Germanate08 - Around Again by Germanate08

Germanate08 - Around Again  by  Germanate08

Happy Holidays to all y'all, we hope you've had plenty of good food and good company. Sue and I have had a slightly low-key holiday season, a little strange to be celebrating away from everyone, but we've had the company of some of our good Wichitain friends to help us celebrate. About a week before New Years, Susan found out about The Flaming Lips New Years Eve Freakout! The third annual NYE party/concert that the band has in their hometown of Oklahoma City. I've liked the Flaming Lips for some time but have never seen them live and I've heard that their shows are pretty outrageous. We were able to get tickets at short notice for pretty cheap along with a sweet deal on a room at the Crown Plaza for the night (ah, the wonders of celebrating New Years anywhere but New York). OKC is only two and half hours away due south, a little closer than KC. We ate at a

swanky tapas bar in their Brick Town area (similar to Wichita's Old Town, the renovated warehouse district) and managed to visit the memorial for the bombing on New Years Day before leaving. We even stopped by a local Macy's to use up a little more of the gift cards we received for our wedding. The concert was fun and crazy. The stage was full of people dressed as flowers, bumble bees and butterflies and so was the audience. They dropped about a bazzillion balloons at midnight and then proceeded to play the entirety of Pink Floyd's the Dark Side of the Moon. We plan on returning to OKC some time in the

future to check out more of what there is to do there.

Christmas was low-key. We had a delicious Indian feast with our friends Marguerite and David Christmas Eve and have otherwise been enjoying the extra free time to hang out and see movies and relax. A couple weeks ago

we visited a town about forty-five minutes north called Lindsborg, a Swedish town where we enjoyed yummy Swedish pastries and crafts (the pastries were yummy, the crafts we just looked at) and learned how to say Velcomen and God Yule. It's a cute little town guarded by rows of wild Dala (large wood carved horses of traditional Swedish design).

Well, after months of the sporting activity I like to call

Exxxxtreme Sedentary Lifestyle, I've decided to sign

up with a local Taekwondo school, Grandmaster Kim's Academy. I stopped training at Grace Wu's Kung Fu before we went to Guatemala and haven't moved my ass further than the distance from the house to the car since then, so I've felt in pretty awful shape, and since I do have a blackbelt in Taekwondo, I decided to return to my roots. Of course, I had to suffer through the "walking like an old man" phase which follows the first class but I'm hitting my stride now.

Sue and I continue to learn about cool places to go here in Wichita, like N&J's Bakery an authentic middle eastern restaurant with good Shawarma and Gyros and belly dancers on Saturday nights. Then there is the hard to describe C Major's, literally around the corner from our house, which isn't a bar (they don't serve drinks) and isn't a cafe (they don't serve food). Basically it's just an old storefront that from the outside looks like it's been closed for decades, stuffed full of eclectic musical items like old acoustic guitars and country western band posters and tubas hanging from the ceiling and those old wooden cable spools that the phone companies used to use here converted for use as tables. There's just enough room in the corner for a band

to set up and play and if you want drinks or food it's BYO whatever.

We hope you're all surviving the cold and the snow (we finally got ours, though not as bad as back east) and the post holiday blues. Here's to the new decade! (Holy crap, where did the past ten years go?) Oh and the pigs say hi, at least I think that's what they're saying, it's all squeaks to me.