What I Did On My Weekend (considerably less political)

I've had a complaint from a regular reader - that my blog has become "too political". Unfortunately, as elections loom ever closer, I feel myself becoming more and more politically interested.

I am looking for those little green plastic army guys. Used to was you could get them at WalMart or the dollar store, but the dollar stores all only have firemen and police now. Hmmmm

Geraldo came and left - it was just wonderful having him here. We ate too much and went to the woods and talked and talked and talked.

We went to Giordanos for dinner first - terrific pizza, and he got to have "deep dish Chicago style" so he could say that he had done. (He paid for it - with Co. credit card. All you political readers - I got some of our money back from Halliburton in the form of Deep Dish Pizza)

We were sitting at one of those 1/2 booth, 1/2 chairs affairs they have, and his back was to the rest of the room. Me, I have that "cowboy" mentality of never wanting my back to the door/room. So I could see the other diners around us rather well.

Now, Geraldo has lovely shoulder-length brown hair, and a short-ish full beard. Directly behind him was Ms. Prim & Proper Republian Schoolmarm. (All designations based solely upon visual input - I know none of these people) I suppose he looked like some left-wing, long-haired communist pinko fag (I bet he even has a commie flag, tacked up inside of his garage).

So we are talking politics. He is from Brazil, so things are different there, and we discussed Hugo Chavez and George Bush and just all kinds of things - and Ms. P&PRS was getting all "persimmony mouthed" and shooting me hate-looks. I was amused.

By the time I got home, I was exhausted. We both were, so we adjourned to our (SEPARATE) bedrooms and crashed out. I did get to hear him speak Portuguese, however. It doesn't sound anything like Mexican spanish, nor like French as I remember it. It actually reminded me of the Polish ladies who used to work for Sunstar.

His English is very very good. The only thing I notice is inflection and pronunciation differences. For instance, the small tree-dwelling rodents with bushy tails were "SQUEE-rils", not Squirrels. I can deal with it. *grin*

He brought me a lovely cookbook of Brazillian food, with stories and travelogue of Brazil as well. I remembered some things about there from my grade-school geography/"social studies" classes, (like "Manioc" root used as starch/flour) but not much. This book is fantastic, and I will probably try some of the recipies if I can find the ingredients or plausable substitutes.

The recipie for Limeade (he pronounces it "Limonade", which sounds like Lemonade, but they have no lemons in Brazil) it sounds fantastic. Will try it with Splenda instead of sugar, however. (You listening Dr. Nick??)

Saturday morning we got up late and had coffee, which he said was too weak (I was about gagging on it being too strong!!) and then we went out to IHOP. (Dr. Nick, you might want to go remove a gall-bladder or something for a while...) Apparently some movie or other had featured a guy wanting to go to IHOP and he wanted to see what it all was.

Then we went out for a long drive, and ended up at Churchill woods - a forest preserve in around Carol Stream. Pretty, pretty spot. Lots of geese. Lots of geese shit. *shrug* But we saw a few squirrels and G was highly amused - took a lot of pictures of them. I don't think they have squirrels in Rio.

Afterwards we tried to get him online, but my selfish neighbor has moved his wireless port to somewhere in his house where it is hard to stay connected and steal bandwidth, so we couldn't play video games. Which sucked, but... oh well. One of these days I will get a wireless router and set some ridiculous password and then have it available for my friends.

So later on we went out to lunch at Portillos. Everyone who comes to visit me gets taken to Portillos, except Pirate, but when he came we were on this really tight schedule with a major internet-weekend-party thing and so there wasn't time. Heck, Randy even has "I (heart) Portillos" bumpersticker on his guitar case wayyyyyyyy down there in Houston.

I'm real happy about this last weekend. I'm dreadfully tired, but I had a good time, and I feel relaxed and happy.

Next up - the long drive to Florida next month.

Mental note - call Susan and GradeSchoolBud with dates to make sure it's ok!!