Caught In The Whirlwind
Archive for November, 2008
Too…Much…Food
01271 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Thanksgiving was yesterday, and I spent the day mostly over at my parents hanging out with the family.
I arrived a little bit before 9 for the traditional putting up of the christmas tree thanksgiving morning. We were a bit worried that my parent's dog would try to eat the tree, but she actually seemed to be ok with it for the most part. The tree was put up without much incident. I didn't even have to take it apart and put it back together again because I screwed up which is something I normally do. Usually after it's all done somebody says "Hey, that looks a little weird" and it turns out I screwed up one branch somewhere in the middle requiring me to take the whole thing apart to fix it. But no problems this year!
After we put the tree up there was a break for lunch and dinner preparation. Had to finish off prepping the turkey and then it was shoved in the oven. There was a little…incident. The recipe we used called for stating the turkey in the oven at 500 degrees for 30 minutes (to get the skin nice and brown) However…when we were doing that the house was starting to fill with smoke. And we set off pretty much all the smoke alarms in the house. My dad wandered in and wanted to see what was wrong. We thought we were doing things wrong, but as it turns out, that's exactly what was supposed to happen, according to Wassy who was my go-to turkey consultant for the day.
The time between lunch and dinner was taken up by decorating the christmas tree and letting the dog sleep on my lap while waiting for the turkey to get done. As evidenced by the picture on the right there.
The turkey ended up being really, really good. Exactly as it should have been, all tender and good tasting. All the rest of the thanksgiving food was good as well, so it turned out being a really nice meal. So nice that I ate way too much. But that seems like what you're supposed to do on Thanksgiving, so that's a good thing!
After we ate, my sister and her husband came over and we played Apples to Apples. And after a fun game of that…there was pie. We were a bit worried about the pie, especially the lemon meringue because when my Mom was moving it from the kitchen counter to the fridge, she tipped it a bit, causing some lemon flavored liquid to run out…which should not have happened. After draining the pie in the sink and putting it in the fridge it looked like everything was ok… But the mysterious pie leakage was never really explained. It ended up being a good pie. Lemon meringue is my favorite pie type.
All and all a very good Thanksgiving I thought. And now I have the remaining 3 days of the long weekend to hang out and get some stuff done around the house. I still need to do a little tidying in my bedroom after getting most of the cleaning done the other day.
QotW: Thanksgiving Tradition
01273 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
What's your favorite Thanksgiving tradition?
My favorite tradition is probably going over to my parents house to put up the christmas tree. I believe I mentioned this last year, but I'm going to mention it again…so deal with it!
Thanksgiving morning traditionally starts with me headed over to my parents house, putting the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV and setting up the artificial (but very good looking) christmas tree that my parents have. It's a bit of a process and takes a little while to do, and my mom argues that we should put the lights on it as we go (a method that I am opposed to) and my dad sits in his chair reading the paper and saying that it's too early to put up a christmas tree.
This year is going to be made a little interesting…because this is the first year that my parents will have had a dog in the house. A very energetic dog. So this could get VERY interesting.
eBaying In My Sleep
01274 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Last night I finally worked up the ambition to list a whole bunch of the games that I have hanging around that I'm not going to play ever again on eBay (shameless self promotion time!) in an effort to declutter a bit and make some extra cash.
It's worth doing, but it just takes so long to compile all the pictures and write a description and it's very much the same thing over and over again. I have a couple more I want to put up tonight. Some leftover magic cards that I never sold the last time I was doing a clearing of my closet and a couple of DVD sets of TV shows just in case somebody's interested in taking them off my hands.
Every time I do this I have thoughts of selling my Wii. I don't really play it much at all and 90% of the games out there for it are crap. But there's still a few things here and there that make me want to keep it around. It's almost the same situation with my PSP. There's very few games I'm interested in getting for it, but those games that I want are really important. So I'll keep the little guy around. I really want to play Star Ocean for example.
Weekendy Goodness
01275 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
It's Monday. So…aside from being back at work, it means it's time for the update on my weekend activities.
Friday evening I found myself over at my parents house where they had invited me over to watch a movie (I Am Legend specifically). Lured by the promise of real, old fashioned popped popcorn, I headed over. After sufficiently tiring out the dog, we started working on the popcorn popping process. Which was…quite an ordeal. I was reading off the instructions on the popcorn, and my mom and dad both had different ways in which they popped popcorn on the stove. Somehow we managed to combine all of these separate methods into something that worked. One quick note about the popcorn: the buttery flavored oil had no actual butter in it. Scary.
I thought the movie was good, but my parents seemed to not enjoy it as much. I didn't think it was awesome, but it was a good mindless sort of fun type movie. I did determine where my lack of bravery comes from as I witnessed my mom nearly covering her eyes at some points and hugging the dog. This proves that the ability to tolerate scary movies is genetic.
Saturday I went over to my friends, Rock Band in tow, as has become the ritual. Wassy had to do some work, so I played a game of Chess with Jay (well…several games of chess…I had forgotten to turn off the 10 minute per game timer so he ended up losing 2 times in a row before I figured it out). It was an…interesting experience. It seems that Jay has a habit of scheming out loud.
Him: How much do you value your knight?
Me: Very much thank you. I have two of them.
Him: Or do you…?
Me: Yes I do!!! They're both right there on the board!!
And so on. This is the first time we've played when we're in the same room, so I didn't know about this before. It seems he does it all the time. From that moment onward "Or do you…?" or variations of that became the catch phrase of the day. Especially during our scrabble game later in the evening. Speaking of scrabble, we watched the Word Wars documentary (about world champion competitive scrabble) using Netflix while we were hanging out during the afternoon. It was good but the people they chose to focus on were some of the biggest losers and jerks on the planet…There was nobody sympathetic, except for one of the guy's parents who said when asked how he was doing during a scrabble tournament: "I'm kicking ass!"
Sunday was my day of cleaning. Since I finished Fallout 3 on Friday, I have to wait for Gamefly to send me a new game which probably won't actually arrive until after Thanksgiving due to how the mail is this week. So I've decided to spend some time doing a really exhaustive cleaning of my apartment. I got my bedroom mostly cleaned up yesterday and did a lot of living room organizing in the evening. I picked up wall-e on DVD and was watching the commentary while cleaning up my living room.
I also attempted a new dish for dinner. Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo to be specific about it. Making everything from scratch including the sauce. It ended up being pretty good, but I need to adjust a few things with the sauce. I let it thicken a bit too much and I need to add a little more cheese to my next attempt (a side effect of the thickening…didn't want to add too much cheese or it would have been WAY too thick). But there will be a next attempt…oh yes…
This week is going to be a long short week. Short because of having only 2 days of work this week. Long because that's followed by 5 days off, Thanksgiving with the family being one of the days. This week is going to be…very strange.
QotD: Favorite Thanksgiving Recipe
01275 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Thanksgiving is only a few days away. What is your favorite Thanksgiving recipe? Will you be making it this year? Mind sharing?
Mind you, I've never had this recipe over thanksgiving, but… this is quite simply the best turkey recipe I've EVER had. Wassy has made it a couple times in the fast and the turkey comes out so very good.
I believe my Mom is going to try doing our turkey using that method this year as well. And since I'm competent in the kitchen now I've offered to help with anything that needs helping with (considering cooking the big meal is a lot of work). So I may be making part of it. Possibly. Haven't gotten that sorted out yet.
Vox Hunt: YouTube Greatest Hit
01277 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Show us your favorite YouTube video.
Opeth's watershed album didn't come with any lyrics in the CD booklet. So Steve Johnson decided he would fix that and write his own. This is what happens when you try to decipher growled lyrics by ear.
Experiencing The New Experience
01279 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
The New Xbox Experience rocks. Period. Just to recap for those who may not be familiar…microsoft has been working on a huge update to the xbox 360's UI when you're not playing a game. The old one was ok, but it was getting pretty cluttered. So Microsoft designed an update.
It's pretty neat. Very well organized now and a lot quicker to navigate for me. They added something like the Nintendo Wii Mii's in Avatars which I could honestly do without. It feels pretty…gimicky but as long as it's in there I'll use it. The best part of the updates come in when you're looking at the Xbox Live Marketplace (where you can go to buy new games, videos, download game demos, etc). Everything comes up much faster now and they added the ability to jump to a specific title by name instead of having to scroll through the entire list if you wanted to download an item with a name starting with Z.
But the bestest new feature (even beating out the ability to copy game DVDs to the hard drive for faster load times) is the Nexflix Instant Watching support. My netflix account is becoming very, very useful. I use the instant watching feature a ton more now that it's availible mac side and also availible on my TV now. The service is pretty easy to use, really nice quality on my standard def tv at least and is just another awesome reason why I don't regret my 360 purchase one bit.
So the NXE gets 2 thumbs up from me.
Updates For All!!
01279 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Update Number 1: The Fish
Last night when I came home from work, Tetra #3 had died. This leaves me two tetras left, who seem to be swimming around much easier than the others were. They're still not eating anything that I can see though, so it may only be a matter of time before they crash as well.
I'm continuing to medicate for a fungal infection with the side effect of the meds being that it medicates for a bacterial infection as well, so hopefully that'll knock the problem out.
Update Number 2: The Car
I took my car into the dealer because the drivers side door wouldn't open from the outside. I dropped it off there and waited while they worked on it, playing Hearts on the computer they had set up in the customer lounge. Very handy. They also had some nice donuts which was good because I had forgotten to make myself some breakfast when I left because i was too busy playing with the New Xbox Experience update that was released for the Xbox 360 this morning. I'll probably post up my impressions on that later.
Anyway, as it turns out, the cable that was hooked to the door handle became unhooked. So they hooked it up and got it all straightened out and sent me on my way, no charge. I'm not to worried about it now…if it happens again I might start asking more questions, but fluke stuff happens every now and then.
Why Won't You Open?!?
01280 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I had a little bit of car related difficulty today. When I went home for lunch I tried to open my car door and it wouldn't open. After double checking to see if it was locked (it wasn't) I noticed that the handle was a little looser than it should be. Bah!
I think it's probably because it got really cold here for the first time this year. Something probably couldn't take it and broke. So I have an appointment tomorrow morning to take my car in to the dealer so they can look at it. I *think* this would be a waranty repair because it's not like I did anything to it except for opening and closing the door normally. And if it's not I'm going to argue with them about it because it should be… I mean, the car is a year old at this point. the door handle should be in working condition!
This comes on the heels of taking it into the body shop to have some cosmetic work done. I had a bit of a run-in with a dumpster while backing out of a parking space a couple weeks ago. It wasn't huge, but there was a dent and the paint was broken, so I had to go fix it otherwise it would have rusted out. I just got it back from the shop on friday and the repair job came out really nice. It's like a brand new car again, so I'm being all protective of it again, even though there's a few paint chips here and there in a couple places. Darn cheap paint job…
Fishy Flu
01281 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
As I mentioned, my fish are having a bit of an issue with disease now in my main 20 gallon tank. The betta is fine, thankfully.
I had initially thought it was Ich, but after treating for it it eneded up not really helping. Over the past week I've lost 2 of my bleeding heart tetras with another one on the way out (I found him sitting upside down on one of the plants last night). I took the opportunity to observe him closely and it definitely looks like it's a fungal infection now. Of course I was sure about the Ich too…but anyway…I went out to Petsmart last night and picked up some more medication which I'm treating with now.
I've seperated the sick fish from the other ones in a little container floating in the water and I'm treating him along with the rest of the fish in hopes that he might get better, but it's not looking real good. He's kinda swimming on his side and not really moving very much. I have a feeling he'll be dead by the time I get home today.
Hopefully this actually ends up being what I think it is…this is getting very old.
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