Hernandez Life » liquor

Happy New Year & Deranged Snowmen

Rick — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:37:20 +0000

We hadn’t originally planed on it, but Phaedra & I ended up having an impromptu New Year’s Bash at our home. Three generations of LaPreta’s plus our friends Stacy & Mike helped us bring the new year in. Thanks to Anthony, we’ll have enough cold-cuts & antipasto to last the whole year. Thanks to my overzealousness, we’ll have liquor to last just as long. Photos of the night can be seen on our family website. Phaedra & I wish everyone a great 2008.

As a holiday bonus, at the end of this post, you’ll find some Calvin & Hobbs’ snowman comics, written and illustrated by Bill Watterson.

To see photos of our New Year’s Eve, please go to our private family website family.hernandezlife.com, or, to save time, just click here.

Leftovers Galore

Rick — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 19:54:40 +0000

Phaedra and I spent the evening we got back from Miami, in making up what we missed by going south (I wish we could merge both events together). The company of Eva, Anthony, Mattie, Jessica, Ben, and Rachel. The excellent food (from both eve’s dinner of seven fishes & day’s dinner of meats). The liquor. The laughter. The birthday cake (Phaedra’s second). ~~The traffic driving back home in the holidays.~~ And of course the gift giving. Everything was great; thank you Eva & Anthony for sharing with us. I wish my family could have been there. They’d have loved it! There are a bunch of photos of the fun, & the kids on our family site.

Remember, to reach the photos, you need the userid & password. If you’ve forgotten, or just lost it, call me, or send me an email, and I’ll get it to you.

To see 14 photos of our visit that night, please go to our private family website family.hernandezlife.com, or, to save time, just click here to go to the photo gallery directly.

I.S. Holiday Party

Rick — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:55:53 +0000

We had our yearly ‘Informations Systems Department’ Holiday Party on Tuesday. Thanks to all the managers for supplying all the food & drinks (including Champaign), also Mike brought in some great food from his wife’s Chinese restaurant. Other IS staff brought in a bevy of deserts. We also had our traditional ‘Chinese Grab Bag’ (don’t look at me, I didn’t name it). Yours truly came away with a nice bottle of Finlandia Vodka with 3 shot glasses. For those of you who don’t know the rules:

Everyone who brought a gift ($20 min – unisexual) pulls a number out of a hat
Person #1 picks a gift, unwraps it, & shows everyone
Person #2 unwraps a gift, then gets to choose to keep it or forcibly trade for Person #1′s gift
Person #3 opens a gift, then either keeps it or trades for either of the two gifts that came before
And so on…
The last person, #32 in our case, opens the last gift and gets to choose between it or any of the 31 gifts that came before.

Obviously the higher the number the better. I got #16. To be real fun, it must be played cutthroat; doesn’t matter if the person who has what you want is your boss or not, a friend or not. We all had a great time.

To see all the photos from our party, click Photos above, click on Work, then click on IS Holiday Party ’07. Or just click here. There are 2 pages worth.

Dec 5th – A New American Drinking Holiday

Rick — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:13:45 +0000

At least it should be. Yes we celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo, but these are not American holidays. Repeal Day commemorates the anniversary of Congress repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and giving us the government’s approval to consume alcohol in all it’s glorious variations. Repeal day is a great ~~excuse~~ occasion to get together with friends and pay tribute to our constitutional rights.

Here’s a quick history:

On January 16th, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act, outlawing alcohol mostly due to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who believed alcohol was the root of all evils. Predictably, our thirst for alcohol increased during Prohibition, and organized crime rose up to replace formerly legal methods of production and distribution. America was not happy, and in the thirteen years that followed, even many of the original proponents of Prohibition came to their senses. In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for President on a platform that included the repeal of Prohibition.

On Decenber 5th, 1933, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment, repealing Prohibition and restoring the American right to a celebratory drink.

Click HERE for a great video showing what life would be like if the Volstead Act had never been repealed. Also click HERE for a very good Bartender’s blog on the same subject.

So to wrap it up, On December 5th, make sure to get together with friends and family, have a few drinks (but don’t drive), and start a yearly celebration of “Repeal Day”.