See you tomorrow, folks.
Random Notes from Home
Daily life stuff….
:: I made pizza for dinner last night. Nothing fancy, just cheese, pepperoni, and sausage, but I made my crust and my sauce from scratch, so that’s something. It turned out really well, I thought. There’s something really satisfying about DIY pizza. Now to experiment with other crust recipes; the one I used is a basic crust from Cooking Light magazine.
:: I watched the last half hour or so of the 24 finale. Hmmmm. Spoiler thoughts (highlight to read):
Jack doesn’t even get to go to bed after his day? Now he’s on the run from both the US and the Russians? And at some point in the past he pissed off China, so where can he go? Canada?
And if the President is feeling that bad about Jack and what he’s been through, why doesn’t she pardon him before resigning her office?
And yes, I’ll totally see a 24 movie.
:: SamuraiFrog on the finale of LOST:
There are two kinds of people–those who loved the last episode of Lost, and those with no poetry in their souls.
I watched the finale (switching back and forth between it and the Celebrity Apprentice finale, which was so much filler that you could watch about eight minutes of the whole thing and catch it all), and I like to think that my soul’s got poetry a-plenty within it, and my reaction to the show was pretty much what my reaction to LOST has always been: Yeah, it’s a pretty show and it’s extremely well-made and Michael Giacchino can write some good music, but…that’s about it. Maybe I’m simply not attuned to the poetry in LOST, wherever it is, but the finale struck me as lots and lots of sentimental stuff, right down to the tearful reunion of man and dog, combined with lots of glowy stuff about death and Heaven. As a non-fan of the show I wasn’t looking for “the answers”, but the online commentary I’ve seen is pretty unanimous that the finale didn’t offer any.
So, basically, what seemed to wind up happening is LOST boiling down to “Our Town meets The Five People You Meet In Heaven meets The X-Files“. Whether they were dead the whole time or whether they were only dead in the parallel timeline doesn’t really matter, apparently, and the creators basically gave themselves the ultimate “out” in terms of explaining stuff: they can simply say, “Explanations, schmexplanations. It’s all religious allegory about death and the afterlife. We don’t need logic for that.” From the vantage point of someone outside the whole LOST phenomenon, it seems to me that what the producers did here was this close to being, if not actually being, an enormous deus ex machina ending. And not just the ending: the entirety of LOST is deus ex machina.
I’m wondering how this show and its ending are going to age, as the emotions of the journey fade and other memories come to the fore. It’ll be interesting.
:: In other teevee season finale news: CSI: Miami‘s finale was unbelievably silly; haven’t seen Grey’s Anatomy or Castle yet (in fact, we’re still eight or nine episodes behind on Castle, so we’ll have new teevee here at Casa Jaquandor for a while); I’m growing more and more weary of The Office and think the show should just end when Michael Scott leaves; The Mentalist needs to wrap up the not-that-interesting Red John storyline soon; and…that’s about it, I guess.
:: It’s really hot this week here in Buffalo. Mid-80s. The kind of weather that makes me irritable and cranky because it’s too unpleasant to go outside and do much of anything. I hate hot weather. This is July weather, and it’s the big reason why July (excepting the Fourth, which I adore) is my least favorite month. July weather in May? I really hope this is an aberration and not a harbinger of a July for the ages in these parts….
:: I’m closing in on finishing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. I’m past the first “Boss” level in World Seven, so I have a couple of levels and then all of World Eight to go. Yay me! I had “reached” World Eight before, but that was with me doing a lot of playing doubles with The Kid, who has beaten the game multiple times now; basically she completed levels while I died a lot. Now I have a game that I’m playing myself. Fun stuff! (We need some more Wii games, though…maybe Mario Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and one of those Lego games, like Indiana Jones.
:: The Daughter is now reading all of the Harry Potter books. She’s on Order of the Phoenix, although she keeps asking me what happens in Deathly Hallows. I refuse to tell her. We’ve watched the existing movies, so she’s still operating on certain assumptions as regarding Professor Snape. Heh! I, of course, refuse to confirm or deny.
That’s about it. More posting later, I hope!
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30 years….
…since Mount St. Helens’s massive eruption of May 18, 1980.
We actually lived in Hillsboro, OR at the time of the 1980 eruptions (there were quite a few, starting earlier than that, but May 18 was the Mother of ’em all). I remember volcanic ash covering our driveway and seeing the enormous ash clouds dominating the sky, even though the mountain was sixty miles away.
Here’s an infographic that explains the geology of the event (via):
The most amazing factoid to me about Mt. St. Helens is that Spirit Lake, on the mountain’s northern side, was elevated to such a degree by the 1980 eruptions that its current bottom is now higher than its pre-1980 surface level. That’s the power of Earth, folks!
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The Preznit!
Next Thursday, President Obama is scheduled to spend some time in Buffalo. Now, I’ll be working, so unless one of his stops is The Store, I doubt very much that I’ll be in any position to see him. But his previous stop is a town in Ohio, so with any luck, his flight plan will be similar to that taken by President Bush in 2004 — the last sitting President to visit Buffalo — who actually flew over The Store in Air Force One while on final approach. I’ve never forgotten that day, as I was one of two people to even look up and see the plane above us and the only one to realize what plane that was. So I’m keeping an eye out for the specific details of Obama’s visit, trying to find out his specific arrival time at Buffalo Niagara International Airport so I can find a reason to be outside about twenty minutes before that and keep an eye out for that magnificent airplane. I can’t wait.
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Save me, Jeebus!
Well, today brought me a first: I saw my very first Chick Tract.
Now, I’ve seen lots of these online, since they’re all very helpfully (to somebody, I suppose) archived on Teh Interweb, but until today, I’d never run into the print version of one before. Someone left one in a conspicuous location at The Store, as happens from time to time; they know they’re not allowed to openly distribute literature on our property, so they do it on a “stealth” basis. They’ll go into the bathroom, do their business, hopefully wash their hands, and leave a couple of brochures on the counter. (Yes, when I find these, I toss them. I don’t care if someone is leaving pamphlets extolling the virtues of The Phantom Menace, I’m tossing them.)
The types of literature usually left behind (heh) by such folks are almost always identical, but today’s was an actual, paper copy of a Chick Tract. I’d never ever seen a printed version of a Chick Tract before, so it was a little exciting to see the creepy artwork, the lousy writing, and the completely unsubtle message (Jesus, or HELL!!!). I was going to toss the thing, but one of my coworkers — a pretty militant atheist, it turns out — was highly amused by the thing and pocketed it to take home, for some reason. I’m always a little curious about this approach to ministry — does the “Leave a pamphlet or two in a bathroom” approach really work? I suppose that probably works more frequently than the even more obnoxious version of this practice, the Christian pamphlet that’s designed to look like a folded-up $20 bill, which the Nice and Helpful Faithfuls will leave on their tables in restaurants in place of a tip. I saw this happen more frequently than you would guess when I worked in restaurants, and let me tell you, not once was the server’s response to receiving one of these what I suppose the Nice and Helpful Faithfuls wanted to hear.
In general, I find the leaving of religious literature — or the actual physical distribution of it, as has happened to me in parking lots or malls or county fairs or city streets — fairly obnoxious and irritating. The active seeking of converts always annoys me, but I have to admit, seeing a real Chick Tract in person instead of online was kind of amusing.
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Adventures in Food
Some recent food-related stuff that I keep forgetting to post….
:: New York State is one of the country’s biggest producers of maple syrup, and every year, in order to bring attention to the state’s maple producers, there’s a thing called Maple Weekend. (Which is now two weekends, but we’ll let that slide.) In the maple-producing hills and hollows of Western and Central New York are lots of tiny restaurants that offer all-you-can-eat pancake breakfasts. Many of these are only open during maple production season, which lasts about six weeks. The one we like to go to is called Moore’s Sugar Shack, which is about an hour’s drive from Casa Jaquandor.
Up and down roads we went, into the hill country of Western New York that I love so much:
Finally we reached our destination, a few miles outside of a little town called Arcade: Moore’s Sugar Shack!
This place is, shall I say, not big. At all. It’s about the size of a typical four-bedroom house. In previous years I’ve been fairly militant about getting up early enough on Saturday morning so as to get to Moore’s at a time before the line has formed out the door, but this year we slept in (we’ll not discuss the fact that my life has reached a point where 7:00 am is “sleeping in”), and thus we had to wait half an hour for our table when we got there. Part of the delay was the fact that one group ahead of us was a party of seven, so it took them a while just to get enough tables available to push together to seat that family; and besides, table-turns don’t come terribly quickly in restaurants where “All You Can Eat” is the policy.
Anyway, the half-hour wait wouldn’t have been awful, except for the fact that the party of seven was a couple of adults and five little girls. The mother decided to pass the time with the eldest girl by doing one of those hand-clapping rhyme games with her. You remember those, right? When you and another person clap your hands together as you recite some kind of rhyme? This wasn’t annoying at all, until each of the remaining four younger kids insisted on doing it as well. By the third time through that game, I wanted to leap through a plate glass window, and there were two more iterations to go.
But I digress! It really wasn’t that bad, and we finally got a table, some much-needed coffee, and we got to look around the incredibly cramped dining room:
Seriously, these pancake houses are tiny. We were seated almost in the exact middle of the dining room, so there’s about as much space behind us as in front of us, and every table was full. I always enjoy the decor, though: old farm tools and antiques from Western New York yesteryear. Finally the main event arrived: pancakes!
The syrup on the table was produced by Moore’s, in their operation right there on those very grounds. There’s something special about eating something on the same spot where it was produced, isn’t there? Our bottle was full when we sat down. When we left, three helpings of pancakes each later, there was about a third left. Yummmmm! (Funny thing about real maple syrup: since we made that switch several years ago, we’re almost nauseated by the notion of eating Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth’s. If I’m at a restaurant where that’s what they serve, so be it, but I’ll never buy that stuff for home use again.)
As you might expect, we were highly full after that meal. We didn’t eat lunch that day.
:: Years ago I bought a cookbook called The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook, but over the years I’ve only cooked once or twice out of it. Why? I have no idea. So I’ve been digging through it recently, and I found an intriguing recipe called a “Baked Lamb Casserole”. Well, I changed things up a bit in the preparation:
That’s beef, not lamb. And the recipe calls for baking the dish in a casserole preferably of unglazed terracotta; not only did I not use unglazed terracotta, but I didn’t even bake the dish! I used my crockpot. Oh well. At least I followed the other ingredients as specified (cumin, diced tomatoes, onion sliced very thin). Except for my substitution of some wine for half the water specified in the recipe. I don’t know that Middle Eastern cooks do a lot of cooking with wine, but I am almost utterly incapable of using plain water as the simmering fluid in any kind of stew. I’m just not wired that way! This was kind of unusual for me; whenever I try a new recipe, I almost always make it exactly the way the recipe says to do so the first time, before I start monkeying with it a second time. This time, I was monkeying with the recipe right from the outset.
But anyway, the stew turned out wonderfully! I served it on a bed of couscous with some crusty bread on the side (although for Middle Eastern authenticity I really should have used flatbread of some sort) and a dish of extra-virgin olive oil for dipping. The dish was wonderful, although it didn’t yield much at all, because I halved the recipe, as I tend to do with new recipes that indicate that as produced they will serve six to eight people.
Anyway, the result was terrific:
I look forward to doing this recipe again, as well as a bunch of others in that cookbook.
:: Oh teevee gods, forgive me, but I’ve become hooked on Survivor. I don’t know why, but I have. Anyway, in a recent episode, the “reward” challenge (where the winning tribe gets some kind of reward, usually food) was…hot dogs. Well, sometimes the power of suggestion is all I need, so all the next day I was in a giant mood for hot dogs. Thus it was that this came to pass:
By the way, my preferred condiment for a hot dog is mustard and diced onions. Once in a great while, maybe some pickle relish. Ketchup? Not on a hot dog. Ever. Ixnay on the etchupkay!
More food-related posts as I continue to eat my way through life!
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Signs you’re in a fine local lunch establishment
Chain restaurants are all well and good, but sometimes you decide to give that little local place a try, to see if it’s any good. You know the place: it’s the one you’ve driven by any number of times while you’ve lived in your town, the one you occasionally see and think, “I should try that place some day.” One day you finally decide to go in there and give it a shot. You walk in and size the place up a bit. What things should you be looking for, before you ever taste the food?
The older the building the place is in, the better.
It should have no dedicated parking of its own. You should have to park on the street or in a town lot and then walk to the place.
The dining room should have exactly enough tables to be served by a single server. Twice that number, making two servers, if it’s warm weather time and thus they have the patio open.
The pictures on the walls should be tastefully chosen, with one or two not quite hung level. Bonus points for local artists’ works being on the wall.
There should be a tiny counter with three or four stools where you could sit, if you wanted.
There should be a display case near the register that contains locally-made baked goods (if not baked goods made directly on the spot).
When you walk in, there should be several tables where people are still sitting who have already been done with their food for some time when you arrive.
The people at said tables should continue to linger while you’re there.
The server should be on a first-name basis with at least one of the parties already in the dining room, if she’s not already on a first-name basis with you.
The hours of operation should be early morning to early afternoon: breakfast and lunch only.
Breakfast should be served at all times.
The lunch menu should consist of seven or eight sandwiches, four or five salads, and a two or three burgers. And that’s it.
Sandwiches should be served with chips and a pickle spear.
When you see the server bringing food to another table, you should note the impressive portion sizes relative to the prices on the menu.
If they’re playing music, it should be commercial-free satellite radio. Or NPR with the volume turned high enough that you can recognize Carl Kasell’s voice without being able to make out what he’s saying.
And then the food arrives, and it is good.
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To Pittsburgh!
Last weekend, The Family and I took an overnight trip to the fair city of Pittsburgh, PA, the mythical city of my birth. We spent one whole day there, not nearly enough, but we had a great time in general.
On our way down, we stopped at Quaker Steak and Lube in Erie and had chicken wings for dinner:
Chicken wings are all kinds of awesome. But then we drove down the rest of the way, staying at a hotel in one of the northern suburbs before rising the next day and heading to downtown Pittsburgh’s Strip District, an area of small shops, eateries, ethnic markets, street vendors and street musicians and the like. That area is fascinating, and I wish we’d had more time to hang out down there, but the clock was ticking and we wanted to make sure we got to our main destination for the day in time to enjoy it fully: the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
The Wife and I visited that museum years ago, when we were only merely dating, so the museum has changed quite a bit since then. Some things were very familiar, while others were almost completely new. They’ve totally redone the dinosaurs, constructing fairly elaborate landscapes for them to “roam” in; they are no longer skeletons standing in rooms by themselves behind rope lines:
I have a lot more photos of our Pittsburgh trip in this Flickr photoset. We had a terrific time. Pittsburgh rules!
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And now for something completely different….
Here at Casa Jaquandor, we have our clock radio in the master bedroom set to WNED, Buffalo’s classical music station. We’re not always awoken by music, though: WNED actually leads off every hour with the newscast of BBC Radio, so when we have the alarm set for the top of the hour, we’re awoken not by music but by the voice of some Brit reading the news.
This occasionally has funny consequences — morbidly funny, actually — when the news item they’re reading at the moment the clock kicks in involves some kind of awful tragedy somewhere. We can’t help but laugh when our slumber is interrupted by a Brit saying something like “mangled corpses in the streets” or “the death toll is estimated to be one hundred thousand” or “A meteor strike has annihilated the city of Hoboken”. It’s just the incongruity of having our day kicked off with something awful, read in the matter-of-fact fashion of Brits on the news.
In other news (!), blogging will be nonexistent for the next few days as The Family and I are embarking on a road trip after work today. Enjoy the weekend, Happy Easter, and we’ll return either Sunday evening or Monday morning. (Sentential Links will likely skip a week, btw.)
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Frustration….
So The Wife’s car needed an oil change, so I decided to do it myself. She’s driving a 2000 Dodge Caravan now, so we went to Autozone and picked up the oil we need, a new oil filter, and a new air filter as well, since we haven’t changed that since getting the van a year and a half ago. I changed clothes (from nice vintage overalls to rattier, “work” overalls, if you must know), and went down to do the work.
Ninety minutes later, The Wife left for Valvoline to have them do the work.
First, it took me a bizarrely long time to figure out the best way to get the van jacked up. I wonder if Dodge doesn’t want people mucking around underneath the vehicles, because it was a chore getting the thing up in the air. The jack itself was no problem, but finding appropriate spots to put the jack stands? That was hard. But I figured it out.
Then I had to look for the oil filter. The first thing I noticed when I lifted the hood is how compact everything is under there; Dodge didn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room for things like hands, tools, and whatnot. And I saw no oil filter, which meant that I was clearly going to have to access it from underneath. Swell. And sure enough, when I looked for it, there it was. OK. Fine. Filter location, check; oil pan, check; drain plug…ah, there it is. Facing the rear of the vehicle, of course. That’s logical. Why would I want to be able to see the part I’m loosening? And why wouldn’t I want to lie down there trying to visualize which way is “tightening” and which way is “loosening”, because my angle is reverse? Ugh.
Anyway, out came the adjustable wrench, which I secured onto the drain plug. And then…nothing. The wrench slipped, but no budging of the plug. Try again, and nothing. Again, and nothing. More slipping of the wrench, then nothing, then nothing again, then slipping of the wrench. At this point I realize that if I keep this up, I’m going to round off the head of the plug, and put away the wrench. Out come the regular wrenches.
Hmmmm…it’s not a 1/2″ nut. Neither is it a 9/16″ nut. I don’t have a 17/32″ wrench, so now I grabbed my sockets. Turns out I don’t own a 17/32″ socket either, which is fine, because it’s at this point that I’m starting to wonder if those clever demons at Dodge used metric nuts and such. Sure enough, it’s a 12-mm hex head on the drain plug. I’ve got metric sockets, so I’m back in business!
Except…not so much. The thing is on so tight that my ratchet won’t budge it. At all. No matter what angle I tried. Pushing, pulling, swearing at it, uttering curses in Elvish, Entish, and all the tongues of Men. Nada. Now, I only have a small ratchet (a bigger one’s been on my “Buy one someday” list for a while, but I tend to wait to strike items from that list until I find a real need for it — so on Monday, Hello, Bigger Ratchet!), so I tried thinking of ways to get more torque off the thing. At work I’d grab a spare piece of pipe and stick it over the thing, but I don’t carry pipe around in my car, so I used my large locking pliers. And yes, this generated sufficient torque on the ratchet to…strip the gears inside the ratchet head. (So on Monday, Hello, Bigger Ratchet and Adapter for all my sockets!)
At this point, I decided that I’d best give up on the oil change for now. I do have metric wrenches, but they’re smallish, and if the thing was torqued down that tightly, I didn’t want to risk stripping the thing. But anyway…ugh. I hate when I can’t do something I’m generically capable of doing. Makes me crazy.
So then we thought, “At least we can get the air filter changed.” Not exactly famous as last words go, but they should be.
It’s my view that the air filter should be the easiest thing on a car to change. It should be only slightly more difficult to change an air filter than to check one’s oil or refill the wiper fluid. And on every car I’ve ever owned, that’s been the case: either undo a couple of bolts or a couple of clips, lift the lid, pop the old filter out and the new one in, replace lid, refasten, lather, rinse, repeat. No fuss, no muss. A person whose only tool is a butter knife should be able to change an air filter.
This belief of mine, however, is not shared by the folks at Dodge, because their air filter is not even visible when you lift the hood. After poking around the visible parts of the engine for a while, and looking in the owner’s manual where the engine diagram doesn’t even indicate the existence of an air filter and whose section in the Maintenance chapter dealing with the air filter simply says “For optimum performance and gas mileage, regularly change the air filter”, we ended up Googling the bloody thing. Turns out that the air filter on this vehicle is down in the bowels of the engine, and to get at it you literally have to remove a big black plastic box-thing that has three hoses running into and out of it. But do you remove the hoses entirely? Just loosen the clamps so the thing swings up and out? And even though the site we Googled said to “remove the bolt fastening this box to the front of the vehicle”, there were no such bolts!
So we gave up on that, too. Double UGH!!!
Thus The Wife went off to Valvoline, and I went upstairs to change out of my now-dirty overalls which were dirty despite the fact that I accomplished zero completed tasks whilst wearing them. She got home an hour or so later, and told me that the boys at the Valvoline joint had a hard time with the drain plug too, which makes me feel better because they get to go down into a pit below the vehicle and stand up to work at it, as opposed to lying on the ground with my head under the car like I’d been. Luckily the plug isn’t stripped, so I should be able to make another go at this thing next time the oil needs changed. (The van needs changes a lot more often than my car, because not only is her car the main one we use for virtually any family outing, but her drive to work is three or four times what mine is.)
As for the air filter? Well, as I noted, this was the first time we changed it since we acquired the thing. So: have you ever had that horrible fantasy where you’re getting work done on your car and while you’re standing there the mechanic pulls something out and yells “Hey Frank, check this out!” and brings over his mechanic buddy to look at the thing he’s pulled out of your car and laugh at it while you try to hide from the guys who already know you’re there because you’ve been talking to them? Yeah, The Wife had that experience.
I have no idea when that air filter was changed last, but apparently it was completely black. And some of the material had been chewed away…but the unidentifiable critter that had literally been living inside it. There were the remnants of a nest and stuff. I’m assuming it was a mouse or rat, but hey, who knows. It could have been a chupacabra or the last remnants of Joan Rivers’s soul, for all I know.
The Wife also reported that the Valvoline guys didn’t do the kind of “hard sell” that they usually like to do, such as telling you your battery is “marginal” (which they told me seven years ago, and my battery is still starting my car today) or telling you that you really really really oughta run some kind of Dr. Halladay’s Secret Engine Elixir through your car to clean it out and purge it of impurities and restore life to tired ball-joints. The lesson here, I suppose, is this: if you have to go to a Quick Lube type of place, go late in the day, preferably within a half hour of closing, so that all the guys want to do is get you in and get you out.
Anyway. That’s the tale. Dodge Caravan 2, Handyman Blogger 0. The rematch has been scheduled, but will likely not sell out in time to life the local blackout.