Othello, Zelda and the Fleshless Reaper

I didn't mention it in any of my entries at the end of last week but Sunday was my birthday, and on the whole not only was my birthday enjoyable, but the entire weekend went really well, three days of sleeping in spoiled me. And not only did I relax, but we also got quite a bit done around the house as well. Much of my time was spent practicing Dreamblade to prepare for the New York 10k I'll be competing in this Saturday. Initially I had a lot of faith in my band, but we've been testing it against a band archtype called "The Passion of the Reaper" and it's having some issues... This isn't to say that it can't win against PotR in fact my impression is that it wins about 50% of the time but of course you'd like for odds that are a little bit better than that, so we'll see I'm still tweaking it. The one thing I don't want to do is panic at the last minute like I did with the 1k and abandon something I know really well.

That's probably the limit of the Dreamblade I can talk about without some sort of a warning or disclaimer, so I'll move on. My family gets together every other week. Many of those weeks are devoted to celebrating peoples birthday's and on those Sunday's the person whose birthday we're celebrating gets to pick the meal, so here's my meal:

Appetizer: Grilled Garlic and Basil Shrimp with Home-made Cocktail Sauce
Salad: Green Salad w/ Bacon, Avacado, Mushrooms, Red Onions, Sharp Chedder, Tomatoes, and Hard-boiled Eggs.
Side Dish 1: Jarlsberg Potatoes, A cassarole type dish with scalloped potatoes and lots of Jarlsberg cheese.
Side Dish 2: Oven-Baked Asparagus w/ Asiago Cheese.
Main Dish: Dry Rubbed Pork Ribs, grilled over charcoal
Dessert: My Mother's Pumpkin dessert (not sure how to describe it other than that)
Drink: Sprite w/ Limeade

Let me just tell you as someone who was there it was even better than it sounds. In addition to this wonderful meal I got the latest Zelda game for my Wii. I got a chance to play that yesterday and it was a ton of fun. I really do like playing it with the motion sensitive controls, fighting is a blast. My kids played it first and they were having a hard time getting past the prologue, it turns out that you have to summon a hawk, by playing a certain kind of grass, then you have to use the hawk to snatch the baby cradle from the monkey then you have to give the cradle to the lady who lost it and then she'll give you a fishing pole, you then have to go fishing, catch a fish feed it to the lost cat who returns to her mistress, who then becomes happy enough to open up shop and sell you a slingshot which you then show off to the kids, which is finally how the next act begins...

After playing Zelda for a couple of hours I went out to dinner and a play with my wife and some friends of ours we've known since we lived in student housing. The play was Othello. Othello is my least favorite of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, but it was still quite good. I particularly liked the actor playing Iago, one imagines that's a good thing since it's hard to imagine that you could have a good production of Othello without a good Iago. Of course there are all these instances of dramatic irony where characters go on about how honest Iago is. At the intermission I asked my friend how he liked it, he said he wasn't picking up much because of the language but he did get that Iago was honest. He was joking of course.

At least I think he was joking