After the finishing up the EOS modal test and the acoustic test, I look forward to a relaxing Friday evening at home with Nopester. I do the laundry and lay down on the couch to relax - feet propped up to reduce the last bit of swelling in the legs. I make a note to call the doctor because it appears that the bleeding might have returned.
I don't answer for 30 seconds and ask "The usual place?"
I leave the house at 9:10pm Friday night and get to the Frat House at 9:35pm. It is early, so the place is kinda quiet. Ta-Wei is not there yet. After watching a few games of pool, I put my name on the list to play - knowing that I am a really bad player and will get creamed, but it is something to do.
I look up at him with a knowing look and continue to line up the shot. I try a shot that has no chance of succeeding. I strike the cue ball on the lower right side sharply. The ball squirts off to the left of his ball - a striped one with pretty red stripes - bites into the felt on the second skim, angles sharply to the right and just barely grazes my deep blue ball. The deep blue solid ball goes into the corner pocket. The cue ball, after grazing the deep blue solid ball, careens and spins wildly across the table leaving me a perfectly straight-in shot with the solid yellow ball. I put on my most "I'm a dumb blond airhead look" with a mixture of non-chalance and look directly at my opponent. He is looking at me, toothpick hanging out of his mouth, mouth wide open, like he has just seen a ghost. I walk over and, instead of slam- dunking the solid yellow ball, turn and make a "safety" play where I bury the cue ball behind one of my solid balls such that my opponent has no shot. "Oops, I missed. You're turn."
He again looks dumbfounded and says, "If I wasn't so I drunk, I'd swear it looks like a map of the United States."
My opponent is getting irritated. I line up my next shot and strike it perfectly. Sinking the eight ball in the side pocket. My opponent says, "You lose."
He starts getting a bit more...agitated. "You sank the eight ball before you sank the rest of your balls. You lose."
He points to the solid yellow, the solid red, the solid green, and the solid maroon balls and says "These other balls".
Now he gets really angry and says "You did that on purpose. What the *&%^ are you doing?"
"I'll be back with your change."
I re-enter the bar to find Ta-Wei waiting for me. He is now bit upset with me. "Why did it take you so long to get here?"
Ta-Wei and I talk about funding issues, "cellular automotive" (I don't even bother correcting him anymore), and other things. When I ask Ta-Wei if his friends are still interested in the geo-economic-political cellular automata models, he responds with "I believe that I have people on both sides of the Strait who are interested and will probably both fund it."
As I head for the door, a lady stops me and asks me why I am leaving so early. She asks me, in the presence of Ta-Wei, if I want to walk across the street with her. Ta-Wei looks at me and asks me "What about Chi-Chi? Chi-Chi is still over there watching you."
I leave the bar with Ashley, as she calls herself, and start walking across the street. I see that Ashley has a dignified and well-drawn tattoo of a rose on her shoulder. I immediately stop walking, tell her that I am feeling ill, and need to go home. (I'm not about to open the can of worms of going out with anyone with a tattoo. Though it has happened to me in the past.) I'm almost in a sprint to the truck to get out of the situation without anymore conversation.
When I arrive at TRW, it strikes me who Ta-Wei's investors may be and I make a note to either find out exactly who they are or terminate any working agreements with him. When I arrive at TRW, I have an email that was sent out at 5:51pm on Friday night approving travel to a conference on Monday. Actually that would be travel on Sunday because the paper has to be presented on Monday at 9am in Portland. I make a note of the timeliness of the approval and continue with EOS testing.