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Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Computer Upgrades, Etc.
I hope everyone out there who celebrates Thanksgiving or something very much like it had a good time. We certainly did.
And as this is a VERY long post, I'm putting it behind cuts.
We drove down to Phoenix Monday afternoon after mucking about in Alamogordo. Got to Tucson for a late dinner and combed a mall for a few goodies. Had dinner at Mimi’s which was a bit of a treat: it’s the first time that I’ve been in that restaurant that it wasn’t full with a minimum half hour wait! In fact, the restaurant was at least half empty and we were immediately seated. We had an appetizer that is definitely worth mention: sweet and sour coconut shrimp. The shrimp were good, not spectacular, but what was spectacular was the coleslaw that it was set upon. It takes a lot to make me think a coleslaw is great, and this one certainly was. The ‘slaw was Thai-influenced with a peanut sauce base and a LOT of ginger! It was great. I think we would have been happy with a larger plate of the ‘slaw sans shrimp.
And being in Tucson, naturally, we hit Bookman’s. I didn’t get any books, but I think I’ve pretty well played out this particular location. Perhaps I should give it a few months rest. I did find a Dead Can Dance CD that we didn’t have, so that was cool. Actually, it was a good trip for music (and movies!)
Tuesday was very yummy. I had breakfast with Michelle, my renter, who had just come from the doctors and a blood draw, so she was famished. We then went to the Pilates studio to work on the studio’s web site. It had been set up by a “marketing company” that had a really great racket, I’m in the wrong line of work but I’m also morally ill-equipped to do such a scam (i.e. I’m kind of too honest for my own good). This outfit created the studio’s web site and did a pretty good job of it. They then moved to Texas (they were in the Phoenix area) and ceased all communications. We finally got the passwords out of them so that we could do site updates.
Out of the blue a few weeks ago we received notification that the domain name registration had expired. Zero warning. So the studio people frantically called Network Solutions and renewed it for five years. Unfortunately they didn’t talk to me or I would have switched them to Go Daddy. But at least it got them back online. Then we find out that the “marketing company” is charging them $25 per month “hosting fee”. This is for a very low traffic web site, you could probably measure hits to it in the low hundreds per month.
So one of the things that we did on this trip was to create them an account on Scottsdale Hosting, where I have my SpareBrainsGames.Com site and my dad’s GotBowls.Com site. $50ish/year at their basic level. That’s going to save Lauren (the Pilates instructor) a fair bit of coin. We got the domain name re-pointed, uploaded the site, fixed the Front Page configuration, created a few email accounts, and got her Qwest account reconfigured for email: they were providing her business DSL and we want to get her off AOL.
And I got a nice $200 check for my services! I was happy.
Tuesday night, Audrey, Michelle, Russet and I troop over to Zen 32 and enjoy fabulous sushi. Audrey and Russ split udon noodles (which contain horrible fungusy things, *blech*!) and Michelle and I split a salmon fillet on top of wasabi mashed potatoes. Quite yummy! For afters Russ, Audrey and I went to Border’s where I found a copy of Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith, as previously mentioned.
Wednesday was shopping for what I needed for Thanksgiving. It included a brief detour to the Phoenix Bookman’s as they oh so conveniently located it next to Sprout’s. I found a Leo Frankowski book that I didn’t know that I was looking for. I needed a fair list of goodies for Russet and I: I was making two side dishes plus brining the turkey, Russ was making one. Got about half of what I needed at Sprout’s, then headed off to Albertson’s across the street. Got the other half there, save one: manchugo cheese. I knew that there was pretty much only one place where I’d get that; and that is a Mexican grocery store. Fortunately there is one in Sunnyslope, less than a mile from my parent’s house. And they had it.
I got home and almost immediately headed out again to Fry’s Electronics to get a video card for my dad. He bought a new computer a few months ago and was always complaining that it was too slow. This shouldn’t be as it was a Sempron with over 700M of ram. From what he described, it sounded like it was probably a graphics lag, and given that it was using on-board video and sharing ram, it seemed a likely candidate.
So we pick up a nice AGP card, I got a good recommendation from one of my WoW buds and we paid about $60 for the card and tromp back home.
Get home, wake up my wife, and we head out to the Game Depot with a brief stop at Tempe Camera to pick up the last supplies that I need to complete this semester.
The Game Depot is an excellent game store. It’s in Tempe, AZ, and has been in business for 20 years, now in its fourth location. It was originally a spin-off of the Flying Buffalo Game Store, the owner of Game Depot, Dave, bought it from the owner of Flying Buffalo. If you’re ever in Tempe, I’d definitely recommend a stop. It’s large, well-lit, clean displays, and has a large gaming area. Every Wednesday night they have a Hero Clix tournament, and my friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
magic_rat was playing. We had made plans to have dinner at Nello’s, perhaps the best pizza joint in the Phoenix area, after. So Russ and I played a game that I’ve been toting around in my backpack for six months or so called Skallywags. It’s an interesting game where you are assembling a pirate crew. The tricky bit is that there are four types of cards: special events, legs, torsos, and heads. You literally build your pirates.
We’d never played before, so it was kind of blindly groping through the rules. You build pirates from your hand (certain cards when played as pirates increase the number of cards that you draw every turn) and you can also exchange parts with a commons area. It was a lot of fun, and at the point that Jason finished and the store was closing, Russet was ahead so she won.
Dinner was fun, lots of good conversation, and after we left – BOOKSTORE! Jason went home, but Russet had found some books on the 3 For 2 table, so off we went. I thought the store we were headed for was a Barnes & Noble, turned out to be a Borders! So in the end it was good. I found a CD that I have been casually looking for for ages: The Ditty Bops! They have a really cool sound, and their harmonizing is just out of the world! So I was quite happy. I was especially happy to find Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys was out in paperback. My back was bothering me pretty bad (it’s been a pain, no pun intended, for the last two or three weeks), so I took a time-out and got a large iced chai and sat down and flipped through a Renaissance Magazine. Fun stuff, that.
Getting home around 11ish, I started making the brine for the turkey. A problem immediately reared its ugly head: for whatever reason, my mother did not have any brown sugar! Fortunately Safeway is open until 1am, so I was able to drive off and get some, giving the poodle a ride in the car and the cat and my brother’s dog and my sister’s two Chihuahuas a bit of a respite.
Got the brown sugar, made the brine, then waited. The brine has to be fairly cold before you put the turkey into it as you don’t want to promote bacterial growth in the turkey. I didn’t have room in the fridge for both the turkey and the brine, so I did a little rearrangement in my parent’s soon-to-be-replaced stand-alone freezer and popped it in with my digital probe thermometer (that would be used to monitor the turkey in just a few hours) to watch the temperature. I then settled back with my laptop for to catch up with my LJ flist.
My digital thermometer died. I couldn’t believe it! It started reporting 150f, then 125, then 95, then when I come back an hour later, it’s reading 200+! At that point the brine was definitely cool enough to start the brining process, so the thermometer was ignored, the brine pulled out, a gallon of heavily iced water added, and the turkey put to soak. I would have preferred a big “construction site” water jug, but we didn’t have one. My dad had the clever thought of going to his fav donut shop, they sell these big buckets that they get things like strawberry jam in for $1.50 or so. My mom cleaned it out while I was out getting groceries during the day. The turkey and the brine came right to the top, but the turkey was fully submerged so I didn’t care. I actually poured out a little of the brine so that I could put the lid on it. After leaving a note that the turkey shouldn’t be pulled out until at least 9am, preferably 11am, I went to bed. It was almost 5:00 in the morning.
Thursday. Woke up about 10am or so, ate a couple of pieces of double pepperoni pizza from Nello’s, and started helping Mom. We pulled the turkey from the brine, sprayed it off inside and out, and got it ready to roast. Brushed it down with canola oil, made a foil tent to cover the breast, loaded up the cavity with aromatic herbs just as shown on Alton Brown’s Good Eats Thanksgiving show. Got the turkey into the oven and commenced prepping side dishes. I made Manchugo mashed potatoes (a Mexican cheese) and orange-scented green beans, both recipes from Rachel Ray’s Thanksgiving in 60 Minutes (I’ll post the recipes if requested). Russet made mashed sweet potatoes.
One weird thing: the sweet potatoes that I bought on Wednesday vanished! Fortunately my dad was out picking up pies from Village Inn and was able to swing by Albertson’s and pick up some more.
With my probe thermometer dead, we improvised cooking the bird. The Gospel According to Alton Brown tells us to put the turkey, after having coated it liberally with canola oil, into a 500f oven for 30 minutes to brown, then drop the temperature to 350 and put a previously made foil tent over the breast then cook until a digital probe thermometer reports 161f. With my digital dead, we did the initial 30 minutes, then let the bird run for another 2 hours. At that point I pulled it out and used a conventional meat thermometer and checked the legs and breast and it all came out to just over 160 degrees.
Everything came together nicely, and the turkey was fantastic! Many compliments were given me, I hadn’t really been thinking at the time that I had “done” the turkey, but I guess I pretty much did. My dad flat-out does not like white meat: he was carving off pieces and popping them in his mouth.
The coolest thing about brining the bird: it’s still moist when you re-heat the meat later!
And then there was pie: pecan, pumpkin, and lemon crème! Very nice.
Thursday night I go to install my dad’s new video card and come up against a shocking problem: my dad’s new computer doesn’t have an AGP port, it has PCI Express. Totally different physical standard. His motherboard also has two on-board SATA connectors! Heck of a system for $200.
Friday morning. After sleeping in, we head off to Fry’s Electronics to return my dad’s video card and get one that works. Normally I won’t go to stores on Black Friday, but we were leaving Saturday, so I wanted to get this in and working. My brother was reading parts of the Fry’s ad out loud over breakfast and mentioned a Compaq laptop for $380. This caught my ears. My Thinkpad is giving me almost constant fits and will probably have to be replaced soon, so I looked at the ad. It seemed like it would suite my needs quite well, though I’d have to replace the hard drive. It came with a 60gig, I could easily put the 120gig from my IBM into it. I discuss it with Russet and agree that it would be both my birthday and Christmas present, so she joins us in our Fry’s run as I probably wouldn’t be able to use her credit card.
We get to Fry’s. The parking lot is total madness, but we get a space fairly easily, albeit at the edge of the lot. We leave my dad at the almost empty line for returns and head back into the corner with the computers and accessories. The first salesman we find we ask about the Compaqs: all gone. They had 100 of them when the doors opened at Oh-Dark-Hundred and they were long gone. Oh, well. I guess I didn’t have to compromise my personal integrity by getting a Compaq (I don’t like Compaq or HP, my preferences for laptops would be, in descending order: Apple, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba, then all the rest.)
We did find a nice ATI Radeon card for my dad for $100, it was the least expensive PCI Express card that they had, so he was only out another $40 or so.
THEN came the check-out line!
Blech. It doubled back on itself FOUR TIMES. They had 70 cash registers going! Even with a line that long, that quantity of registers kept the line running pretty smoothly and we were out in fairly short order.
Back at home, after doing a little maintenance at my condo, I got the video card installed and configured, ready for my dad to stress it to the max with spider solitaire and web browsing. Russet and I went over to Bear and Felicia’s for an afternoon and evening of Champions and dinner (taken back to B&F’s) from Chino Bandido Takee-Outee. A little board gaming followed, but again, my back was bothering me and I just didn’t feel like participating.
Eventually we got home, but this time without stopping at a book store.
Saturday was our return home. My dad and I went back to my condo to install a new cabinet that the renter had requested, a bit of a challenge but not a big problem. Came home, finished packing, and we hit the road.
Dinner at El Charro in Tucson, a Bookman’s visit, and we were home at about 3:30 Sunday morning.
And as this is a VERY long post, I'm putting it behind cuts.
We drove down to Phoenix Monday afternoon after mucking about in Alamogordo. Got to Tucson for a late dinner and combed a mall for a few goodies. Had dinner at Mimi’s which was a bit of a treat: it’s the first time that I’ve been in that restaurant that it wasn’t full with a minimum half hour wait! In fact, the restaurant was at least half empty and we were immediately seated. We had an appetizer that is definitely worth mention: sweet and sour coconut shrimp. The shrimp were good, not spectacular, but what was spectacular was the coleslaw that it was set upon. It takes a lot to make me think a coleslaw is great, and this one certainly was. The ‘slaw was Thai-influenced with a peanut sauce base and a LOT of ginger! It was great. I think we would have been happy with a larger plate of the ‘slaw sans shrimp.
And being in Tucson, naturally, we hit Bookman’s. I didn’t get any books, but I think I’ve pretty well played out this particular location. Perhaps I should give it a few months rest. I did find a Dead Can Dance CD that we didn’t have, so that was cool. Actually, it was a good trip for music (and movies!)
Tuesday was very yummy. I had breakfast with Michelle, my renter, who had just come from the doctors and a blood draw, so she was famished. We then went to the Pilates studio to work on the studio’s web site. It had been set up by a “marketing company” that had a really great racket, I’m in the wrong line of work but I’m also morally ill-equipped to do such a scam (i.e. I’m kind of too honest for my own good). This outfit created the studio’s web site and did a pretty good job of it. They then moved to Texas (they were in the Phoenix area) and ceased all communications. We finally got the passwords out of them so that we could do site updates.
Out of the blue a few weeks ago we received notification that the domain name registration had expired. Zero warning. So the studio people frantically called Network Solutions and renewed it for five years. Unfortunately they didn’t talk to me or I would have switched them to Go Daddy. But at least it got them back online. Then we find out that the “marketing company” is charging them $25 per month “hosting fee”. This is for a very low traffic web site, you could probably measure hits to it in the low hundreds per month.
So one of the things that we did on this trip was to create them an account on Scottsdale Hosting, where I have my SpareBrainsGames.Com site and my dad’s GotBowls.Com site. $50ish/year at their basic level. That’s going to save Lauren (the Pilates instructor) a fair bit of coin. We got the domain name re-pointed, uploaded the site, fixed the Front Page configuration, created a few email accounts, and got her Qwest account reconfigured for email: they were providing her business DSL and we want to get her off AOL.
And I got a nice $200 check for my services! I was happy.
Tuesday night, Audrey, Michelle, Russet and I troop over to Zen 32 and enjoy fabulous sushi. Audrey and Russ split udon noodles (which contain horrible fungusy things, *blech*!) and Michelle and I split a salmon fillet on top of wasabi mashed potatoes. Quite yummy! For afters Russ, Audrey and I went to Border’s where I found a copy of Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith, as previously mentioned.
Wednesday was shopping for what I needed for Thanksgiving. It included a brief detour to the Phoenix Bookman’s as they oh so conveniently located it next to Sprout’s. I found a Leo Frankowski book that I didn’t know that I was looking for. I needed a fair list of goodies for Russet and I: I was making two side dishes plus brining the turkey, Russ was making one. Got about half of what I needed at Sprout’s, then headed off to Albertson’s across the street. Got the other half there, save one: manchugo cheese. I knew that there was pretty much only one place where I’d get that; and that is a Mexican grocery store. Fortunately there is one in Sunnyslope, less than a mile from my parent’s house. And they had it.
I got home and almost immediately headed out again to Fry’s Electronics to get a video card for my dad. He bought a new computer a few months ago and was always complaining that it was too slow. This shouldn’t be as it was a Sempron with over 700M of ram. From what he described, it sounded like it was probably a graphics lag, and given that it was using on-board video and sharing ram, it seemed a likely candidate.
So we pick up a nice AGP card, I got a good recommendation from one of my WoW buds and we paid about $60 for the card and tromp back home.
Get home, wake up my wife, and we head out to the Game Depot with a brief stop at Tempe Camera to pick up the last supplies that I need to complete this semester.
The Game Depot is an excellent game store. It’s in Tempe, AZ, and has been in business for 20 years, now in its fourth location. It was originally a spin-off of the Flying Buffalo Game Store, the owner of Game Depot, Dave, bought it from the owner of Flying Buffalo. If you’re ever in Tempe, I’d definitely recommend a stop. It’s large, well-lit, clean displays, and has a large gaming area. Every Wednesday night they have a Hero Clix tournament, and my friend
magic_rat was playing. We had made plans to have dinner at Nello’s, perhaps the best pizza joint in the Phoenix area, after. So Russ and I played a game that I’ve been toting around in my backpack for six months or so called Skallywags. It’s an interesting game where you are assembling a pirate crew. The tricky bit is that there are four types of cards: special events, legs, torsos, and heads. You literally build your pirates.We’d never played before, so it was kind of blindly groping through the rules. You build pirates from your hand (certain cards when played as pirates increase the number of cards that you draw every turn) and you can also exchange parts with a commons area. It was a lot of fun, and at the point that Jason finished and the store was closing, Russet was ahead so she won.
Dinner was fun, lots of good conversation, and after we left – BOOKSTORE! Jason went home, but Russet had found some books on the 3 For 2 table, so off we went. I thought the store we were headed for was a Barnes & Noble, turned out to be a Borders! So in the end it was good. I found a CD that I have been casually looking for for ages: The Ditty Bops! They have a really cool sound, and their harmonizing is just out of the world! So I was quite happy. I was especially happy to find Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys was out in paperback. My back was bothering me pretty bad (it’s been a pain, no pun intended, for the last two or three weeks), so I took a time-out and got a large iced chai and sat down and flipped through a Renaissance Magazine. Fun stuff, that.
Getting home around 11ish, I started making the brine for the turkey. A problem immediately reared its ugly head: for whatever reason, my mother did not have any brown sugar! Fortunately Safeway is open until 1am, so I was able to drive off and get some, giving the poodle a ride in the car and the cat and my brother’s dog and my sister’s two Chihuahuas a bit of a respite.
Got the brown sugar, made the brine, then waited. The brine has to be fairly cold before you put the turkey into it as you don’t want to promote bacterial growth in the turkey. I didn’t have room in the fridge for both the turkey and the brine, so I did a little rearrangement in my parent’s soon-to-be-replaced stand-alone freezer and popped it in with my digital probe thermometer (that would be used to monitor the turkey in just a few hours) to watch the temperature. I then settled back with my laptop for to catch up with my LJ flist.
My digital thermometer died. I couldn’t believe it! It started reporting 150f, then 125, then 95, then when I come back an hour later, it’s reading 200+! At that point the brine was definitely cool enough to start the brining process, so the thermometer was ignored, the brine pulled out, a gallon of heavily iced water added, and the turkey put to soak. I would have preferred a big “construction site” water jug, but we didn’t have one. My dad had the clever thought of going to his fav donut shop, they sell these big buckets that they get things like strawberry jam in for $1.50 or so. My mom cleaned it out while I was out getting groceries during the day. The turkey and the brine came right to the top, but the turkey was fully submerged so I didn’t care. I actually poured out a little of the brine so that I could put the lid on it. After leaving a note that the turkey shouldn’t be pulled out until at least 9am, preferably 11am, I went to bed. It was almost 5:00 in the morning.
Thursday. Woke up about 10am or so, ate a couple of pieces of double pepperoni pizza from Nello’s, and started helping Mom. We pulled the turkey from the brine, sprayed it off inside and out, and got it ready to roast. Brushed it down with canola oil, made a foil tent to cover the breast, loaded up the cavity with aromatic herbs just as shown on Alton Brown’s Good Eats Thanksgiving show. Got the turkey into the oven and commenced prepping side dishes. I made Manchugo mashed potatoes (a Mexican cheese) and orange-scented green beans, both recipes from Rachel Ray’s Thanksgiving in 60 Minutes (I’ll post the recipes if requested). Russet made mashed sweet potatoes.
One weird thing: the sweet potatoes that I bought on Wednesday vanished! Fortunately my dad was out picking up pies from Village Inn and was able to swing by Albertson’s and pick up some more.
With my probe thermometer dead, we improvised cooking the bird. The Gospel According to Alton Brown tells us to put the turkey, after having coated it liberally with canola oil, into a 500f oven for 30 minutes to brown, then drop the temperature to 350 and put a previously made foil tent over the breast then cook until a digital probe thermometer reports 161f. With my digital dead, we did the initial 30 minutes, then let the bird run for another 2 hours. At that point I pulled it out and used a conventional meat thermometer and checked the legs and breast and it all came out to just over 160 degrees.
Everything came together nicely, and the turkey was fantastic! Many compliments were given me, I hadn’t really been thinking at the time that I had “done” the turkey, but I guess I pretty much did. My dad flat-out does not like white meat: he was carving off pieces and popping them in his mouth.
The coolest thing about brining the bird: it’s still moist when you re-heat the meat later!
And then there was pie: pecan, pumpkin, and lemon crème! Very nice.
Thursday night I go to install my dad’s new video card and come up against a shocking problem: my dad’s new computer doesn’t have an AGP port, it has PCI Express. Totally different physical standard. His motherboard also has two on-board SATA connectors! Heck of a system for $200.
Friday morning. After sleeping in, we head off to Fry’s Electronics to return my dad’s video card and get one that works. Normally I won’t go to stores on Black Friday, but we were leaving Saturday, so I wanted to get this in and working. My brother was reading parts of the Fry’s ad out loud over breakfast and mentioned a Compaq laptop for $380. This caught my ears. My Thinkpad is giving me almost constant fits and will probably have to be replaced soon, so I looked at the ad. It seemed like it would suite my needs quite well, though I’d have to replace the hard drive. It came with a 60gig, I could easily put the 120gig from my IBM into it. I discuss it with Russet and agree that it would be both my birthday and Christmas present, so she joins us in our Fry’s run as I probably wouldn’t be able to use her credit card.
We get to Fry’s. The parking lot is total madness, but we get a space fairly easily, albeit at the edge of the lot. We leave my dad at the almost empty line for returns and head back into the corner with the computers and accessories. The first salesman we find we ask about the Compaqs: all gone. They had 100 of them when the doors opened at Oh-Dark-Hundred and they were long gone. Oh, well. I guess I didn’t have to compromise my personal integrity by getting a Compaq (I don’t like Compaq or HP, my preferences for laptops would be, in descending order: Apple, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba, then all the rest.)
We did find a nice ATI Radeon card for my dad for $100, it was the least expensive PCI Express card that they had, so he was only out another $40 or so.
THEN came the check-out line!
Blech. It doubled back on itself FOUR TIMES. They had 70 cash registers going! Even with a line that long, that quantity of registers kept the line running pretty smoothly and we were out in fairly short order.
Back at home, after doing a little maintenance at my condo, I got the video card installed and configured, ready for my dad to stress it to the max with spider solitaire and web browsing. Russet and I went over to Bear and Felicia’s for an afternoon and evening of Champions and dinner (taken back to B&F’s) from Chino Bandido Takee-Outee. A little board gaming followed, but again, my back was bothering me and I just didn’t feel like participating.
Eventually we got home, but this time without stopping at a book store.
Saturday was our return home. My dad and I went back to my condo to install a new cabinet that the renter had requested, a bit of a challenge but not a big problem. Came home, finished packing, and we hit the road.
Dinner at El Charro in Tucson, a Bookman’s visit, and we were home at about 3:30 Sunday morning.