Food

Doctor Ordered Seperation

It has now been a week since Donna has returned home from the hospital and she is making slow and steady progress towards normal. In that week her sister has come and gone, leaving behind a refrigerator and freezer full of cooked food that fits into Donna’s colon friendly menu (and is tasty to boot) and I have gotten about 30 hours of sleep total, none of which has been more than an hour and a half consecutively.

Whenever she gets up to go to the bathroom, I wake up too. I have to turn on the bedside lamp so she can find her way to and from because the Xanax makes her very drowsy. Most nights around 2:00 AM (the doctor thinks because of the steroids) she feels so cold that she has to put on a second long sleeve shirt and a thicker pair of socks. Then for whatever reason, she cannot stay in bed past 4:00 AM and her rattling around in the kitchen making grits keeps me from returning to a full sleep.

Needless to say this is taking its toll on me, even the people at work notice that I look like crap. Yesterday at lunch I went out to the car covered myself with a blanket and tried to get some shut eye. I set the cell phone alarm for 12:55 so I would wake up and get back to the drawing board. Fortunately I woke on m own at 12:53 because I had set the alarm for 12:55 AM!

Today we both had doctor’s appointments, her with the gastro guy to see how things worked out with Monday’s medicine change (very good) and me with the GP to check on my blood pressure (better than I thought.) My GP is her GP and even though it was my appointment he did ask about her some too. When I told him that I was having sleep issues his “cure” was a script for lorazepam and the recommendation that we try sleeping in separate bedrooms. So tonight, because tomorrow is a work day, we are going to give it a try. She will spend the night on the living room couch with the TV and I will stay in the recently vacated back bedroom with the PC and internet radio.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 537

Cosmic Dog Run

How far would you drive for a hot dog for lunch? 135 miles? We would.

Saturday we are going to take a road trip to Mt. Pleasant, SC to visit Jack’s Cosmic Dogs. Now the timing of our trip may be a mistake, this place was recently featured on the Food Network’s The Best Thing I Ever Ate (which is the reason we are going), so there might be a crowd, but after driving that far we will probably even wait a bit before giving up.

You know now that I look, if we were to swap the rotation of our loop, we could hit a second place featured in the same show, a BBQ place in Orangeburg. But we won’t be doing that, we’ll just save that for another day.

Of course we will be doing some geocaching too. I’ve picked out almost 40 along the route, but 3/4 of them are if we feel like it on the way there and back. The important ones will be in the middle around Charleston where we hope to get 3 Delorme pages and 1 county for the SC Challenges.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 527

Onions Are Like Underwear…

…you gotta have ’em. Or so said a contestant on Chopped this evening.

This morning we met the MMC for breakfast in Augusta and Donna and I left a bit early with plans to do a little geocaching on the way. Well it turned out we weren’t that early and didn’t stop anywhere. There was a cache that was located right behind the shopping center where breakfast was to be, so we walked around to grab it before going inside. With the title and the hint we think we found a part of the cache, but the actual container didn’t appear to be around. Dang.

The eleven of us finished eating by 8:15 and we were then stuck, the bowling alley, our post breakfast entertainment, didn’t open until 9:00. We stood around outside the door of the restaurant chatting and watching someone in a truck in the parking lot tossing bread out of his window feeding seagulls. After the novelty of that wore off, we trooped down to Kmart (the only other place that was open in the center) and shopped for blue light specials. Tiring of this Donna and I said, “We’ll meet you there.” There was geocache right down the street. Found it, yeah!

A couple of games of bowling was quite enough (my wrist was sore by frame 5 of the second game) and most of the group were busy picking out a lunch place while Donna and I and another couple walked 2/10 of a mile to behind a restaurant to try and find a cache that was hidden there. It was sprinkling slightly and GZ was between the back of the restaurant and its dumpsters, it wasn’t the tidiest place, so we gave up looking after about 3 or 4 minutes. Darn.

After our failure the 4 of us went our separate ways. Donna and I were going home, but couldn’t agree on what we wanted for lunch, so when we drove by the place the rest of the club had picked, we pulled in. It was BBQ place, not atypical as they had other meat items and seafood on the menu, called Flyin’ Cowboy. The food was slightly better than good and I could probably eat here 2 or 3 times a year, but probably won’t because it is 25 miles away. One of our group ordered a “Manhandler” which consisted of 6oz of pulled pork piled on top of a softball sized loaded baked potato. John was up to the task and finished the whole thing, along with both his side dishes, earning himself the title of “Potatohandler.”

To recap, on today’s Miata Club event, we all drove separately to a restaurant and had breakfast. Afterward we did some shopping together followed by driving to a bowling alley separately. We bowled a couple of games together and then drove separately to another restaurant and ate lunch. Well, at least some of us actually drove Miatas…

Here is the top count from yesterday, the first nice day since it seems like Thanksgiving. Today it was cold in the morning and now hasn’t stopped raining since this morning.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 521

Feeling A Little Like Hansel

Along with the usual cornucopia of food stuffs that I normally get in my lunch, I had a bonus, a a 2oz. bag of Zapp’s Hotter ‘N Hot Jalapeno Potato Chips. The Accounting Manager had some pound cake in her office. In a cube in PIC there was both a German Chocolate Cake and a sort of Lazy Man’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Thing, i.e. one big thin cookie from a tray and chopped up. The department next door had their holiday luncheon and had left over (large) Chocolate Chip Cookies. In the afternoon there mysteriously appeared a Whitman Sampler box in Engineering. On our doorstep when we got home was a Christmas box from my brother that included chocolate and cajun cashews, a chocolate peanut cluster thing and some almond wafers.

I am a little nervous that one day soon I will walk into a darkened room, someone will lock me in and then up the heat.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 513

Sex, TV & Spam

There were 89 spam messages caught by my spam filter at work this morning and quite a few dealt with trying to sell magic pills to improve my sex life. I am amazed at the creative titles and thought that they could be broken down into which Cable TV channel they would be shown on if they were the titles of infomercials instead of the subject lines of spam.

Release your inside beast! on Animal Planet
African temper in amour on BET
Your prescription for success on Discovery Health
Become arousal athlete! on ESPN
Pumper for pant muscle on Fit TV
Recipe for hot nights on FOOD
Invest in your wang! on CNBC
Be her volcano on National Geographic
Just be a male! on Spike
Right spell for your ‘magic wand’ on SyFy
No sad accidents in bed on Tru TV
Be furious in bed on Versus

I’m not sure what channel these last three belong on, maybe you have some channels I don’t get, let me know what you think:
Be good at humping!
Become a lech instantly
Flaccidity is not for you

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 466

Food For Thought

Venture capital needed for a new company that Mark, Jim and I are forming to make food fun and easy. Jim’s first request is help in making a PB&J sandwich without ruining your nice fresh, soft white bread. Peanut butter and jelly formed into slices and individually wrapped, ala Kraft Singles. I thought that once that product takes off our next release should be a Fluff ‘n’ Nutter variation.

After our new company is making money hand over fist we will be getting into genetically engineering fruit. Mark likes apples, but hates the skin, so our first venture in that direction be be to create an apple that will peel like a banana. I thought why stop there, we should make it so that alternating sections are either dense intertwined fuzz or little bitty hook things so that when reeled down and pushed together below the apple they become a stick like handle.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 405

Back Pads

This was our Friday afternoon off and I put it to good use by replacing the back brake pads on the Emperor. Donna put it to good use by having the time to try out a shrimp salad recipe she saw on a Barefoot Contessa cooking show.

I spent the evening plotting out caches along routes for the two statewide challenges we are doing. Now we just have to hope that on Sunday we don’t get the 60% chance of rain, but fall into the 40% no rain range. And she spent the evening watching Food TV looking for other meals to try out in case we fall into the 60%.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 392