More foodieing

In the grand tradition of writing reviews that are not helpful in the slightest way to my regular readers, I will be starting today a series reviewing every single independant eating establishment in the Stony Plain - Spruce Grove area. The odds that anyone will ever go to any of these besides me? Slim to none. Do I care? Not even slightly. Why do I do it? Mostly to amuse myself.

The first review is of the Rainbow Palace - A "Chinese and Western" joint located right below my office. I assumed - wrongly - that it was so close that it made no difference how good the food was, it was worth a try. Did I mention that I was wrong? Yeah... Wrong.

I ordered the Chinese Lunch Special - which consists of chicken chop-suey, sweet & sour pork, and fried rice. I shall review them in that order. Oh, and it included a small bowl of salad-in-a-bag and an individual portion container of dressing. They have both kinds - ranch and italian.

Chop Suey - bean sprouts and coleslaw mix and leftover boiled chicken bits, stir fried in a sauce that seemed to consist of canola oil and water. It tasted about like it sounds.

Sweet & Sour Pork - dry fried pork bits with flavourless orange sauce. May have had some vinegar in it, but I cou;dn't tell. Probably mostly orange food coloring and sugar.

Fried Rice - Dry and flavourless, made from what appears to be uncle ben's converted, rather than chinese rice. Really, really bad.

It wasn't even a very good value. Taken as a whole, it sucked. It gets one and a half pints of the kind of watery draft beer you get in shady dive bars. You know, the kind that tastes sort of like beer, but not enough like beer to justify drinking it.

A down-home patriotic kind of beer.

I just bottled a North American Pale Ale, (Treewhale Pale) which is a style typical of the region that western separatists usually call Cascadia, and found very little elsewhere. This version is a deep copper, with a strong Cascade Hop aroma and flavour. I am less impressed with the head retention that I have seen so far, but who knows, that may get better. It was also a little chunky going into the bottles due to the single stage fermentation. It may not be a medal winner, as it is up against stiff competition in that category, but I'm sure it will be good enough to drink. I happened to chance into a couple of dozen empty bottles that took me over the top in terms of my bottling capacity, which I had expected to require me to drink another dozen or so beers prior to bottling.

Now I am pondering the next brew. I am thinking of a mash-extract California Common Beer, and do half the batch as a blueberry, that way I can enter one beer in two categories in the competitions this year. Also, I added a spice tea to a few bottles of my cider, so that I can enter it as two ciders as well. This is all in response to the call for each member of the Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild to enter at least three beers for competition this year. This way, with my Hefeweizen, my Pale Ale, and my ciders, I can make one more beer, flavour half of it blueberry, and enter a total of 6 times, all with making only one more beer this competition season. I think that this is a pretty good way to start, since this will be my first competitive season. If nothing else, I will make the better brewed beers seem good by comparison.

Don't ask me about tires.

Needless to say, I still don't have snow tires, and I hate the tire people at Costco. The dry goods people and optical crowd can stay, but the tire people are useless. I'm going to Fountain Tire, where they, at least, know that wheels come in different shapes and sizes, and that the rim offset matters.

In happier news, Jenn and I got to sleep this weekend. Great glorious long stretches of sleep for hours at a time, with an extra hour falling back as well. It was great.

Another great thing was Jenn's birthday party, where we did a murder-mystery and I got to be the killer. Much food and fun was had by all, thanks to all the people who were there, you made it tons of fun.

For the crowd from Calgary, if the weather holds, we will be arriving on the morning of the Saturday of the long weekend, along with four dozen empty wine bottles, two cats, and Lucy, our demented highway-eater. Plans include Dim sum on Sunday morning, and hanging out with friends I haven't seen in too long. If you think that this may apply to you, you are probably right.

Also, work is keeping me medium-busy with the potential for even more busy in the immediate future, so I'm enjoying that a ton. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get my thesis finished right quick. Hopefully I can get it done right away, but this last minth has not been condusive to finishing. I really don't want to take a whole extra semester, but I guess if I have to, I have to. Trying to avoid it, though.

Bawled out for almost buying myself something.

Hey, there, Jenn pointed out that I shouldn't be buying myself anything for the next few months because it's hard enough to shop for presents for me. If any of you really feel like getting me a present, you can always check out my amazon.ca web page, or if you really want to spend an arm and a leg on something that I myself can't afford (at the moment, let's see how the two-incomes thing works out next year) you could get me this. Expensive, AND in US funds. a double hit.

Well, best of the season to you all.

This is how we roll in the C-H-U-K ...

"They called up the white Coupe de Ville at once. Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver's seat and make every inch of the car jump, by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and high-priced Special Effects. The rear windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller-coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand - but there was no doubt in my mind that I was into a superior machine." - HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

1- The leather is grey, not red.
2- It has a sunroof, not a cloth-top.
3- It is a Sedan de Ville, Fleetwood, not a Coupe.

Other than that, yeah. And you get to name her.

Rule of thumb: if you have a choice between buying a 15 year old car that cost 9,000 new and a 15 year old car that cost 60,000 new, both of which cost the same now, get the one that used to be 60,000. It is still way more car than the smaller one, and what are you going to do? Drive a $1700 car for years and years yet? C'mon! You are buying this car like seasonal clothes that will be out of style next year.

An update brought to you without the use of a keyboard.

Believe it or not this blog was written entirely using voice recognition software. Although I had to tell my computer what a blog was, I haven't had to touch my keyboard yet... Which I think is pretty impressive. My using voice recognition software is of course in aid of my dictating documents electronically for work. I suspect that initially this will go slower than my just typing these documents but, that may just be a function of my not normally having a complete sentence in my mind at one time.

One of the problems with this is that it requires a very distinct way of speaking. I'm not really used to speaking this clearly all the time and it will take some getting used to. On the upside, it looks as though if I actually have something to say I will be able to get it down on paper in a reasonably quick way. If I'm not using strange words like blog that didn't even exist in the time that's this program originated, it seems to have little difficulty in recognizing what is that I say. Another interesting thing that I can do with this is control my Windows environment using only my voice. For example, I just opened in close my WordPerfect without having to touch my keyboard.

As an aside I also seem to acquired from work a brand-new laptop computer. Nothing to fancy, mind you, but a more powerful computer than my brother built for me lo these many years ago. It is a 1.7 gigahertz notebook with all the bells and whistles that you get for under grand these days. I'll need to pick up a USB mouse to go with it because I still can't stand using this little thing-I don't even know what you would call it, a track pad? At any rate I seem to have plenty of power for this voice recognition software.

As for work, it has been interesting as one could expect considering that I can't really practice law right now because I'm not insured. As a result I have just been going over files and catching up on a bunch of stuff that I messed well I was not practicing. Not the least amongst these things is the family law act which has made some changes to the way that I will be practicing especially for people who are common law rather than married people seeking a divorce. It is had the effect of replacing a bunch of old statutes (I'm really surprised that this thing wrote down statutes instead of statues!) With one all-encompassing statute that covers areas of spousal support, child support, guardianship, custody and access, and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that before now was scattered to the winds amongst a bunch of different statutes. I must say that I will not miss The Domestic Relations Act, the Parentage and Maintenance Act, and the family provisions of the Provincial Court Act.

OK I'm kind of choked about this, WordPerfect doesn't seem to be recognizing when I talk to it. It looks like I will have to dictate all my stuff into Dragon Pad, which comes with the voice recognition software, copy it, and then loaded and save it in what ever program I decide to use. That having been said it's still a lot faster than my typing my own documents or even having my secretary transcribe what I've dictated.

Other fun stuff that is going to be going on for me this week includes a big brewing session on Friday evening, and when we have some friends coming over one of whom has no interest in beer or brewing, whose job will be to entertain Jenn for the evening, the other of whom will be assisting me in brewing a batch of North American style pale ale. This is one of my favorite styles of beer, consisting of a malty amber beverage with almost overpowering hop aroma and flavor, with the classic flavor of a North American hop, namely Cascade. The flavor profile is citrusy, and very characteristic of beers brewed in the Pacific Northwest and California such as the classic of the style Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. For a very good local example, try Alley Kat Brewing Co. Full Moon Pale Ale.

Well, I have to get up early tomorrow morning so I need to start getting ready for bed early tonight. Goodnight all and hopefully, this voice recognition program will keep working this well I'm at work.

A bit better

Yesterday I felt like I had been run over by the flu bus. Today, it seems more like a bicycle, or maybe a hand-cart.Thanks to the amazing restorative power of an extra 20 or so hours of sleep and a bunch of ginsing, my main complaint now is the coughing stuff up, as opposed to the feeling of having just been beaten by a sack of sweet valencia oranges. Hopefully I will be much better by tomorrow when I have a bunch of stuff to do.

I'm sick.

It seems that if I get too happy about anything, fate steps in to balance my life. I had been happy to have a new job and to be finally getting close to done my thesis, but here I am, knocked flat on my back with a fever and sore throat. I'd go into more detail, but the ny-quil is kicking in, and I can't hold my head up all that much right now.

And yes, wheat is, in fact, up.

Wheat, or rather weizenbier, is on tap at the Whale and Cedar Freehouse, and if you come by, you can have some. It comes in three sizes, and I'm sure you know what they are:

Wee (12 Fl Oz)
No So Wee (20 Fl Oz)
and
Friggin HUGE (34 Fl Oz) (Mmmm, german liter stein)

All servings come with a slice of lemon, and our patented Treewhale Charm.

Also, I wrote to my aunt Nan today, and if you have an aunt Nan, you should too. If not, you should write to a different elderly relative, because if you don't, who will?

Wheat's up with Owen

Well, in the last couple of days, I've gotten a job (lawyering, of all things, who would have thought) been called back by my thesis advisor (only good things, astonishingly enough), and bought my first new pair of shoes in over two years. Good shoes, too, Clarkes, they make my old shoes feel like the insoles were made of plywood (those ones were $12 runners from Zellers that I got when my stomp-y boots disintegrated. Yes, it has been a good couple of days for YT.

More problems with this Nirvana I call Home

Let's put it this way:

The thermostat is set to 25 degrees C.

The temperature reading on the thermostat reads 13.5 degrees C.

Why does this always happen on a weekend?

Too cold to post with no socks on. Going back to bed.

My last two days:

Yesterday, I got to hang out with some friends who have been hard to pin down for various reasons, ranging from overwork to living in different cities. Just as I was sitting down with them, however, Jenn's sister called from the emergency room indicating that we needed to come and pick up her mum, and that she had needed to get painkillers for her tooth, and couldn't wait until the end of the long weekend. When we got to the hospital, expecting to take her home and put her to bed, it turned out that she in fact needed much more attention that Kayla had let on, and that Jenn would need to look after her on an ongoing basis for the evening. Fine. I made arrangements with my friend who was supposed to come for supper, and was, in fact, able to keep that date, although Jenn was not, which made Suz sad, but when your mom calls from the hospital, you kinda hafta go.

Had a good visit with Suz, and made quite merry over vegetarian lasagana and virgin margaritas on my deck.

That was good and all, but it became apparent that Jenn (and by default, I) needed to stay the night to drive her mum around in the morning. Normally this would be fine, but all the beds and even some couches were full, leaving Jenn and Myself to sleep on a slowly deflating air mattress on the living room floor. By four in the morning, the mattress had deflated enough that at least one part of me was resting on the floor no matter how I positioned myself. I was drifting gently in and out of a fitful sleep when, out of the darkness, the two cats who hate each other erupted into a vicious fight on my crotch. There was screaming and kicking (and not a little blasphemy on my part) which apparently woke the house to much amusement as they were able to reconstruct in their mind's eye almost instantly the situation in the living room.

At that point, Jenn stuck the offending evil white cat in the basement and, she thought, locked the cat door to prevent her from getting back upstairs. Better she should bother her real owner in the basement than my crotch in the living room. Unfortunately, the door proved too tricky for Jenn to operate in the dark at four in the morning with no glasses on, and less than an hour later, the stupid cat was back and had gotten stuck in the blinds about two feet from my head, proving that she doesn't need to fight the other cat to sound like she is killing babies.

Needless to say, I am so sleep deprived that I am almost passing out as I write this.

I hate that cat.

Weird Dreams.

Last night, I had, like a dozen just out-there vivid dreams, but the only one I remember is this one where my brother and I were playing Atari 2600 and he gives me this ice cream cone (cookies and cream in a flat-bottom cone, since I know you weirdos are going to ask). That is the one I can remember, because I said to myself as he gave me the ice cream cone, "Well, this must be a dream. He wouldn't give me an ice cream cone. He's mad at me because of that whole thing, which is too bad, because I like ice cream."

Camping

In order to celebrate our newfound hot water, we decided that it would be fun to replay our past week's experience of no hot water and go camping. We hopped in the truck with a few friends in convoy and headed to Thunder Lake Provincial Park. We got there just in time to get the last site that would fit all our vehicles and one tent. This is just as well, since there would have been an extra $20 per night PER TENT!!! For tents over one.

incidentally, if we had, say, three people camping each in a one-man backpacking tent, all on foot, we would have paid $65 per night in site fees. The people in the next site had 3 full sized pickup trucks and a 35 foot trailer, with air conditioning and satellite dish, and had a full dozen people staying there, all for $25 per night. The site is the site, no matter how many tents are on it, it should be one site one fee, anything else is absurd.

Needless to say, however, it was a successful trip. We ate and drank ourselves stupid, played crib and president, and generally chilled out around a campfire. I also discovered that my Coleman stove doesn't need new seals - it is about 20 years old and had been in storage with no fuel in it for about 19 of those 20 years, and the last time I took it out it seeped gas around the seals. No longer, however, sitting full of naphtha for a few months has reinvigorated the leather in the seals, and the thing should run trouble free for many years to come. Heck, it's probably the last camping stove I'll ever need to buy. We cooked a bunch of good stuff, both over the fire and on the stove, and we relaxed in one of the few totally dead cellphone zones I know.

Once we returned, we divvied up the remaining food and headed off to our respective showers to de-stink ourselves. I learned how to play crib again, which probably makes the fifth time or so. I also learned how to bake muffins on a campfire, and that you shouldn't drink red wine that had been lying in the sun for several hours.

You get to drink from.... THE FIRE HOSE!!!!

Updates, updates, updates....

Just 8 short days after having our hot water cut off, we are now once again in the money, the hot water money, that is. It came on again as a lukewarm trickle this morning, and has been slowly heating all day. Normally this would be cause for celebration.

However,

As we sat back enjoying Jenn's first day of Not School this summer, we heard an unusual sound coming from the hallway. Sirens. Klaxons. Fire Alarms. Not to put too fine a point on it, the building was on fire.

Happily, some forethought had gone into this, since we had a rabid paranoia about fire at our old wood-frame, smoking-encouraged, bad-wiring building. Our insurance contact information, CDs of all our pictures, and a copy of my thesis are in a steel box on an easy-to-access shelf in the office. The cat carriers, somehow, had managed to become disassembled, however, which led to our running down the stairs with cats under our arms and a box in the other hand, tossing the whole mixture into the back of the truck once we got outside, and sat chatting about previous fires in the building with elderly residents as sirens approached. I heard of the time one complete unit burned out, but as a concrete building, every wall is a fire wall, and therefore one unit can burn to a cinder and not damage its neigbour but for the smoke.

As it turned out, this fire was on 18 - a byproduct of repairs being made involving heat guns to dry drywall patching in a unit that had been damaged by the exploding hot-water system. To celebrate the fact that the building has not burned down, I will go have a nice hot shower. In my own apartment. For a change.

Updates from behind the barrier

Even as the ravening masses outside pound at our door trying to get in and kill us for our electric kettle, we have been living a more or less (mostly less, actually) comfortable life without hot water since Friday Morning, which means that we are will into our sixth day without hot water. Here's a couple of observations:

1) I smell funny. Even though I have been using the shower at the pool, I suspect that the inadequate temperature and pressure of that water, and the proximity of goat-smelling Uzbecks is preventing a really good cleansing.

2) Doing dishes with water you have heated on the stove is a huge hassle, especially if you have to do the dishes that were in the dishwasher when the water turned off and so everything got baked on and nasty, and especially if you are rinsing them in the bathtub, one turkey roaster at a time.

3) My face is breaking out from the lack of hot water washing, or possibly from the greasy food that I have been eating in the absence of anything more homemade, it being difficult to face the idea of cooking, which would lead to dishes, see above.

4) No hot water has _NOT_ actually prevented me from enjoying my favorite hobby - zymurgy - I bottled 30 bottles of Kiwi-Melon Pinot Grigio last night, and laid on a 5 gallon batch of Wheat Beer, using a Brewhouse Prairie Wheat kit with Wyeast #3333 German Wheat Beer Yeast. The results ought to be tasty with a slice of lemon in a tall glass. Results will be mentioned in about 3-4 weeks.

No Hot Water

Let me first say that my hot water is something that I hold dear. Hot running water is what separates us from the savages. Were it not for hot running water, we would all be reduced to a pack of wild animals fighting in the streets for the scraps of our fetid and dying civilization, as Foreigners with strange customs and lower expectations for the daily necessities arrived in droves to cast us down from our Liberal Democratic Throne and hurl the world into a pit of darkness lasting a thousand years. A new Dark Age for Mankind! Just as we are on the cusp of attaining the keys to a golden age of civilization - unlimited power from fusion, vast advances in medicine, No Disease, universal education for children around the world, a grand time for all! Instead, we will struggle in a new darkness extending throughout all 18 floors of this stinking building, as the overarching stench of unwashed bodies mixes with he sickly sweet stench of rotting unwashed dishes.

BEWARE! THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU - OR YOU - OR YOU!!!

I think I saw George Romero setting up his cameras at the end of my hallway for his new film, shot on location in the heart of the Real Action! The stringy hair, the ugly skin, and the zombie stench are too much for a civilized person to bear. I have bolted the door, and I will not be going out until the all clear is sounded! We are Well Armed! Many may try to get through the door, but they will not succeed! While others panic and run, we have forted up, hunkered down, and are awaiting the end with gleeful anticipation! This is what it means to be one of The Prepared!

On one mission earlier today I left the apartment to get the feeling for the brewing crisis. I approached the panicking security guard at the front desk of the complex. "A LETTER?" he exclaimed, bewildered, "A Letter? You expect something to happen? NOTHING will happen! Don't you Understand???"

Indeed I understand too well! His Russian Mafia employers are trying to do to us what we did to them! Bitterness over the Cold War has resurged and they are trying to destroy our Civilization, our WAY OF LIFE! They are in league with the terrorists, no doubt.

I can hear you now, "What rot!" you say, "What rot this fellow is talking! Surely he knows that no hot water in one building will not destroy civilization as we know it!" Indeed you may say that, but while it may be only one building now, there is NO END IN SIGHT! Parts have been ordered, they say, time to make the repairs, they say, patience is appreciated, they say, but All The While, I have not had a shower in my own home in days, and my dishes are piling up at an alarming rate. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it sure as the pope drinks wheat beer burned in a day, and that is Our Fate if we do nothing to stop it!

Do you part! Stay armed, fill the bathtub with water, because you can rest assured that once they have taken the hot water, the cold will follow as surely as night follows day, and then the Electricity, and then... And then... You have seen them... Yes, they'll be coming for you, jackals gnawing the displaced hip-bone of Our Nation. I must go now. I need to stack Heavy things in front of the door, and test to make sure the whiskey supply hasn't been poisoned.

Edmonton Heritage Festival

On Sunday, Jenn and I went to the Heritage Festival, a long-weekend adventure of eating and cultural stuff that we enjoyed greatly. There were about 60 different cultural associations with tents displaying arts and crafts, cultural stuff, and mostly food. It works a lot like the midway. You buy a sheet of tickets and each food is so many, between 1 ticket for little bits of thing like a cookie, to 7 tickets for the big 3 items and rice sort of affairs. I could bore you with details, but suffice it to say that we were there for about 7 hours and didn't stop eating. Here are a few of our observations:

1 - every culture in the world has grilled meat on a stick.
2- It must be very hard to do the layout for the event, keeping the Arab tent across from the Israeli tent, the Serbs and the Croatians and the Bosnians equi-distant, and all away from the Greeks, and so forth. (Incidentally, the Canadian Forces recruiting display was in the middle of that particular triangle)
3-Every culture has deep fried dough with sugar on it, but the biggest ones come from Romania.
4 - There is less vomiting at the heritage festival than at the midway.

A party and a day just for ourselves

As some of you may know, our 1st wedding anniversary passed this weekend, and we celebrated in style.

First, on Saturday, we had about 15 people over for a great big barbecue on the deck. Folks came from as far away as Calgary to wish us well, which was much appreciated. For those of you who couldn't make it, you missed out on some serious rib eye and plenty of potluck, and cake, the entire top layer of our wedding cake. This means that I now have room in my freezer for actual food I can eat without getting a divorce.

Jenn was sweet enough to get me my very own copy of the classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Along with two 3 DVD sets of "The French Chef". It was almost as like she could read my mind.

Thanks to everyone who made our party a success, it will be the first of many, I'm sure.

Then on Sunday, we finally got around to the breakfast that we had been looking forward to the day after our wedding, but which we just didn't have time for. We went for a leisurely 2 hour brunch at the Fairmont Hotel MacDonald. In the Empire Ballroom, which has been restored to its original 1915 condition. Needless to say the food was wonderful, with handmade crepes, mimosas, pastries, seafood, hot and cold items of all kinds.

We then headed to the Telus World of Science, because we are both very strange people. We also popped over to the flea market, because that is what we used to do on a Sunday when I lived in Westmount, we would pop over to the flea market and listen to the vinyl cafe on CBC.

In the evening we went to the Keg, because so many of you have seen fit to give us the gift of red meat, which is much appreciated. I had an enormous rib eye which I couldn't come close to finishing, and Jenn had the blue cheese filet, which she came closer to finishing, but not quite. Lunch leftovers today were lovely, by the way.

Once home, we collapsed, and passed out from red meat until this morning. I hope everyone got home safe from Edmonton, thanks for coming.

Lovely supper

Today was farmer's market day in Collingwood, as well as "Jenn and Owen go to T&T" day, so we wound up with an assortment of lovely things. First of all, new potatoes, then hardneck garlic, peaches, salmon steak, and artichokes. We took advantage of our Barbecue having a side burner as we boiled the potatoes and artichokes together, and grilled the salmon. I also made Aioli with taragon, chive, and scallion, and topped the potatoes with that. The artichokes we had en vinaigrette. All this was accompanied by a bottle of Viognier, which went down a treat, and for dessert? Watermelon. All in all, a nice day.

Oh, and we went for a swim before supper, too, which took the edge off the 34 degree heat.