Sam's Club had boxes of kiwis, my favorite fruit, so yesterday that was prettymuch all I ate. This turned out to be a bad idea when the restaurant/bar opening I went to did not have the complimentary appetizers I'd been promised. Although while waiting an unacceptable amount of time for an overpriced drink, I did get the chance to make a suitably witty remark to one of my social betters. Brief, enjoyable interactions with strangers are all too rare.

I'd planned to bring Jenna, but when she didn't answer her phone I ended up bringing Ben instead. (This was a coworker's thing and so I didn't want to bring a whole crew.) Unfortunately we spent most of the night talking to the progressively-drunker wife of a coworker; she was quiet at first, but as the night wore on she monopolized progressively more of the conversation. Until I got us out of there.

Afterwards Ben and I went to the Groveland Tap, which has a late night Summit special, but the atmosphere at place reminded me of Gabe's, a.k.a. the bar that gave me food poisoning. Maybe if the music hadn't been blaring I'd've had a more positive impression; however, if there's one thing I hate (and there are, in point of fact, several dozen things) it's bars with music you can't ignore.

Lost was good, but skip the next two paragraphs if you're still planning to watch the season premiere.

So. I liked that they kept with the flash-forward format, and my guess as to the identity of the six is Jack, Kate, Hugo, Ben, Sawyer, and (shakiest guess!) Sun. Remember that I have purposefully detached myself from the aggregated mass of Internet theories, screencaps, rumors, and speculation otherwise known as the Lost Overmind — but feel free to offer up any guesses not influenced by, for example, the Jay and Jack podcast. Which I hear good things about, if you're blessed with a pre-TiVo mentality.

I expect the season finale to merge the flash-forward and the real-time story. If not this season, then the next, but this format won't continue for as long as the flashbacks did. As we say in my family: there's very little meat in these gym bags. /Lost.

I accomplished a bunch of mundane but extremely practical stuff this week, e.g. filing my taxes. (Refund!) More importantly, I wrote down the beta version of my monthly budget. So I may be less fun this month, but I think my tentative entertainment allotment is, if anything, more than reasonable.

Most of the stuff I like to do is free in any case. I read the first ten Powers books this week, along with some graphic novels I'd happened upon at the same library. Powers seems pretty good, but if you're versed in the mythology then the Gotham Central series is a better, darker take on some of the same themes.

I've got $15 to spend at Borders and I'm not sure if I should blow it on another volume of Lucifer or another cookbook. Or maybe something else. I was there for a looong time on Friday without being able to come to any sort of decision. I would have stayed even longer, but I ended up driving to Minneapolis for dinner and drinks with my brother and some of his friends.

Mac's Industrial Bar: not bad. It was pretty low-key, and they had really good happy hour specials — $3! — on really good beers.

I'm on a fancy beer kick lately, as you can tell; I'll probably segregate that stuff onto its own blog at some point soon, because I'm sure it's hella boring to constantly hear about it here. And because then I can keep better track of what I've had and what I've liked, with the eventual goal of never drinking a bad beer again.

(I'm also on the verge of a fancy cheese kick, in all honesty, but since you can't get together with your friends for a few hours at a cheese cellar, don't expect me to bust my food budget on Gorgonzola. The $5/pound sharp cheddar is extravagant enough.)

Before the Super Bowl today, Matt and I watched The Bourne Ultimatum, which I'd checked out from the library thinking it was the previous installment — because who knew the library would have the newest one? Good stuff.

The Super Bowl itself was pretty entertaining, hurrah for the underdogs and all that. Did anyone else get tricked by that anti-smoking ad? That whole campaign is ice-cold. Remember the grandpa watching the kid take his first steps?

I skipped the half-time show completely and I have no regrets.

I should definitely sleep. Work was crazy last week, and it'll be crazy this week I'm sure.