The Deuce Fo’

As promised, pictures from the Steuben’s Holiday Toy Drive/Party.

Holiday spritz.- Hendrick’s Gin, sherry, Aperol, lemon juice, Prosecco.

X-mas S’mores – Milagro Reposado Tequila, Sombra Mezcal, Cappuccino liqueur. It also had a small roasted marsh mellow on a stick across the top!

cOld Fashioned – Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey, Griottes, Orange slices, Chai syrup, soda. Ended up being a *little* heavy on the whiskey!

Hot Buttered Pumkin – Sailor Jerry Spiced Nay Rum, Pumpkin, Jonesy’s Hot Buttered Rum Mix. Served warm. This one was sooooo good!

Winter Gin Fizz – Hendrick’s Gin, Domaine de Canton, Cinnamon Extract, Agave Nectar, Lemon Juice. This was possibly my favorite drink of the night. It was very tart, almost sour, but there was a very sweet sugary lemon coating on the rim that helped to balance that out well.

This is my friend Moe’s drink, Red Skies at Night – Sailor Jerry Spiced Navy Rum, Lillet Blanc, Lemon Juice, Egg Whites. There was a sugary, cinnamonny, stuff around the rim of each glass that she caramelized with a blowtorch (below).

And importantly, remember that all this fun and games is to help collect toys less fortunate kids in the Denver area. It ended up being a huge success and there were a LOT of toys there, this pic didn’t capture even half of what was there as they flooded over the booths and tables in the front area!

Again, it was awesome to get to attend a great event and I hope to attend next year as well and maybe see if I can get snuck into some other COBG events!

In other news, as an early xmas present to myself I finally went ahead and jailbroke my iphone.

This is what it looks like now:

It’s awesome. The first thing is the themes, I can have wallpaper now! This is the Mac OSX Snow Leopard theme. Some themes come with new icons for the standard and most popular aps (like all here are new except the “Settings” icon, which makes sense to keep as that’s the icon OSX uses). Also there’s a bunch of cool shit like tethering (using my phone as a modem), the 5 icon dock, Backgrounding (running multiple applications at once), a battery manager that can display the actual % left (like the 3G S does) and many more that I haven’t even checked out yet. There really aren’t many limitations anymore, I guess that there is even a jailbroken ap that allows you to use the camera as a video camera. Crazy. It’s weird that with all this potential, Apple still limits the native features. I’m sure that there are reasons for this like running multiple aps at once can drain the battery quickly and almost absurdly fast if you go out of control with it. I guess that that might be part of the reason why the jailbroken community continues to coexists, as an outlet for people that don’t just need the simple version.

Speaking of Xmas presents… This year we aren’t really doing the present thing, but on my holiday wishlist for myself…

Netflix – Time to join the 21st century. A lot of movies out there that I missed and now want to see. $10 a month for Blue Ray discs + streaming movies. Boom!

Some boots. I was recently told that while it works for some people, of which I am apparently one of, the dress shoes with jeans thing is widely misused and unfashionable. When I asked what the alternative was, I was told nice boots. While I will have to confirm this with my fashion consultant, it was intriguing and I looked into it. I think that I could pull off the boots and it would be a hell of a lot easier to dig my car out in the morning after a snow in some of these than in my current flatbottomed, no traction, dress shoes. I’m looking at one of these two pairs. Thoughts?

Wine – I need to get a case of wine again, it’s great to have on hand and I might be able to get hooked up. I’m open to suggestions, but I usually have the guys at the small wine shop down on the corner pick out some of their favorites.

Not sure what else is really on this list, not trying to be greedy, and I don’t have a lot of extra time to devote to other random shit, so that’s all for now.

For Xmas in general I’m headed out to CA for a long weekend with the aunt and uncles. I’m not sure how it’s going to go down, but I’ll post a report afterwards…

New sweet jams: