Cold blooded

During the tournament, we had a couple guests to take care of. In our house itself, there was IM Sandor Kustar (a Hungarian currently living in South Dakota) and GM Dashzegve Sharavdorj (a Mongolian currently living in Colorado). David Pruess and Irina had vacated the apartment (they stayed at his mom’s place), and the two Georgian grandmasters (Zviad Izoria and Giorgi Kacheishvili) were staying there. For the most part, it wasn’t too painful to take them around to wherever they needed to go, but there were a couple amusing scenes …

I’m vegetarian, and in the house, Jesse almost always eats vegetarian. GM Dash, though, was not a big fan of eating tofu – he prefers his meals with red meat. Normally in Mongolia, he said, he’d be eating lamb (about 3-4 days a week) and beef (about 2-3 days a week), with some horse and camel thrown in for good measure. This surprised our other guest, Sandor, who breeds horses in South Dakota! Luckily, GM Dash took a flight to Vegas after this tournament, not to Sandor’s ranch.

One of our guests (who shall be nameless for now) wasn’t quite sure how to operate a gas stove. I have the only downstairs bedroom in the house, so when he turned on the stove in the morning before the second round, I was awoken by the loud, constant clicking of the stove – he had turned it on by turning the knob to the right, but he had left it on the “lite” setting, not bothering to turn it further to “High.” Not sensing anything was the matter, he had gone back to his room to let the water boil. Guess they have electric cooktop ranges at his place.

We also had a bit of an ant invasion over the past couple weeks. It started raining around the start of the tournament so it seemed likely the ants might try to go indoors, but when a guest left a box of apple turnovers on the table in the common room, they invaded. From there, they made their way into the kitchen and the dishwasher of all places. Running the dishwasher got rid of the current crop but didn’t keep them away for good. I had read online that using vinegar in the dishwasher would get rid of them, so I was thinking of making a quick trip to buy some white vinegar. Jesse, though, figured his aged balsamic vinegar, “imported from New Mexico,” would do the trick just as well and dumped a bunch into the soap dispenser and a little around the bottom of the dishwasher. That did the trick, and now our dishwasher smells a bit better too.

This wasn’t even our first dishwasher story. Soon after we moved in, David didn’t realize that dishwashing liquid and dishwashing detergent were not interchangeable. He had put regular Palmolive soap into the dishwasher’s dispenser and let it run. Needless to say, the dishwasher was shortly overflowing with suds. Andrew, though, came to the rescue by deciding that it was an excuse to mop the kitchen floor, so we collected the suds and passed it off to him.

As for the title of this post, Jesse had a tough event in Berkeley – he finished with 5.0/10 (1 win, 1 loss, 6 draws, and 2 half-point byes). After one of his tough games, he wanted to re-watch Dave Chappelle’s skits about Rick James. Ever since, when he takes some of my food from the fridge, he sings out “Cold blooded!”

Advertisement