Groove Neuter’s blog

Feeling out of sorts that my memories are not staying put in their hermetically sealed mental compartments.

How dare people live, evolve, and generally move on with their lives.

Why aren't you all where I left you? 

I thought I finally had you organized, somewhat figured out, a semblance of order,
and here you are surprising me with all this growing up nonsense.

The nerve.

The gall; continuing to live after the time we knew each other.

Least you could do is not leave clues where I might stumble, unawares, upon your updated info.

Now I have to revisit/reorder how I feel about everything all over again.

I think it's going to be a good thing,
or rather it is already a good thing, and I will come to that realization eventually.

Going to need a bigger brain, and a bigger bottle of tequila.

Excuse me, I must intoxicate, inebriate, and otherwise imbibe.

The wife had Intralase Lasik last Friday.
I was freaked out.  Turned out fine.

Youngest daughter winged a ball at wife's face the next day.
I freaked out.  Missed the eyes, turned out fine.  She can read the 20/20 eye chart line.

Eldest daughter fell out of bed Monday night.
Gashed the back of her head on the bottom corner of a dresser.
I freaked out and got a lot of blood all over me while I held her.
After a trip to the ER at Midnight and three staples, turned out fine.

Youngest smacked eldest in the back of the head with a (hard) toy dragon.
I freaked out.  Wound didn't open, no new blood, just a headache for eldest, so, you know, fine.

Eldest wants to go to preschool today as there are only a few sessions left for this school year.
I take her and find out today they're doing an inflatable bouncy-house all day because it's storming outside.
I freaked out.  I'll find out in an hour if anything got bumped loose, but I haven't gotten an emergency call yet.

She has a follow-up doctor appointment today anyway.

Wife has a follow-up eye appointment tomorrow.

Me, I've about exhausted my freak-out for the week.

Plenty of Boulevard Brewery mixed-packs, Bacardi Solara Rum, vodka, and tequila though... so I might make it yet.

For years the wife and I have been making a McDonald's mutation sandwich which we dubbed the Beef N' Bird.

Equal parts double-cheeseburger and McChicken. 
Discard one set of buns (i.e. let the kids eat them when they swoop in to take a break from the playground.)
Combine the meats, sauces, and assorted veggies (term used loosely)
between remaining set of buns and there you have it. 
The Beef N' Bird.

I was inspired by this when preparing dinner last night and classed-up (ever so slightly) the original concept.

Gourmet Beef N' Bird:

Pan-fry a large medallion of beef sausage until crisply browned then cut in halves and cook two chicken tenderloins pan-fried in the beef sausage drippings.

One large leaf of Romain lettuce placed on a plate, with a thin layer of sun-dried tomato pesto spread over it, then sprinkled with grated Romano cheese.

When the meats have cooled slightly (so not to wilt the lettuce) alternately place sausage halves and tenderloins on top of the Romain leaf.

Drizzle spicy wing sauce or BBQ lightly over the meats and serve.

BeefNbird2

Sunny, 75, and a breeze out of the South.

4.18.08 058

4.18.08 065

4.18.08 066

My yen and yang seem to swirl around food-stuffs.

This past week I, among other things, went grocery shopping and got taken out to dinner.

You know the stereotype of the slow moving grocery line caused by a coupon-clipper, paying with cash and exact-change, who doesn't begin to start rummaging for these items in her massive saddle-bag until she's verified a price-match for every item scanned and then made sure all the bags made it into the cart?

I fear that I might become that person.

Twice in the past week I've picked out items, checked them out, paid for them, and not gotten home with them.

I suspect it is because I always have the kids with me when I'm shopping and the clerk, bagperson, and myself are usually distracted with them being cute when it comes time to put the bags back into the cart.

The latest instance was milk.

I picked up six, paid for six, and only got four home into the fridge.
(half-gallons mind you, they were on sale and thus less expensive per volume than the full gallons.)

However, as cosmic balance, the Millionaire and his wife were in town and I got taken out to dinner.

Chicken Oscar at Merchant's upstairs dining room and 18 year old Macallan scotches.

I'm going to make the choice to be really happy about the meal out, the good booze, and the after show at Tootsie's.

After all, no point crying over milk you paid for but were too lame to remember to put in your cart, so your 2 year old could have spilled it when you got home anyway.

Came upon new info that made me smile and makes me think that I owe
some bureaucrats in DC an apology.

Turns out that they ARE slick enough to deposit your stimulus rebate check in the same manner
that you received your income tax refund.

So, folks like me that used direct deposit for the refund will get the stimulus funds in like manner.

Sweet.

I'm feeling all good about the amount of postage that will be saved.

So, the house next door sold, and out moved a family with kids about our kids ages.

In moved renters, with a dog, staked outside 24/7, who barks and growls every time we go outside.

His tie-out extends all the way to the property line, which he snaps taut every time I go outside with our dogs or kids.

We ask the landlord for a fence, to keep our kids from doing something a kid would do like chase a ball downhill, and wind up getting bitten.

We've wanted a fence for a while as the back of the yard ends in a cliff down to a ravine.

So far, the feedback we've got from the property manager is that the landlord's OK with it, as long as we pay for the fence he picks out, and our rent goes up because the property would now been improved with a fence and to cover maintenance for it.

On the other hand, we've got our own renters in the house we left behind in the relocation wanting improvements for their own lease extension/renewal.

I'm not only seeing both sides of the fence, I'm seeing it simultaneously and let me tell you; there isn't any green grass on either side.

We paid our State(s) & Federal Taxes for 2007 a few weeks ago using online software.

Easy-peasy even with being landlords now and a mid-year multi-state move and all.

Ended up with a small refund from the Feds, and we selected the electronic direct deposit option.

One week later, boom, there it is.

Compared with last week, when we got the letter from the IRS telling us to expect an economic stiumulus check from them sometime this Summer, whenever they get around to printing and mailing all of the checks out.

Now, since they already have our direct deposit bank routing and account numbers on file from our 2007 refund, wouldn't it have saved the postage of the expectation letter, the printing of a physical check, the stuffing of envelopes, and the mailing of the actual check; if they had simply direct deposited the funds to our account?

We'd have had the funds sooner to go a-stimulating with, and it would have been less costly to taxpayers (i.e. US) to get the funds (maybe they could have given us more to go stimulate the economy with instead).

But organizations above a certain size or with enough tenure protection seem to get inversely less sophisticated with regard to financial cleverness, or of any kind actually.

It's the coupon-clipping, comparison shopping stay-at-home domestic caretakers that we should employ to direct matters of government bureaucracy.  The efficiency gains would, I believe, be astounding.

The Sax Rohmer book was good, but dated from its era.

The formality of the language made it a bit like research rather than a fun poof, nonetheless, it was intriguing.

Part of the interest/novelty for me was using the browser Google Books tool to consume it.

An advantage of using a browser is that I could always drop myself a short burst email of what page I was on when finishing a section.

I'm not sure all e-book readers have that "where I last left off" bookmark feature.

I could also use a burst email to log for myself where important page numbers were so I could bounce back on whim via the page number selector.

All in all, not quite as cumbersome as I had envisioned and I'm glad I've now had the experience of the text and the Google Books feature.

I've heard/read some of the controversy about this Google feature.

Funny though that I never used/looked at the product itself, just listened to the pros/cons swirling around it, then moved on.

Today though, while reading a mystery novel that referenced another mystery novel, I gave it a whirl, on accident.

It all began with "Design For Murder".

Carolyn G. Hart can go on at (sometimes too great) length about other mystery writers and their creations in her "Death On Demand" series.

They are American Cozy Mysteries, but she has me hooked anyway.

Her main character for this vehicle is the owner of a mystery genre bookstore and herself a fanatic.

So, it can be expected and forgiven (just barely) how often she will expound for paragraphs on the works of other writers inside her own works.

In the case of the reference to "Fire-Tongue" by Sax Rohmer, I was more intrigued than irritated.

Rohmer began this effort without having the solution in mind, and at the end, could not solve his own mystery to complete his manuscript.  It was at this point that Rohmer sought the help of a friend, Harry Houdini, who was able to provide the solution and conclusion for the mystery.

I had left myself a Post-It in the book to go back and research that text to see if I could find a copy to experience myself.

So I Google it, and what do you know?  The first result is the Google Books listing!

I have at this moment in my other browser pane, the very text of the novel I was interested in.

I can understand the copyright argument about Google scanning texts.

However, for me to use for hard to find or out of print texts, this will be one of those resources that you don't know how you lived without it.

Now, back to "Fire-Tongue".