Bye Bye and a Boddingtons

As I had mentioned in my previous post, the original location of the Winking Lizard is closing. The team, which has grown significantly due to the increased number of fans, had a last meeting there.

It got me thinking about how this venture started with AneLyn and me. It was meant as a way to get through our daily work life and keep sane. OK, so we really like the beer, wings and burgers as well. Like all really good things, it just kept growing. It became a fun excuse to leave the office at 4:30. It gave us a chance to commiserate.

As I was sitting there, it was the usual cast of characters plus 1. Over the past few months, Loose Lips has been joining us for cocktails. You might be wondering why he never made it into any of the blog posts. I had been wondering about that as well. It seems the antics of Hollow Leg had dominated for awhile. I also realized I had started to shift the blog into a conversation about beer.

Loose Lips has been a very good addition in this regard. He loves a good beer. Yesterday, he was drinking Arrogant Bastard ale. That's right, it was referenced in a previous post about Hollow Leg's visit to Arrogant Bastard's brewing company - Stone Brewing.


At any rate, it seems like such a short span of time for this gathering to become such a great part of my life. It is always fun and never dull. Generally, we manage to drag it into the gutter part of the way through the evening - Loose Lips definitely is a strong contributor in this area as well. (I should mention that Loose Lips alternate name was going to be piglet.

It is hard to believe that I actually finished the World Tour , or hit the century mark as they say, back in May. At the time, Hollow Leg suggested that we should do a second round. I declined because I thought we wouldn't be able to do it . . in hind sight, football season is on the way.

Cooler heads did prevail. I finished my last Boddington's and had a shot with the Team. Sandbox bought the girls a "Last Call" t-shirt. The boys weren't nearly as organized!

So Bye Bye old Winking Lizard, hello new Winking Lizard! Can't wait to see what good time we have there.

A Picture is worth a 100 beers

OK. I have always found a strange intersection between events in my life. Sometimes it is more than two things, that those would be intersections among things.

However, I have been diligently logging my experiences on the WLWTOB. One of the beers that we enjoyed was from the Czech Republic. It was call Staropramen. It is pronounced STAR - O - PRAY - MEN. As we made our way around the tour, we had a couple of verbal mishaps. The crack staff at WL was very happy to help us with learn the correct pronunciations.

As you might know, Hollow Leg always managed to add a Fraternity House level of humor to several situations and outings. For this beer, he coined it as Straponman pronounced STRAP - ON - MAN. Not quite correct, but it made it very memorable.

This name was not an isolated incident. On another occasion, Hollow Leg was drinking Arrogant Bastard Ale by Stone Brewing Company. Stone is located in Escondido, CA. The evening we realized this, he called pronounced it - ESCON - DIL - DOUGH. Close, but no cigar (no pun intended Monica Lewinsky).

Irony took a hand here. Hollow Leg happened to be going to San Diego - just down the street - on a vacation the next day. He called me to let me know he was in ESCON - DIL - DOUGH.

So that brings me back to Staropramen. I am checking through my e-mail and a friend of mine - completely unrelated to the beer tour - is in Prague. I asked him to send me a few pictures. Being the beer lover that I am, he sends me the following.















Unreal. I can't believe all of the beers. Of all the silly things.

It just makes me think about all of the intersections in life. It makes me think that a picture is not only worth a thousand words, but definitely makes the 100 beers well worth the journey.

Cheers or as they say in Prague - Na zdraví (to your health)