Dinner and a Show

Tonight Tara and I went out to a place called "Smash Burger", a new restaurant in town. Their thing seems to be smashing meat before they cook it.

I had a chicken sandwich, Tara had a chicken salad. Mine was a grilled chicken on a multigrain roll. It was pretty good, and the bread didn't really upset my stomach all that much. Nice fresh topping as well.

Tara's salad seemed pretty big, she seemed to like it. You order sides a la carte, I got the smash fries, which were french fries with olive oil, rosemary, garlic and what they call "other herbs". I thought they would have been perfect had they had just a little bit less oil on them. Tara got Haystack Onions, which were like little unbreaded onion rings. We both decided that we wouldn't try those again. They were just greasy fried onions, but not wet. Not sure how else to describe them.

They had on their menu something called veggie frites - "flash fried asparagud spears, carrot sticks, and green beans". Sounds pretty good.

After dinner, we went up to campus to see the play "Tartuffe". The cast seemed to have a pretty good time with it. I am sure I read the thing years ago, likely in High School, or something.

Anyhow, the one risk with sitting on the front row of the Pardoe series year after year, is that in the livelier plays, there is a tradition of selective enforced audience participation. A couple of plays ago, we went with another couple to the play. The husband (Kirk) was serenaded to on bended knee by one of the actors. Last time there were some actors in cool animal masks weaving their way through us.

Different story today. They had some sort of thing during the intermission where the actors kind of goofed off and danced around. Kirk, who went last week, told us to not miss the intermission. One of the maid laides came down and asked me to dance. Tara fully expected me to tell her no. I'm not sure what made me go up there, maybe it was the opportunity to make a total fool of myself on a stage.

Anyhow, she asked me if I knew how to waltz, which I guess was a no. She tried to tell me to use a three step dance, and we would just go around the piano on the stage. What I know she was thinking was "Why is it that the very irresistible and ruggedly handsome ones are the clumsy ones. I hope I'm not maimed here..."

Anyhow, go see "Tartuffe". It's a good play. Just don't sit on the front row.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Payne

Grandpa,


I brought this card I made for you home on Saturday afternoon. My lazy good for nothing Dad didn't help me get it in an envelope with a stamp until tonight.

Since it's your birthday today, I think the card will be a little late. That same son of yours tried to call after he got home from work, but there wasn't any answer, it was too late to call when he got back from his Stake meetings. We hope you had a good birthday.

Love,
Kate

I think Ruth did it...

Tara's going to be home in an hour. What do the girls do to get ready for her to come home? Clean their rooms? Take naps? Finish eating their lunch?

Nope. Someone decorated their little brother. With permanent marker.

At least there is no Hitler mustache. And we don't have a family picture scheduled. I was so close...

LDS Humanitarian Services: Haiti Relief Widget (Maranda)

Reading

I haven't been doing a lot of reading lately, I don't know what the problem is. It's not for a lack of books. I think I am just lazy. Tara read 94 books last year. I read nine, which doesn't even sound all that big when you spell it out.

I'm not even sure what I want to read. I've got some books hear at home in a pile, there's one sitting in the truck, and I've got one sitting at my desk at work. But none of them are getting read. I guess I need some suggestions.

Tara suggests that I read "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", but that seems like a thinly veiled attempt at getting me to read a Jane Austin book. Anyone else got anything to recommend? I've read quite a few in the past, I even once had a page listing all the ones I could remember. Maybe I need to rebuild that web page. Maybe there will be something in there that triggers something. Maybe I should look through the ones documented here. I think I'm tired of biographies right now, unless someone has a compelling one to recommend.

Anyhow, last year I read 9 books, in 2008 I read 17, in 2007 I read 14 books. Nothing close to 94. Maybe this year I should set a goal to read 12 books. One a month. Otherwise, I can totally see myself not getting any reading at all in this year...

Good times

We went to Drew's tonight for Anson's birthday party. Drew has built a little play area downstairs, including an indoor slide. (Bean bag at the bottom as a landing pad.) The girls had a good time down there.



Adam enjoyed watching everyone slide down the thing, once he figured out what was going on. I sat him down on a bean bag at the end of the room to watch the festivities.



Good times...

The dinner Tara missed out on

I was at the store tonight ("Babysitter Thursday"), and figured I should eat something for dinner. I was in the produce aisle and got some zucchini. Last year in NYC, at Carmine's, we had some fried shredded zucchini. It was great. I've been trying to duplicate the recipe, and I think I am getting closer. They don't have the recipe in their cookbook, just a picture of the things. It might be time to for an investigative return trip...

Anyhow, after getting the zucchini, I thought "steak pizzaiola." I can't resist. I got a nice ribeye. I went home to send the babysitter on her way.

The onion rings were a game time decision. And not a bad one. Unless I wake up in the morning paying for it all.

Tara's out of town, so I didn't had back on the crushed red pepper, either. Good stuff.

Restaurant Review

Chili's
American Fork, UT

We were driving around looking for a place to eat last night. I wasn't feeling the greatest and didn't want to stop at a place that would upset my stomach. Chili's was a safe bet, I can always count on their chips and salsa in a pinch. (I once got a double order of chips & salsa at the St. Louis airport, for a flight to somewhere back East. The people sitting next to me watched me eat the entire bag. There were very impressed...)

Tara and I rarely get the deals that have dinner for two for a particular price, usually there is either not something on the list I can/should/care to eat, or we are in the mood for something else, but this time we got Chili's 3 course dinner for two for $20.

We got the onion string & jalapeno stack for the appetizer. I ordered chips and salsa as well. The onion/jalapeno dish was pretty good. I ate about 18 of the japaenos, which I expected to not be super hot, but weren't too bad. The breading was much less greasy than the stuff you get from a bloomin'/blossum onion.

I tried their new Mini Tacos for my entree, Tara had the Mesquite Chicken salad. I ended up with two smoky chicken tacos and two ground beef tacos. The chicken tacos were a little bit weird. Maybe there was just a little too much tang in the smokey flavor or something. I thought the ground beef ones were pretty good. I thought the tacos would be crispy shelled when I ordered them, but they ended up being warm corn tortillas, not crispy. Not a problem, really, and probably healthier. Tara really liked her salad, it had all kinds of stuff in it.

For dessert, I think Tara wanted the chocolate chip paradise pie, but it came with ice cream, and she was planning just just take it with her, so she got the strawberry cheesecake. I dropped her off at her sister's house afterwards, and didn't get a report on the dessert, I expect it was just fine...

All in all, the 3 course meal from Chilis seems to be a pretty good deal.

To the Miata parked in front of my house

I'm not sure where your driver is, but he didn't come to my house. Or, likely, our neighbors, who are not home, or the elderly couple across the street. I assume he went to the house to visit one of the single girls over the way.

I'm not sure why you weren't parked in front of that house. No one is parked there at all. Was your driver trying to be sneaky, parking over here? Let me tell you why I park the van in front of the house. It's so those crazy kids of mine do not walk in the mud on the way in the house. This is especially important on a night like tonight, where it's wet.

Maybe your driver didn't notice the truck you got parked behind. It's not a giant of a truck, but it's not a little tiny truck, either. That truck could eat you for lunch. It feels to me like the truck is dying to throw it into 4 wheel drive, pull forward a little, then shift to reverse and let it rip. Up and over, baby, up and over...

For now, console yourself in the fact that I am restraining the truck from taking that action.

Restaurant Review

Slab Pizza
Just South of BYU Campus, Provo

This is a new restaurant in the bottom of an apartment complex. They do 20 inch crispy thin crust pizza. I won a free pizza there the other day, Tara and I went in tonight to try it out.


The pizza is huge. I haven't seen a 20 inch pizza in a long time. Maybe it's the fact that I don't eat that much pizza anymore. Maybe it's the fact that my kids love Little Caesar's... 20 inch. That's over 300 square inches of pizza...

Anyhow, it's a thin crust pizza, cooked just to the point that the crust is crisp and holds it's shape, not so far that it's burnt. Tara and I didn't finish the thing.


We had pepperoni, they had a handful of specialty pizzas as well. They also sell it by the 'slab', a quarter of a pizza (75 square inches - still 1/2 the size of a little caesars pizza) per slab, for less than 4 dollars.

The pizza was pretty tasty, the owner was talking about the nice quality product they use to one of the other customers. Hopefully they can maintain the profit margin, and don't drop the quality of the stuff.

Anyhow - Slab Pizza - worth checking out.

New Toy

Our neighbors brought over an "Elton John junior singing machine" today that they were done with. Adam seems to enjoy singing into it, although he's not wearing the glasses that came with it. I drew the line at the feather boa.

I am just kidding, of course. As far as I know, this has nothing to Elton John, and the glasses were already in the house.

My second support call with Veracity

So, come to find out, the internet connection here at the house still is not quite up to snuff. It's ok, in pieces and chunks, slow the rest of the time. I started poking around tonight, and found that one of the two DNS servers I am getting from my ISP is not responding. It's consistently like that, I've been watching for a while now. One works, one doesn't. I can bypass the dead one on my laptop just fine, which makes things work great. I don't have that option on the wireless router, so things like my phone and the Roku box are out of luck there.

What did I do? I ran a trace of the DNS traffic on my laptop, captured it and bundled it into an email to the people, explaining what I was seeing and asking what can be done to fix it. I got the email address from their website. The result? The email bounces back undeliverable. Who do they think they are, the people that support the Nexus One phone?

Not expecting much out of the call, I picked up the phone and called the support people. (After hours support, you have to understand here...) The call pretty much completely lived up to expectations. I wanted to get an email address from his to mail in my support issue. (Looking to bypass level 1 tech support.) Turns out they won't claim to have an email address for support, only a billing email address.

The guy did a pretty good job trying to figure out what to tell me, based on what seemed like his experience level and whatever quick fix scripts he was using. I talked about how the DNS timeouts were causing response issues, he talked about me going to a speed test site, they would do something for me if my QoS is below the standard. I sort of patiently explained that I didn't have an internet connection speed problem, but a DNS lookup problem. This makes browsing places seem slow, but only because I am waiting for DNS timeouts to finish before a lookup can complete.

He wanted to talk about bypassing the wireless, which I was not interested in talking about. I again explained that I was not able to resolve DNS through one of the two DNS servers they have, and he wanted to talk about manually entering DNS. He asked if I knew how to do that in Windows. I told him I did, and I am sure bypassing DNS to point at the DNS server that was working would get my laptop to function as expected, but would do nothing for any of the other devices at the house, and besides which, I am running Linux on my laptop. His response? "Oh, we don't support Linux."

I thanked him for his time and hung up. No sense trying to go any further. 10 minutes on the phone with him was plenty. What I really need is to get to talk to level 2 support, but I think that will need to wait for morning.

Maybe I need to pull out that Netgear Dave gave me and see if it will let me set the DNS lookups manually or not...

"Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!"

After my epic fail yesterday at washing off the mess in the bathroom yesterday, I decided that I didn't really want to live my life like Lady MacBeth. (I don't watch crime dramas on TV. Do you ever see someone cleaning up the messes the next day on CSI or Law and Order?) Anyhow, on the way home from work today, we stopped for nail polish remover, both acetone and acetone-free.

The acetone-free nail polish remover didn't really do much. I used a lot of it, but it didn't help much, so I moved to the hard stuff. Turns out the real nail polish remover actually removes nail polish! It also removes paint. (More brown was coming off than red, so I'll leave the wall for later, when I get the paint out in the Spring to finish painting the house. The bathroom had some places that needed touching up anyway...)

Tomorrow there may not be any paint left on a couple of areas of the bathroom, and the plastic seat lid may turn black and crack, but for now, the bathroom doesn't look completely like a crime scene.

Sunday Morning Follies

Sunday mornings never seem to be uneventful around here... We have church now at 1pm, which in a way is nice, because we come home, get dinner ready, and by the time they eat and things, they are ready for bed, especially since the little kids miss their naps.

One of the benefits and drawbacks to the later time is that there is more time in the morning to get ready for church. This also sometimes translates to sleeping in, at least until Lily decides she must have cheese, and comes asking for it 15 billion times.

I thought we were ahead of the game this morning, because Adam got a bath last night instead of this morning. He was a little nervous, though because Lily and Ruth kept trying to inch closer to watch him take a bath. He successfully shouted them off last night. Today, however, was not without drama.


Today's drama included, but was not limited to Mary opening a door to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and having a jar of pink nail polish fall and break everywhere. This was 30 minutes before church started, and lead directly to us being late. When we are late at our ward, we have to sit out in the hall because there is no room for us to sit all together, and we are not willing to punish people in the ward by splitting kids up just to sit in the chapel...
I tried cleaning things up, but we don't have any nail polish remover in the house right now. It splattered all over the place, and doesn't really match the color scheme. Hopefully more of it comes up, but I'm not sure about the wall or the shower curtain. The wall I can paint over, Tara already wants to replace the shower curtain. The toilet seat is getting clean, but I had to use a scubber pad, which started scratching the thing up. We will see what happens tomorrow with acetone.

My first support call with Veracity

Our internet provider merged with another local provider a while back. Until today, my only interaction with them has been to send money at them. Last night our internet went down, or at least our ability to resolve DNS names... I called today, this is what is happening: (play by play because I figured out how to post from my phone)

2 minutes: (not bad) got someone on the line. He asked for my name, then put me on hold to check things out.

6 minutes: verifies address, back on hold.

10 minutes: off hold - not talking. Hear someone in background talking to supervisor about someone else's problem. Supervisor has to explain things multiple times to employee.

12 minutes: verifies phone number twice, back on hold.

18 minutes: 3 accounts w/ same name. He sees machine. I told him I get DNS timeouts. He had me enter DNS info manually, still getting timeouts. Back on hold, he explained he was having a hard time finding all my equipment.

31 minutes: DNS back to automatic. Asks for make and model of the wireless switch. Asked if I power cycled the thing. I let him know I did that just before I called.

34 minutes: back on hold for a minute. (Supervisor helping now.) Had me bypass the wireless. No go - reboot computer. Requested MAC address of wireless switch. Done rebooting. Still can't do lookups. They asked for MAC address of desktop, to verify they are seeing the right thing. Goes away for a minute, comes back, has me plug the wireless back in. Has me try to ping Yahoo, no dice. Tech goes away again. (I think he's muting at this point so he can talk to his supervisor.) He comes back and explains that they are getting a different MAC address for the wireless device than the one I am giving them. I get intot he setting of the wireless. (Surprised I can remember the password.) The WAN MAC address is the one they see, but it's not the one labeled on the device...

53 minutes - Decides this needs to go to level 2 support. Puts me on hold to log all the details into the call.

64 minutes - comes back, wants me to connect the desktop directly again. After a couple of release/renews, actually get a good DNS suffix. Things work. I end up getting rid of them to work on the wireless by myself.

I ended up having to release/renew the address on the wireless several times as well before the thing actually got a valid IP address and domain suffix. I guess they are really having DHCP issues of some sort, but I have gotten myself an address, and have everything reconnected, so I'm not going to worry about it until it happens again...

Avatar

Drew, "Grizzly Adam", and I went to see Avatar tonight. We showed a bunch of people the benefits of using the kiosk to buy tickets, then went in...

The movie was good, it took a bit for me to get used to the pace of the movie, I guess. I don't know if it was just mee or not, but lots of CGI action movies seem to move a little too fast.

The movie was good. ("Technology is bad"). I thought the story was good, and was glad that they didn't just make it a n "Alien" spin-off, although those dog things looked awfully familiar...

It's so easy

At the end of 2008, our insurance company started issuing flexible spending cards for use when making FSA eligible payments. It was a wonderful concept, I thought, letting us actually use the money in there directly, instead of making the payment, waiting for the claim to post, and eventually requesting a refund. I have found a couple of flaws in the past year.

First, they don't easily tie together stuff you have done through the card, and other things you did, which are available for a refund. I spent hours a month or two ago trying to reconcile claims to posts on the FSA card, to see what could be posted for a refund. I think I got it, they didn't complain about it after, I might have missed one or two, but I am not going back to get it fixed at this point.

Second, they keep somehow deciding that purchases throught he card might not be eligible for a refund. I'm not sure their critieria always is. I've gotten 4 or 5 of these letters in 2009. They want you to substantiate the card transactions... Earlier in year, they complained about something that was paid at my Doctor's office. I convinced them of the error of their ways. Today I got another letter for a post at a pharmacy. Isn't anything at a pharmacy FSA eligible?

I called up there this afternoon to talk to them about this letter. The lady looked at the notice, and explained that they wanted a verification that the thing was FSA eligible. I explained it was for a prescription, she went and looked at the claim, which showed that I should have charged $26.52 in eligible expenses to the card. I told her that was the amount the letter was complaining about. She had no explaination. No reason for the letter to be sent, but I still have to 'substantiate' the purchase. She couldn't do it for me, I had to return the letter with the documentation. She printed out the information that substatiates the purchase, and is dropping it in the mail down to me. Tomorrow or the next day, I have to take that letter out of the mail, stick it in the envelope with this letter, and mail it back up there. I love IRS regulations...

I asked the lady how much of the 2009 money was left. (We can use it up to March 15th, or something like that.) There's $69.72 in there. Should be pretty easy to use it up in two months, but I wonder what the letter will say when I accidentally post $69.73 to the account...

Return of the Rooster!

As an early teenager, I had a paper route. (Didn't everyone?) Somewhere along the way, as part of the paper route, I qualified for some sort of prize. The reason for this escapes me right now. The prize I chose was a very fine alarm clock.

What made this alarm clock nice was that it talked. It talked loud. When the alarm went off, it would tell you the time, in a very loud voice. You had the option of doing a 'beep-beep-beep' with this time announcement, or have it crow like a digital rooster. I choose the rooster as the default ring. (Of course.)

The drawback to this is that I slept right through the crowing and announcing of the time. The thing just kept going and going, hoping I would respond to it's incessant racket. It didn't bother me any, but it bothered people around me.

I am sure Drew could comment of the rooster, sharing a bedroom with me. (I don't think he reads this blog, otherwise he'd say something.) We were in a bedroom in the basement, the noise of the rooster wafted up to the second floor through the heating ducts. I am sure my family has not very nice things to say about the rooster...

Working summers at the local scout camp, I worked in the kitchen. This meant I was supposed to be up before the rest of the staff. The rooster lived out there as well. Having the rooster at the camp was helpful, because everyone around me was so willing to get me up out of my cot in the morning so that the alarm clock didn't keep going. Some of the camp staff had more colorful things to say about the rooster than my family might share.

I am sure the rooster made it to my Freshman year of college. Rob, do you remember the rooster? I had an 8am class. Made it to class three times. The rooster kept crowing and crowing, but Chem 113 went on without me.

The rooster went with me on my mission. This is where the line starts to blur. I wrote home in the middle of my mission to let them know that I augmented the rooster with a second alarm clock. This is the last place I can seem to track the thing down at. I'm not sure where it went past that.

Anyhow, things haven't changed much in 20+ years. I still sleep right through alarm clocks. Sometimes Tara lets me, other times she makes me get up and 'turn that thing off'. (I've used some pretty annoying ringtones on my phone in the past to try to get up in the mornings.)

Last night I set the alarm on my new phone for the first time, and what did I find? The phone has a rooster alarm setting! It came with the phone, honest. I woke up this morning before the alarm went off, and to be nice, disabled the thing before it started crowing. Tomorrow morning I have to be up at 6am to get to work early, I plan to let the rooster rip, bright and early...