Sober Bday Party #2 – Mugs of Water and Shots of Orange Juice

Posted on March 19, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

It was Thirsty-Thursday so a group of my friends decided to preemptively celebrate the birthday of our red-headed, saint patty’s day born, Irish friend. We headed out to Parish Cafe for mug beers, deserts, and camaraderie. I had already been out to dinner elsewhere so when I arrived at the bar I asked for a water instead of my usual mug of beer.

Cheersing to our friend's quarter-life crisis. Note my water in the bottom right-hand corner, and yes, someone else is drinking out of my mug.

We frequent Parish Cafe quite a bit because a few of us have beer mugs there. The deal is that you have to drink 100 beers in 180 days in order to get a mug. While it wasn’t difficult to do physically, it was certainly difficult on the wallet. Beers can range from $6-$14 depending on the alcohol percentage and style. So our mug beers cost a minimum of $600 to obtain. However, this number could easily be doubled or tripled when you factor in the food we purchased along with many of the beers we had. Newly employed and recently out of college, my roommates and I decided it would be a great idea to blow our first paycheck on beer mugs at Parish. It wasn’t a total waste because #1 it’s kind of cool to have a mug of beer with your name on it and #2 it’s the same price as a normal draft beer only you get half-again as much beer. The moral of the story is that the monetary return on investment in beer mugs is pretty low but the social return on investment is pretty high.

You can get your mug laser-engraved with whatever you want on it. I chose "World's Best Grampa" it's an inside joke between me and my friends but I get a lot of great comments from other people who notice it.

The night turned from beers to whiskey pretty quickly after arriving. I had already told the bartender about my sober month so when all my friends ordered whiskey shots she brought me an orange juice shot, I thought it was a nice touch.

My shot of orange juice next to four (large) shots of whiskey.

So after several beers, a shot, and a few drinks we all disbanded and went our separate ways home. I managed to get to sleep before 1:00am so while I stayed up much later than my previous month’s challenge would have allowed, I went to bed sober so I woke up the next morning relatively ok, still tired but no hangover. This wasn’t the case for at least 3/4 of my friends who all told me how crappy they felt the next morning. The hangover eventually wears off so the question is: is it worth it to feel like crap the next morning in order to get tipsy with your friends the night before? The jury is still out on that one. Rarely do I ever drink to the point of regretting it and if I manage to get a hangover it’s usually not that bad (unless liquor or wine is involved). Usually it’s just a few mugs (or a growler if I’ve been hiking) of beer which doesn’t lead to a hangover. All in all it was a good night out with my friends and aside from someone sniping my beer mug and having to drink an OJ shot, I hardly noticed that I hadn’t been drinking.

Baby’s First Vegetarian Barbeque

Posted on December 4, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

My friends and I use the term “Baby’s First (fill in the blank)” to describe when someone does something for the first time. Baby’s First Hike, Baby’s First Bruins Game, Baby’s First etc etc. So today for me was Baby’s First Barbeque. I was going to get ambitious and make a dish but I opted for veggie burgers from Shaws instead. First however, here’s the outline of my day.

Sarah and I spent the morning cruising around Boston and we came across a CrossFit promo in Copley Square. Apparently they are putting in a new gym in Back Bay and they were giving out Paleo-Muffins. CrossFit is all about the paleo-diet. It’s basically a hunter-gatherer diet where you eat only the things you would have been able to scavenge for, mostly nuts and berries with a huge de-emphasis on carbs and an over-emphasis on protein. From the reading I’ve done, the paleo-diet has been discounted by nutritionists as a viable way to increase your level of athletic performance. In order to perform at a high level, you need carbs (even in power lifting), the paleo-diet has a grudge against carbs and an emphasis on protein which people tend to abuse. Carbs do not make you fat, it’s actually very difficult for your body to turn carbs into fat because evolutionarily your body wants to ingest carbs and then immediately use them for energy in your muscles. It’s excess calories that make you fat, not carbs (sorry Atkins diet). OK, enough pontificating, the moral of the story is that CrossFit as a workout is awesome, but these paleo-muffins tasted like sawdust, no thanks.

Nasty paleo-muffin from CrossFit table in Copley Square.

We then went to Boloco for lunch. My go-to choice would have been an original classic with chicken but this time I went for the original classic with grilled vegetables. I liked it well-enough but I prefer fresh and crunchy vegetables, not sautéed or boiled, give em’ to me right out of the ground. Then Sarah brought up the fact that we’re “that couple”, the well-educated, city couple who are both vegetarians and who should probably move to Cambridge in order to fit in (no offense to the vegetarians in Cambridge, but you’re definitely a “type”).

Veggie Boloco Burrito after picking up my previously Macbook from the Apple Store.

That night my broomball team from Social Boston Sports was having a BBQ out in Somerville. On the way there we picked up some Morning Star Veggie Burgers. As usual I looked at them with disdain and skepticism, really doing it just because I have to. I also picked up beer from Peak Organic out of Portland, ME. My buddies busted my chops a little bit about bringing veggie burgers and organic beer. I defended myself on the beer-front by explaining that Peak Organic is awesome beer regardless of how it was made, after they had a few they shut up about it.

Morning Star veggie burgers from Shaws, I heard they were the best so I picked them up.

Stuffing a veggie burger into my face. At first I wasn't 100% sure it wasn't a real burger. After consulting two of my vegetarian friends they confirmed it was indeed veggie.

I took a couple of small bites out of it to see if it was veggie or meat.

The veggie burgers were actually awesome. I could hardly tell that they weren’t real burgers, I had to double and triple check to make sure my buddies weren’t pulling a fast one on me. They definitely weren’t as tasty as real burgers but they were passable. We noticed that most of the ingredients actually came from corn. I’m learning that this is not uncommon when it comes to industrialized food. We’re consuming more corn in our diets than ever before. I can’t imagine that it’s corn itself that is the problem, but when it’s present in almost everything we eat then it certainly changes our diet as a culture in a drastic way. I’m not sure what the impact of that is but it’s definitely a change from how we ate 30-40 years ago.

By the end of the night I reached an epiphany about being vegetarian. For me, vegetarianism has always been associated with eating healthy. The two are perhaps correlated but not synonymous. You can eat as much junk food as you want, you just can’t eat meat. You can be vegetarian and still be super unhealthy, this is something that I hadn’t considered before tonight. So I had a bunch of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies as well as beer (both organic and non-organic, I don’t discriminate) and Knob Creek bourbon whiskey. I think I’ll probably be the only person who actually ends up gaining weight as a result of becoming vegetarian.

Ate a gratuitous amount of chocolate chip cookies at the BBQ. This sounds obvious, but being vegetarian isn't exactly about being healthy, it's just about not eating meat.

Thursday October 27th – Saving My Worms, Whiskey, and Microsoft Excel

Posted on October 29, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Tonight was a pretty successful yet probably uneventful evening. I had to troubleshoot my vermiculture composting bin because my worms were freaking out trying to crawl out of the bin. So I did some research and figured out how to fix the solution. I’ll find out in a week or so whether or not what I did will work. Then I spent some time doing a few logistical things with my blog. I updated the Facebook page I created a few weeks ago and then came up with an excel spreadsheet that will help me analyze my photo-blog challenge this month. As evidenced in the quality of my photos this month, my point with this challenge was not to be artistic, it was to take a look at my lifestyle through random photos (10 or so every day at randomized time points). So like a good engineer I’m going to do a bit of analysis afterward to look at trends and whatnot.

Self explanatory; reading Dracula on the train.

When I went to put my week's food scraps in my compost I saw that my worms were buggin' out and trying to crawl out of the bin. I did some research online and realized that my bin was probably too wet, so I added some dry newspaper bedding to help absorb the moisture. I'll check it again next week to see if it's less moist and if my worms are happy again.

I read online that your bedding should take up 3/4 of your bin. I was putting minimal bedding in assuming that the worms would be happy playing in the composted material in the bottom, but apparently they hang out in the bedding area. So I filled the bin about half-full with dry newspaper pieces (to help absorb excess moisture). I'll check next week to see if anything has changed.

Checking out my Blog's Facebook Page. When I upload a blog post it is automatically Tweeted (@youngandurban) and my Twitter feed is embedded in my Facebook page. This way now people besides my friends on Facebook and my Twitter followers can follow my updates. Like me on Facebook! http://on.fb.me/slQvpI and follow me on Twitter @youngandurban

More Twitter stuff on Facebook. If anyone knows how to make my twitter feed my landing page for my Facebook page, please let me know, that'd be great, thanks.

Devising a way to analyze my randomized photo blog. I'm basically counting up how many pictures I took throughout the month and then categorizing them; inside, outside, with friends, in transit, physical exertion, etc. This will help me to "calculate" how I am spending my time and thus what is important to me. Is this how I want to be spending my days as a freshly new 25 year old? Less working and more playing outside maybe.

Watching the Bruins lose horribly in a crappy game instead of watching game 6 of the baseball world series. I don't know how we messed that one up, I guess we were just over-stoked for the hockey season. The baseball game was apparently unreal, walk-off homerun in the 13th inning, bummed I missed it.

Enjoying some Knob Creek Kentucky Straight Burbon Whiskey while coming up with a good excel sheet to analyze the content of my photo blog.

I’ll find out in a week or so whether or not my solution of adding dry paper scraps to my compost will help to dry it out a bit. Also, I’m going some time over the next few days going through my month’s pictures and plugging info into the excel spreadsheet that I made; am I inside/outside, with/without friends, being physically/intellectually stimulated, etc. I’m interested to see how it turns out. I’m excited for Halloween weekend, lots of time with good people, hopefully a few adventures, and most importantly it’ll be the first weekend in a longggg time that I haven’t been in NH hiking. So I’m looking forward to hanging out in Boston for once instead of being out in the woods every weekend (although I much prefer the latter).