DOWN WITH PANTS!

I have set a goal, I will start blogging again nearly daily on both of my blogs as well as reading all of your fine blogs again on March 3rd. In the meantime, here's a review of Restaurant Brooks in Ventura that I originally posted on Yelp...

With a friend who is a registered nanny in town to help us out, the wife and I got to go on our first date in almost a month after the birth of our little girl. We chose Brooks and it's seasonal cuisine based on all the great reviews on here and the other great press it has received. With all the hype behind Brooks, I had high expectations, even if I was trying to temper them a bit.

Well, no need to temper my expectations; it was even better than any of them reached. Now I'm afraid to over hype Brooks myself. But the meal was so good, I'm just going to have to gush. In fact, I would say that, without question, it was the best meal that I have ever eaten.

We had the five course tasting menu, one with the wine pairing and the other without, and they were nice enough to give my wife (who is still not drinking much being a lightweight after months of not drinking) her own glass for a little taste and with a couple of the wines, basically her own full serving. Every single course was delicious and the wine pairings were all spot on.

As both a way to show you what you can expect out of the five course tasting menu, even though it changes constantly, as well as a way to document for myself my favorite meal ever, here's what we were served, everything ridiculously delicious....

1st Course - Central Coast smokehouse smoked salmon with a whole wheat noodle cake and orange sake sauce.
Wine: Gruet Winery - Brut - Sparkling Wine - New Mexico

I've eaten smoked salmon all my life having grown up in the Seattle area - smoked salmon capital of the world - but I've never had it like this and pairing it with this Brut was amazing.

2nd Course - Wild boar and white bean cassolette topped with a baby arugula salad
Wine: Anglin - Viognier 2006 - Paso Robles

They put the arugula on top of the cassolette and while it sat there, the arugula steamed a little bit and picked up some of the flavor from the delicious cassolette.

3rd Course - Seared ahi tuna with Tobiko caviar served on soft polenta
Wine: Kunin - Pape Star 2006 - Central Coast

Perhaps my least favorite course, it was still arguably the best seared ahi I've ever had. I don't know much about caviar, but here is something I learned - If you take an individual egg in between your teeth and bite down it pops like a balloon and tastes great. We are so refined.

4th Course - Grilled skirt steak with fingerling potato hash, rapini and black pepper sauce
Wine: Old Creak Ranch - Peitie Sirah 2005 - Ojai

Perfectly cooked, perfectly sauced, perfectly potatoed, perfectly paired up with a great local wine.

5th Course - Lemon two ways - Meyer lemon slushie and an almond shorbread lemon bar
Wine: Martin and Weyrich - Moscato 2005 - Paso Robles

Best lemon bar ever! When I bit into the lemon bar, the immediate taste in my mouth was lemon, of course. After chewing and swallowing the lemon bar the taste was more of the shortbread coating. When I took a sip of the Moscato, it had the exact same taste as the shortbread coating, then that slowly went from that taste back to a lemon taste. The wine brought the lemon bar full circle, an almost perfect wine pairing.

The service was outstanding. Our waitress was super friendly, knowledgeable, helpful and genuinely interested in serving us. Owner and chef Andy Brooks made the rounds and said hello and was clearly proud of the food that he was serving that night.

And the space is very nice. The dining room is kind of modern, kind of industrial, but still very warm and inviting and it's all tied together with a great photograph - make sure you read about it's origins.

It was also the most I've ever spent on a meal. $85 for the tasting menu with wine and $55 without wine plus a healthy tip, but it was all very much worth it, especially for a special occasion such as this and the prospect of very few meals eaten out in the near future.

This is it. Ventura's foodie haven. It makes me want to go back through all my Ventura reviews and deduct a star from all of them. I'll just give Brooks a sixth star here, I don't have that kind of time.

Best restaurant between Los Angeles and San Francisco? Maybe. Best restaurant between Tijuana and Vancouver?

But seriously, I don't want to over hype it.

Other than the joy of being a father, the one thing that I discovered while I was off for nearly two weeks while Death? was giving birth and for the first week of our babies life is that there is one kick-ass game show on in the middle of the day.

No, I'm not talking about the bastardized version of The Price Is Right and the totally uncomfortable Drew Carey. Seriously Drew, quit asking people if they want to say hi to anybody while they are spinning the wheel. They almost always forget about the wheel and nearly miss what they land on. And the less talking a Price Is Right contestant can do, the better.

Nope, I'm talking about Merv Griffin's Crosswords. Hosted by the dreamy/creepy Ty Treadway, Crosswords is exactly what it sounds like. It's a fast paced game that starts with two contestants. Those two contestants get clues for words and the first person to ring in, say the word and spell the word, gets the dollars. After the first commercial break, three spoiler contestants are brought in and if the main two contestants don't answer correctly, the spoilers get a chance to take their place. In a couple of the shows that I watched, a contestant was rocking it, kicking ass and taking names, building a huge pot of money only to lose their spot at the last second and that spoiler contestant ends up winning the whole thing after answering only one question right. Unforgiving game shows, that's what I love.

In this day and age when game shows consist of five super easy questions spread out over an hour, it is so refreshing to find a game in which we solve an entire crossword puzzle in 30 minutes. And it's very easy to play along at home - the questions are relatively easy since they want people to answer them quickly so you get to feel smart and feel challenged a little bit. It's kind of like watching the Teen Tournament on Jeopardy. It's hard, but easy all at the same time.

I just signed up to be on the show, we'll see how that goes. I'm not too bad at the game when watching it, but my crossword skills otherwise are pretty rough. I finished the easy Monday LA Times crossword today, but the Tuesday version really messed me up and that's just the second most difficult one of the week. I can't even imagine how few words I would get on the Friday puzzle.

Anyway, I'm bummed I can't watch it anymore, I need a TV in the office. I'm looking forward to my six weeks off later so I can watch Crosswords. Oh and to spend time with my daughter - that too. To find out when Crosswords is on in your market, click here and enjoy!

Don't worry, Down With Pants! will be back, I'm not going away. It's just that right now my time at home consists of, when she's awake, holding her and playing with her and when she's asleep, holding her and letting her sleep on me. I just don't want to put her down and do anything else yet. In fact, the last two hours were spent uploading pictures, checking email and attempting to write a blog post with her sleeping on my chest. The only reason I'm able to finish this post is because she got hungry and I don't really have anything to offer her in that respect.

The question is, does Down With Pants! become Down With Poopy Pants! - the daddy blog or do I try to keep the daddy posts to a minimum? I haven't quite decided yet. My life is going to be non-stop daddy stuff so I should write what I know about, but then again, it would be nice to have a non-daddy outlet in this blog.

Either way, if you want to see a bunch of pictures of us, head on over to my Flickr set here.

After six days in the hospital - two inducing, one laboring and three post-partum - we finally returned home today with our little peanut.

Our little Adelaide May was delivered on Friday at 3:50 AM after nearly 22 hours of labor. Momma had to have a C-section after going through just about everything that having a baby has to offer and the picture above is me in the ICU with Addie minutes after her delivery. Don't worry, she was fine, all C-section babies have to go to the ICU for a little while.

It was probably the most difficult, painful, tiring, exciting, happiest, optimistic couple of days of my life - and I didn't even do the hard work. This is going to be tough, without a doubt, but it is already so much fun and so rewarding, I can't even describe. I couldn't be happier with her and mom and our family. This is about as awesome as it gets.

FYI - We are getting ready to head to the hospital tonight so that Death? can be induced. Our little girl will be with us within the next couple days! Maybe tomorrow, maybe Thursday, we'll see. Inducing can take a little while, let's hope for some quickness. But baby is fine and mom is fine, it's just the right time to get the process going.

I'm really, really excited. I just cleaned the entire house not only because the parents are coming, but because I don't want our baby to come home to squalor. Since this is a little sudden and early, I had nothing ready. Yes, I began nesting at around noon today. The daddy hormones are off the charts.

Anyway, I probably won't give any more updates on here for a while, but I might Twitter some updates, so if you want to follow me, head to my page over at Twitter.

Since a good portion of us don't get Martin Luther King Jr. Day off anymore, I propose that we the people take a personal holiday Friday and spend the whole day at the cinemas. There are just so many incredible movies opening that day, we should get them all in one sitting...

First film: How She Move - Oh yeah, another dance/step film. What a great way to get the day and the juices flowing. A little light hearted battling to lead us into...

Second film: RAM-MOTHER-FUCKING-BO - Woooooooo hooooooo! USA! USA! USA! I just pray it doesn't devolve into some taught political thriller. I want the taste of terrorist blood on my lips when we head across the multiplex to see...

Third film: Untraceable - Ooooo....a horror/thriller film about the perils of the internet? This is sure to be both plausible and shit your pants ridiculous. Nothing like torture on a Friday night.

Fourth film: Meet The Spartans - From the terrors of Untraceable to what looks like it could become an all-time funny classic. Perfect! What a way to end the evening.

So, who's with me for this grand quadruple-header? Bueller?

I saw this new transport vehicle this morning on the Ventura County Star and I got a little bit excited. But I was disappointed by the accompanying story.

Sadly, it is not manned by Jawas. Sorry.

BTW - Down With Pants! is not completely dead. Just in slow motion.

Whoops. Somehow I missed Improv Everywhere's No Pants 2K8 on the subway on January 12th. The movement spread to Portland and their MAX system where a nice little group of pants haters gathered to celebrate. That's where the above picture, taken by gumanow and posted in my DOWN WITH PANTS! Flickr group, originated.

There are so many reasons why I love Portland and their pantslessness is yet another to add to the already long list.

I sincerely hope that patrons riding the S.L.U.T. in Seattle dropped trough that day.

I worked for the Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings baseball team (now the Harlingen WhiteWings) as the Director of Media/Community Relations during the 2001 season. It was an interesting and difficult season to work for the WhiteWings and to be quite honest, I didn't like Harlingen very much. One season in the Valley was plenty. But I still had fun and wouldn't trade it for anything.

One afternoon before we headed to Edinburg for a game against the Roadrunners, we were sitting around the office shooting the breeze a little bit with our team's manager, Boston Red Sox hall-of-famer and one of the greatest characters I have ever known, George "The Boomer" Scott.

Once a great player for the Sox, The Boomer was a gruff, overweight, old school kind of a baseball guy from Mississippi that unfortunately had some health problems and was never well liked by his players. No matter, he was still hilarious in his own, understated way. I can still here him walk into the office and yell at me "HEY BIG MAN," I don't think he ever knew my real name. "YOU FIND A PITCHER FOR ME YET?"

When we traveled the 30 miles to Edinburg for games we rented a couple vans for the team and a pickup truck for Boomer instead of the usual sleeper bus. But we noticed that Boomer was picking up the equipment and leaving at 11:30 or noon for a game giving him a good two or three extra hours to get to the ballpark. We were curious as to why he was leaving so early for ballgames and he explained that he had been going to a barbeque place in McAllen for lunch and to take it easy for a little while before the game.

"The owner of that place is a total asshole," piped in our assistant GM, John. "They have good food, but he doesn't sponsor us and is always a jerk when you talk to him."

A silence settled over the room and after a long pause, Boomer, in all sincerity, broke it in the only way that The Boomer - keep in mind he's a big, old school, Mississippi born African-American - could....

"Whell......Ah don't go dere to find out that the man is an ass-HOLE. Ah go there... fortheCHICKEN!"

And with that....we lost it. I think I laughed for half an hour straight.

You're the man Boomer, wherever you are. You might be the only reason I have any positive memories of my time with the WhiteWings.

With only a month left to go, baby fever is starting to hit it's peak around here. Last night we decided to use a little bit of retail therapy and headed to the Camarillo Premium Outlets and one of the best, cheap, cute outlets there, The Children's Place. We bought a few things but more than anything, I was really confused by the fact that The Children's Place doesn't seem to understand human reproduction very well...


OK, I guess this could happen. A 6-9 month old could be a big sister if either they are the older twin or mom got pregnant again minutes after giving birth (not really possible)...


But unless I am mistaken - a high school education isn't what it's cracked up to be anymore - a birthday girl cannot be 6-9 months old. Right?