The Niners Flubbed It, and I Cocked Up My Beaver

I just spent about five hours standing in a bar, and now my feet and legs hurt like hell. I wouldn't mind it so much if there was a victory at the end of it all, but as luck would have it the San Francisco 49ers proved they still can't win an NFC Championship, so the pain is all for naught.

At least I can go back to not giving a shit about football again. I only gave a shit in the first place because my coworker James wanted to see the game with someone and asked me to join him. Otherwise I would have been "cleaning my apartment" (hahahah, that joke never gets old) and running errands like grocery shopping and maybe even a Goodwill run.

Day was not a complete loss: we did chilaquiles for brunch at SanJalisco (go there: hardly any wait on food and the place was packed with Mexicans, which says something about the quality and authenticity of the food), and really the first three quarters of the game were pretty good. Until the fuck ups started adding up and we had to face the fact that the Giants would be going to the Superbowl instead of us.

Assholes.

Last night, however, I did something at a bar on the other end of the spectrum: attended the annual Burns Night at the Edinburgh Castle.



My ex actually suggested the event — we were both lame and had no plans for a Saturday evening — and it turned out to be a bit more surreal and entertaining than we had been hoping for.



The featured celebrity was the guy who played bagpipes in So I Married an Axe Murderer (which I haven't seen, admittedly). Various special guests got up to read some of Burn's poetry to us, tell us fart jokes, and recite somewhat inaccurate history at us. (The problem with being a nerd, especially a British history nerd, is that I actually got bothered when someone was going on about how the Church of England was founded by Edward VIII, and how Mary Queen of Scots was under arrest and eventually executed by Elizabeth I because she refused to convert from Catholicism. Sorry, not quite true.) I even tried haggis, and while I won't say it won me over as my new favorite dish, it wasn't nearly as offal-awful as I had been led to believe. One more tick to my Belt of Adventurousness.

Tomorrow in San Francisco: getting my first facial. As an overly-generous Christmas present I got a gift card for a local day spa, and my company gave me a free day off for Chinese New Year (hooray for dragons!), so I'm using the combination of the two windfalls to see what this whole pampering thing is all about.