I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot of Anber­lin lately, since I got their discog­ra­phy. Thanks to Vince for telling me about them, they are an awe­some band. How can you go wrong with a cover of When In Rome’s “The Promise” ?

Today, Chi Hai and Anh Nick took me out on the town. Had drinks at a really cool diner called Town Talk, and then walked around the block for sushi at a place called Midori’s Float­ing World. Both places were great.

Town Talk is a restored diner from the 1930s with some really great chefs who do classy ver­sions of diner/​comfort foods. And they have “mixol­o­gists” there. These bar­tenders are like mad sci­en­tists who throw together some really cool drinks. I ordered a “Catcher in the Rye,” and the guy mixed a cou­ple of ingre­di­ents in a shaker, poured it into a baby mar­tini glass for me, and then busted out a cou­ple of unla­beled bot­tles and use eye­drop­pers to put in those ingre­di­ents. Then, when I was mostly done with my drink, he poured the rest of the shaker into the glass, and told me to try it again. The mys­tery drop­per ingre­di­ents had kinda set­tled to the bot­tom of the glass, and were now mixed back into the drink, and it tasted even bet­ter than before.

Midori’s Float­ing World, named after that period of Japan­ese art, is also really cool. Midori is an older Japan­ese woman who works the sushi bar area, and her hus­band is head chef in the kitchen. Their fam­ily is all the wait staff. We had some nigiri with really good qual­ity fish (but it was sliced a lit­tle thin). Nick got some soba for us and the broth was excel­lent. And they had a really good selec­tion of sake and Japan­ese beer.

After din­ner, Nick and I went over to his friend’s place to play poker with his broth­ers and some of his fam­ily friends. It was a $10 buy-​in, and I won a huge hand by slow bet­ting just enough to sucker three peo­ple who flopped a pair a kings when I had pocket aces. I actu­ally knocked Nick’s brother Paul out of the game in that hand, and he offered me $20 for my seat, so I took it and Nick and I ran home before he could change his mind. (I was about tied with big stack at the time, but with my tight play style, I tend to do worse and worse as more and more play­ers get knocked out.)

And dur­ing poker, I got a call from Jason about my BASOOS, which I hope was passed down prop­erly like I asked, and then from my sis­ter, who said I won an award and she was hold­ing it right now. I’m not sure if she wanted me to give a speech over the phone or what. I’m really sad I missed out on my pres­i­den­tial ban­quet, but I did have a really good time anyway.