New Year
This New Year we didn’t have anything amazing planned. Mom suggested that we go to San Francisco to watch the fireworks, but Ellen and I felt that it was too much work, and from previous experience, the firworks weren’t all that great. So we decided we should go to a sports bar to see if we could catch an NBA game. Initially, we went to Magoo’s Grill in Pleasant Hill, but it seemed like there were very few people there, so we decided to go to Elephant Bar. There were some stuff showing, and there were lots of people, but it wasn’t really the sports bar atmosphere that we were looking for. So we went to Masses Billiards & Sports Bar & Grill in northern Walnut Creek. It was more of a Pool Hall, but we decided to check it out anyways. There weren’t a lot of people there, either. Bay Area people are no fun.
Finally, we decided to go to Pyramid Alehouse in downtown Walnut Creek. It’s not really a sports bar, but at least it had the people and the atmosphere. We had the a sampler of beers, which included the Haywire Hefeweizen, Draught Pale Ale, Thunderhead IPA, Alehouse Amber Ale, and Pyramid’s current seasonal offering, which I didn’t remember, I think it was some winter warmer. I liked the Hefenweizen and the unfiltered Alehouse Amber Ale. We also ordered some spinach and artichoke dip. We asked the waiter if he could switch the TV channel to the Lakers-Sixers game, and we thought they did, but it turns out we were tricked. Initially, the game came on NBA TV, but actually, it just happened that we saw the quick report before they continued with NBA commercials. I guess because of some stupid licensing agreement, they can’t show games on NBA TV, how stupid. Anyways, the game was showing on Fox Sports, but this place didn’t have that channel subscribed on their DirectTV :-/. So we ended up not being able to cheer for the Sixers afterall.
After that outing, we went home to celebrate New Year’s Eve with Mom. Since we could only receive one channel from Concord from our TV antenna, we decided to watch the New Year’s celebration live on the internet with Kron4. Because of our crappy, crappy, connection from our neighbor, I couldn’t really receive it from the living room, and we had to watch it on Mom’s computer, since her computer was closer to our neighbor. Stupid connection. Anyways, we watched the countdown, and the fireworks this year was actually better than when we saw it. We opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Barefoot champagne is pretty good.