What a great day! It was Sheri's first day at the new job and I was slightly anxious that things were not going to work out, but they did wonderfully.

My first anxiety was that there might have been a miscommunication between her, the recruiter and the employer and that she would show up to work and they would say something like "Mr. Smith will be in conference room B for your second interview." The recruiter didn't speak English as a first language and was very difficult to understand on the phone and was a soft-talker. After her first interview they said if they liked her they would call her back for a second interview with the head boss, but when they did call it was to say come to work. Something just didn't seem right.

My second anxiety was that her group would be a repeat of the group she was in when we first moved to Chicago. She felt like an outsider and they did not go out of their way to make her feel welcome. If that was the case and she dreaded going to work every morning, and Sunday nights brought on depression, I would feel the anxiety just as much as she does, maybe more. After one day she thinks everyone in her group are all good people with similar personalities and temperaments and all about the same age. She really felt good about the whole thing.

I didn't know on her first day if she was going to have an opportunity to call me and fill me in on how the day was going, so I made a little code list she could use to call me, tell me the code, and hang up whenever she had a free minute in the restroom or breakroom. I couldn't stand not knowing if she was dying a slow death all day. This is the list:

A Doing great! People are nice. I think I will enjoy the work.
B OK. A little nervous but I am hiding it OK. Nothing bad or uncomfortable.
C As well as can be expected. It will take me a few weeks to get comfortable.
D Uncomfortable but I will live.
F This sucks. Can't wait to get home.

She called me after being there an hour and said she was at level "C". Great! I thanked God it wasn't a "D" or "F".

After about another hour or so she called back and she moved up to a "B". Awesome!

After lunch she called again and she inched up to a "B+"! I wanted to do a little jig right then and there. The rest of the day stayed at "B+".

Just that would have made it a great day, but we went out for a great celebration dinner which made it a really great day. We never got around going out for a celebration dinner for the contract job she started in November, the start of my new job in January, or her birthday, so tonight's dinner covered all of these.

We went to one of Sheri's top five favorite restaurants if not her favorite: Sullivan's Steakhouse.

We started off with their signature lettuce wedges with blue cheese chunks and tomatoes. (I actually think these are the real reason she loves Sullivan's. These are her favorite.) We also had a nice loaf of hot bread and iced tea.

She couldn't manage a whole steak so we split a 16 ounce New York strip. We also split an order of creamed spinach and an order of au gratin potatoes. We decided to stay for dessert and coffee and we split an amazing crème brulee. Everything was fantastic and was the perfect end to a good day.

Our Sunday

I cooked us a nice hearty breakfast of eggs and rashers and coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and read the Sunday paper while we ate.

We hung out in the family room watching TV for a bit and then we both went upstairs to the office for a couple hours. Sheri hung out with me while I finished our taxes. All I have to do is submit them on-line, but I want to do one more review before I pull the trigger.

After that we got on our street clothes and ran the following errands:

1. Filled up Sheri's tank with gas so she will be all set for her first week of commuting again.

2. Went to Trader Joe's to stock up on snacks for work. Sheri got a handful of Luna bars. I got a handful of Kashi bars, two bags of their roasted peanuts and a bag of sunflower seeds.

3. Stopped at Walgreen's to try a new Hershey's Extra Dark chocolate bar. Walgreen's had it advertised in today's paper for $1.50 which is 50¢ off. I didn't have high expectations but it was really good. It has a 60% cacao content. Very smooth texture. Complex flavor. I think it compares very favorably to my other two favorite chocolate bars from Lindt and Scharffen Berger. I just now remembered something as a wrote that last sentence: Hershey's bought Scharffen Berger about a year ago. I'll bet they used a little of what they learned from that purchase to come out with this new product line. Give it a try when you want to treat yourself to a little something.


4. Home Depot for the season's first bag of lawn fertilizer. We also wanted to check out house plants and I wanted to pick up a box of galvanized decking nails in case I ever need to make any repairs to our fence.

5. Meijer for some things for this week's dinners. We got a chuck roast on special for $2 per pound for the crock pot on Wednesday, and lettuce and a tomato for BLTs on Tuesday night. We were looking for the new Coke BlaK and didn't see it, but there were a couple guys with Coke uniforms on so I asked them what they knew about it. They told us Target had it for sale.

6. We stopped at Starbucks for Sheri.

7. Went to Target to get the Coke BlaK.

We are hanging out now watching Simpson's and Desperate Housewives. I just opened up a Coke BlaK and I love it! To tell you the truth I actually don't taste coffee too much. It actually has more of a rich caramel taste. Maybe like the way the caramelized sugar tastes on crème brulee. I can actually see enjoying one as a dessert rather than knocking one back to quench my thirst.

We picked up a four-pack of the new Coca-Cola BlaK today at Target and it is icing down now.

It is Coke with a little coffee taste added. Also it has half the sugar and twice the caffeine as a regular Coke.

I read a review of it and they said the coffee taste is very very weak, so I am not expecting much, but I love trying new stuff.

Target has the four-pack of 8 ounce bottles for $5. I'll let you know what I think of it.

I thought our taxes paid for city paramedic service, but we just got a bill in the mail for $300 for last month's call. I will call Monday to see if our insurance covers it.

It has been forever since I have had popovers, and I have been having a craving for them lately, so I just put a batch in the oven. Sheri says I have never made them for her before, but it seems like I would have at least once or twice. Maybe when she takes a bite of one it will refresh her memory. She claims the only time she ever had a popover was in the fifth grade at a friend's house. She says she vividly remembers thinking it was the best thing she ever ate so maybe she is right and I never made them for her. The will be ready in about 30 minutes.

One of our fence posts on our six foot privacy fence broke in the strong winds we have been having the last few days. Last night I pounded a stake into the ground at an angle away from the fence and then nailed a 2 x 4 to the fence and the stake to brace the fence until it gets fixed so the fence sections don't break and cost us more money.

I will be conducting five training sessions over two days next week for the users of my application. I will be going to their sites so I will be doing a lot of driving. It will be a nice change from the normal pace. I did two training sessions last week but I took a programmer with me just in case something happened that I didn't know how to recover from. It was a good thing because he had to Remote Desktop back into the application server to reset a couple things.

Next week I will conduct four more training sessions and then all of the users will be trained for the phase one of the rollout. We will run parallel with the current process for at least a couple weeks to work out any problems that arise. Once we are comfortable everything is working correctly I will cut off the current process and have everyone use my app.

In healthy, non-diabetic patients the HbA1c level is less than 7% of total hemoglobin. It has been demonstrated that the complications of diabetes can be delayed or prevented if the HbA1c level can be kept close to 7%. In general, values should be kept below 8%.

Four months ago I was at 6.1% and on Saturday I was at 6.3%.

I heard on the news this morning that gas is likely to pass $3.00 per gallon this summer.

My Weekend

Friday morning before I left for work I put a quartered onion, a cup of water and a corned beef brisket into the crock pot on low. I have never cooked corned beef in a crock pot, I have always boiled it, and I was a little concerned about it being too salty. It was a little saltier than I would have liked it, but not to the point of being inedible. It was extremely tender though. I also picked out an especially lean cut. I will probably do it in the crock pot again, but maybe next time I will add more water to help leach out more of the salt.

Every Thanksgiving and every St. Patrick's day I always wonder why I don't cook turkey or corned beef the rest of the year since I like them both so much. Maybe I will see if Sheri is interested in having me cook some more corned beef when she gets back.

Without Sheri here to make me go to bed I stayed up way too late watching TV and surfing the Net on the couch. I didn't close my eyes until after 4 AM. Because of that my Saturday was kind of a waste. I didn't get out of bed until 11 AM. I wanted to do our taxes and maybe clean out the fish tank. I made it to CompUSA to buy a webcam that was on sale and to Trader Joe's for some more soy protein and milk. The rest of the day was spent playing with the web cam on the couch. I made sure I got to bed at a more reasonable hour Saturday night. I think I was in bed by 11:30 PM and watched a little TV for about half an hour or so.

This morning I got up at a decent time, made some coffee and a bowl of cereal and ate that while I flipped through the paper at the kitchen table.

I went through some mail, paid some bills, and then started working on the taxes a bit. I think I have most of it done. I just have to check out a couple other deductions.

A little bit ago I started getting hungry so I cooked the other half of the head of cabbage from Friday and warmed up the remaining corned beef and ate that while I watched the Malaysian Grand Prix. Giancarlo Fisichella from Italy won driving for Renault.

I think I am done working on taxes for today. I think I am going to let my corned beef and cabbage digest a bit and then give the fish tank the long overdue cleaning it needs.

I also plan on watching the Ohio State game at 3:50 PM CST.

Today's long-distance hidden-surprise was a 10-pack of Trident gum with a note that said "You are my sunshine. I love you."

Sheri is in Columbus for a week visiting her Mom and her sister's family. Every evening she has called and directed me to a different hiding place in the house.

The first night I found a Twinkie two-pack with a note saying she is missing me already.

The next night I found a little packet of smoked almonds with a note saying she is nuts about me.

Tonight I found a little bag of malted milk balls (robin's eggs) with a note wishing me a happy St. Patrick's day.

Can I get a "What! What!" for Tim-In-Law? He has decided to pick up his blog again. Welcome back.

Last year around this time I was jonesing for a good all-you-can-eat fish fry, and I didn't want it from a restaurant. I wanted it to be more like homemade. The places for that? Churches and VFWs.

I did some looking last year and found the local VFW has a Lenten fish fry every Friday evening. Boy was I excited. And boy was I disappointed. The VFW hall is huge and a lot of people show up for it. That is the first strike against it. With a couple hundred people all demanding fish there is no way they can cook it up fast enough as they need it. Therefore they must have cooked it up well ahead of time and put it under a heat lamp. They had two kinds of fish. One tasted good but was cold and chewy. The other was a little more tender and fresher, but very fishy. The second strike against it was that the food was not prepared by the VFW members, but by a hired catering company.

This Friday the fish fry jonesing started again. I resigned myself that I wasn't going to find any good fish fries locally, and would probably have to drive out to an area that is a little more rural.

I asked Sheri to do some on-line searching while I wrapped up at work and drove home. She hit gold. A neighboring village has a nine hole golf course with a little pub where you can stop for a beer and a bite to eat after golfing. It turns out they have a fish fry every Friday night, not just during Lent. What gave me high hopes was the on-line menu said it was "hand breaded". I didn't want some frozen-solid pieces of fish that were breaded in a factory months ago.

The second I saw the fish I knew it was going to be great. They were big irregularly shaped filets of cod, not uniform cookie cutter factory fish. The batter was not overly thick or salty. After my first three filets I would removed the breading from one side of filet before I ate it to reduce the number of calories.

We will definitely be going back. I was going to post a picture of the outside of the building, but now I don't think I will. The place has a really small dining room area, and when we arrived there were only two tables open, so I don't want to hip all of the locals to the place and make it too popular. If that happened the best case scenario is we would have to wait in line for a table. Worse case scenario the quality would slip and/or they would raise the price.

They also have sweet potato fries on the menu. The next time we go we are going to tell them not to bring us the regular fries, and order a basket of sweet potato fries instead. Sweet potatoes are much MUCH better for you than regular white potatoes.

I love grape soda, but for years lamented that I could not find any diet grape soda.

While strolling down the soft drink aisle at Meijer on Friday evening I looked up, and in plain sight I saw "Meijer Diet Grape Soda". I couldn't believe it at first. I have actively looked for diet grape for years, and all of sudden right in front of me, there it was.

When it sunk in I think I almost ran across the aisle to grab one, just to make sure I beat anyone else that may have been on a diet grape soda quest. I grabbed two more just in case I never see diet grape soda on the store shelves again.

The verdict? Delicious. I plan to contact the store manager and request that they make that a regularly stocked item.

The kicker? It only cost something like $0.68 for a two liter bottle! I would seriously probably buy three bottles on every visit to the store even if it was in the $2.00 per bottle range.

We had a really nice time yesterday (Saturday). Jake's wife Jackie had a work-related conference to attend in the loop. She had to come in Thursday evening and attend the conference on Friday and Saturday. Jake thought he would take the opportunity to visit Chicago. They are hosting a foreign exchange student and brought her and one of her high school friends along as well. (Jake is a college friend, a college roommate, and the best man in our wedding. Only myself and anyone that have met him through me call him Jake.)

We got on the train that arrives at Union Station at 9:40 AM and had them meet us at the station. We thought we would start the day by letting them experience the world famous Lou Mitchell's for breakfast.





Their foreign exchange student on the right and her friend on the left.


The original plan for the day was to get them out of the Loop and Mag Mile area and into some Chicago neighborhoods that are not touristy. That changed however when we found out that it was Chicago's big Saint Patrick's day parade. The first big event of a Chicago Saint Patrick's day celebration is the river is dyed a bright unnatural fluorescent green. So after breakfast we followed the Chicago river up to the Michigan Avenue bridge where the dye is added. I have never seen it in person and did not realize how bright green it actually gets.







The river dying started at 10:45 AM, and the parade was scheduled to start at noon. We knew that Jackie had a lunch break at noon and she said she was probably going to a Corner Bakery that was near the conference for lunch. We went to the Corner Bakery to see if we could intercept her and take her to the parade. We couldn't find her so walked down to Jackson and Columbus to watch the parade. I was disappointed I didn't get to see any bagpipes. We got there a little after it started so maybe they were at the front of the parade. I love the pipes and drums.





Except for the green beer that was all of the Saint Patrick's day festivities we knew of, so we thought we would take the Brown Line to the Belmont stop and walk around there for a bit. We thought the girls would like Hollywood Mirror and The Alley, but it was just too different for them. I bought an African shirt at The Alley that I almost bought the last time I was there. I will post a picture of me wearing it later.

On the way to the Belmont stop a group of drunk girls celebrating Saint Patrick's day got on the train. One of the girls, from head to toe, could have been a Playboy playmate, and Sheri and I made a face at each other with a look that said "A hot girl that could be a Playboy playmate has her butt about 4 inches from my face." Well lucky me, she took a liking to your humble narrator. She offered me some of her vodka. Put her green feather boa around my neck. Took our picture. Told me she only moved here 7 months ago from north west Indiana. This was only the second time she had taken the L. (This was the point where she earned the trixie label.)

It was also fun that they kept forgetting they were on a moving train and kept forgetting to hold on. They crashed into me multiple times which was much better than a first date if you know what I mean. After a while she sat in the seat in front of us next to Jake. Her other friend sat on her lap. Her friend put her hand on my knee to steady herself thinking it was her friend's knee. I didn't say anything. I was surprised she didn't look as good in the pictures as she did in person. Sheri agreed she was adorable though.







We hopped back on the L to make sure we were at the hotel when Jackie was scheduled to be done with her conference at 4:00 PM. We got there a little early so we got some drinks, relaxed, and watched the Ohio State game at the hotel bar.

When we met up with Jackie she was starving because she had almost nothing to eat all day. We decided to walk to the Near North and see what we could find. We ended up at Big Bowl. I had some spicy Szechuan eggplant. Very good.

It was going on 5:30 PM and they had a 5 hour drive ahead of them, so we said our goodbyes in front of the restaurant and we made our way back to Union Station. We walked the whole way back and I wish we would have taken the L because I had a blister on each foot and drank too much water with dinner and painfully needed a restroom.

We got the 6:30 PM train back home. There was an old crazy guy a couple seats in front of us that provided us with some entertainment. Too much stuff to write about everything but I will give a couple of highlights. He sat next to a guy that looked trapped. It was fun to watch the expression on the trapped guy's face. At one point the crazy guy was reading the fine print to the trapped guy from a couple of McDonald's coupons. When they unplug the train from the station power and switch over to the train generators they have to turn the lights off for a minute. When the did this the crazy guy belted out and scare everyone with "Turn on the lights! I'm trying to read!" He was wearing TWO pairs of prescription glasses. I don't know how he could see anything. He had a pair of Christmas-themed suspenders on. His pants where about half way to his armpits. He was proudly telling the trapped guy how he didn't need to wasted a plastic spoon to eat his McDonald's ice cream sundae. He just uses the lid. Then he proceeded to take a big ball of napkins that were rubber-banded together out of his pocket. He took of the rubber bands and revealed, what else, a McDonalds ice cream sundae. He then started to eat it with the lid and made a sticky mess of himself. He had a two-foot piece of paper towel from the men's room and used that as a bib. I should have taken a picture.

On the way home we stopped and got some fat-free no sugar added ice cream, a banana, pretzels, and some double-chocolate syrup so we could make sundaes.

We got home, took showers, changed into our PJ's, made sundaes, and crashed on the couch and watched TV. We both felt achy in certain spots from all the walking we did. I had blisters on both feet, my right calf was cramping, and, as expected, my back and neck were sore. Sheri's felt a little sore in her hips. We both fell hard asleep on the couch and then went upstairs around 1 AM.

Sheri's emergency room total is now over $6,500.

A Starbucks press release says: "Starbucks will host its first-ever Starbucks Coffee Break on March 15 from 10 a.m. to noon, inviting customers across the country to enjoy a complimentary cup of freshly brewed coffee. In stores and on street corners, from insulated brewing equipment and giant coffee backpacks, partners (employees) will pour tall (12-ounce) cups of coffee to surprise customers and delight commuters.

I stopped by the Post Office today during my lunch hour. There was one person in front of me and two behind me. A little old lady that could barely walk and had a walker and a bunch of stuff falling out from under her arms was about to try and go through a door. With as much difficulty as she was having just staying vertical I knew there was no way she was going to get through the door on her own.

I said excuse me and squeezed past the guy in front of me and opened the door for the lady. She thanked me and then asked if I could also get the two vestibule doors. I walked ahead and got the door and patiently waited while she shuffled her way to me. Then I opened the second vestibule door and waited while she did some more shuffling and listened to her complain about how she has complained before about the handicapped buttons not working on the doors but they never do anything.

As I walked back in I was trying to decide if I was going to ask for my place back in line or just go back to the end. I decided I was not in a hurry and didn't feel like explaining myself so I just made my way to the end of the line. The grandma that was behind me in line smiled at me and told me to take my place back in line in front of her. She said it was so nice what I did.

When it was my turn to walk up to a clerk the first thing he said in kind of a snotty tone was "Did you just cut in front of all those people waiting in line?" Crap. "I was in line but the old lady you were helping was trying…" then the grandma behind me piped in and stood up for me. The clerk didn't say anything else to me during the rest of my transaction. No good deed goes unpunished.

So far the total is $3,404.25 for Sheri's emergency room visit two weeks ago.

Look at the love in D's eyes.

I had a meeting in the Loop today for a few hours, and Sheri didn't have anything going on, so we went down early and ate breakfast at a little crepe place and read the paper for a couple hours. When I went to my meeting she wandered around for a bit and then had lunch with a friend. When I was done with the meeting I met her at Ogilvie where she just hanging out reading a book and people watching.

When we got home I made a quick batch of hummus and we ate some of that for dinner while we watched Doom. The movie was just OK. Nothing great. Fun just to watch the special effects.