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.

We are going to buy a new (to us) car very soon. One of our cars needs between $2,000 and $2,600 of work but I think it's only worth about $700. It will probably be a Toyota Corolla because of the Toyota reliability and they get about 40 mpg. But I might also want to look at a Toyota Yaris. I prefer to drive a car into the ground. We have had this one for about eight years.

I am not a "car guy". A car is purely an expense to me and I do not get any pleasure or ego boost from cars. The more reliable and the less gas a car uses the better.

We have fun turning certain TV events into little special little events of our own. Things like the Super Bowl, Rose Bowl, Oscars, etc. We make special treat foods to eat while watching whatever it is on TV. Things like my homemade pizza, sauerkraut balls, foot long subs, shrimp boils, steaks, fancy cheeses, enchiladas, loaded nachos, my award winning guacamole, etc.

Tonight we were excited about the MTV Video Music Awards and I had a GREAT seasonal as well has practical idea: fried green tomatoes! I have six giant plants and they are all loaded with green tomatoes, and I don't want any of them to go to waste.

I cut them about a half inch think and sprinkled them with salt and pepper about 15 minutes before cooking them. This lets the salt draw some of the moisture out of the tomatoes so you get a crispier crust.

I dipped each one in milk, then flour, egg, and finally a mixture of half corn meal and half Italian seasoned bread crumbs and the then fried them for three minutes on each side.

I think I cooked up about 20 of them and we only have four or five left.

I dipped them mostly in horseradish sauce and she dipped mostly in honey mustard.

The best line from the awards show so far was from Jack Black: "This show has been laying farts for the last 20 years. Tonight I'm going to light a match."

The hottest hottie so far was Jessica Simpson in her little black dress. We just felt it was a shame she had to talk. I'm surprised I already found a picture of her from tonight's show:

Weekend Recap

Friday
After work we went to Lou Malnati's for dinner. We had a small Lou pizza which is spinach sautéed with garlic, mushrooms, sliced Roma tomatoes, cheddar and mozzarella cheese. (our favorite) We also ordered family sized house salad.

We walked around downtown a little bit after that and then drove to Trader Joes to get some stuff to make an hors d'oeuvre for the following evening. I took 8 ounces of crumbled blue cheese, mixed in three tablespoons of honey (yes, honey!) until it was smooth, and then folded in two tablespoons of chopped pecans. It was a huge hit. Everyone loved it. It tastes amazing even though it sounds weird. Super easy but very impressive. I mixed up when we got home around 9 PM so it could sit overnight.

Saturday
We went to Burger King for our breakfast and to read the paper, and then walked across the parking lot to a hardware store that was having a grand re-opening and had lots of good coupons and, more importantly, a petting zoo.

We wanted to take a cheese spreading knife to the dinner we went to that evening but we don't have one. We walked a few store-fronts down to the grocery store but they didn't have any. We got Sheri an iced Starbuck's and went home.

We putzed around the house for a few hours and then left a little early for our dinner to run a couple errands. We went to Meijer. No cheese knife. We received a promotional cash value card from Home Depot. It said it could have $1, $5, $10, $25, $500, or $1,000. (or some similar combination of numbers) We had our card scanned at the customer service desk and it was worth $1. I couldn't think of anything we needed so I got a 20 ounce bottle of Diet Coke and paid $0.17 for it after using my card. That was kind of fun.

We drove a few stores down to Linens-N-Things. We found ONE set of cheese knives. I was looking for one knife for about $1.80. They only a four-pack for $10. It was also the last one. We went back and forth and then decided to go ahead and get it. They had a nice feel and were made from one piece of stainless steel. I am glad we got them.

We received a coupon good for a free frozen custard from new place, so we went and split one, and then we drove to our friend's house. It is about 30 minute drive to his house from ours.

We had a really nice time. There was some salsa his girlfriend made with peppers and tomatoes from their garden. Grilled marinated shrimp as an appetizer. (everyone got their own skewer.) My blue cheese spread and crackers. Hamburgers. Tomato and cucumber salad in a vinegar, sour cream, sugar dressing. Pickled blue gill fish. (I was surprised that Sheri LOVED it!) Baked beans. Lots of good conversation. We really liked them and have never done anything with them before. I hope we do things with them in the future. We were shooting the shit at work one day for a while and I guess he just decided he liked me and said I have an open invitation to stop by his place whenever I want. So we took him up on it and said we were stopping by on Saturday.

Sunday
We got up early and went to McDonalds for breakfast and to read the paper, and then we went to the zoo for a few hours. It looked like rain and was overcast most of the day, but it turned out to be perfect for us because it 1) kept it cool, and 2) kept the crowds away. It misted a couple of times during the first hour we were there, but it was not even enough to take cover from.

After that we went to Whole Foods for lunch. We each got a few things from their hot bar and ate it in their little dining room. Then we walked around and tried all of the samples. We ended up just getting a sweet onion, a little one ounce Scharffen Berger chocolate bar for me, and the worlds most expensive bunch of cilantro. $2.50!

Last Tuesday when we were at my boss's house for the beer making party he sent me home with a dozen or more Roma tomatoes. We got the onion and cilantro to make pico de gallo. It was actually a good thing the cilantro was overpriced. I didn't feel like dicing up all of the tomatoes, and if we only paid the usual $0.80 for cilantro I probably would have not done it. But I didn't want to waste the world's most expensive bunch of cilantro, so I was incented to get up and make it. It turned out to probably be one of the best batches, if not the best batch, I have ever made. I usually make the mistake of adding too much onion.

We have been watching the Emmy red carpet show and Emmy's since then and are getting ready to go to bed soon.

I made the biggest map I think I have ever made today. It was 24 feet long and three feet wide. It was at 1 inch = 325 feet and covered almost 18 miles. It was an aerial photograph with road detail overlaid on it. When I had it spread out on the floor and standing at one end it looked I was coming in for a landing on an airplane. It was actually kind of weird feeling. Almost like I was looking at a mini Earth.

Sheri picked up a box of reduced fat Cheez-It crackers last week, and I was surprised that I think they are actually better than the regular ones.

The cheese taste is much more pronounced, and the cracker itself feels a little lighter, but it has more of a crunch.

I am totally going to get one of these clocks made with E Ink when they start selling them. It is paper thin. Looks just like paper. It does not require any electricity to keep the display "on". It only needs electricity to update the display. Therefore this clock only uses a little zap of electricty every 60 seconds, and even less to keep the clock chip on time, which means the batteries are expected to last for years.


click for full sized image

At the blood donation today at work they did not have the machine for collecting platelets so I just gave whole blood. I have never felt lightheaded after donating blood before, but today I did. I sat at their snack table and had a few little cans of orange juice some cookies, and that helped, but I still felt a little off even an hour or two later. I feel fine now though. It is probably because I didn't eat as much as I should have before I donated. I had my usual soy protein drink in the morning and a Kashi granola bar about 30 minutes beforehand.

We had our front walk mud-jacked today and it looks good. Money well spent.

The dog we were sitting the last week was picked up by his people at 5 PM.

I put one of my sick days into the sick bank at work. Now if I suffer a catastrophic illness I get up to an extra five weeks of sick time! Pretty good deal.

I signed up to donate blood at work tomorrow, but I don't know if I am going to donate whole blood or just red cells.

When you donate just red cells they spin those cells out and pump your plasma along with some saline solution back into your body. They can take twice as many red cells this way than when you donate whole blood, so it is like donating two pints instead of just one.

The only thing is it kind of freaks me out that they are pumping stuff back into me. I am OK with sterile bags of IV drugs, but it just seems like it would be easy to contaminate my blood while it is outside of my body during the separation process. The rational side of me says it is completely safe and they wouldn't do it if it wasn't, but it just freaks me out.

On the other hand I think the humanitarian side of me wants to do as much good as possible, so I think I will probably get over it and donate just red cells. It takes longer, but they said it is more comfortable because they use a smaller needle.

I have not really posted in a long time and things kind of build up, so this is just kind of a random dump.

I feel fortunate to have always had jobs I enjoy and don't dread going to every day.

Sheri stopped by my office late Friday afternoon and I walked her around to introduce her to people I work with. I was a little surprised that a few of them gushed to her about me. I expect "It's so nice to finally meet Brad's wife." Not "It has been great having Brad here. He has made my life so much easier. He is never in a bad mood. Etc. etc. etc." Of course it was nice to hear though.

We are dog sitting again. Today we took him to walk around our downtown and park area. I forgot how approachable you become when you have a dog. I don't think we were walking more than five minutes before we were stopped by a woman asking if she could pet him. I think for the few hours we were out with him people stopped to talk on average about every 10 – 15 minutes.

On the way home I remembered that we still have a good amount of hummus left but are out of pita bread. We stopped at Trader Joe's just for some pita and I forgot that they have a fantastic soy pita bread. (I think I even wrote about it before but I forget when.) It tastes better than some regular pita I have had in the past. Of course it is very high in protein and fiber and has fewer net carbs than regular pita. Just delicious.

I don't know why pre-made hummus in the store always seems so expensive. I little 8 ounce container will sell for over $3.00. For that much I can make a couple pounds of hummus at home, and it will probably taste better.

The hardest part about making hummus for the average American is they don't keep tahini in the fridge. Tahini is just ground up sesame seeds and is very similar to peanut butter. Do yourself a favor and buy a big jar and keep it in the fridge. I think hummus is about a near perfect food and I can make a meal on a couple pieces of pita and lots of hummus. High in protein, fiber, and good fats, but it is also delicious. I especially like it in the summer because it is cool and refreshing.

I found a neat shareware program that will set the clock on your computer with your GPS called Tardis 2000. They use it on the International Space Station to keep their computers on time. (Yes, you can get a GPS fix in space.) I have it running on my laptop and it works great. It also acts as an NTP server so other computers on your network can get their time from that computer so you only need one GPS receiver for your network.

It is a little pet peeve of mine when people say "GPS coordinates" or "GPS location" or "GPS latitude and longitude". They are still coordinates and locations and lats and longs, regardless if you got it through GPS or not. All you have to say is coordinates, etc.

I think I am getting close to buying this barometer. It is the only one I have been able to find that graphs out the barometric pressure over the last 6, 12, or 24 hours.



We are getting the walk-way that leads from our driveway to the front porch mud-jacked on Wednesday. It has settled and become uneven. They will drill strategic holes in the sidewalk and then pump concrete under pressure into the hole until it lifts the slabs back to the correct position.

At work I can apply unused sick days to my retirement seniority. So if I have half a year of unused sick days, I can retire half a year early.

My tomato plants are doing great. Loaded with tomatoes but none of them are ripe yet. This was the first year I had a tough time finding suitable tomato plants. I could find single plants in a large pot for $1.60. I am used to six smaller plants in a flat for about $1.60. I think we finally found our tomato plants this year at Menards.

So that I don't waste any tomatoes when I get sick of eating them (Sheri is not a huge tomato fan) I think I will cook them down into sauce and then freeze it. Every week or so I will make a batch with whatever I have left over and then just put it into a freeze bag and freeze for later. It kills me to through out moldy tomatoes that have been sitting on the kitchen counter for too long.

I just got my first issue of GPS World magazine in the mail yesterday and you didn't.

I think this new technology called Photosynth from Microsoft could be one of those things that changes to world.

It takes lots and lots (think hundreds and thousands) of digital pictures from hundreds and thousands of users and automatically stitches them together into a 3D world you can navigate. Zoom in. Zoom out. Rotate.

I can envision a site like flickr.com where as soon as you upload your pictures they automatically find their place in the virtual world and add their own bit of texture.

Imagine a big catastrophe like 9/11 or Katrina. Pictures from people's cell phones start trickling in, each with a different perspective of the same things. This could give the rest of the world a better idea of what things look like on the ground very quickly.

Watch this video and you will get a better idea.

We have a lot of pictures at work for every project we do. (Again think thousands.) We were discussing just the other day how to archive them in a way that could leverage the pictures someone else took for a previous project for a totally different and unrelated project. I had something like this in mind, but not quite as fancy or with 3D.

I think this picture looks like it was taken in a studio with a fake background and artificial lighting, but nope, it was just a self-portrait taken by holding the camera at arms-length while we read the morning paper on a bench at the park.

This is a pretty good hummus recipe. We always like to keep a couple cans of chick peas on hand, especially in the summer time, so we can whip up a batch at a moments notice. We keep a large jar of tahini in the fridge which will make many batches of hummus.

2 15 ounce cans of chick peas
2/3 cup tahini
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 cloves garlic (I substitute a little garlic powder if I don't have any fresh on hand)

Toss it all in a food processor and blend until smooth. Sometimes I might add a few dashes of Tabasco. It is also really good if you garnish it with finely minced parsely.

We had left over pork kabobs from yesterday. I toasted half a piece of pita bread, spread a few tablespoons of hummus inside and then put some cold pork into it. Delicious. It sounds really simple, but the tastes add up to something quite greater than the sum of their parts. Try it.

$4 per gallon gas by the first quarter of 2007.

I bought this tonight for my six watches. They had a 10-watch case, but that only left room for four more, so I went with the 20-watch case.

I think Nutella is overrated. It tastes almost exactly like Duncan Hines chocolate frosting. You can taste a slight nuttiness from the hazelnuts, but it is so slight that once you put it on a banana, cookie, etc. the hazelnut taste is totally overpowered and it might as well be chocolate frosting.

There are two main things that make a pizza a St. Louis style pizza. One is it has a very thin crust, but it does not get soggy. Secondly, and most importantly, it does not use mozzarella cheese. It uses a special cheese you can only get in St. Louis called Provel. It is a blend of cheddar, Swiss and provolone. It is very creamy and you do not get the strings of melted cheese tugging off the rest of the toppings when you take a bite. It was pretty good. Imo's claims to be the originator of St. Louis style pizza.

I had a pretty good crab cake po' boy last night. It was almost all crab meat. I don't think it had any bread crumbs. Not sure how they held it together. Good flavor. Slight spice.

I am finally going in for my one-hour birthday massage today at noon.

This picture made me laugh.

This is my tomato patch I planted a couple weeks ago.



Sheri planted a couple flats of flowers but ALL of the ones in the front rows died for some reason. The impatiens are doing well.



This is along the back edge of our yard.



Our goat's beard plant.





I don't know what the problem is with our ligularia. In the past if it doesn't get enough water it will wilt and look like it is going to die. You give it a big dose of water and it literally perks back up in an hour or two. That didn't work this year. I think it might have been damaged by a frost we had and is having a hard time recovering.



Our ornamental grass had a slow start last year, but this year it has taken off. Notice our hostas are intact thanks to our smelly rotten egg-based rabbit repellant.

Our shish kabobs on the grill.



All cooked up and ready to eat.

The shish kabob turned out excellent! Better than I expected. Before we left the house this morning around 10 AM I cubed the steak into bite-size pieces and put them into a bowl of teriyaki to marinate.

When we got home at 1:30 PM I cleaned the mushrooms, but them in half and let them marinate in teriyaki for a bit. Mushrooms are very absorbent so I only let them marinate for 10 – 15 minutes.

After I got the mushrooms going I cleaned and quartered two large sweet onions. Actually they were so big I cut actually cut the onion into sixths. I skewered these without marinating, but the next time I would let them sit in teriyaki for a bit. The salt would have helped to break down the cell structure a bit and make them more tender.

At this point I started the grill, and then skewered the mushrooms and then the sirloin cubes.

The mushrooms and beef were cooked perfectly. The onion was sweet and little smoky/charred tasting, but I would have liked it just a little softer. It was still good though.

Of the three we both liked the beef the best. I expected Sheri to like the mushrooms the best, but the meat was really really good. I think the secret was the small size of the cubes. Because they were small I didn't have to cook them very long. I have had kabobs that were cut too large and they get dried out because you have to cook it too long to get the centers done.

The sirloin we got was normally around $9 per pound, but it had a sell-by date of today so it was only $4 per pound. It was a great piece of meat.

I don't know why but I have never prepared kabobs before. This is great summer food. Easy and quick to prepare. Light. It doesn't heat up the kitchen. Low carb high protein. Lean. Delicious. What more could you want?

We are going to keep an eye on the butcher shop and whenever they have sirloin on special pick some up and make kabobs.

That is going to be our main meal of the day. We have a few ears of corn and some peaches for later on tonight when we get hungry.

The outside thermometer says 92 degrees right now, but we have the blinds on the south side of the house closed and with a fan on it is fairly comfortable. No air conditioning yet, but I don't know how long that will last.

We picked up a sirloin steak, a couple big sweet Vidalia onions, and a large pack of whole fresh mushrooms. Tomorrow we are going to make shish kabob and some corn on the cob for lunch. We also got a few fresh peaches for dessert. After we eat that we are going to settle in and watch the soccer game.

We went to Meijer to pick up just a few things, and for something to do, after a nice dinner in our downtown and strolling around for a bit of people watching. We ended up spending over $100. All good stuff though.

Sheri is on call this weekend so we are sticking close to home.

For the longest time my weight was holding very steady around 232 – 233. I started to get complacent because I could eat something I wasn't supposed to and my weight stayed the same. I started having more treats because my weight pretty much was stable. Over the last four weeks or so though I added about five pounds.

I am back down to 235, but my goal this summer is to get below 230, and if I do that then get to 225. I think it is totally doable.

We planned on watching a movie tonight, but by the time we got home it was almost 9 PM so we are just putzing around the house. I put the lawn sprinkler on when we got home and I have to go turn that off soon.

A vendor is going to demo a GPS camera for me today. The latitude and longitude are tagged on every picture you take, and then there is software that automatically positions it in our GIS. We could shoot 100 pictures of construction sites in a day, come back to the office and have them all be linked in a web-based map before we went home for the day! I am pretty sure we are going to get one.

I bought a sheet of these stamps at the post office today.

I got my 12 tomato plants planted in the garden this evening. Better late than never. Of course last year I don't think I got them in until July!

I meant to pick up two packs of traditional red tomatoes, but I picked up one pack of yellow tomatoes by mistake. Oh well.

None of the sunflowers I started indoors a couple months ago made it. There are a couple holding on, but I don't expect them to do anything. I still have a bunch of seeds, so I am going to plant them around the edges of the tomato plant patch and see what happens, and maybe some other random spots around the yard. I just have to make sure Sheri doesn't go after the seedlings with her Weed-B-Gone. Maybe I will mark them with popsicle sticks.

I have purchased all of the materials I need to make this bicycle map holder. I will let you know how it works out. Here are the instructions.

I only have about one more month until my sixth-month probationary period is over at my new job. w00t!

Things are going really well there and I am thoroughly enjoying the job.

This morning we got a pretty early start. Sheri had some strawberry shortcake on the patio and did her crossword for breakfast. I made some French press coffee and started working on the pile of mail and bills that I let accumulate this week.

After Sheri finished her crossword she cut the grass and then did some touch-up around the yard with Weed-B-Gone. After that she was ready for a break so she went out for a bit of clothes shopping. She didn't get anything, but on the way back home she got an oil change for the car.

After I got done with the bills I did a few more chores around the house. Chopped up the pineapple we got a couple days ago; applied some rabbit repellant around the yard; and a couple other things I can't remember.

Sheri was so anxious to get the bikes out that she brought them up from the basement without my help. I got the tires inflated and the plan was just to go for a short ride around the neighborhood. We decided to ride to the little shopping strip that is about a mile from our house to mail a letter. When we got there we discovered the mailbox had been removed.

We had a quick conference and decided to backtrack and go to another mailbox a little farther away. After we got the letter mailed we had another conference: go home or explore the new bike path the city is about halfway done building. We decided to see where the new bike path led.

We ended up biking all the way to the nice little downtown of our city. We went to our local independent coffee roaster and each had an iced coffee at the sidewalk tables and watched all of the people walking up and down the sidewalk. Really nice.

Before we got up to leave we started thinking about what to do for dinner. We decided to stop by the grocery store on our ride home and pick up a few things. I got a few pork chops, fresh salsa, and fat free sour cream. I grilled the chops and then sliced them up in thin strips and we made tacos with some excellent fresh tortillas we discovered. We ate on the patio and had strawberry shortcake for dessert.

We ended up riding about 10.5 miles. I also used the heart rate monitor I got last weekend. It worked great.

In today's Sunday newspaper ad section Office Depot had the Microsoft wireless laptop mouse on sale for $10. It is normally $30. It works great and I think I am going to go pick up at least one more. You do not need to mail in a rebate. It is $10 at the cash register. The package says the one AA battery it takes should last about 6 months.

After picking that up at Office Depot we stopped at PetSmart to see if there were any dogs to say hi too. We also picked up two pounds of small Scooby snacks to have on hand for the neighbor's dog we like.

From there we went to Walgreens because they had a good sale on cosmetics. While Sheri was picking out her stuff I wandered around the store and I came across the second incredibly good deal of the day. The Timex heart rate monitor usually retails for around $50, and they had it on sale for only $26! I got the last one too. Last year I was kicking around buying one, and probably would have eventually even without the bargain-basement price.

We have a stationary exercise bike with a built in heart rate monitor and I love using that because it ensures that you are both:

a) not overdoing it by making sure your heart rate does not go over your high target, and
b) makes sure the 30 minutes you are taking out of your schedule to exercise is actually benefiting you by making sure your heart rate is high enough.

There have been times I have been on my regular bike and I didn't know if I was pushing myself too hard or not. Maybe it just felt like I was because it was hot or thirsty? I didn't know. With this monitor I will have more productive rides because I will know for sure what my body is doing.

It has an upper and lower limit alarm. If it hits the upper limit you know to back off before you hurt yourself. If the lower limit goes off you know to kick it up a notch to make your exercise time really count.

I have read a few studies that said exercising above your recommended heart rate does not burn significantly more calories or give you any extra health benefits, and could actually be dangerous. If you do not get your heart rate high enough you are missing out on all of the benefits of your exercise time. Keeping your heart rate in your zone is the best way to make the most out of your efforts.

There is a transmitter on a strap that goes around your chest and transmits your heart rate to the watch. I tried it on and it picked up the signal and my heart rate right away. I got on the bike to see if the two numbers matched up. They did to within just a few beats from each other.

Sheri got a paged to a bridge call while we were out, so we had to cut it short and go home. When we got home she could not connect to work, so she had to drive into work to fix things. I didn't have anything going on so I came with her. I am sitting at the desk next to hers writing this and using my new wireless mouse on my laptop.

When she is done we might go to the Starbuck's next door for an iced coffee and see if there is anything we want to do on this end of town. We are spitting distance from O'Hare for your reference.

We were watching a movie, but Sheri got paged to a bridge-call, so I turned the TV to Sabado Gigante (good eye-candy to watch without volume) and I am going to make a batch of guacamole. It sounds like a network problem so I don't think she will have to get too involved. Just hang on the line in case they have a systems issue.

I like going down to the river and try to get the geese to bite my fingers. Today I was successful.

click for close-up

I don't know how it works in the ladies room, but in the men's room if you walk in and every urinal and toilet bowl is being used, you are obligated to say "It looks like a full house."

You are also obligated to say it in such a way that indicates you think it is the funniest and most original line ever quipped.

This picture was taken mere minutes ago as we sit in Burger King having breakfast. I am picking out a hotel on the Internet for a trip I have coming up while Sheri works a crossword.

We just got back from the grocery store where we discovered a new pasta product from Barilla called Barilla Plus. Here are the amazing ingredients in the order listed on the package:

Semolina (same as regular pasta)
Lentils
Chickpeas
Oats
Spelt
Barley
Egg whites
Flaxseed
Wheat fiber
Durum (same as regular pasta)

One 2 ounce serving has 17% RDA of protein and 16% RDA of fiber. It also has 15% of the RDA of ALA Omega-3.

I can't go nuts eating it, but when I do eat pasta it will be much better for me than regular pasta. I have already cooked half of it and made macaroni salad. It tastes just like regular pasta. We have tried some other low carb and high fiber pasta that was too tough or cardboard tasting.

After Sheri spent 15 hours last night holding a telephone handset to her ear we thought it would be a good idea to invest in a good telephone headset. I had done just a little bit of preliminary research and it seemed a good one, not the best, but a good one, would be in the $80 to $130 range.

Then we had the thought that maybe she could just bring her headset from work home on the weekends she is on call, or maybe they had an extra one lying around. So when we left the house this afternoon our intention was just to go to a few places and price them out and read the packaging.

The first place we stopped, Office Depot, had the GN Netcom 5140, normally $80, on sale for $60. GN Netcom and Plantronics were the two brands I saw most often during my research so I felt comfortable with the brand. For that price we just went ahead and bought it.

When I got home and set it up I could hear the other person but they could not hear me. Also it wasn't working the way the instructions said it should. When I hung up the phone the call was supposed to terminate. It didn't and I still heard the call through the headset. I also could not dial when in headset mode. I had to switch to handset mode, dial, and then switch back to headset mode.

I tried another phone and it behaved the exact same way. I thought a faulty microphone could of course be way the other person could not hear me, but I couldn't see how that could be responsible for the other problem with the hanging up and the dialing stuff, and I couldn't believe that an $80 headset could have two major things wrong with it. I decided to take it back and exchange it. When I brought it back home I behaved exactly the same as the other one. Crap. The chances of two units have the exact same defect seemed to be about zero, so the problem had to be me. I have set up several telephone headsets before, and I checked and rechecked how I had everything connected, but it just wasn't working.

I tried calling their customer service line but it is closed on the weekends. I decided to just put it out of my mind and give them a call on Monday. Something was just not right, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

About an hour or so later a thought slammed into my head: both of the phones I tried were the Slimline style where most of the guts of the phone are in the handset. That put the hook downstream of the amplifier. With a conventional phone the hook would be upstream of the amplifier.

Did we even have a non-Slimline style phone in the house? I couldn't remember. I guess I would go to Radio Shack tomorrow and find the cheapest conventional style phone. Then I remembered a packing box that I have not touched since we moved here five years ago. I wasn't sure, but I really seemed to remember a phone in that box.

I dug out the box and sure enough there was a phone. I plugged everything in and it worked like a champ! Then I felt bad that I returned a perfectly good headset.

I am glad we picked one up today and that I persevered to get it working because Sheri has been on the phone again for almost an hour, and it looks like she will be on for at least another two hours.

Poor Sheri. It is 9 AM and she is still on the phone. 13.5 hours. She doesn't think it is going to be fixed in the next hour or two either.

What makes it even more sucky is she thinks rather than pay her the extra 15 hours, or whatever it turns out to be, they are just going to tell her to take a day or two off.

I woke up at 4:30 am, rolled over, no Sheri. Panic. "SHERI!?" No answer. "SHERI!?" No answer. At the top of my lungs "SHERI!?" I hear a whispered response from downstairs. "what?" OK, she's alright and not blacked out somewhere.

Poor thing. She is still working. The last box got corrupted and they are trying to restore or rebuild some databases. I am just glad it was the very last box they did and not one of the first ones. Well at least she is hourly right now, and so far that is almost an extra 10 hours. From the way it sounds it will probably be at least another two hours which puts her at 7 am and 12 hours of extra pay. I feel wide awake now but I know I am going to crash hard later today.

Sheri has to work tonight, but fortunately she can do it from home. I am not sure what exactly she is doing but it involves 22 servers and several other people on a conference call. She is stopping them. Loading stuff on them. Other people do stuff. Starts them back up. It was scheduled to go from about 7:30 PM until midnight. It is almost 12:30 AM and she still has a few more to do. At least she can do it from home.

I want to go to bed but I will stay up and keep her company. We got a pizza for dinner so she could pick on it if she got hungry. I have made coffee. Read a little bit of the book I am reading about coffee. Surfed the Net. Played with my GPS. Made iced tea. Drank iced tea. When it is time to go to bed I know the coffee and tea are going to start wanting back out and I probably won't sleep very much. We have a brunch date with her Starbuck's friends tomorrow morning. (Actually this morning now.)

I started 12 sunflowers in 6 starting pots about a month ago and they are ready to be planted outside. I want to do it this weekend but I am concerned it might be too cold. I have rabbit repellant to spray them with once I plant them. I will plant the rest of the packet of seeds in the ground around the sprouted seedlings.

Work is going well. I feel like people appreciate and value my work which is always a nice environment to be in. Plus I enjoy it most of the time. I think I am ready for a day off though. I can not take vacation or sick time for my first six months there. Stupid. I wonder if they would change that rule if a new hire came to work with the flu and got the HR director sick because the newbie couldn't take a sick day.

The "b" key on our laptop's keyboard is broken. I am thinking about taking it apart to see if I can fix it, but I am worried I might cause more damage than good.

Me enjoying a cup of coffee before our Intelligentsia Coffee factory tour last weekend. I think they probably have the best coffee in the United States. It is what Charlie Trotter serves in his restaurant!


We took home a pound of coffee from this freshly roasted batch. As Shawn would say: "Deeeeeeelicous!"

There is a neat piece of free software called POI Loader you can download from Garmin for use with most of their recent-model GPS units.

POI stands for Point Of Interest. My GPS came with about 6 million POI's all over the United States. A POI can be a restaurant, airport, a historical monument, gas station, ATM, post office, shopping center, movie theater, hospital, etc. In early 2000 when Sheri had her gall bladder attack at 2:00 AM in a town we were unfamiliar with I just went to the hospital POI tab on my GPS, searched for the nearest hospital, and it got us there.

The POI Loader software lets you create your own POIs and then transfer them to your GPS unit. You could load new restaurants, mailboxes, all of your friend's houses, etc.

It would be a pretty neat tool if it stopped right there, but it does two other even neater things.

First it can load POIs with speed information attached to it, and if you go over the speed specified by that POI it will start beeping at you. You can program in speed traps, school zones, tight curves, etc. If you stay at or below what you have programmed in it does nothing. This is a feature that gets a lot of use in the UK. The have a huge network of unmanned speed cameras all around the country. A small industry has popped up that keeps track of these speed cameras and daily posts fresh POI files on the Internet. People load them into their GPS units before a drive and get a warning before they approach a speed camera. How far away from the POI it sounds an alarm is dependant on your speed. I think it said it calculates the distance to sound the alarm so you have 36 seconds before you get there. If you are going 30 mph it will warn you when you are 1,584 feet from it. If you are going 70 mph it will warn you at 3,696 feet which is almost 3/4 of a mile.

The second neat thing it can do with POI's is a proximity alert. This gives you a little warning before you get to a point regardless of how fast you are going. The impetus for this was the stop light cameras that take your picture when you run a red light. You can also use this feature for other cool stuff. Maybe for all of the rest stops along a tollway so you do not miss one. Maybe all of the Starbucks to give you a heads-up in case you need a little caffeine. Maybe extra large alignment-destroying potholes. The possibilities are endless.

I just loaded a few test ones for around the neighborhood and went for a quick drive. They work as advertised. Very cool.

The record format is longitude, latitude, description@speed

So a speed trap record on I-88 might look something like this:

-88.17385,41.80625,Speed Trap@63

I would not get a warning unless I was going 64 mph or faster.

The proximity POI has two things different about it. The first is there is no speed indication associated with it so a record would look like this:

-87.64190,41.67796,Halsted & 119th

The second thing different is not in the record format, but in the name of the file you create. If the upload program sees the word "redlight" anywhere in the name of the file it will treat all POIs in that file as proximity POIs. That's it. Piece of cake.

By the way both of my examples really are either a speed trap or a red light camera. Feel free to use them.

The type of file these records need to be in is CSV which stands for comma separated values. It is just a text file with the extension changed from .txt to .csv.

You put all of the CSV POI files in one directory and point the POI Loader to that directory. Any CSV file it sees in that directory will get loaded. It will overwrite any previous POIs you had loaded on your GPS.

One of the things we do on a regular basis is try to remember where the closest mailbox is while we are out running errands to mail back a DVD from our on-line queue. I think a long term project I might do is shoot the GPS points for all of the mailboxes I come across in our city and then load them to our GPS. Yeah, I know my idea of fun is a little bit different.

We learned on our coffee factory tour that roasting destroys acids in the coffee. A lightly roasted coffee has the most acid while French roast has almost no acids left.

As I mentioned the other night we received the GPS we ordered. It is the Garmin StreetPilot i2 and so far I think I love it. It is going to replace the GPS unit we have that cost more than five times what this one costs.

The form factor is really amazing. It is entirely self-contained in a package about the size of a tennis ball. It is only $240 so obviously there are some things missing that the $2,000 - $3,000 factory installed units have.

1. The screen is small at only 1.7" wide by 1.3" high. If you have ever driven with an automotive GPS you know that once you are going you rely mostly on the audible instructions. You glance at the screen once in a while for clarification on a turn, distance until next turn, and name of the street you need to turn on. The screen size is totally adequate for all of this.

2. The screen is black and white, not color. Color looks nice and pretty, but I think it only provides minimal, if any, extra functionality or usability over black and white.

3. It does not have a hard drive. It comes with a DVD with street level detail of the entire United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. You have to load map data from the DVD to the GPS using your computer. I uploaded all of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Missouri and that is all it can hold. If I was going to travel to another state I would have to delete a state and then add the new state. It took about 15 minutes to load all of that data to the GPS. If you were a salesman that covered more than five states regularly that might become inconvenient. For my purposes it is a totally acceptable tradeoff between functionality and price.

4. One of the biggest reasons for the huge price differences between this unit and other more expensive units is how it handles the temporary loss of the GPS signal when going under bridges, tunnels, heavy foliage, etc. On the factory installed units there are inputs to the GPS from the cars speedometer, a compass, and/or gyroscopes. Let's say you enter a long tunnel that has a fork about half way through. The expensive unit will keep making a guess on your location based on how far you have traveled based on your speedometer. At the fork the compass and/or gyroscopes will know if you veered left or right. This process is known as dead reckoning. When you exit the tunnel it will take a few seconds to pick up the GPS signal. To the user it should all be transparent and it will appear that the GPS knew exactly where you where the entire time. Our old portable unit was obviously not tied into our car's speedometer, but it did have a couple gyroscope-like sensors inside of the unit. When it lost the signal it would know if you veered one way or the other, and it could also sense acceleration and deceleration. If it didn't sense an increase or decrease in speed it assumed you maintained the speed you were traveling when the signal was lost. Our new GPS does not have any ancillary sensors like that. When it loses signal it will keep plotting your course for 30 seconds using the speed when the signal was lost. It won't know if you have accelerated, stopped, or if you took a turn. Again, the reduced functionality is totally offset for me by the huge price difference.

The lack of a larger screen, hard drive, and ancillary sensors is also what lets the unit be stuffed into a purse or laptop bag, and then used in any car you want.

You can search from over 6 million points of interest. (restaurants, hospitals, shopping centers, etc.) or you can enter an address or intersection.

There is software that lets you load your own points of interest data. There are lots of enthusiast sites where you can download POI files others have created. (mailboxes, speed traps, etc.)

The unit itself feels solidly built. The scroll wheel has a nice smooth feel. The buttons have a nice firm click.

We have not used it for any trips yet where we did not know where we were going, but from my experience with it so far I have no problems recommending it.

For an extra $60 (300 total) you can get the StreetPilot i3 which is the same unit except with a color display.

For an extra $140 ($380 total) you can get the StreetPilot i5 which has a color screen and all of the map data already loaded. You do not have to load map data from a DVD.

Outside the Weiner Circle late Friday night.



This was our order.



People waiting in line for some tasty dogs and abuse.

Last week was our 10 year anniversary and we wanted to do something special. We decided to spend the weekend in Chicago. At 6 PM on Friday we had a cab pick us up at home and take us to the local train station. We got to Union Station around 7:30 PM and then hopped on the L to get to the northeast corner of the Loop. We walked to the hotel, checked in, and went up to our room to freshen up and relax for a little bit. We were a little tired from the day at work as well as getting downtown.

After about 30 minutes or so at 9 PM we changed clothes and went back out. We took the Brown line north to the Diversey stop and walked to the world-famous Weiner Circle. I have never been there but have wanted to for a long time.

It is a really good hot dog stand open very late at night, but what makes it famous is the way the staff is rude to you. Not rude like at Ed Debevic's, but rude like dropping the F-bomb, along with several other bombs, every other word. If you don't order fast enough they tell you to hurry the &%$# up. If you stumble on your order they tell you to get the @#$%& out of your mouth. You get the idea. They didn't give me a tough time, but gave me a dirty look and didn't talk to me other than "What do you want?" and "$10.19". The dogs and fries were fantastic though. At least equal to Gold Coast Dogs, probably a little better because they put more stuff on. The fries were fantastic too as well as a bargain.

After we ate and hung around a bit to watch others getting abused, we walked across the street to a 7-Eleven for a few things, and then back to the L stop.

Back at the hotel we got into our PJ's and watched TV in bed until around midnight.

Saturday morning we woke up at 6:30 AM and went downstairs for the buffet breakfast. It is normally $19 per person, but because we used our AAA discount we also got coupons for free breakfast. It was really good. They had an omelet station, and they brewed Starbuck's coffee. We took our time and read the newspaper for a couple hours.

We walked to the L and took the Green line west to the Ashland stop, and then walked a couple blocks to the Intelligentsia coffee factory. The first Saturday of each month they give tours of the facility. I have wanted to take the tour since I discovered Intelligentsia, and it just happened to work out for us. The tour is $7 per person, but each person gets a half pound of freshly roasted coffee, which is about what their coffee costs anyway, so it's kind of like a free tour with the purchase of their coffee.

They roasted a 69 kilogram (152 pounds) burlap bag of coffee to illustrate the roasting process, and then that freshly roasted batch of coffee is what they sent us home with.

We took the L back to the Loop and went to the Marshall Field's store for a light lunch. We went to the basement deli and got a half pound of pesto chicken salad, a half pound of broccoli salad, and a couple of rolls. We split that and then just sat there for a while and watched all of the people. After a while we got an iced coffee and an oatmeal cookie.

Around 2:30 PM we walked back to the L and took the Brown line north to the Belmont stop. We had 4 PM tickets to the Blue Man Group. We had a great time and recommend it.

After the show we went to a nearby Ethiopian restaurant. We have never tried Ethiopian food and we both really enjoyed it. The most distinctive thing about the dinner is the big sour dough pancakes that come with the dinner. One large pancake is laid out on a platter and everything is ladled onto that. We ordered a dinner-for-two combo and it came with lamb, chicken, spinach, cabbage, and something similar to hummus. It also came with four of the pancakes on the side. You ripped off a piece of the pancake and used that to scoop up some food from the platter. No utensils are used. The dinner also came with a couple of appetizers: a bowl of vegetable soup, and a small bowl of cold lentils and some flour tortilla squares to scoop it up with. Sheri LOVED the lentils. Slight spicy. Dessert was a small bowl of something between yogurt and cream cheese with a raspberry sauce drizzled over it.

We enjoyed our leisurely walk back to the L and the ride back to the hotel. We watched Mad TV and Saturday Night Live in bed until we fell asleep.

Sunday morning we woke up and had breakfast at the buffet again, read the paper in the lobby for a little bit, and then took a cab to Union Station in time to get the 10:30 AM train back home.

When we got back home the GPS I ordered was waiting for me on the porch. I didn't expect it until Tuesday. I was glad to get it early, but I was also a little annoyed that it sat on porch for over 24 hours, but all's well that ends well. I LOVE it and highly recommend it. I will write more in-depth about it very soon.

Sheri came back from doing a little shopping and then we went to Meijer for a few things. We picked up some ground beef and a couple ears of corn on the cob for dinner.

I took out the glass and installed the screen on our front door, and moved the garden hose to the backyard and watered the flower beds.

We are watching Desperate Housewives now and will go to bed when it is over.

That about covers our great anniversary weekend and I will post pictures of the weekend tomorrow.

I like keeping Kashi Go Lean bars on hand at work because they are high in protein (one bar has 20% RDA), high in fiber (24% RDA), and its carbohydrates have a low glycemic index, which means your body slowly converts it to blood sugar rather than giving you a huge spike all at once.

Anyway, some of the flavors have a nougat-like center that is very very firm, to the point of hurting your teeth and tiring out your jaw. I had the idea to microwave it for a few seconds to soften it up.

I tossed it into the microwave and pressed the start button. After just two seconds the inside of the microwave was filled with bright sparks. I forgot the inside of the wrapper is metallic. I opened the microwave door and the wrapper and shrink-wrapped itself tightly to the bar. I guess the metallic part heated up quickly and caused the plastic part of the wrapper to melt and shrink. I looked really cool though.

I pried the wrapper off and put it back in the microwave by itself for an additional 10 seconds. It worked great. The inside was much easier to bite off. I think that is what I will do with them from now on.

Around 3:00 AM this morning I was half awake and heard a noise coming from Sheri's side of the bed. It took me a second for it to register, but then I determined it was Sheri grinding her teeth.

It didn't sound just like teeth clicking against each other, but a destructive high-pressure grinding that would most surely result in going to the dentist for painful crowns to replace the parts that got chipped off. Once it sunk in I quickly jumped to wake her up as quickly as possible to stop the damage. It turned it was just the sound of her trying to force the plastic cap back onto a tub of Vaseline. I got shivers for the next couple of minutes every time I heard the sound in my head and imagined it was her teeth.