We just got back from having a nice Thanksgiving in


I took Wednesday off work and we left for Toledo first thing in the morning. This worked out great because we missed the very heavy Chicago traffic that you get the evening before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day. We did not get any stop-and-go traffic the entire trip. Excellent.

We got to Toledo about 2 PM. We hung out at Mom and Dad's house for a few hours, talked and played with Shawn. When we got word that Tim and Lisa were leaving work we got in the car and met them for dinner at "2 Toots Whistlestop Grill". This is one of those kid restaurants where the food is delivered to your table on a model train that comes from the kitchen and circles the restaurant. Shawn was unbelievably excited to go. The burgers were surprisingly very good.











We spent Thanksgiving Day at Tim and Lisa's house and enjoyed Tim's annual deep fried turkey.





I made my homemade dough in Chicago a couple days in advance and then froze it. On Thanksgiving Day I thawed it, formed it into rolls and baked them.



Tim carving up the turkey.



The spread.



When we were cleaning up after dinner we experienced a major catastrophe. The plate that had ALL of the turkey broke as Tim was carrying it across the kitchen!





Tim felt so bad that we could not enjoy the beloved leftovers the next day that he fried another turkey on Friday night after work! What a guy.

After dinner Shawn and I went outside and I followed behind him as he rode his bike around the neighborhood. I ate too much and just needed to walk a bit.



Friday Mom, Dad, Sheri, Shawn and I did a little shopping. We did not get up for the door buster specials though. The highlights: a 24" x 36" picture frame, an electric throw blanket, some toys for Mitch, and a few other things I think I am forgetting.

We had lunch at



I had their famous (and huge) cod sandwich and Sheri had a vegi omelet and fries.

Dad pulling a salt shaker from Shawn's ear during a coffee break.



Shawn explaining the finer points of the Titanic (or the Hindenburg, Bismarck or Pearl Harbor) to a patient Sears sales clerk.



Saturday we got up and Mom and Dad had already left to run a couple errands. We packed things up, and then soon after they returned we went out to lunch (Mom, Dad, Sheri, Shawn and me) to a place called The Star Diner. It is kind of like Hooters, but they serve breakfast, do not serve alcohol, and are only open for breakfast and lunch. Sheri thought the "uniforms" they wear were much more flattering than the Hooter's ones. The waitresses were all very attractive, and the food was very good too. I had the cobb salad. Good except for two things: 1. The onion was a yellow cooking onion and very harsh and was cut into very large strips. I like raw onion but it was too much for me and I had to pick it out. 2. There were several chunks of the dense yellow core part of the head of lettuce. I picked those out as well. Everything else was fantastic. Sheri had the Buffalo chicken breast sandwich and fries. Very good. Dad had a Rueben sandwich which he said was excellent. Mom and Shawn had breakfast items which they seemed to enjoy.

After that we went back home, finished loading up the car and hit the road by 2 PM.
We got back to Chicago at 6 PM on the dot. Driving back on Saturday rather than Sunday was much better because we missed a lot of heavy holiday traffic.

As soon as we got home Sheri jumped back into work and has been on a bridge call ever since. It is midnight now and it sounds like she has to do something at 3 AM.

A few pictures just because.

Sheri bringing me my breakfast Saturday morning after I gave blood and before we went to the greyhound rescue. I went to sit down because I was feeling a little unsteady.



Our breakfast. I am crazy about McDonald's bacon-egg-cheese-biscuit (which is at the bottom of the picture) and Sheri orders the Egg McMuffin but has them substitute regular bacon for the Canadian bacon. NO fried potatoes! I can allow myself the occasional luxury of fast food if I just stay away from the fries. They double the calorie count and triple the fat content of the meal. Potatoes also jack your sugar way up.



Our GPS in action. We were on our way to the greyhound rescue. I was experimenting with using my flash in bright sunlight so the subjects are not back-lit.



This is the fire I built with our new wood for the OSU vs. Michigan game. I am pretty happy with the wood.



We lucked out. While eating our breakfast on Sunday and flipping through the ad inserts I saw that Meijer had dog pillows on sale. Exactly what we were looking for. They were normally $40 but on sale for $24. We bought two of them. Either to have one upstairs and one downstairs, or to have as a backup if one becomes too dirty, damaged, etc. I guess we will try it out in front of the fireplace for now.

I just ordered a 42" cage, two extra large sweaters, and a rubber shedding brush from Doctors Foster and Smith. The same cage at PetSmart is $100, but they on-line they had it for only $70.

Even though the cage weighs 42 pounds shipping for the whole order was only $11! I would have paid more for that in taxes if I bought it at the store.

It is 12:30 AM and Sheri is still on her bridge call. I am on the third load of firewood I carried inside from the wood pile. I just poured myself a big tumbler of iced tea so I guess I'm up for the duration as well.

We have a few things to get before Mitch arrives. Probably the most important is a new cage. The one we have from Goliath is too small. We measured the size cage they recommend when we were out there this morning and it was 42" long, and 28" wide and tall. They will rent a cage for three months for $30, but a brand new one only costs $60 so it makes more sense just to buy one.

Probably the second most important are some sweaters for him. Greyhounds have very little body fat, very thin fur (usually naked on their bellies), and we keep the house on the cool side, especially over night. Doctors Foster and Smith have nice looking sweaters in his size (extra large) for only $11 each. I am thinking about getting him two or three so as one gets dirty we can swap it out with a clean one and throw the dirty one in the wash.



We will probably also get him boots but not right away.



We need a big soft cushion for him but I don't feel like paying $50 - $70 for one from the pet store. We talked to someone that had a great idea: keeping an eye on the scratch and dent sections of stores like Ikea.

We also need general pet supplies. Coal tar shampoo for their skin. All the dogs we saw fresh from the track looks like they had flaky dry skin. Goliath had sensitive skin and coal tar shampoo seemed to do the best for him. I think the bristles on the shedding brush we had for Goliath are too long for Mitch's short coat so we will need to get a short hair brush. Maybe one of those rubber things with the little nubs. Greyhounds are not supposed to be big shedders, and they don't have an undercoat, so this may not be that big of a deal anyway. We'll have to get a bag of the same kind of dog food he is eating now so we don't upset his stomach with a big change. They recommend elevated food and water bowls, but they were eating Scooby snacks off the ground just fine today. I am not convinced they are necessary. We still have the water bowl from Goliath that has the 5 gallon water jug that automatically keeps the bowl full. We have a leash from Goliath. He comes with the special collar they need. Maybe a few toys to chase around.

I think that is all we need. I am not above getting something like this for him though.



It is 1 AM now and Sheri just finished her call so we are going upstairs and go to bed.

Sheri started working on a problem for work around 2 PM and is still on it at 8 PM. She says it is not going to end any time soon either so I guess I will keep myself busy by writing a few posts I think I have in me.

A couple months ago at work they had a blood drive I participated in. Back in Ohio I tried to be a regular donor but I think I only made it three or four times. I thought about here but never got around to actually doing anything about it. After the blood drive I made a resolution to try and regularly donate and made a little reminder in my calendar 8 weeks out to remind me to donate.

Thursday after work I went to get a haircut. The closest blood donation center to us is just a couple storefronts down from where I get my haircut so I thought I might as well walk down and get that crossed off my list.

Since I already donated once before with them they had me in their database and knew my blood type. I am O+ which I think makes me either a universal donor or a near-universal donor. (I think I might not be able to donate blood to an O- person.) While they were going through their normal paperwork routine she stopped and tried to recruit me to be a double red blood cell donor because of my high-demand blood type. This is where you get hooked up to a special machine that sips a little blood out of you, it automatically spins the red blood cells out right there and then pumps the plasma, a little saline solution and some anticoagulant back into you through the same needle, and then repeats the process until 492 milliliters, about two cups, of pure red blood cells have been collected. The actual needle time was about 30 minutes. I could see the little clear container of my plasma fill up and then get pumped back into me. It was a yellowish color. Because they are just taking my red blood cells they can take twice as many of them than they would for just whole blood.

I think they use pure red blood cells for cancer patients.

On the way home I got cold, my teeth were chattering a bit and I had a few body shivers. I don't know if this was from the donation or I was just cold from not having on a heavy-enough jacket for the weather. They did give me an electric blanket while I was donating and had heating pads under each of my arms, so it was probably a little bit of each.

I was scheduled for 8 AM but they were short-handed this morning so I didn’t get going right away when I got there. They got the machine all set up while I was getting my paperwork done but when I got into the chair the machine indicated a priming fault and they had to uninstall the entire single-use sterile tubing kit, reinstall another and then get the whole system primed and ready again, so that added some extra time to my morning.

With double red cells you have to wait 16 weeks between donations rather than 8 weeks with whole blood.

I want to be able to do something good to give back to the community and society, and volunteering at a nursing home or something like that takes too much time, so this seems to be a good match for me. I don't know if I believe in karma, but if it exists this also has to give me all kinds of points for that too.

They said they have a hard time recruiting double red blood cell donors. I asked how many double reds they get per week and she said the last one they had at this location was about three months ago! She said there are a couple regular double red donors at the location in the city next to ours though.

I got back home around 9:30 AM and Sheri was dressed and ready to go see the greyhounds, but I wanted to lie down and warm up a bit first. That took about 20 minutes on the couch under the comforter.

I had Sheri drive because I felt just a little off. We went to McDonalds and had breakfast inside. I only had a Luna bar and an 8 ounce glass of milk before I donated which is probably why I felt a little off afterwards. I should have eaten more before I went but I was running late. I stayed up with Sheri until 2:30 AM keeping her company while she worked.

We didn't linger too long inside McDonalds reading the paper or anything. I just didn't feel like eating in the car.

We drove out to the greyhound rescue, picked out Mitch, went to the grocery store for football food, drove home, started a fire while Sheri started working, watched the Buckeyes win, and then I took a nap while Sheri continued to work. I woke up, made some food, and Sheri is still working. I think I am going to go bring some more firewood in the house now.

This is Mitch the greyhound and we will be adopting him. He still needs to go to the vet to be neutered and spend a week with a foster family to teach him how to climb steps, not get freaked out by mirrors, etc. He has only lived at dog tracks his whole life and this will all be new to him.







Look how muscular he is!


Mitch was an active racer but he got into a bad dog fight and had a major artery ripped open. It would have cost the owners more money to rehabilitate him than they would recoup from racing him after he healed, so they gave him to the rescue.

We don't have his racing number yet, but when they do we can look up how he did in every race he ran in his career. How cool is that? His birth month and year is tattooed on the bottom side of his ear.

Greyhounds are sight hounds (as opposed to scent hounds) and moving-things really get their attention. A squirrel that you can't even see on the neighbor's fence across the street is like a big red neon sign to him saying "Chase me!" Because of this the rescue people could not stress enough how important it is to be very aware of him when going through an outside door. They said they are trained to run like crazy as soon as the trap door at the starting gate opens up, and they think some of that stays with them whenever they see a door opening. They had lots of sad stories about people whose hounds snuck through their legs in the doorway and they find them two miles away flattened in the road. (They can cover two miles in about 2 minutes 40 seconds!)

We spent time with four dogs today. The first one came right over to us and immediately started snuggling which was nice, but he seemed too timid. We were afraid he would be a nervous dog with separation anxiety issues which can be a real handful. Mitch was the second one we saw and he had a perfect combination of being into being affectionate with us and playing with toys and exploring the room. The third dog really couldn't have cared if we were there or not. He was interested in what he could see out of the window and front door and didn't really seem into his toys. The final dog had a personality about halfway between Mitch and the third dog. He was a little more into us but not as much as Mitch. The third dog was also all black and I really wanted more of a classic brindle greyhound coat. So Mitch it was.

We should have him in about three weeks.

Now we are getting ready to settle in and enjoy the Ohio State vs. Michigan game.

I went to a camera store at lunch today to get a grey card (they were out of stock) and I was looking at their Manfrotto tripods. They feel NOTHING like the $15 Vivitar tripod I got at Wal-Mart a few years ago.

I guess really good tripods you buy in two pieces. You buy the legs separately and you buy the head that the camera attaches to separately. The few I glanced at were priced about $100 for each component. But they felt amazing. Perfectly machined. Everything glided and snapped into place very precisely. It sounds weird to go on about a tripod like this, but it's one of those things were you won’t get it until you actually hold one. One of these days…

A few times over the last month or so we have made chicken paprikash with homemade spaetzle and loved it. For the spaetzle I would just use my fingers and pull small bits of dough/batter from the bowl and drop it into the boiling water. It worked and it tasted good, but they were on the large side and not uniform in size.

Because we liked it so much we went on a quest to find a spaetzle maker. I didn't know if a place like Wal-Mart would, but I thought for sure Bed Bath & Beyond or Linens & Things would. Nope. We couldn't find one anywhere.

On Sunday when I was out with the brother-in-law and nephews I stopped in Sur La Table to see if they had one. I literally walked 20 feet inside the store and they had them hanging right there, like they were waiting for me.

Last night we had to try it out. Here I am filling the hopper with the batter. It turned out a little runnier that usual but it still worked OK. The pot it is sitting on is half-filled with boiling salted water. The pot in the foreground is the chicken paprikash. It turned out a little runnier than usual too, but still tasted delicious. The white balance is off in the picture because it is really a nice red color; not yellow/orange. Compare it to the bowl of the finished product at the end to see the real color.



I moved the hopper back and forth and little perfectly sized dumplings fall into the water and get cooked. It only takes a few minutes for them to cook.



Here is a serving bowl of the cooked spaetzle. I add a little butter to the bowl to keep them from sticking together. The little specks you see in them are nutmeg. All of the authentic German recipes called for a little nutmeg, so I added some and I like it.



Here is the paprikash and spaetzle in a bowl, even though you can't see the spaetzle. Notice the rich red color.



It is so delicious it is almost unbelievable, but it is so easy to make. Even on a night after a hard day at work I can get the whole thing ready, start to finish, in about 30 minutes. Both the paprikash and spaetzle.

For some reason Ben feels like his new pants are going to fall down, so ALL weekend, whereever he walked, he had at least one hand holding up his pants at all times. I thought he looked like a little old man.





I got in trouble for taking the picture below. I lost Sheri and Greta in Caputo's so I was just wandering around enjoying hanging out when I noticed the neat colors of all the pasta packages stacked up and thought it might make a neat picture. As I snapped the second picture I hear a goon voice behind me say "Who are you wit, sir?"

Caputo's security? I said "My wife and mother-in-law."

"Well we don't normally allow pitures in here." I wanted to say get bent, but instead I said I was just waiting on them and liked the colors and wasn't with another store trying to research prices. They lost some good will with me on this, but I am still crazy about their sausage.



A little angel.

This was Ben's idea of a picture. He held up the crayons and asked me to take a picture. I did it only to humor him, but after I looked at it enlarged on my PC screen I like it. His hand and crayons in sharp focus but his face slightly out of focus. Describing it doesn't make it sound like a picture you would want, but for some reason it works for me.

He calls this "Battle".

"Lets do battle Unc Bid."

Back in Columbus there was an Italian butcher shop/grocery store called Carfagna's that made really good Italian sausage. I assumed when we moved to Chicago there would be good Italian butcher shops all over the place to get authentic sausage. I was wrong. At least in the areas we frequent.

That has now changed with the discovery of Caputo's. We picked up a pound of their hot Italian sausage on Wednesday night and grilled it up last night. I think it is actually better than Carfagna's, and not just a little bit better. It is REALLY good. Very juicy. Seasoned well. NO gristle or bone bits.

I can't wait until the next time now.

This is our fire wood pile with the camouflage tarp. Much less intrusive than if it were a big pile of blue.

I discovered a neat trick my camera can do today. Before I tell you what it is I need to tell describe how cameras set exposure so everyone is on the same page.

Every camera lets the amount of light in that will let the average grey level of the picture equal 18%. You can buy an 18% grey card from Kodak to assist with setting exposures (I want to buy one) but more on that later.

If the subject matter is mostly dark, everything will get lighted up so the average shade is 18%. If the subject matter is mostly white everything is going to get darkened so the average grey shade is 18%.

The problem with this is that things that actually are white will not appear white. They will be a dirty grey. Black things won't appear black. They will tend towards grey.

To solve this problem some cameras (mine) have different white balance settings. Mine has white balance settings for the following situations:

Daylight
Outside shade
Cloudy, twilight, sunset
Tungsten lights
Fluorescent lights
Flash bulbs

These help, but it is not perfect.

Now for what I discovered today:

The camera doesn't know what things are actually white. You can take a picture of a pure white object in the lighting you are going to take the picture and tell the camera that is what white looks like under that light. Not only will the whites be white and the blacks be black, but all of the colors will be more accurate.

(Disclaimer: These pictures are for technical illustration purposes and are not intended to be family keepsakes.)

This is the picture I used to tell the camera what white looks like.



This picture was taken with the auto white balance mode. The camera can only guess what white is. Notice everything has a yellowish color to it. Her shirt is blue, but you can barely tell that by this picture.



This picture was taken using the custom white balance information gathered from the white napkin picture. Notice the blue shirt now looks blue. You have no way to know this because you are not here, but the colors are much more faithful in this picture than the first one, and the ugly yellow tint is gone.



Pretty neat, huh?

Our Christmas cameras came today, but they did not show up until almost 5 PM. I was hoping they would show up earlier in the day so we could get the batteries charged before we went to a grand opening of a new Italian grocery store in the area.

We went to grocery store, had some pizza in the café, walked around the place, had some free coffee at the coffee bar, and then went home.

By then our batteries were charged so we could play around with our cameras.

I took about 70 pictures, but they were more figuring out what the buttons do and how the camera responds than really trying to take a picture. The light in our family room is horrible for photography at night anyway.

The purpose of this picture is I wanted to play around with setting the ISO. The shutter speed was 1/400 of a second and I had the 300mm lens at f8, but I had the ISO cranked to 1,000. The higher the ISO the less light you need, but more "noise" will appear in the image. (In digital photography it is called noise. With film you would call it graininess.) The lower the ISO the more light you will need, but the image will be very clean. For not knowing too much about nighttime sky photography and not having a shutter release cable I think it came out OK.



With film you had to make the decision of what speed film you were going to load in your camera not knowing exactly where you might need to take a picture. I usually ended up in the middle with 200 speed. If I was indoors the flash would help out, and out doors my shutter was fast enough to handle pretty bright sun. With digitals now day you can set the ISO on the fly for each picture. I can set the ISO down to 100 and all the way up to 3,200!

With this picture I was just experimenting with depth of field by opening up the aperture all the way in aperture priority mode. The pop bottle is in focus while Sheri is out of focus. I never experimented with depth of field with my old film camera so this is all new to me. Fun!



I told you the light is horrible. Maybe tomorrow night I play around with the white balance options.

It has been a while since I posted, so this will be another one of my stream of consciousness posts to try and get caught up on everything.

I have off work today for Election Day. We were going to go out to breakfast together, read the paper, etc. but Sheri had some work to do at 4 AM and we didn't get up until after breakfast hours were over. We both voted around 11:30 AM. I am looking forward to watching the returns tonight to see if the Democrats can win back the House and/or Senate.

I think I am getting a cold or something. My nose has not been too runny, but starting yesterday afternoon my throat was sore. By the time I went to bed it was actually painful. Some hot mint tea this morning really felt good, but it still hurts and food doesn't have much taste. My stomach might be a little gurgley too. Fun.

We got a face cord of firewood delivered yesterday. I borrowed the neighbor's wheel barrow and moved it all to the backyard and stacked it before Sheri got home from work. (My back is still a little tight.) We burned some last night while we watched a movie and it seems to burn pretty good. I bought an 8' x 10' camouflaged tarp to keep the rain and snow off of the wood pile. The camo pattern is perfect for the back yard. It is almost unnoticeable, whereas the traditional blue color tarp would stand out every time we look at the back yard. Sheri wasn't sure she wanted the camo version. She thought it would look "red neck", but after putting it on the pile she agreed it really does blend right in and camouflages its presence.

This was the weekend we had tickets to the OSU vs Northwestern game and our first Gourmet Club dinner, but Sheri's side of the family will be visiting so we will be playing with the kids instead. We will be getting our cameras tomorrow (more on that in a bit) so it will be a good excuse to take lots of pictures. I've heard Ben has gotten pretty good at saying Uncle Brad. He is so sweet and cute that he provides hours of entertainment just watching him do his thing. We have been doing kid-proofing the last few days, but still have more to do. Our house was a little more kid-proofed when we had Goliath, but with him gone there are lots of little dangers lurking around we need to move out of reach. We bought a table cloth for our kitchen table and put in the leaf today. We also have a list of groceries we still need to get for the kids.

For Christmas this year we decided to buy each other cameras. We also decided to get them sooner rather than later because they are something we can put to use right away. (This weekend with Sheri's family, Thanksgiving, etc.) We will get them tomorrow and I am really excited. Sheri is getting the Canon PowerShot SD700 (4x zoom and image stabilization in a tiny little point and shoot!) and I am getting the Canon Eos 30D I have been drooling over for too long.

I used to have a film SLR (still have actually) and I miss taking pictures and being creative and experimenting with exposure settings. Shooting with film, though, I was always a little hesitant to experiment too much because every shot cost money for both the film and the developing. Also when I would try some experimentation, by the time I got the film developed I forgot what I did differently with a particular shot so I didn't learn anything. Shooting digital I can see the results immediately, plus it doesn't cost anything extra to shoot the same shot with 20 different settings. Did I mention I am really excited?

Last week I made another excellent batch of chicken paprikash. Instead of using store-bought egg noodles I tried making home made spaetzle. Unbelievable delicious! It is probably the favorite thing I make now, and because I use fat free sour cream it is actually pretty healthy food. The only thing I have to be careful of is the carbohydrates in the spaetzle. But they are SO good.

Monday and Tuesday of next week I will be at a GIS conference in Oak Brook. I am looking forward to that. In December I have another week-long GIS class. This one will be an intro to programming with ArcObjects.

With this being a three day week because of Election Day and Veteran's day, next week being a three day week because of the above mentioned conference, and the following week being a two day week because of Thanksgiving, November has turned into a cakewalk.

We are planning our Black Friday strategy, but so far only Ace Hardware and K-Mart ads have been found on the BF sites.

We are going to a bar and grill this after to watch the Bears game. We have a seen a sign that says they have a free half-time buffet on Bears' game day so we thought we would give it a try.

Sheri is back on-call this morning for the next week, so we might have to leave the bar early.

My boss's boss had a house party after work tonight. Sheri picked me up at work and we drove there together. We were one of the first ones there and we stood around a huge (10 feet by 3 feet?) table in the middle of their kitchen and watched them prepare all of the food.

He is very Italian and most of the food for the evening was Italian. For sides they had a huge salad with a simple balsamic vinegar, oil, and sugar dressing. There was a huge bowl of very good mushroom risotto. The main course was fabulous homemade pizzas. He only made one of each kind so if there was one you particularly liked you had to grab fast. I got full before he stopped making pizzas though.

The first one he lightly brushed a par-baked pizza shell with melted garlic butter, and then layered it with sliced Roma tomatoes. Then he put a layer of fresh-off-the-stem basil leaves, and finally covered all of that with sliced fresh mozzarella.

He also had what looked like between a 5 and 10 pound brick of regular mozzarella that he grated as he needed it. It was some of the best mozzarella I have ever had. I need to ask him where he gets it.

I forget the combinations of the rest of the pizzas, but some of the ingredients were fresh chopped spinach, chicken, caramelized onions and peppers, gorgonzola cheese, artichoke hearts, fresh mushrooms, Italian sausage and prosciutto. I think I am missing at least a couple of ingredients but you get the idea of what kind of pizzas he was making.

He had a lot of good bottles of wine but I stayed with Diet Coke. Sheri had a couple glasses and I took sips.

He had a huge awesome dog that weighed 128 pounds. I never heard of the breed: a bouvier. Soft curly hair. Nice personality. Playful.


We got there at 5 PM and left at 7 PM. We stopped back at my work to pick up my car and then drove home. On the way home Sheri went through the 40 or so work pages she received while we were at the party. When we got home she immediately logged into work and dialed-in to the bridge call, and has been working ever since. It is almost 2 AM Saturday morning and it sounds like they are still going strong. I just made her some strong black coffee to keep her going. I am staying up so we are both on the same schedule for the weekend.

An hour or two ago her bosses' boss gave her an awesome compliment. He said "he hears nothing but good things" about her, and to please stick through this crazy time. He said after they hire two more people and stabilize the environment she won't have these marathon weeks and will only be on call every fourth week. Nice.

Not too many plans this weekend; Buckeyes game tomorrow and the Bears on Sunday. There is a good restaurant/bar at a local municipal golf course that has a sign out front that says they have a free buffet every time the Bears play. We are going to see what that is all about.

Someday? Soon? I have already downloaded the 200 page instruction manual and pretty much read it cover to cover.

I had a meeting in downtown Chicago on Friday at 2:00 PM. The office is on the other side of the Loop from Union Station. There was a train schedule to arrive about 20 minutes before the meeting, but I didn't want to run across the Loop and show up out of breath and sweaty. Especially if the train was five to ten minutes late it would be even worse.

At that time of the day the trains run every two hours, that meant I had to get on a train around 10:30 AM for a 2:00 PM meeting, which meant a fun day for Brad!

I went to my office to do a few things for a couple of hours first thing in the morning before I got on the train. I got into the city around 11:00 AM. I think I wrote here before about my quest for a place like Krema Nuts in Columbus that roasts their nuts fresh daily and locally. I finally found the place. It is called Ricci & Company. I walked from Union Station to the Quincy Street L stop, took the Brown Line around the Loop and got off at the Chicago Street stop. I walked one block east on Superior Street and there it was. A small little store front. As I was walking in three guys were walking out each with an armful of nuts. It was not much to look at inside, just a small little room with a counter to a little office and a counter to the back room. I ordered three pounds of jumbo peanuts, a pound of Spanish peanuts, and a pound of salted blanched almonds. The guy wrote this down on four plastic lined brown paper bags and handed it to another guy. The second guy filled and weighed my bags while I waited. Nothing pre-packaged. I love that! The first guy wrote up an invoice by hand for me and I paid him while my order was being filled. The nuts are delicious. Sweet and crunchy. Lots of flavor. I am going to try and make an effort to go their regularly.

After I got the nuts I got back on the L to the Loop to the area near my meeting. I finally got to go Central Camera after hearing about it for years.

For lunch I walked around the corner and had a great sub at Fontano's.

I wanted to review some documents before the meeting so I walked across the street to DePaul University, got a Diet Coke, ate some peanuts and read some documents for an hour or so. Then I walked to my meeting.

After the meeting we all went to the bar across the street for a few drinks.

That evening I picked up some pizza on my way home and we watched a bad movie.

We have had a fun day so far. I got up early and made a pot of chili and then put it in the crock pot to cook the whole day. I did a couple things different this time and they all turned out good. I added about three tablespoons of grape jelly for a little sweetness, and I added some garlic and extra cumin. I think this pot was better than last weeks.

Then we went to Fry's to get Sheri a Bluetooth headset to use with her cell phone for work. We got a Motorola H350. We went there for a Plantronics one they had for $20 because it was on clearance, but they said they sold out at 5 PM the previous night. This one was $50. We didn't go through the normal Brad-research process for this, but she is on her cell phone at least four or five hours a day for work and holding it in the crook of her neck or using the speaker phone was starting to become a pain. Its batteries get recharged via a mini-USB port, so you don't have to carry a charger with you. You can just keep a 12 inch USB cable with you and plug it into your computer when the batteries get low.

After that we took a drive out to the country to look at a dog at the greyhound rescue. The dog had loads of personality and was very playful, but it was a female and I think we really want to hold out for a male. The main reason for me is the size. There are exceptions, but on the average females are between 45 and 65 pounds and males are between 65 and 85 pounds. Another reason for wanting a male is that the females get injected with a lot of growth hormones to give them extra muscle mass. This results in an increase in the risk of cancer in females. The dog we visited today had amazingly defined muscles. It definitely looked like she was pumped up on steroids. Also the staff there today told us female greyhounds are a little more aloof and less affectionate than the males.

Having said all that, the dog we saw today was very sweet. She seemed to be immediately drawn to me. She was led into the room, she sniffed Sheri, and then jumped up on the bench that was next to me and practically dove into my lap. Her are a couple cute pictures.



She was pushing into my chest demanding to be pet.


I was whispering sweet nothings into her ear. I am The Dog Whisperer.


"Please take me home."


It was around noon when we left the rescue and neither of had eaten so far for the day. We found one restaurant but walked out because there was one person waiting tables, seating people, and running the cash register. People were getting grumpy because they had been waiting in line too long to pay their bill, so we thought it would be best if we left.

We ended up eating at a casino buffet. I was pretty good and stayed away from most of the carbs and fried foods. After we were done eating was just sat at our table, drank coffee and watched the gamblers milling around while we talked to each other. We really enjoyed that. When we finally got up we found a couple 5 cent slots next to each other and lost money for about 30 minutes and then left.

We are getting ready to watch a movie and eat some chili.

This is very cool (to me at least).

It is all of the animated radar data across the entire United States from the National Weather Service mosaiced into one large animated image. You can see the outline of every county!

The small radar images you usually get on the web always bug me because I always seem to end up wanting to see what is just beyond where the radar data stops. This certainly takes care of that.

It is large, about 2 megabytes, and it is updated about every 10 minutes.

Here is a link to an interactive map for the 2006 Chicago Marathon I made on local.live.com.

You can use it to figure out the best place to watch the race or find out where traffic is going to come to a halt.

I like local.live.com much better than Google Maps. Take a look even if you aren't planning on going to watch.

(There is a pushpin on the map for Ricci Nuts because I wanted to check it out while we were down there, but it turns out they are not open on Sundays.)

We are mostly weekend-warriors when it comes to cooking. We will buy a bag of onions for something we are cooking, and we might use some onions from the bag for something else down the road, but usually the rest of the bag goes bad before we can use them all.

Because of this we started not keeping onions on hand, but instead would buy a single large Spanish onion for whatever we were making. We eliminated the wasted food problem, but we pay about three times more for the large onions rather than just buying a bag of cooking onions.

Friday night when we were shopping for chili ingredients, the large individual onions were $1 per pound and a three pound bag of small onions was only $1.50. I think one of the large onions is probably a pound if not a little more. A solution to this dawned on me then and I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner: I could chop up an entire bag of onions, put individual portions in zip lock freezer bags and freeze all of them.

Tonight I chopped up all three pounds of them, which was 16 onions, and it resulted in eight cups of chopped onions. I measured one cup into each zip lock bag. Not only will this prevent waste, but it will be much easier when it comes time to use them. Just get a bag from the freezer and dump it into the pot. I also want to do the same thing with green peppers.

After chopping about the third or fourth onion my eyes were burning and watering so bad I could not continue. I took a large box fan and set it on the counter in such a way that the onions were downwind of me and none of the vapors could get to my eyes. It worked perfectly.

I have made three pots of chili over the last three weekends. This weekend and last weekend I made the chili on Friday night so it could sit for a day and be better for Saturday and/or Sunday.

The one I made tonight is my best one yet. The first batch I made three weeks ago was from Carol Shelby’s kit. The next weekend I used one pack of regular McCormick's chili seasoning, and one pack of hot, but instead of ground beef I got two pounds of round steak and diced it very very small by hand. I liked the texture using the diced steak gave the chili, but not enough to dice two pounds of steak every time I want to make chili.

Tonight I used a medium hot chili powder from the only place I will buy spices anymore, Penzey's.

Here is how I made tonight's batch:
===
2 pounds lean ground sirloin
1 large onion, finely diced
1 green pepper finely diced
1 tablespoon butter
1 eight ounce can of no salt added tomato sauce
2 cups chicken stock
5 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
3 bay leaves

Brown the ground beef in your chili pot, drain and set aside.

Add the butter and diced onion and green pepper to the pot. Stir to until the butter is melted and the vegetables are evenly coated. Reduce the heat to medium, cover the pot and sweat the vegetables until they are very very soft. Almost mushy. Do not brown them.

Add the chili powder to the vegetables and sauté for a couple minutes. I think cooking the chili powder like this for a bit brings out more of its taste.

Add the ground beef back to the pot and stir.

Add the tomato sauce and chicken stock, cinnamon, cocoa powder and stir well. Cook on medium to medium high for 5 to 10 minutes while stirring frequently to avoid burning.

Put the corn starch and water into a plastic container with an air tight lid and shake vigorously until all of the starch is completely dissolved. Add four or five tablespoons of the hot liquid from the chili to the starch mixture a tablespoon at a time and stir after you add each spoon. This is to slowly increase the temperature of the starch. If you dump the starch directly into the hot chili you risk getting little starch gel balls. Pour the warm starch mixture into the chili pot and stir. This will give your chili a nice smooth texture and body.

Add the bay leaves, reduce the heat to low and cover. Stir occasionally while it simmers for an hour or so.
===
That's it. Do NOT be tempted to add additional tomato products or beans. This is traditional Texas style chili and once you try it you won't go back.

It has almost zero carbohydrates. Very low fat. High protein. Delicious.

We have been getting about three meals per pot for the both of us. Let me know if you give it a try.

I have wanted these slippers for years, but they never have them in my size. On Monday I finally found a pair in my size and had to get them.

I promised a co-worker that I would proofread her thesis for graduate school this weekend, so Sheri and I are set up at Panera for the morning. It is 60 pages and it is about using GIS to correlate external factors to predict mortality and quality of health in a geographic population.

Sheri has not been able to get her laptop to connect to our wireless router at home, so she is going to see if she can connect to Panera's wireless. If she can't then we can have her IT people look at her laptop to see if there is something in the configuration preventing it. If she can then I have to do some more work on our router. It is weird though because I have been able to connect a bunch of other laptops to our router wirelessly. I don't know why this one is acting differently.

Random Stuff Going Through My Head

Sheri has been on-call this weekend after only being on the job for five days! She has spent about 10 hours dedicated to on-call activities this weekend and is on a conference call right now that has been going for almost two hours I think. We were on our way to the apple festival Saturday morning and we had to turn around and head back home to fix a problem. We thought we would be OK if we went out in the morning because problems there seem to happen in the afternoon and evenings. Thing seem to be going well for her there. Enjoys the work. No jerks out to get her. Seems to be catching on to things quickly. She is excited about the potential to work from home most of the time. I don't know if I would want to work from home the majority of the time. I think I would go buggy. It would be nice to do it once a week or when I felt like it, but I would not want it to be my SOP. Personally I would be afraid I would not be able to get out of bed. I need the pressure of needing to appear at my desk to get me going. I also like being able to leave the office behind me at the end of the day. Sheri is wired differently than me and I think it has a better chance of working out for her. I am happy for her.

I had a great doctor visit on Saturday. My blood sugar is finally officially in the non-diabetic range. My hemoglobin A1c was 5.9%. We are going to take dropping the meds slowly. We dropped one and cut another one in half. He wants to hear from me in six to eight weeks to see how my readings are. I thought I put weight on when I came to Chicago five years ago, but I actually showed up here around 260. Dropping those thirty pounds last year made a huge difference. The next time you are at the hardware store look for a 30 pound bag of something and pick it up. That is a lot of extra cells for my system to keep alive.

We are getting closer to filling out the paperwork to get a greyhound.

I am at a loss as to why I never see the Garmin GPS navigator I bought over the summer sold at retail outlets. I have only seen it for sale on the Internet. It goes for just a few dollars over $200. The units that get all the buzz are in the $500 to $1,000 range. If they let people know that they can get the same quality of navigation and route generation as the suckers that pay over $2,000 to have it factory-installed in their cars I think just about everyone would have one. I had these thoughts on Saturday when I was amazed again at how adeptly it was guiding us to and from Long Grove, Illinois for the apple festival.

We could not get Sheri's work-laptop to connect to our wireless router so for now I broke out our 100 foot LAN cable. It can from the office to our bedroom or downstairs to the family room. It is a pain in the butt to walk over for now, but I will spend some time troubleshooting this week.

I made a very good batch of chili for the OSU vs Iowa game Saturday night. It was a traditional Texas style chili. What is traditional Texas style chili? No beans and almost no tomato products. I used two pounds of ground beef, but only one 8 ounce can of tomato sauce. The rest of the red color comes from the chili powder. To people that are used to using cans and cans of tomatoes it sounds weird, but those Texans know something about chili. It is also almost totally non-acidic, so it is good for people that get heartburn and indigestion. Contrary to popular belief peppers do not cause heart burn. Think of every peppery dish that you associate with heartburn. It probably has a highly acidic component to it. That is what does it to you. Years ago I was having indigestion so I talked to the doctor about it. He prescribed me an acid reducer and said reduce or eliminate soda, coffee, citrus, etc. I followed up with "and peppers" and he gave me hearty no. He explained what I just mentioned above and then told me how good peppers are for blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. The chili was so good I will probably make another batch very soon. It is already all gone.

I cut the grass this afternoon. Today was gorgeous here.

I am getting urges to buy a toy again. Thoughts of the Canon EOS 30D are in my head again. I have also been thinking about the electronic barometer I wrote about earlier as well as a Nintendo Gamecube. You can pick them up for $100. We are not hardcore gamers and we thought it would be fun every now and then to play some video games on a Friday night rather than watching a movie.

I am crazy about Krema Nuts back in Columbus. They roast their nuts fresh everyday, and I have not been able to find anything like that here in Chicago. I think I may have found something similar to satisfy me thought: Ricci & Company. They are located in the City and on weekends are only open on Saturday until 11:30 AM, so it will be a little inconvenient, but I want to plan a Saturday excursion soon to see how they match up against Krema.

My one gripe with Krema is their peanut butter: it is not salted. Peanut butter needs a little bit of salt. I like natural -peanut butter because it does not have the extra sugar or saturated fats that shelf-stable peanut butters use, but I still like a dash of salt in it. One of these days I am going to send an e-mail to Krema and ask them to make a salted version. They have a five pound bucket they sell for $10. I would go through a few of those year if it was salted.

Something bad just happened on the bridge call, but Sheri didn't do it. Whew!

There is a good chance I am going to try my hand at hunting next season. A friend at work is in the process of getting a new hunting dog (she was just born two weeks ago) and it will be trained and ready by next season. He mentioned taking me out. I have always wanted to try that.

Speaking of delicious birds we are going to see if we can get a fresh (not frozen) turkey in the next couple of weeks from HoKa Turkey Farms. I would like to be able to go out and point to the live bird I want and have them dress it right there, but I am not sure if they operate that way. I just sent them an e-mail asking if they work that way after I typed that last sentence. I will let you know what I hear.

I think I am going to bed soon and leave Sheri downstairs with her bridge call.

I did not ride my bike as much as I wanted to this summer.

We have been talking about replacing all of the carpet downstairs, the front room, family room, and dining room, with a laminate like Pergo. The carpeting is starting to show some wear, and if/when we get a dog it would make cleaning up after wet and dirty paws much easier. When we were at the neighborhood gourmet club kick-off they had their entire downstairs in wood laminate and it looked very nice.


I guess that is about all that was bottled up for now.

"If I just ignore him maybe this pumpkin head will go away."

I was so taken with the new toilet seat we purchased today that I had to shoot a quick video of it in action. Enjoy!

Separated at birth?

The one famous person that people always say I look like is the ex-coach of the Chicago Bulls, Phil Jackson. What do you think?






I was sick as a dog with a 103 degree fever and a runny nose when this picture was taken, which I think is the reason my nose looks big and puffy in this picture. Just try to ignore that.

After five years of living here we do not really have any friends in the neighborhood. We know a couple of our neighbors well enough to have a little talk when we are both out working in the yard, or to ask them to watch the house when we are on vacation, but no one to go out to dinner with or watch a movie.

To remedy this Sheri started doing some investigation and found a few neighborhood clubs. She signed up for the monthly bunco club and has already been to one of those. She had a good time and met the head of another club called the Gourmet Club.

The information she brought back home was it only meets four times per year, and it is just going to someone's house and everyone brings a side dish. OK. I can do that and it sounds like a good way to meet people. It cost $30 to sign up for the club.

Tonight was the annual kickoff meeting. There were 35 couples, which means 70 people. It was a little awkward at first because we didn't know anyone, but then a guy recognized us that we rode the bus with to the train station when we first moved here. Then his wife joined in the conversation, and then a women that knew the bus guy joined our circle and brought her husband. So within 30 minutes we had a pretty lively conversation going and felt right at home.

The official meeting part of it started at 9 PM and we all moved into the house. They passed out a little hand-stapled booklet that had the word "rules" in the title. Warning bells went off in my head. Why do you need "rules" to have dinner at someone's house?

I did some quick flipping through the booklet and came to a page with the dates of the four dinners. Under each date had every couple's name grouped with three other couple's names. The word "host" was by the first couple's name in each group. More warning bells, and louder this time. I looked for our name. On the date of the third dinner the word "host" was next to our name. "Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Warning Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!"

I just wanted to go to someone's house, bring a side dish, and mingle with people and basically blend into the background. I don't want to have to host a gourmet dinner night for three other couples I don't know. I was a little annoyed because I was roped into something without knowing all of the facts.

The topic for tonight was cordials. A couple women were standing up in front of everyone and would talk about a liqueur and what cordial they were going to make with it. They made the drinks in little plastic cups that probably only held a couple ounces, and I think they made four different drinks. In between talking about the drinks, mixing the drinks, and passing out the drinks we started talking to the couple that was sitting next to us. It turns out they live just a few houses down and have three boys. They said they are going to have us over to their house soon for a cookout or something, and they have a trampoline they said Sheri could use any time she wants.

So that was the third nice couple we met and liked inside of 90 minutes, and I looked around the room and it seemed like most of the people looked nice, so I started to change my outlook on hosting a dinner. We only have to make the main course and provide drinks. We get to tell everyone else what side dish to bring, and it's not like we have to find seats for 70 people like the couple did tonight. Only eight people.

So after my initial uptightness and social anxiety fears subsided I think I am looking forward to these small intimate dinners and will be a good way to meet a lot of people in the neighborhood.

We are already talking about what we will have on our menu. It falls on St. Patrick's day so the question is do we do the obvious boiled corned beef and cabbage or Reuben sandwiches, or do we do something totally unrelated to corned beef. They purposely do not schedule new couples to host a dinner until the third or fourth dinner so we get a feel for how to host one. Maybe a boiled corned beef dinner isn't gourmet enough. I think we might contact the three couples that will be at our house and ask them if they want to go with corned beef or something different.

It turned out that the guy that hosted tonight's get-together works for one of the engineering firms we use and knew at least half-a-dozen people in common! Small world. They were really nice people and had a cool house. He is bridge engineer and she reminded us of Bree Vandekamp.They just installed a large koi pond in the backyard. He built a permanent round brick fire pit that us and the first two couples were sitting around at first. Lots of nice landscaping and strategic plants.

Everyone got to go home with a nice bottle of wine, a bottle of pre-mixed Kaula white Russian, and a table decoration that the host couple made out of a wine bottle. They drilled a hole in the back and fed in a small string of twinkle lights and decorated the top of it with some plastic grape vines. It looks really neat.

We had a nice nine day vacation to visit our families last week. I still have write about it.

We went into the city Wednesday night to see Cat Power in concert at The Vic. I still have to write about it.

Early tomorrow morning we are going to watch a cricket match. I want to write about it.

We are going to a neighborhood gourmet club party tomorrow night. I will probably write about it.