OK, so I am a little late as usual on this but Daniel's birthday was May 6th and he has been quietly celebrating since the 6th!
It all started with a birthday party at his Mom's on Wednesday last week. His Grandmother and Mom made a delicious Vietnamese meal followed by a light and delightful cake from La Bledo with coffee flavored butter cream. Who doesn't know that Daniel loves coffee anything!?
His Mom and sisters gave him tickets to one of the Capitals Stanley cup playoff games.
My gift to Daniel was Direct TV the premium something package, so he could have HD everything and access to as many sports channels as possible. I know, I know what am I thinking?? It is his birthday and it what he enjoys so there it is...Direct TV, the gift that keeps on giving. Sports channels from every part of the country. A special channel for hockey, one for baseball etc., I am sure you get the point there are around 230 channels and the majority...well you know, they are sports or sports related. I have to admit the HD makes a huge difference, we do not watch much TV, in fact the shows we enjoy we typically miss and end up watching them online on the laptop! But watching HD is like 3D, I feel like I can reach out and pluck each little sports man right off the TV. I imagine there little legs flailing around as I remove them from the TV by the back of their shirt, something like
Toy Story and the army men. HA well it feels as though you could do this! The technology is incredible, now I can't wait to see what Kelly Rippa really looks like at 9am!
So I took a half day on Friday for the Direct TV man to come and complete the installation. I waited and waited ...tick tock well you know how it goes, you get a block of time like 1-6pm and they usually show up at 6pm. This was the second time I would be waiting for them to arrive. The first time I found out we were not allowed to order directly from Direct TV because we are a multi dwelling unit and this MDU co. in New Jersey owned the dish on the roof. With technology comes complications, needless to say I wasted most of my Saturday and was pretty ticked. The maintenance man who lives on the property told me he would not come over to speak with the installer because this was "not an EMERGENCY" What??? Not an emergency, you are kidding me right? Oh well he won and a week later we had the Direct TV. It gets better though, the contract with DTV specifies that they must install only when the leasing office is open and the maintenance men are on the premises. And you guessed right, the office closes at 6pm and the installer arrived at 6:15pm. I called DTV and asked if they were going to pay for my day of work missed since I would have to wait yet another day! Luckily the folks here at Commonwealth Crossing were nice enough to stick around, unlock the boiler room where all the lines feed to and leave me with DEAN the installer. Daniel had not yet arrived home from work. It wold be my responsibility to lock up and escort the Dean man. Dean is half Puerto Rican half Italian and is speaking spanglish to me telling me "girl this is loco", "how am I gonna do this, ohhhh shit"(wiping his brow)! I know it sounds like no big deal but all of the buildings are wired together feeding into the boiler room two buildings down from ours. They feed down to a crawl space that looks like the well in the movie
The Ring with no lighting and through the next two buildings. Fortunately, Dean was successful and I got to see behind the scenes where we live... a little creepy. The boiler room appears to be right out of a horror flick and the smell of oil,dirt, mildew and standing water all mixed together made my skin crawl.
Dean practically moved in; he had to use a drill with a cement bit the size of my arm to feed the line into our apartment from the hallway. Our building was constructed in the 1930's from cement, cinder block and plaster. Dean stayed for pizza, beer and the hockey game since the drill lost it's juice and had to recharge. Apparently we were pretty noisy with the drilling at 8ish and the shouting over the hockey game because our neighbors ended up in our apartment amidst the chaos. When the hockey playoffs began I warned our neighbors of the yelling, pacing and stomping in our apartment and wanted to be sure they knew we were not having multiple domestic quarrels or wild sex. If you are outside our door during the playoffs you will hear things like "put a body on him", "bitch, that's how you do it" among other foul language and shouting. Dean started the installation at 6:30pm and left at 9:30 ish after the hockey game was over. You can see Dean and Daniel below. I am not sure Dean was going to be well received by his wife when he finally made it home; his phone also lost its juice at some point while he was here and he was a good hour from home. He lives in Montgomery county Maryland. Poor Dean, I am glad he ate here.
Daniel continued celebrating his birthday on Saturday, May 9th. We ran some errands; including picking up the hockey tickets he received for his birthday and then metroed into DC.
The arena was completely red, the fans were loud and the game was complete with fights and all.
