to stay in the poker room until after 4:30 a.m. When we finally left, there was brochure at the cashier window that said, "Knowing When to Stop" and it's where this blog post gets its name. At breakfast the next day, we were reading some of the questions inside that we thought were funny like:

Do you have an urge to celebrate any good fortune by a few hours of gambling?

Do you ever gamble for longer than you had planned?

Are you reluctant to use "gambling money" for normal expenditures?

-Misti's craps roll in the morning - she made me and Michelle some money!

-Drapo and Roy's antics with Matt's car at the rest stop - putting the windshield wipers straight up and twisting the blades around. Of course matt's all in the car and seat belted in before he realizes and has to get out and fix it. Funny.

-Cheesequake! It has much to offer. Seriously. It does.

Anyway, all in all it was an awesome weekend. Even more so since I left AC up $160. It's all about knowing when to stop, see? Thanks for the fun weekend guys!

The Time Traveler's Wife

It's book recommendation time! I just finished reading this book: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This may be one of my favorite books of all time...its a combination of all the things I like in a story - someting supernatural - in this case, time travel. Henry DeTamble time travels to his past and future without meaning or desiring to. It's also one of the best love stories I've ever read, Clare and Henry are so well drawn, and their love is so normal and obvious that that's what makes it powerful. It's also very funny in places - poor Henry can't control when he time travels, but it tends to happen when he gets stressed, so there's some very funny worrying about time travel - like when poor Henry is hoping he won't disappear right before Clare's family's eyes at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve or at their wedding. This is one of those books that you were sorry to finish it was so good. Enjoy!

The Departed

I saw this movie on Monday night with Matt, Pat and Michelle, and I've been looking forward to doing a blog post about it to tell you how awesome it is.

Now it's a little complicated, because I really don't want to give anything good away, but I'll try to say what's good about the film without being horribly specific.

Jack Nicholson. He's back. He's awesome in all the comedies he does, but you forget how much awesomer he is when he plays villians, and that's what's happening here. He's an Irish mob boss and he's badass. And disturbing. And the whole time you're watching him on screen you're sort of saying to yourself "I can't not look at it..."

Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio are good too in their respective roles. I also enjoyed the story, it was interesting and kept me entertained the whole time...I thought it was well done. It was cool to watch a film about the Irish mafia - I always enjoy films with an Irish angle because of my heritage, and this one had some pretty funny quotes about being Irish in general. Like this one:

"You know, Freud once said that the Irish are the only race who are impervious to psychoanalysis." Awesome.

Go see it.

Vienna and Wolfgang Amadeus

The last place we went on the Europe was Vienna, and one of the cool things we got to do there was go see a Mozart concert at Schoenbrunn palace, the "summer residence" of the Habsburgs. A massive lemon cream colored palace...they call it the Versailles of the east. And it's pictured here. The other photo is of the Orangerie - the concert hall where we saw an orchestra, opera singers and dancers perform some of Mozart's "greatest hits" if you will. Funny aside...in Prague Drapo and I were walking around and passed some kind of concert hall and they had a sign for that night's performance saying "Mozart's greatest hits" and we just thought it was hilarious - like the way you see Aerosmith's Greatest Hits 1985-1995 in the store. Anyway, dinner at this palace and then the concert was awesome...a very cool thing to have done while we were in prim and perfect Austria.