2004-10-12 - 2:34 a.m.

Friday night I got home in time to watch the Sox sweep the Angles to win the ALCS, and then got to watch Kerry mop the floor with Bush again in the second debate.

On Saturday after work I took the Roommate out to Jacob Wirth�s for some Octoberfest magic. (We split a pitcher of Paulaner Octoberfest, one of many octoberfest offerings, and it was the best octoberfest I�ve ever had. Octoberfest.)

I�m not a big German food guy, but the place was great. I used to go there for beers in college (usually after class), but I�d never eaten there. I like it because it�s been around forever and ever and it�s obvious that it hasn�t changed much--huge and open, lots of bustling, old hardwood floors that might have once seen sawdust. People used to eat like this, or in places like this.

As for the German part, well, there�s not a huge German community in Boston, so it�s not like I�m used to that kind of food. I lived in Holland for a semester and spent a good deal of time in Germany, but I had no money (re: zero money) so my exposure to German food (or for that matter, food native to any european country) was almost exclusively limited to the specific differences between Big Macs.

So I was very afraid. I�m not a big sausage guy and get a little grossed out by them--I always think of that SNL skit about the Bears and Ditka. I dunno--I always get a little nauseous.

But these were good--classy. Think not huge portions, but two really nice, choice, thingies that ended in -wurst. I only started getting grossed out at the end, and my favorite part was when the waitress casually dropped of a bottle of mustard on my table, as if I had been waiting and waiting for mustard and she finally brought mustard (when's the last time you've ever been a situation where there's a potential of having to wait too long for mustard? Not recently? Good.), and I had the best potato salad (it was WARM!) I�ve ever had, as well as the best cornbread (!) I�ve ever had.

After that we headed down to the Tam to see the Twins get beat by the Yankees. I was really pulling for the Twinkies--they were the better team and it sucks when anyone gets beaten by the Yankees. Rooting for the Yankees to beat another team because you�d rather go through the Yankees because they beat you so often over the years--that�s just contradictory logic. If you hate the Yankees so much, and your �reason� for it is because they�re a dynasty and they own baseball and because they keep outspending the other teams (like you), then you�d want the little team with the much littler payroll to win. Red Sox fans that wanted the Yankees to beat the Twins would be Yankees fans if they had grown up in New York. And they read the Herald (that was on their front page)--the worst newspaper in the universe.

Of course I had made the completely unrelated decision to wear the New York t-shirt I got in New York to work because I want to dress down for a Saturday but still wear something nice and I was at the bottom of my clean laundry supply (I since fixed that, mind you). So that adds a touch of hypocrisy to my previous statement. Believe me, once I made the connection I wished I had a couple of extra bucks and H&M was still open, so as to not watch the game dressed as such.

After that was the Marvels at the Abbey, and it was a good show. The Wine Bar was open, and the Roommate and I fully lamented over the changes. They might as well call it the Underground Wine Bar (if you get the reference, I owe you a beer).

The Marvels were great, but we were a little ready for home when we were done--they got our eight bucks--so we didn�t stick around for the last band. We walked down the street to the best place to get cabs, waited a while because they�re hard to get in Inman, finally flagged one down, got in, drove perhaps 500 feet, and got pulled over. The cabbie was a Somerville cabbie, picking us after we had left a Somerville bar, to drive us home to Somerville. But he picked us up across the town line, in Cambridge.

And we got pulled over in front of all the cool kids smoking outside (and between bands, to boot) at the Abbey--we got caught ducking out early.

We made sure our next cab was a Cambridge one and drove past the flashing blue lights.

Sunday was walking around and this and that and that and this, watching a little Pats, playing a little guitar, doing a little laundry, getting some awesome rice wine and some shrimp crackers at Reliable Market, and I thought the day was over when my laundry was done, but then I had yet another coffee before the show at the Middle East upstairs. And it was one of the best shows I�ve seen in a long, long time. All bands were great.

Seriously--one of those things you have to be there for. The last band was outstanding. The cab ride home was incident free.

I still didn�t get my Dippin� Dots, though.

Today was work--getting into the office and being surprised that nobody was there on Columbus Day (what a great holiday, eh? No point to it, you get to feel bad about American Indians all day--of the day off holidays, definitely the one most deserving of the we need an excuse to stick an extra day off into the calendar year award), and I had to turn off the office alarm at 1:30 PM (I�m usually the one closing up at 9:30), and it was kinda fun to take my iPod there, although I was paranoid to have it out of the house and I forgot the clip-on remote control that skips tracks and adjusts volume, as well as the protective case I bought for it, and it took me awhile to remember to put it on hold as I walked around with it, and I didn�t know I could adjust the volume until Taylor showed me and looked at me like I was an idiot. I�m still glad I brought it. I haven�t walked around, listening to music, since Christmas when I took my new toy on the Commuter Rail to West Roxbury on Christmas Eve in the snow, walking to South Station and listening to Heavenly.

But then it was 5:00 and the place was packed and we got all the projects done and I left happy and exhausted).

I�m going to watch Futurama now.