Saturday, February 24, 2018

My First Drag Show

We took another trip to Columbia, MO. Gotta hang out with Zoe as much as possible before she turns old in a couple months and all she wants to talk about is her 401k and redoing her house's bathroom tiles.

We had dinner at Fuzzy's Taco Shop because we heard that's where the tubular kids hang out.


Once Lydia has a few sips of the sauce her real personality comes out.






Fuzzy's has this fun "margarita with a beer in it" thing going on which was novel.






Then we decided to head to Yin Yang Night Club for a drag show. Hadn't done that before and it sounded like a good idea.


It was a fundraiser for Ms. Gay Missouri something something. I assume making a dude look like a lady costs a fortune.




It was a lot more entertaining than I had expected. It was like a lip-syncing variety show, with singing, comedy routines, and some light gymnastic type stuff.




There was a ritualized tipping system where people would line up and politely hand the performer money. Not rowdy in the slightest which surprised me.




The bathrooms were like a condom fiesta.


While I was watching I invented a game called "which lady do I know who doesn't look as good as this particular dude dressed like a lady?". I'm still working on the name.




There was one chick dressed like a dude.






There was a dude with a beard.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

My First Hot Pot

Because it was close to Chinese New Year our friends Wing and Joel had us over for a hot pot, which was pretty amazing. It was sort of like a cross between Japanese oden and shabu shabu plus noodles. There were all the delicious things. 


Oden is like a stew of fish cakes.


And shabu shabu is dipping thinly sliced meats in boiling broth in order to quickly cook them.




Lydia had the honor of trying her first taste of SPAM. Surely not her last.


Success!

Thursday, February 15, 2018

A Good Day at the Brewery

There were all kinds of fun things happening at Anheuser-Busch today! A couple of the guys planned a winter olympics party and made the boss move of borrowing the slushie machine from the tour center and filling it with watermelon Natty Rush.








There was some beer pong.


Pretty much at the exact same time there was a Chinese New Year lion dance going on up on the 8th floor.


Newbies often think this is a dragon but they are wrong/dumb.


It was chasing away evils spirits, bringing good luck, typical lion stuff.




In China lions like to eat lettuce.




Four of us bonded wheeling a really heavy slushie machine down the streets of Soulard back to the visitor center.


I gotta say it was a good day.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

A Mardi Gras Carjacking

We finally ran out of friends that live in Soulard, so we didn't have a house party to go to when Mardi Gras rolled around. We booked an all inclusive thing at Big Daddy's Bar & Grill instead.




The food was pretty bleh but anything tastes good after a few hurricanes.






The thing was Fireball whiskey sponsored so there was a lot of swag floating around.






\
Matt likes shiny things.




When you party with the Schaeffers you often end up in the emergency room. Remember when Lydia ruined Halloween?


So Zoe had her mom come to pick her up and her mom found a place next to the brewery to park. Well some crackhead came by and tried a couple of the door handles, when they didn't open said crackhead bashed one of the car windows in. He entered the vehicle, punched Zoe in the face, and then tried to drive the car away. Being a crackhead who clearly sucks at his life really really hard, he proceeded to crash the car into multiple nearby vehicles and got pulled out of the car and stomped.  And the day was saved! 


Zoe took an ambulance to Barnes-Jewish Hospital where a doctor confirmed our worst fears: Zoe was now in the later stages of punched-face syndrome. Then the doctor sent her home. The end.

Tuesday, February 06, 2018

A Field Trip to Granite City

Anheuser-Busch has a lot of breweries across the country because they brew a lot of beer. A lot of that beer goes to nearby distribution centers where it's stored while it waits to be loaded onto trucks and shipped to a store near you. My job is to build different tools and reports that show data about how fast the trucks are being loaded, how many mistakes are made while loading, etcetera, etcetera.

Since I'm doing so much work involving the distribution centers I thought it would be good to go visit the nearest one over in Granite City, IL. GRAN as we call it is the busiest of the distribution centers and handles a lot of the craft beer as well so the truck loads leaving here are the most complicated.




The Cold Room is where we store the keg beer because it needs to be kept refrigerated as it is not pasteurized.








Import keg beer on the other hand is pasteurized so that it can survive its boaty journey to America.


I'm always sad when I think about how much beer has to be thrown away. Beer that has passed its freshness date or stuff that gets damaged in shipping is marked as "dump beer" and gets shipped to a company that dumps the beer and recycles the packaging. I just learned that when A-B dumps beer it gets a refund on the excise taxes paid to the federal government. Very interesting.














I got to take home a case of fancy Goose Island Noel that was still good it just was out of season.


Best field trip ever.