Time for a weekend recap! Friday after work it was “date night” at Buffalo Wild Wings for me and Lauren. We sat at the bar (rather than waiting in a 35-minute line for a table) and were delighted to find someone had left a bunch of credits in the tabletop game thingy. So we sat and had a couple beers and lots of delicious boneless wings. At night Jason stopped by to hang out.

Saturday, Lauren went to earn some big bucks by working OT, while Jason and I went to the Metrodome for the Twins Metrodome moving sale. I thought this sale would be very cool—my one big chance at buying an authentic piece of Twins history. Apparently, so did 15,000 other people. We got there when it opened at 10am and our jaws hit the ground when we saw the line stretched all the way around the Metrodome and down the street. Over the speakers, a recorded message stated “you may experience a short wait in line.” That was the understatement of the day. They had a queue up at the entrance that would corral about 100 fans. The other 14,900 filed in behind. Very poor job by the team organizing that sale. I heard there were just two checkout counters, causing a 90-minute wait just in the checkout lines.

Dejected and unwilling to kill six hours to get halfway through line, Jason and I instead went out for breakfast at the Uptown Diner, home of Minneapolis’s largest, unhealthiest, most delicious portions of hashbrowns.

That night it was off to the Profile Event Center to DJ my first wedding dance since our own. The couple was very nice and fed me a filet mignon dinner. The highlight of their reception was a choreographed dance during the introductions featuring the wedding party dancing to “I Got a Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas. Their dance rivaled ours in terms of crowd participation, but an exhausted bride and groom pulled the plug on the dance shortly after midnight despite their raucous guests enjoying themselves.

Sunday, Lauren and I met up with the Berglund-Husebys for the Bar Abilene breakfast buffet. If you’re looking for a good southern-style breakfast buffet and bottomless $4.95 mimosas and no wait in line, this is the place to go! Then I spent the afternoon watching football, including the Chargers’ amazing 21-20 win over the Giants. I took a late afternoon jog around Lake of the Isles to get some exercise, and my God, the pain. My upper left abdomen was in such sharp pain I could take no more than ten steps before I’d have to stop running. The pain never really subsided, but I eventually just fought through it and ran home. It still hurts today. I wonder if I didn’t strain a ribcage muscle or something.  Then we watched Dexter, some more House from Netflix, and went to bed.

Very quick post, but I just wanted to congratulate my wife Lauren Poulter Glanzer for being the only participant in my annual baseball prediction game on ryanglanzer.com to correctly predict the World Series would be Yankees over Phillies!  These picks were made before Spring Training even started.

Baseball experts Marcie Glanzer, Jeff Thompson, and Andrew Baker also correctly predicted the Yankees to win, but not against the Phillies.  And Calvin Krogman got the Yankees-Phillies matchup correct, but predicted the Phillies would win.

We won’t know who the official winner is until the MVP and Cy Young Awards are handed out, but Lauren is looking good to finish first out of 25 participants.

Sadly, I predicted just two playoff spots correctly (Twins and Phillies) and my World Series prediction of Indians over Cubs looks absurdly foolish.

Here’s a website I ran across that I found so compelling, I may want to try doing this myself over the course of the rest of my life. Just the adventure Lauren dreamed of!

These guys are attempting to visit every tri-state corner in the country—in addition to the Four Corners—which ends up being 62 different points. And there’s even more when you start including province/state borders. Did you know Canada has its own Four Corners? Crazy!

Many of the state boundaries are formed by rivers, so not all of them are easily reachable. And many of the boundaries are in remote rural areas which require some off-road hiking. The South Dakota-Minnesota-North Dakota area is apparently one such area that requires walking through a bean field near White Rock, SD.

So how do you know when you’ve actually reached these remote locations? Well, just about all of them reachable by land are marked by some sort of crude stone monument. As for the ones underwater, you just have to nail it down on the GPS.

And what do you do once you’ve reached the tri-state marker? You take lots of pictures of you running from one state to the next, hopping over the borders, or saying stupid things to your travel companions like “Oh my God, I’m in Nebraska right now and you’re in Kansas and you’re in Missouri… and now I’m in Kansas and you’re in Missouri and you’re in Nebraska! This is amazing!”

As lame as that probably sounds to most of you, I think this would be wildly entertaining. Who’s in?

What do you think the single most overpriced everyday item is?

For me, the answer is very clear: greeting cards.

How can people think $4.99 is an acceptable price to pay for a folded piece of paper with some words and pictures printed on it? Even for lesser priced greeting cards that go for $2.49, the markup still has to be at least 1000%. I guess you gotta hand it to the greeting card companies that worked hard to make that price seem reasonable.

Not that I didn’t enjoy opening all the wonderful cards we received for the wedding, but it’s possible I would have enjoyed them just as much if they were hand-made, or even just a piece of cardstock paper folded in half. After all, it’s the personalized hand-written message on the inside that is most meaningful.

I have been known to send weird greeting cards. Once I gave Lauren a Valentine’s card that was made of a bunch of my business cards taped together. I also recently used a folded piece of cardboard for a wedding card with a quick crude drawing on the front.

But the bottom line is I can’t think of any other item that people purchase every day that is more ridiculously priced. Can you?

For those who I didn’t e-mail right away with the news, the last of our wedding fun is over with the release of the photographer’s photo gallery. There are 1,013 photos, enough for me to post a new photo each day until August 12, 2012. Lauren and I spent over 45 minutes taking a first run through the images on Thursday, and I’ve spent another hour or two going through them more times since. Excellent work, CM Photographics!

You are able to order prints through the gallery, but if you’re really nice to me I might send you a copy of our DVD with 4 GB of the originals in hi-res.

In other news, I was happy to see the Vikings beat the Packers yesterday. I have long been a Chargers fan first, Vikings fan second, but it’s difficult to root for a team that I get to see play two or three times a year on TV. Not to say I’m a fair-weather fan one way or the other, but the Chargers have really struggled to a 4-3 record in a weak division while the Vikings have been among the league’s best and most exciting teams. The Chargers are 2 back of the Broncos and still have to play the entire NFC East, while the Vikings schedule is very favorable after their bye week. I’m just saying, I am finding myself more interested in the outcome of the Vikings’ games than Chargers’.

In World Series news, I was upset to see the Yankees take a 3-1 lead over the Phillies last night. Whoever has played the Yankees this post-season looks foolish. The Twins and Angels were both humiliated, and now the Phillies are doing the same. Brad Lidge joins Joe Nathan and Brian Fuentes as closers unable to shut the Yankees down late in games.

I remember when the Yankees won the World Series in 1996 and I considerd it a respectable victory over Atlanta. And then they won it again in 1998, 1999, and 2000, which was maddeningly annoying, but in hindsight respectable as well considering the vast majority of their players were homegrown (Jeter, Posada, Williams, Rivera) or just great stories (Brosius).

But what’s the fun in seeing the team with by far the highest payroll and the best players winning? It’s one thing when they are able to woo the big-name free agents into coming to New York, but seeing a guy like Mark Teixeira pick the Yankees over his hometown Orioles in free agency just makes it worse. The great players want to play there to win, meaning the Yankees don’t even necessarily have to make the best offer to a free agent. Joe Girardi will probably win Manager of the Year for leading the Yanks to 103 wins, but I bet Ron Gardenhire could have won 110 games with that lineup.

Of course the downside to the Yankees losing the World Series is they’d be that much more active on the market this winter, likely feeling they need three or four more superstars in order to compete. They’ll probably land Matt Holliday and trade for Prince Fielder regardless and bat them seventh and eighth in the lineup.

Sorry, just a little bitter today.

Quick post, just wanted to give a link to the latest Facebook photo gallery from a series of October parties.  1) The Halloween keg at Andrew and Amanda’s.  2) Our leftover wedding booze party.  3) Brian Gioielli’s Halloween party.  4) Eileen Gano’s Halloween party.  5) Walshichetti’s Halloween party.  All partied out for a while.

My costume was Timberwolves head coach Kurt Rambis, only in his mid-1980s Laker look.  Rambis of course was known as much for his unorthodox look as he was his gritty style of play.  Lauren went as “cat out of the bag” on Friday, but switched over to a Canadian Saturday.

The real Kurt Rambis (circa 1987) and me posing as Kurt Rambis.

The gang on Halloween night at the new Walshichetti house.

It has been a while since I’ve posted something unrelated to the goings on in my life. So here is a post with me going off on a topic that needs addressing: this type of commercial on TV or radio that goes like this.

Woman: “It’s my—”
Man: “It’s my—”
Asian Woman: “My—”
College Student: “It’s my online checking.”
African Man: “My—”
Old Man: “It’s my—”
Young Couple: “My—”
Group of Construction Workers: “My—”
Chinese Man: “It’s my online checking.”
Kid: “—online checking.”
Businessman: “—online checking.”

There are so many of them, and they’re all the same. A group of diverse people interrupting each other saying how something is theirs, and they’re really excited about it.

And there are many variations of this, like the 2004 Twins intro video that was played before games. More creative, but equally as painful.

Corey Koskie: “The future—”
Jacque Jones: “The future—”
Matthew LeCroy: “The future—”
Brad Radke: “The future is now.”
Eric Milton: “Is now.”
Luis Rivas: “Is now.”
Ron Gardenhire: “Now.”
Torii Hunter: “The future is now.”

What?! No it isn’t! The future is the future, not the summer of 2004. If the future of the Twins was a quick exit from the 2004 playoffs at the hands of the Yankees, then— oh wait, they were right about the future (see 2009 Twins).

Then they came out with those ones where people say…

Girl: “I am.”
Man: “I am.”
Boy: “I am.”
Man: “I am LeBron James.”
Woman: “I am LeBron James.”
etc.

No you aren’t! None of you are LeBron James.

And then even the big players got involved.

Girl: “I’m a PC.”
Man: “I’m a PC.”
Idiot: “I’m a PC.”
Jerk: “I’m a PC.”

This is no longer an original idea. It would be nice to not encounter these types of commercials anymore. Lauren knows how annoyed I am when I hear them. And then I try to reenact the commercials to emphasize just how bad they are which annoys her.

That is all.

Not a whole lot new from here.  Lauren and I are just wrapping up a fairly restful, enjoyable weekend.

Friday after work we used a gift card to Laredo’s in St. Louis Park.  We will have the review available soon on our food blog, but I will say that it was a very unique Tex-Mex dining experience.  That night we chilled at home and continued watching House on DVD, the next show up in our series of TV shows on DVD.  It is taking me a while to get into it because, unlike awesome shows like Six Feet Under and The Wire, there is no arc from episode to episode yet.

Saturday we spent much of the day in Edina at the Galleria where Lauren used up our Crate & Barrel gifts cards from the wedding and completed her wish list.  Let me tell you, that was a lot of fun for me.  I did run into old VF co-worker Jeff Gwost though and had a friendly chat.  At night Lauren was excited to break out her new kitchen gear and entertain some dinner guests.  Apologies to golden birthday boy Jesse Cooney for not being able to join in his celebrations!

Today we wandered over to the Walshichetti house to watch the Vikings/Steelers game, which ended disappointingly.  But the Chargers won easily over KC to improve to 3-3.

I also had my share of excitement with Comcast this weekend.  We have had problems with our HD service and they sent out a technician Saturday morning who swapped out our bad box for a brand new one.  After returning from our afternoon shopping spree, we were greeted by a strange repetitive clicking noise, which turned out to be the new cable box.  The hard drive wouldn’t start up, making our DVR feature useless.  I called Comcast back again at 12:30am and they assured us they’d come back Sunday to give us another new box.  To make it up to me, the support guy offered me six free months of the premium sports package!  Right now, there’s another Comcast technician in our apartment replacing the cable box, and he too is offering us some free programming for our run of bad luck.  I could pick whatever I wanted for free between HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and Starz, and I chose Showtime because of Dexter, though HBO with Curb and Flight of the Conchords was very tough to pass up.  Our failures with Comcast have actually been a good thing!

Jordan put her three children up to this witty video wishing Grandpa a happy 49th birthday!

It’s not quite as entertaining in our household, especially when one of us had to run the camera, but I tried my best to one-up my sister’s birthday greeting!

1. The most addicting website I’ve yet to run across is sporcle.com.  I can’t stop playing around on there.  There are thousands of games that all have the same premise of naming everything from a list, like name all the actors from a certain show, or name the 3 most populous cities in each state, or name all the NL Rookies of the Year.  I just can’t contain myself.

2. I’ve given up on playing Scrabble on my phone after two solid years, and yesterday downloaded The Sims 3 to play when I’m sitting in my car in the Supervalu parking lot waiting for Lauren to get off work.  My Ryan Sim already died after 3 days after getting electrocuted repairing a fridge.

3. I attempted to deposit our wedding checks at Wells Fargo the last two days.  On Tuesday, the teller only let me cash the ones that just said my name on them.  Today, the same teller agreed to let me deposit the ones that said Ryan “or” Lauren on them.  Still I am sitting here with a wad of Ryan “and” Lauren checks that cannot be deposited until we have a joint account, apparently.

4. Over the course of the last two weeks, my gym activity has nearly stopped due to the wedding and honeymoon, and not surprisingly, I went up from 235 to about 241.  I am planning to start back up with the gym soon so I don’t get any more out of shape.

5. Tonight, Lauren and I stopped at the Poulters’ and picked up the bulk of our wedding presents.  We also stopped off at rehearsal dinner site Biryani for takeout, and used our new wedding silverware, plates, and wine glasses for the first time.  Lauren was surprised we only got 3 of the 12 place settings we registered for, but our Crate & Barrel gift cards should help with that.

6. This year, I have been invited to no fewer than six Halloween parties.  Not sure if it’s just because Halloween is on Saturday this year, but it seems everyone is hosting their own party.  I will have to pick only one, though, as I supposedly am DJing Friday night.  I despise coming up with costumes, but I thought it would be funny to dress head to toe in orange with some thin pink stripes interspersing and go as one of Big Bird’s legs.

7. My DSU laptop is already in rough shape with the sound out, and at the wedding our other laptop that was playing the slideshow took a high heel to the trackpad and is also on the fritz.  We may need to invest in another laptop for my DJ business.

That’s all for tonight!