Glover Wedding

Went to my buddy’s wedding this weekend and I did the worst scheduling for flying in and out. I was booking a flight on a site and the prices were a bit too high, well while I’m looking a super cheap flight popped up and so I took it. However it was booked for LAX and everything is closer to John Wayne in the south. So I had to rent a car which made the flight cost as much as the next highest booking price, so I saved no money.

Anyway, the wedding was at a beautiful winery in the middle of the mountains. I don’t have captions up yet but will get around to it. I’m beat from traveling at the moment. I unfortunately forgot to take a real camera, so the image quality is pretty low quality from my cell phone.

Well I traded up bedroom TVs.  I was using an old CRT 19″ Sony and moved up to this Toshiba 19″ HD.  I’ve discovered a very fascinating thing about it though. As you may or may not be aware we’ve made the switch to digital broadcasts which also allows for over the air HD broadcasts. Some stations were already broadcasting in HD before the switch but now all your local channels should definitely be.  Knowing this I thought to myself that it kind of sucks that I can have my cable plugged in and get all those channels but need to plug into an antenna for the over the air HD stuff.

Well this is actually false. When I setup the auto-tune it picked up on all the digital channels and local HD channels! This only makes sense of course due to the switch, but it’s a very pleasant surprise. I get all the regular channels plus, strangely, Animal Planet in HD. If only I could trade Animal Planet for Food Network!

So when I was at the parent’s house in SA I decided to retune their TV as well and there were the HD channels! Wimbledon in HD was pretty great I must say. Anyway, if you bought a new TV with an ATSC tuner you should retune and check out all your local digital/HD stuff.

I realized recently that the bulk of my wardrobe hasn’t really changed since my high schools days.  When I do get new clothes it’s always gifts from relatives so ultimately I’m at the mercy of what other people think looks good on me.  Thinking about this conundrum I realize that my entire closet is comprised basically of what everyone else’s appearance of me should look like.  It’s a strange revelation I think.

While I’m not one to go clothes shopping I suspect I should be doing it more frequently than I have been and I need to start phasing out fashion trends from the 90’s.  I dunno though, how often do/should people be doing such a thing?  Maybe it’s totally normal.

Ready set go!

Potato Salad

5 ½ pounds Idaho potatoes
¾ pound (about 2 medium) yellow onions, chopped
¾ pound (about 6 ribsstalks) celery, chopped
16 ounces Kraft Dill Pickle Relish
1 ½ pounds (24 ounces) sour cream
12 ounces Kraft Mayonnaise (see Note)
2 heaping tablespoons coarse black pepper
1 heaping teaspoon garlic salt
1 heaping teaspoon celery salt
1 tablespoon salt, or to taste

GARNISH:
Sprinkling of paprika
Sprig of parsley

Put unpeeled potatoes in a large pot of salted cold water; bring to a boil and cook until tender throughout, about 25 minutes. Test by inserting a knife into a potato. Refrigerate 30 minutes to allow potatoes to cool. Carefully peel potatoes and cut into 1-inch cubes; set aside.

In large mixing bowl, blend together onions, celery, relish, sour cream, mayonnaise, pepper, garlic salt, celery salt and salt. Add cubes of potato and mix gently.

Cover and place in refrigerator until ready to serve.

For Garnish: Dust with paprika and garnish with a sprig of parsley.

Note: County Line uses Kraft Extra Heavy Mayonnaise. The recipe was tested with Kraft Real Mayonnaise with excellent results.

Recipe can be halved, if desired.

In the past 7 days I’ve done tons of crazy things.  Well, they aren’t so crazy I guess, but here’s the rundown of what I’ve been up to.

Since around about the Fall of 2005 I’ve been the raid leader of a WoW guild which I occasionally talk about here and there.  In February of 2007 I became the guild master as well.  I decided last December that I needed a break and that I should focus on school for this Spring semester but that got bumped due to random politics at the time.  During the middle of the semester a new patch hit and I was again on the fence about stepping down.  Ultimately I pushed it off again.  Around 2 weeks ago I finally decided no matter what I’m going to have to step down from WoW and move on and last week I finally did.  It coincided with my annual birthday bash trip to San Antonio.

It’s a really hard thing to sort of let go of.  One, I’m a control freak so it’s tough to now think that it’s possible that if I’m in conflict with an issue, it might just stay that way.  It’s yet to happen and I doubt anything crazy will happen, but you never know!  This is going to sound really crazy but I knew the ins and outs of the guild and accessory items to the guild so well that I can’t yet comfortably take weeks off yet.  It’s still somewhat transitory.  There were mods we used in game custom built for us as well as very quirky systems we used for our web site that I feel like maybe only 2-3 people know how they fully work and interact with the guild.

This all sounds like I quit WoW though and really, I’m just taking a backseat to the next generation.  I’m still around but my login time will not consist of 80% dealing with other people and 20% doing random things for myself.  But it’s time for the guild to take the next step.  You can’t be the parent forever, so it’s time to see what the kids have learned and how they cope with things.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens after the summer when we have a new batch of recruits and maybe I’m just some mystery dude.

So May is birthday month, with me, my older younger sister, and my little brother all having birthdays within a timespan of about 13 days.  I originally planned to go 18th-22nd but work cropped up, which is the only busy time of year for me between sessions, and I had to push it off to 21st-26th.  Hammeron demanded I go to Whole Foods and I had pushed off seeing Star Trek to see it in IMAX.

So I get to San Antonio and my Mom usually makes a huge cake for us.  This time however, due to the request of her friends from work, she bought a cake from this cafe waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay downtown.  So job 1 for me was go fetch the cake.  My mom wanted to get a grand marnier cake but my sister went with the black forest chocolate cake instead.  There’s a picture of a slice on the sidebar on my flickr feed.  It was good.  Mom didn’t like it, she’s picky, but I suspect it’s because she wanted the grand marnier.  All of my sister’s friends liked it though so it’s no big deal.

If you’ve been following my twitter, I broke my Rock Band drum set foot pedal.  Despite owning the super great mega pedal, it broke where the mega pedal doesn’t connect, at the very base where it has a pin connected to pivot.  My initial plan was to super glue it back together.  I was stuffing my face with chicken while I let my sister do it.  So after letting it set overnight I started a song up and after about 3 notes it breaks again cleanly.  I said screw it, we’re going to Gamestop.  We head over and buy the replacement pedal with the double bass module.  I get home and plug in the new one and it’s great.  However, I have this new nagging annoyance that I have double bass and one broken pedal.  So I try the super glue again.  I went crazy with the stuff.  I let it set and sure enough, it has yet to break.  However I have been using the new pedal as the dominant pedal and the broken one as the secondary one.  Regardless, it has yet to break after a few songs.  As a sidenote, double bass is incredibly difficult to learn to use once you’ve gotten single bass working.

Afterwards we headed out to see Star Trek.  I really wanted to see it in IMAX but apparently the theater only shows the newest releases of the week or something crazy in IMAX so I had to see it regular style.  Overall it was cool.  I won’t spoil it but my brother/sister got an earful when it was done.  There are things I didn’t like but the good things outweigh that stuff so overall I enjoyed it.

Sunday felt like a lost day to me.  I borrowed Crisis Core from Ashley before I left so I wouldn’t die of boredom and I put about 5 hours into it overall.  It’s pretty neat but really easy at the same time.  Though I can’t really tell if games are easier because I’m older and wiser or if they are in fact, just easy in general now.  There’s some random hard stuff in there and I actually really hate how the level up system works, but the main story of the game hasn’t caused any problems yet.  The battle system is entertaining enough. I need to finish it soon.

Monday we went out to Whole Foods which was a really crazy store.  95% of it is organic and everything smelled so fresh.  It was pretty great.  I got a Mix1 for me and my brother and he got a Dagobah chocolate bar just for novelty sake.  Though it was a pretty good chunk of chocolate anyway.  They had Brain Toniq there as well and I tried a sample.  I would say in the general category of energy drinks, it was better than most and it wasn’t carbonated which is a plus for me, but the taste wasn’t there for me.  The only problem with Whole Foods is that it’s so far away, it would be impossible to buy anything that needs refrigeration since the trip back home is so far and it was around 100 degrees in the car.  After that we shipped out to the mall for some new threads and hit up all the stores at La Cantera.

As usual when I visit I like to go out to eat with my brother and sisters somewhere that I don’t have in Lubbock.  However it being Memorial Day I wanted to head to the County Line for some killer BBQ.  I think my new favorite there is the pork ribs.  They’re so great fallin off the bone style and succulent.  The potato salad is king as usual and we had ordered 2 loaves of bread to take home.

My Mom also went on a spree of buying suits for me recently, none of which fit.  However she has a friend that is a tailor, which is a crazy profession for some reason to me, but I forgot I went there on Sunday to get 2 of these suits fitted.  I picked them up on Monday and man they look great.  This year is like a marathon of weddings so now I should look pretty dapper.

Ok lastly, while I don’t actually ask for much on my birthday, I walked home with the new fitted suits, a crazy hand blender with chopper, Gurren Lagann disc 1, and I got myself the second season of Shin Chan.

Now that Summer is upon me and lots of freed up time due to lack of WoW, I’m gonna start plowing through these mountains of games/movies/anime that I’ve neglected all these years.  It’s certain I won’t be finished by the end of the Summer, but hopefully I make a dent.

A friend’s birthday recently elapsed and since it was midweek I thought nothing of it.  However festivities ensued the weekend after (this past weekend) to which I was part of at the last minute.  The plan was a scavenger hunt for her presents all around town with me and another friend planting gifts just ahead of her path to ensure proper delivery.  The gift locations were meaningful to the gift giver and giftee.

Location 1: Gas station
We had very specific instructions with this one to place it on pump 3.  We drove around what seemed to be pumps with no numbers which made it somewhat tricky, but we finally discovered the numbering scheme and found that someone was actually pumping at pump 3.  So we sat behind them waiting, which had to be akward for this person since we never got out and when he was done we moved up immediately.  We waited patiently while munching on some kind of cheetos which weren’t what I asked for but tasty nevertheless for a text message stating the gift searcher’s location relative to us.  We left the gift, a book, above the pump and hoped that no one would pull up to pump 3 after we left and headed out.

Location 2:  House
We went to a house that we previously lived in and on the way I was thinking about how very horrifying it would be to see if the people living there would notice us planting an object somewhere around the place.  Fortunately for us, the house was for rent and no one lived there currently.  So we popped this present into the mailbox.  Unfortunately for us, this location was literally 3 minutes from the previous location.  So as we were driving to the next spot, the searching party drove directly beside us at the intersection.  I yelled at my cohort to duck and I threw down my sun visor to obstruct the view of my face, but didn’t switch sides as their vehicle drove directly beside us.  We get a text message saying that our giftee was in fact dumb, and didn’t notice us.  We die laughing to the next spot.

Location 3: Scary Restaurant
In what can only be described as the worst part of town, we made headway to this remote restaurant that was apparently shut down.  This is what I coined the warehouse district of the city but there were a couple of seedy looking houses overlooking us.  We actually had no idea if this was the right spot or not, which is kind of frustrating as the driver.  We decided this had to be it, there were no other restaurants around, and then hopped out of the car to find a suitable location for this gift.  As we’re scouring around, we look to our right and notice someone staring us down from their screen door.  Very uncomfortably we find a place to pop this present and hope that our buddy finds this thing.

Location 4: Disc Golf Park
So we’re comfortably ahead of our search party as we attach this gift to the bottom of a bench near tee #2.  We’re sitting here waiting when all of a sudden we spot the search party’s vehicle turning into the park.  My mind reels at the possibility of it not actually being them considering we didn’t get the warning text message, but I decide in the worst case scenario, we have to go.  This is truly a hilarious setup since no other cars are in the vicinity and they parked exactly where we were not but 1 minute ago.  Our clueless friend again, somehow, didn’t notice.  As we’re making our getaway we get a text “HIDE!!!!”  Clearly, some amount of delay occurred there.  We laughed until we stopped.

Location 5: Old job
So we go to this old place of employment that my friends worked at.  We stroll on in and there’s 2 girls on the phone.  With a very very puzzled look on their faces, we explain our situation that we’re placing a gift here for a friend.  One girl asks “Uhhh, is she coming to get this today?”  We said yes and then they just sort of took the gift.  This was an odd moment indeed as my friend breezed her way right to them all the way in the back of this office with no hesitation.  She explained that if they got up it would screw up their actual job so she had to walk back there.  It was gutsy and I thought she was going to punch them.  Ok I didn’t think that, but it was funny because I was going to explain it all from the doorway in a non-menacing way but she just bullied her way to the back and gave them the run down.

Location 6: The bar
We hang out at this place every few weeks.  It’s a nice place and our plan on the way there was to hand the gift off to the hostess.  However since it’s early Sunday, there’s no hostess.  So we waltz up to the bar and explain the situation to the bartender.  He says no problem any place we want to hide it specifically?  Does she have a favorite beer?  I have no clue, but my friend knowing our friend better than me says “Yeah Guinness.”  So he puts it behind the Guinness tap.  When our friend finally arrives at the bar, she snoops around the foyer, the bar, and is completely stumped.  The bartender asks her “Can I help you?”  She says, “Yeah did anyone come by and leave anything?”  He says “No, not that I know of.  But can I get you a drink?” She says “No…” He follows up with a “Well how about a Guinness?”  To which her quick reply is “Ok sure!”  At this point the friend who was traveling with her says “WHAT!?  We don’t have time to sit and drink a beer!”  This friend looks at the bartender with a crazy look and the bartender gives her the nah-it’s-ok-this-is-supposed-to-happen look/hand gesture.  He then hands her the beer and the gift very coolly and doesn’t even charge her for the Guinness!  We as the gift placers were not amused by this beer break!  It is however totally funny in retrospect.  Even without the beer, her next clue took her forever to decipher.

Location 7: Coffee Shop
The problem with this spot is that the coffee shop is closed and secondly in the middle of a shopping center.  So there’s really no great place to hide anything.  Did I mention it was a breezy day?  This gift was a pillow, fairly light.  So our conundrum was placing it in the wind, attaching it to the abandoned store, or doing something else.  We looked over and saw a stack of newspapers which we could use to weigh down the present if placed in a bag.  However as I approached this stack, I noticed a pair of old man glasses on top.  I backed away like I discovered someone had peed on the object and the stank of this form of personal identification had slapped me in the face.  Why? I don’t know, but it was an oddity.  Anyway, we ended up putting it in a paper shopping bag and weighing it down with a water bottle.  We also ended up sitting there for what had to be like 45 minutes.

Location 8: Back to the starting point
The final location was simple enough, it was go back home!  Strangely, it took a while for our scavenging friend.  Overall I think it took over 2.5 hours total.  It was pretty great though, except for the more difficult clues to the next locations.  Mostly that was just boredom on our end, but I’m certain it was probably more exciting for the seeker.  Did I mention a dog was so scared to have me hold it, it pooped all over me?  Yes this was in the beginning of the story and actually created a nice diversion to account for me and my teammate not being around when the birthday girl arrived.  It was pretty funny, even to me, the poopee.  The pizza and birthday pie made up for it.  Plus I’m pretty used to animals doing crazy things, mostly throwing up, but even so, pretty tolerant of such things so it was no big deal.

Stinky Flowers

Up around campus about half the trees up here bloom these white flowers.  They stink horribly.  Seems like I’m the only one who notices.  Every whiff of these things almost induces this gag reflex yet everyone around me doesn’t seem to notice one bit.

Watchmen Movie

I saw it.  Don’t take kids.  As I was leaving the movie I look over and see these two kids and was sort of shocked.  There’s several different ways you can go into this movie:

• Novel reader.  You know what it’s about.  You will like this movie if you liked the novel
• Non novel reader/expect this to be like X-Men or something.  You will hate this movie.  You will be confused and angry.  You will do something dumb like take your kids to an R rated movie with very graphic violence and hot steamy airship sex scenes.  Incidentally, you’re a horrible person for not doing some research beforehand.
• Non novel reader/no expectations: You will probably like this movie because it’s somewhat fresh and new apart from your regular super hero movies.

Overall, after watching it, I felt the same after I read the book.  It was neither great nor terrible.  It was entertaining and worth experiencing but somewhat depressing.

Weather

The weather has been so great lately except the occasional windy day.  Every time I’m outside I want to ignore anything I have to do indoors and do something.  My brain sort of seizes up when I have to determine what “something” actually amounts to though.

A lot

It is two words.  Stop thinking that it is one.

Ubiquity

I have failed in any attempt to use it.  It seems so great yet almost paradoxical.  You want to make it easy to combine elements of the web and mash them together, yet the way to use it seems to require some semblance of moderate to advanced computer knowledge.

Street Fighter 4

I played it heavily for a week.  I did a very horrible thing though.  In my process of unlocking all the characters, I set rounds for 1 and difficulty to easiest.  So when I went back to trying to play online, I was thrown off guard by opponents who played more intelligently than a rock.  I was discouraged and took a week off to let my friends unlock stuff and get more practice time in.  I myself haven’t been seen online in SF4 in a while.  This is disappointing and I should actually start playing again soon.  Probably over Spring Break.

Rock Band

In early to mid February I had probably hit the peak of my drumming ability.  I was breaking through songs I had massive difficulty with such as Don’t Fear The Reaper on expert.  Then I sort of stopped playing and when I picked it back up, I had lost it.  It’s crazy that such discipline is required for this game to basically stay in shape mentally and physically and yet so interesting to me.

Working Out

Speaking of staying in shape.  I bought a pull up bar.  I very faithfully used it every other day all of February.  It’s laughable how poor my level of strength was as I just bought it and rewarding to see how far I’ve come in just a month.  However, I took a week off and am starting it all up again.  I think I’m going to try working it in every single day now and seeing how that goes.  Against previous attempts to start working out, I’m going to do this gradually and see how it pans out.

Now that I’ve owned an iPod for over a year, I have this sort of strange phenomenon I’m going to term iPod syndrome.  In the first place, I have a small capacity iPod, so this probably affects those people more than those with 20+GB iPods.  When you’re under the 16GB limit I’d guess that you’re like me, and have to manage your playlists really well for the day.  However, if you’re exactly like me, you’re REALLY lazy and just have a 4+ star playlist and maybe a customized playlist.  Over the course of several months it ends up that you sort of become sick of these songs which are in fact your most favorite or at least highly rated of songs.

The problem with the small size limit (for me 8GB) is that not all of my 4+ star rated songs fit onto the iPod.  So I have it set to random select.  There’s a lot of different ways to select your size limit, but the real problem is I use my iPod more than I use iTunes and iTunes is what actually updates song information like last played and skip count etc..  This seems really idiotic since the iPod should basically be running miniature iTunes and should be updating the songs and syncing back with my desktop but it doesn’t appear to be.

So what happens is I get really bored with my music and new songs really drive me to listening.  But what does this really mean?  It means that iTunes is the platform to leverage buying new songs!  It’s a horrific cycle!  I mean there are alternatives to iTunes sure.  But it’s interesting how this can affect me as a small capacity user.  If I had my full library I might not be as affected because the combination of genius+full library might not get me as bored as fast with my music.

Ok secondary to the boredom with music, I picked up a second gen iPod Touch and man, they are so sweet.  Mine is a great slim little brick, but they somehow trimmed them down even more to a blade shape.  I kind of really want to get a 32GB touch now but ah well.

Incidentally, I have a really peculiar syncing problem.  I can’t do autosync anymore because it adds playlists I don’t want synced.  I’ve weakly searched the support forums but I don’t think anyone else has this problem.  It’s so weird.  I wonder if I do a full format if that would fix it up, but I’m not sure how it stores my contacts since I have added some unique ones in not in Outlook/Google.  This reminds me that I have been meaning to move everything to Google in the event that I one day do get an Android phone.

Here’s Tyler Florence’s recipe

Ingredients

• 4 ripe avocados
• 3 limes, juiced
• 1/2 red onion, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 serrano chiles, sliced thinly
• 1 big handful fresh cilantro, finely chopped
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions

Halve and pit the avocados. Scoop out the flesh with a tablespoon into a mixing bowl. Mash the avocados with a fork, leaving them somewhat chunky. Add the remaining ingredients, and fold everything together to gently mix. Lay a piece of plastic wrap right on the surface of the guacamole so it doesn’t brown and refrigerate 1 hour before serving.

And here’s what I adjust usually.

In the first place, you may notice when buying avacados that there are two different sizes.  The above is a good guideline for large avacados.  Since I only try to make enough for me, I go with small ones.  In which case I use 1.5 limes, and 1 serrano.  Otherwise here’s what I do once I have the ingredients.

Halve and pit the avacadoes and dump them into a mixing bowl.  I use a potato masher to mash them up because a fork takes forever.  Leave some nice chunks. I juice the limes, mix in the onion, garlic, and I chop the serrano as tiny as possible.  There’s no amount of olive oil in the list, but I basically just pour for about 2-3 seconds.  Don’t over salt the guacamole because the chips you eat will also be salty generally.  The hardest part is leaving it in the fridge, but it gets a lot better after all the flavors hang out for a bit.

Ok really it should be like take 5. Like I said earlier, I bought a Pur water dispenser to raise the quality of water used for the tea batches. I made another standard version 1 batch but it was really sweet. Like crazy sweet. 2/3rd cup of sugar, 2.5 quarts of water or whatever that line is on the pitcher which I have yet to understand. I think there are 2 measuring lines, actual water, and ice. But anyway, it seemed like a lost hope. I imagined what I needed was sugar that was sweet but didn’t have as strong of a flavor if that’s even possible since sugar is only sweet. So in retrospect, I’m like grasping at straws to figure out what’s going on. I drank about 1/3rd of it and decided to dilute it with more water. So I added more water, and it was perfect!!! (maybe) I need to buy more reference material but I feel like what I had finally made was definitely tasting much better.

• So $19 for this tea maker
• 2 bags of  lipton tea
• Fill to the pitcher to the third line
• 2/3rd cup of sugar in the pitcher for when the tea comes out piping hot
• Then dilute it with plain water after it’s been brewed

The problem is I don’t know how much I diluted it.  I feel like I went down to the 2 quart line then I doubled it’s volume with plain water.  Either way, it’s a great alternative to $5 a gallon!