A carnival of technology

There’s a restaurant near where I work called Off the Grill. They’re apparently a Tennessee-based chain, and I’ve been a little pessimistic about the place due to the location. The shopping center where they’re located is brand new and filled with stores catering to affluent office workers in the area whom may not even exist. There’s a Caribou Coffee in this strip mall, which I guess is ok, and I was at one point in the habit of spending a good bit there, but I certainly don’t go there for the food. The only other restaurant is called Justix, a place that sells meat on a stick. That seems like a good idea, but the meat isn’t that great, the array of sauces is overwhelming, and the whole experience really isn’t worth the seven or eight bucks they expect for a skimpy meal. There used to be an Arby’s Marketfresh whatever next to it, an experiment Arby’s is making in trying to turn their brand into an upscale quick-serve deli, but I thought that was kind of goofy and they went of business after only a few months. Off the Grill serves steak. I like steak, but fast-food steak seems kind of weird. Off the Grill also delivers, which I also think is kind of weird. My Alabama readers may recall Steak Out, a steak takeout restaurant, and Off the Grill reminds me a bit of that place. I don’t recall ever actually eating Steak Out’s food, but the whole idea seems strange to me.

The last time I ate at Off the Grill I had a grilled chicken sandwich and a baked potato. The sandwich was ok, but I think that Chick-fil-a does grilled chicken better (and certainly cheaper), so I didn’t think much of it. What really stuck in my mind was the potato. I feel that I know my way around a potato, and the thing that they served me really sucked. Off the Grill somehow found a way to bake a potato into a featureless, tasteless mush; it was really horrible. The potato was enough to turn my otherwise pretty alright experience into a culinary horror, and I didn’t eat there again until today.

Today, while pondering the list of restaurants I’ve eaten at dozens of times, I decided to give Off the Grill another chance. Steak is their thing, and I hadn’t actually tried that. The sirloin tips on the menu had an asterisk next to it, so I ordered that along with a salad and some vegetables as my two sides. The first thing that struck me was the confrontation with the cashier. Ordering cow requires a specification of cookedness, of course, and I ordered medium-rate, as is my wont. I usually take the attitude that redder is better, but I don’t trust many places to get rare right, and I’m not even sure how tips are supposed to work. “Medium-rare” is a fairly well established point in the five levels of grilling, so I didn’t think much of it until the cashier insisted on referring to it as “mid-rare.” I wasn’t expecting this bizarre, foreign response, so I assumed he hadn’t heard me and repeated myself, for which I was met again with this abbreviated blurt of a steak specification. The receipt agreed with me with “medium rare,” so I really don’t get why he was treating me like the cook. The whole exchange seemed to me like a series of fast talking nonsense, and, since I’m from the South, I wasn’t mentally prepared for this linguistic assault. I picked the vegetables off the menu without much trouble, but I got stuck trying to pick a second side that didn’t involve potatoes, at which point the cashier rattled off a list of things that were not up on the big board. I picked the salad since it was the first word I understood. Off the Grill needs to give their people some speech lessons or something.

As for the meal, the salad was nothing to write home about. There was some lettuce, a cherry tomato or two, a layer of Kraft shredded cheese, and a little container of “lite” ranch dressing. I don’t know if the dressing is just the default they have for ranch or if the cashier was trying to say that I’m fat, but I didn’t like it. The vegetables suffered the same fate as the potato: they were mushy and unpleasant. The steak tips were pretty good, though. If this restaurant were any good at sides I’d want to go back there, but as it is, I don’t look forward to any repetitions of this experience.

And now, cycling. Cristina, my officemate who is more of a dirty hippie than me, sent me a link to the Georgia Capitol Ride, an annual event where bikers ride downtown as part of some kind of transportation statement I guess. I had heard about this event—while out on a ride once with blind Joe, some lady came up to us at Riverside park and talked about the ways Roswell does bike stuff, such as this ride and some criterium they have once in a while—but I had no idea when this ride occurred. It seems pretty neat, but I don’t plan to participate. Firstly, it’s a ride in a big group, and I don’t think I’d do well in that environment. I’m a bad cyclist. I will split lanes, ride on sidewalks, cut people off and weave through whatever traffic I think I can get away with in my effort to get from point A to point B. Just this past Thursday, the day it was raining like crazy, I weaved around one of those big white vans that I felt was making a left turn a bit too slowly. I flipped the driver off in response to his honking; I was in the wrong and knew it, but I had to defend my actions regardless, and I then proceeded to outrun him and about five other cars while continuing down Peachtree Dunwoody to the MARTA station. I don’t think that this is really the best face to put on bicycle advocacy.

Secondly, this ride has a helmet requirement. I wear a helmet myself, but I think that this particular aspect of the ride contributes to the misconception that a helmet is a magical shield against deadly injury. I recommend that all of you read the section on helmets in The Art of Urban Cycling by Robert Hurst. It starts on page 169, and it’s short enough that you can read it in the store without anyone yelling at you. Helmets have several pros and cons, and I think that wearing them should be a personal choice. Georgia only requires helmets for riders under the age of 16, and I agree with that policy. So boo on you Georgia Bikes for their misplaced safety statemets.

Thirdly, the pamphlet for the ride states that bicycles must follow the rules of the road (e.g., stop signs). This is great and all, but the ride to the capitol has a freaking police escort. To me, police escort mean running some damn red lights. What’s the point otherwise?

Lastly, the ride is really long. I’m on the path for the Roswell ride which starts at Roswell City Hall and is 21 miles. If I were to make this ride, I’d probably start at my Roswell Road intersection just inside the perimeter instead of riding or driving up to Roswell, but that’s still a pretty good ways, and I’m aware from my morning commute that the road is both hella trafficy and some kind of crazy hilly. The website says that the Roswell Road route will ride at 12mph, which I guess is an average, but I can’t help but think that I’d be expected to make it up that hill at 12mph. I’m lucky to make it up that way at all. I drop into the granny gear as soon as I turn right onto Roswell and thank my lucky stars for that unused turn lane just before Glenridge as an opportunity to catch my breath. I’m just not sure that I’m sufficiently hardcore for this crowd.

I’m not going to do this goofy political ride, but it got me thinking. Just how far can I go? There’s a Sandy Spring bicycle organization, The Green Tour, that has several routes through Sandy Springs laid out, and I’m thinking of trying one tomorrow. I have no interest in racing, so I’m not going to look for any of their Tour de Jerkass events (I swear, those punks don’t even wave at me), but maybe their choice of roads will be interesting. I think I’ll start with the double-diamond level, which seems stupid on the surface, but, taking into account how much I ride, it maybe isn’t. The route circles through some residential streets around Mount Vernon and Heards Ferry and makes a second loop through the Dunwoody panhandle, where I’ve never actually been. I need to return my Blockbuster rentals by Monday, so I figure I’ll try to work that in. I’ll probably start with my usual route, taking Lake Forest to Allen Road to Sandy Spring Circle, go from there to the bike route, circle around Dunwoody, cut across Abernathy instead of returning on Glenridge in order to stop by Blockbuster, and then circle around all those roads by the river. Wish me luck.

Lunch today was an odd convergence of synchronicity and annoyance. I rode the bike today despite the rain, because I’m an idiot, and this limits my mobility, making the already difficult decision of where to eat lunch even more of a chore. I’ve become jaded about pretty much everything around the office, so it takes me a good while to decide where to eat. Today I got hungry long before I made this choice, so I suited up and started off on the bike before actually making a decision. I originally intended to get takeout, since I like to avoid riding on a full stomach, but the choice I ended up making was to go to an Italian place, Al Capri, which is in the spot once occupied by Port City Java. Supporting local business gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and it’s close enough that I could eat in the restaurant without puking on the way back, so I made a slow, casual coast through the parking lot across the street in order to turn around and retrieve that big heavy lock that I left at the office. The shopping center for Al Capri is hard to see from the road, so it’s a little bit low rent. There’s a paint store, a halal meat market (which actually sounds kind of interesting; I should go in there some time), a skate shop and a military recruiting post. The recruiting center, of course, makes me the most wary: one time when passing by the spot on foot on the way back from Roswell Bikes, I was harangued by a young man who basically accused me of being unamerican for not wanting to join up and get shipped off to Iraq. I don’t want to have any part in the military. Regardless of the war going on right now, I have at times a problem with authority, and I doubt I could even pass the physical. The military’s great and all, and I’ll keep supporting our troops by donating to the USO now and then, but I can’t see myself being a part of the military.

As I stopped in front of the office building and started to dismount from the bike, a black sedan with US government plates pulled up into the parking lot and rolled down the windows. I vaguely recall some kind of shouted words just before this, and, though I’m usually able to track the positions of all the cars around me as a part of my goal of not getting run over, I can’t recall if the car pulled in off the street or if it was circling the adjacent parking lot. Anyhow, the car was full of Marines, and one of them in the back, Sergeant Isenhower, wanted to have some words with me. It’s probably worthwhile to note at this point that I don’t think too clearly after getting of the bike. I was already pretty hungry, and there’s no direct metabolic path from fat to glucose, so my brain kind of suffers. The bike makes me dumb. One time that punk at Performance Bicycles decided to quiz me on the amount of change I should receive, and, after hemming and hawing for a good while, I got it wrong by a dime. So there I was, my body searching for the right muscles to destroy in order to think, and Sergeant Isenhower wanted me to join up with the Marines. I told him flat out that I didn’t want to, and he thanked me for my honesty and drove off after handing me a business card. I honestly can’t figure out any reason they chose me as a target other than that recruiting centers are getting desperate and are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Marines saw me on the bike, so there are several possibilities that they may have inferred from this. There are several reasons to use a bicycle as transportation, and rainy weekday bikers might fall into one or more of the following groups: the poor, those unable to drive (license suspended due to DUI, maybe), and the pinko commie environmental liberal pigdogs like myself. Poverty is a good target for military recruitment, but a casual look at my bike—skinny tires, prominently displayed logos from fancy parts—should disprove this hypothesis in my case. I’m not obviously a yuppie racer, though, and I don’t know how observant the Marines are with regards to bicycles, so they may have made a mistake on this count. Non-felony criminal records shouldn’t have an effect on recruitment, and environmentalists are probably bad targets. An assumption that I can’t afford a car is, as far as I can tell, is the only good thing for them that can be determined from a bicycle, except perhaps that it also makes me easier to catch. I have a young face, so this could also have been the reason they decided to pursue me. Bicycles also imply physical fitness, but I’m not exactly the paragon of health. I wear baggy clothing, though, so maybe this was also a factor. In all, I found the experience confusing and unnerving. I also found it interesting the Marines apparently don’t have the money to print new business cards. The card I got had whiteout over pretty much everything except “U.S. Marine Corps” and “Sergeant” (the previous cardholder was a Gunner Sergeant, so the spacing didn’t come out too well), and Isenhower’s name was written in by hand. Maybe they’re not out of money and just trying to be thrifty. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to combine a troop surge with tax cuts.

The thing that upset me the most about this experience is that I didn’t want to change my mind about my lunch location, but I would have to go next to the recruiting center in order to eat by my plan. I’m beginning to strongly dislike those recruiters, and that’s sadly becoming a factor in my lunch decisions. I stuck with it anyways and ended up eating a meatball sub. Those meatballs were seriously the most delicious meatballs I have ever eaten. I’ve seen the recruiters eating here on some occasions, but I’ve still yet to see the restaurant crowded. Al Capri apparently started doing delivery (which was handled by the waiter, leaving the owner to both cook the food and wait tables), so maybe that’ll help them out. I hope that the recruiters at least have enough money left to leave a decent tip.

I got back on the bike today for some shopping. The thread-and-tape job I gave my blue jacket is holding up against the wind, but I’m not sure how it’ll handle rain. It failed the shower test, but I’m hoping that real rain will be a little less intense than my old-school water-wasting showerhead. One thing that I left off of yesterday’s list was the fenders: the front fender was destroyed, and I don’t know of any way to buy just a front fender, so I’ll need a new pair of those. The weather today was dry, so I’ll figure I’ll drive somewhere tomorrow to get new ones. As for the pannier, not surprisingly, superglue was unable to hold the two thin plastic points together against the twisting force of opening the latch. So long, Delta panniers; I hardly knew ye. New panniers are pricey, so for now I’m going to let my road bike handle like a road bike and kill my back, instead. I need to do some more looking around as far as panniers, too. The Delta panniers were waterproof but very small. I’d like something larger, and I think I could deal with something less impermeable that comes with a rain cover or something.

My first stop was at REI where I bought a new helmet and a pocket knife (I’ve been without a knife (again) for about a month now, and I couldn’t find it under the couch like last time). I got the knife with the corkscrew but not the scissors since the scissors are kind of silly. As for the helmet, I ended up just buying the black version of what I already had, Bell’s “Citi” helmet. Helmets, like every other part of my bike, fall into that narrow transportation-minded area between mountain bikers and racers, so my options were pretty slim. There was one helmet marked as “Mountain” that would have worked well but looked kind of goofy, and there was another “Life-styles” helmet, as Bell calls them, as the only other option with a visor. Maybe I should just get sunglasses. Anyhow, this other helmet, the “Metropolis” (I had Kraftwerk stuck in my head the entire time at the store, and I bet that now you do, too), is extremely similar to the Citi. It’s the same roundish shape and has the same number of vents. In fact, the only differences I could find are that the Metropolis has some weird metal screws in various points that I couldn’t figure out the purpose for (sharp metal bits next to my head seems like a bad idea), the Metropolis has a gummy plastic layer along the front of the bottom rim where the Citi has bare foam (I can live without the extra plastic), the Metropolis uses a three-size system where the Citi has a single universal size (Large had a maximum diameter of 63cm, which probably would have been nice over the Universal size’s 61), and the Metropolis costs $30 more. Not seeing $30 worth of benefit, I decided to save my hard-earned moneys and went with something I know mostly works. I guess that’s what capitalism is all about.

REI didn’t have the eyeglass-mounted Third Eye mirror for some reason, so I picked that up at Performance. The same guy who was working there last week was there today, and he commented on the progress of the wound like everyone else has. With that in mind, I might as well just answer everyone’s questions here. Yes, it looks a lot better now, but I think the quick-healing is mostly an illusion due to the blood and scabs and stitches that were present when everyone first saw the wound. I do not have any kind of mutant X gene that I’m aware of. I’ve not been putting anything on it because the doctors and nurses with fancy degrees say that I shouldn’t. As far as my other injuries, my elbows and arm are basically back to normal, my knee still looks funky but feels ok, and, despite the worries of one of my coworkers, I don’t believe that the pain in my ribcage is a sign of anything broken. It didn’t show up until day three, bones can bruise too, and the pain is annoying rather than excruciating. I didn’t go into that much detail at Performance, since I doubt the guy would care, but I did save four bucks using my Performance points. I guess that was from the tires I bought a while ago.

Besides having a heavy bag strapped to my back, the only annoyance I encountered on the way to Performance was being unable to see behind me. I’ve grown quite used to the mirror, and when wearing it I only turn my head as a means of informing drivers behind me that I can see what they’re doing there and I might be doing something myself, like trying to merge. I’m not really looking at anything when I do that; it’s just a signal. As a result, I’ve gotten really bad at looking back, so there were a couple surprises. They weren’t the dangerous kind of surprise, fortunately, just the sort where a particularly quiet car passed me without me realizing there was anything behind me. I’m used to knowing everything that goes on back there, so it was a bit unsettling at times. I have the mirror again, though, and thusly armed I went to the Publix on Hammond to buy my bike’s weight in groceries.

I don’t really like shopping at the Publix on Hammond since it’s smaller than the usual Publix, but it’s the nearest normal supermercado that isn’t Kroger. Unlike other mini-Publixes, they manage to stuff all of the usual services into this one (bakery, pharmacy, deli, Suntrust bank), but the produce section suffers a little. There are three items I occasionally want that I can’t find at this one despite my requests: Crystal hot sauce (disappeared after Katrina; I’m not sure if the hot sauce factory is running again, but it seems like every other Publix has plenty of the stuff), Blue Plate mayonnaise (they have Blue Plate light for some reason, but that stuff’s just gross) and, most recently, fresh spinach did not return after the E. Coli scare. Other than that, though, I guess the place is pretty alright. It at least has a certain level of familiarity, and it’s always fun talking to that one bagger with the Mike Tyson voice (his brother turns 35 today). I didn’t require any forbidden items, so everything turned out well. One of the things I got for Christmas was a Southern Living “Weeknight Meals” cookbook (thanks, Mom), and to kick off my use of that I’m going to try the slow-cooker potato soup for Monday. Also, one of the fans of my cookies at work recently let it leak that I bring cookies sometimes but hide them in my office since I think it’s really nasty how people paw through things in the break room, so I’m going to try to bake some this weekend lest the leakee think I’m playing favorites (which I guess I am, but whatevs). At least I’ll have something to do tomorrow that doesn’t involve spending money or playing Guitar Hero (confidential to Cantrell: I got 234944 on medium “Message in a Bottle”).

So biking consumed most of my day. I haven’t noticed any remarkable difference with the new wheels and hubs, but I was able today to ride the entire painfully uphill length of Sandy Springs Circle while only stopping once for under a minute at a red light at Hammond. I haven’t been able to make that stretch without resting even when I haven’t been off the bike for over a week. Maybe it was just the lack of panniers, but maybe it’s something in the wheels. I did stay off of the OTP portion of Roswell Road, but I rode on Abernathy between Mount Vernon and REI, which is probably even stupider traffic-wise, but short. When I put the rear rack back on today, I did notice that the metal strips that attach under the seat are bent, but I’m not sure if that’s from the wreck or just the way they are. There’s about a 30° drop from the line of the rack to the holes near the seat post, so these flexible metal strips already had to bend to connect, but I can’t remember how far they had to go. It’s not really a load-bearing point, so it’ll work either way; it just looked weird at first. Everything else is in good working order. The only things left to buy are fenders and, eventually, new panniers. It’s nice to be free of the car again.

Trader Joe’s is open in Sandy Springs now. For those of you who don’t know, Trader Joe’s is a chain of grocery stores that’s known for having the ridiculous yuppie food that you might find at Whole Foods but at, for the most part, normal grocery store prices. They also have some amount of normal food there, so you don’t necessarily have to pay five or six bucks for the gallon of organic milk squirted from the teats of uncaged cows; they have the regular stuff, too. This isn’t true for all food items, though, so using Trader Joe’s for a full shopping trip requires either some compromise or being a smelly hippie.

I decided to check out the new location that opened up this weekend, filling the space left by the Movie Trading Company on Roswell Road, mainly out of curiosity and because I had no idea what to eat tonight. The only food I have right now is potatoes, and—don’t get me wrong, I like potatoes—sometimes I want to eat something that isn’t a potato. I’ve eaten some Trader Joe’s products before, and some of them were pretty alright, but some of them were pretty gross. My impression of the store from my meager experience is that you can get some good stuff there if you try, but I have a good chance of not liking the sort of person that shops primarily at Trader Joe’s. Much like a lot of the food, there’s just something a little bit off about that kind of person.

The first thing I noticed about Trader Joe’s was that they don’t have a bicycle rack. No other grocery store I go to has a bicycle rack, so I wasn’t terribly upset attaching my vehicle to the cart return like usual, but I would think that a store selling eggs from cage-free hens with a good education would at least try to encourage non-car transportation. The second thing I noticed is that the handheld baskets are larger than normal. I’m not sure whether this is to discourage the use of a cart for medium-sized loads or to encourage people that normally use the baskets, like most people not shopping for a family who don’t wait a month between grocery trips, to spend more. Either way, I don’t like it. Normal baskets offer me a good indicator of when I should stop buying crap and worry about how I’m going to carry it home, whereas Trader Joe’s gigantors would push me a little past that limit before becoming full. Besides that, that amount of stuff gets a little bit heavy. But whatever, I can adjust to these small annoyances.

I know what their snacks taste like and I have enough fruit around for snacking purposes, so my purchases concentrated on normal food and booze. One of the things Trader Joe’s is known for is the “two-buck chuck” wine (actually three bucks here), a line of wines bottled under the Charles Shaw label from the Bronco Wine company, and since I’m all about them grapes these days, I figured I’d try some. At the worst I’m out three bucks. I also picked up a chicken tandoori something frozen dinner (it was ok, not great), some eggs (not cage free, $1/doz.) so that I can fry the rest of the okra (the only way to eat okra) I bought from Rick’s Farmer’s Market a little bit ago, a bottle of Three Philosophers for less than what it goes for in the liquor stores, a six-pack of Sierra Nevada’s celebration ale (I remember last year’s being quite tasty) to confirm in the cashier’s mind that I’m a drunk (maybe true?), and a box of Irish breakfast tea, since I’m running low. As you probably know, I’m a coffee drinker, but I do enjoy a cup of tea from time to time in the afternoon. I like Irish breakfast since it makes a good, strong cup and has a neat flavor to it without any of the froufrou citrus and spice crap they put in a lot of green teas. I also get a kick out of the idea of a tea being blended with a particular ethnicity in mind, and I read somewhere that everyone who drinks Irish breakfast drinks it for breakfast except for the Irish, who drink it whenever they feel like, so I’m apparently perpetuating some kind of stereotype four generations down. Eh. The box of tea is ridiculously huge with 80 bags. Even when I get into a big tea kick, my usual purchase of 25 from Twinnings lasts me about a month. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this amount of bulk, but, again, I’m only out three bucks if something goes wrong.

As for the wine, I guess I’m glad I’m only out three bucks. I got the shiraz, since I’ve enjoyed quite a bit the ones from South Africa and Australia that I’ve tried of that variety, but this stuff certainly isn’t anything special. It’s a little too sweet, a little too plain, and it has a kind of funky aftertaste, something that makes me think of dirt and kerosene. Sure, three bucks is hella cheap, but a couple dollars more can buy a lot more enjoyment.

I find it useful to be able to cut things in the normal course of a day. I’ve been carrying around some variety of a Victorinox Swiss Army knife nearly every day since sometime in high school. I guess I wasn’t really supposed to have a knife at school, but I knew the principal fairly well, so I didn’t really care. Knives get dull, of course, but I haven’t had to actually sharpen one in years. I end up losing them first.

The first knife I lost in recent memory was taken by a TSA employee since I had forgotten to ditch it before a flight. My flying habits are to take MARTA to the airport and to stuff everything into carry-on luggage, so I didn’t have much of an option. I think I lost another knife in between that one and my most recent one, but I can’t remember how. Most recently I lost a knife last week, a dull knife that I had been thinking about sharpening, but I think I dropped it somewhere on Mansell while trying to fix a problem with a bungee cord holding bags to my bike. Whoops.

So it’s time for a new knife, and I’ve been thinking about which one to buy. My past string of knives have been the Tinker model. It has two blades, a can opener, a bottle opener, that thing on that back that closes on your hand when you try to use it, and a Phillips screwdriver. The punch thing on the back is pretty useless (see hands, closing on), and I’ve had very few times where I needed the screwdriver and could actually fit it into whatever I needed to turn. I find everything else on the knife useful. I don’t really want any of the heavier tool options, like the saw, and I don’t think I’ll find a knife that doesn’t come with the punch thing, but there a few options for the screwdriver’s spot. The standard option is a corkscrew, and this got me thinking: would I find a lot of use for a corkscrew?

My parents are wine drinkers, and they’ve tried at various points to guide me down that path. It never really took, though, and I ended expressing my snobbery through beer, instead. I find beer easier to understand and less intimidating. The different varieties of beer are diverse enough that it’s very easy to understand to basic characteristics of each, and, though some varieties that take better to cellaring are often sold as part of a particular year’s “vintage,” the product from year to year isn’t going to vary as much as (I guess) one would expect from wine. Or if it does, the time that the beer was made at least isn’t advertised to the same extent. Wine is the just a single fruit, fermented, so I would expect more differences from year to year than with beer, the product of many ingredients and a consistent recipe. To me, wine is a bit overwhelming.

I’ve bought wine a handful of times for cooking, and I always feel lost when doing so. However, I recently had something of an epiphany: there’s a lot of stuff on the wine shelves in grocery and liquor stores, and a lot of people seem to like it, so maybe I should give it a shot. I didn’t figure out what beers I like by just looking at them, so maybe I should do something similar to my perpetual mission of malted discovery: try a bunch of stuff and see what I enjoy. So far I’ve had a couple of bottles from South Africa. I didn’t know where to start, but the depiction on the bottle of a giraffe as a “Tall Horse” seemed like a good compromise between the opaque (to me) and plain descriptions of some kind of grape and the ridiculous names that seem to have become popular in recent years. It grabbed my eye without offending me. I had a Shiraz, which (I looked it up) is some kind of grape that makes red wine, and I kind of liked that. I also had a Chardonnay, which was ok but not something I thought was all that great. I’m just a beginner in this and have no clue what I’m doing, but this was an eye-opening experience. I can enjoy wine. A whole new world of drinking is opened to me.

To get back to the knife, wine bottles have corks, and corks need a corkscrew. I have two: one of those big things with the levers that I bought at Target a while back because I thought I might need a corkscrew at some point, and more compact one that I got from the parents that unfolds into a corkscrew sticking out of a handle. I can’t seem to use the big one correctly—I can’t seem to screw it in far enough without going entirely through the cork to pull it all the way out, and once I’m partway out the whole assembly is stuck to the bottle so that I can’t just pull the entire thing out the rest of the way,—so the smaller corkscrew is the winner in my book. The one on the knife would be used in the same style as the small corkscrew, so I could probably get some use out of that. And who knows, maybe I’ll find myself lost in the woods one day and need to open a bottle of wine.

This begins the week that I’m going to start trying to cut down on eating out. Friday night Mexicans and another recurring social event in the middle of the week will probably have me eating out twice during the week, but if I can eat in the rest of those nights and get into the habit of packing a lunch, I will have cut down my eating out by 11 instances (I had Chick-fil-a for lunch today). I don’t want to plan every day in advance, since I fear that planning too far ahead would make eating a chore again; hopefully giving myself a few options for a meal without limiting myself to any particular one will keep some spontaneity in this plan.

I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time cooking during the week, so I’m going to try to have enough prepared this weekend that I can quickly assemble a meal on a weeknight. Tonight I’m going to bake a meatloaf which should give me four or five servings, among those lunches being a possibility. Tomorrow night I’m going to cook something out of the pasta cookbook: orecchiette with spinach and garlic. I’ve made this recipe before, and I want to make it again in part so that I can use up the rest of the orecchiette I have from last time and in part so I can raise hell when I can’t find any spinach. Seriously, grocery people, it’s edible again. The pasta book claims that the recipe will make six servings, but I’m going to assume that I’ll end up pigging out and plan for three. For a couple more meals, I have some frozen gumbo from the St. Ann (I guess it’s Annunciation of the Lord now? The new name isn’t very catchy) Memorial Day shindig, and I can thaw that in the fridge on Monday (and possibly Tuesday. I don’t actually know how long things take to thaw.). For side dishes, I have a cob of corn, and I plan to buy some green beans today as well as fixings for some macaroni and cheese that I can make in an hour or so. I can either wait that long one night after work or make it on Sunday.

I figure that all this food gives me at least nine meals, and I can make non-meatloaf sandwiches for the other two. I hope that this works. Coming next week: crock pot adventures.

I need to cook more.

There are several reasons for my new cooking drive, the first being a boredom with eating out. In my rush to get home, I usually just grab a TV dinner from Publix or something to go from a restaurant, and I nearly never pack a lunch to work. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m so bored with all the restaurants around the places I live and work that choosing something to eat has become a chore. I no longer crave any particular food; I simply give up my search for desire and settle on one of the same places I always go. I want something new. Secondly, there’s my health. As you’re probably aware, I’m a bit overweight, and, though turning my commute into a workout has helped a lot, I seem to have bottomed out as far as weight loss. Though there might be some fat to muscle conversion going on in my legs to slow this down, the keys to dietary health are eat less and exercise more, and I’m only doing one of these things. I imagine that most of the things I cook are better for me than the average restaurant fare. I know I’m able to get rid of some of the gut, since I was a lot lighter in college when I was eating one meal a day on average, but I’d like to reach that state without starving myself anemic this time.

My weakness is planning. In the limited time I have at nights, I can’t waste a whole lot making up my mind what to cook, and my leftover management skills are rather poor. The crock pot gives me a means of cooking things during the day, but I’ve already had all of the things in the recipe booklet that looked good, which brings me to my next problem: available recipes. Chris Lumens’s recent posts on food have made me realize that I have similar troubles: though I have a couple of cookbooks for simple, unfrightening recipes given to me by my parents and by Mike, as well as a book of pasta recipes also from my parents, my cache of recipes doesn’t have quite the variety I would like. Also like Chris, I’d like to buy more food locally than from the supermarket, a problem I sometimes solve by visits to that market stand on Mount Vernon, but that’s a secondary problem for now. I want to get into the cooking habit first.

Beginning this weekend, I’m going to try to plan out some meals. To start I’m going to use the recipes I have on hand, maybe starting with my mom’s meatloaf which I haven’t had in a while, but I’ll eventually look for another cookbook for more ideas. When I cook something, I need to figure out beforehand how long leftovers will last, how long I can eat them before becoming bored and how much I should freeze. I need to include lunches in the plan so that I’m not eating so many burritos from that place on Mansell. I need to plan things a week or so in advance so I can have the ingredients and plan how much time I’ll be spending in the kitchen. I need to enjoy food again.

My Sandy Springs city council representative decided to hold a town hall meeting on Tuesday, so I went to figure out what’s going on in my metaphorical backyard. Ms. McEnery posted a PDF of the presentation she used to the city web site, so you, too, can see all the stuff I learned. It was mostly about how we have police now and what the budget looks like. I thought it was a bit odd that the city has no money budgeted this year for sidewalks and road improvements, loud among the complaints that led to incorporation, but they chose to pay off all of the debt they borrowed for the first partial fiscal year from December 1st of last year to June 30th. I guess not having any debt is nice, and the city manager seemed to know what he was talking about. Anyhow, the city has a police department now, they’ll have a fire department in a few months, and they don’t have any money leftover.

Also at the meeting was Robb Pitts, Fulton County District 2 Commissioner and recently famous for his role in that mess with the parks. As you may have heard, Fulton County recently crafted a plan for the disposal of several park properties within the city limits of Sandy Springs, as state law does not permit the county to continue providing park service to a municipality of over 5,000 people, and the proposal they ended up voting on could have been construed as allowing the park land to be sold to anyone who wanders off the street and wants to build a new office tower. Pitts, once the backlash hit, reversed his vote, overturning the proposal, and he’s been in damage control mode ever since. There was a definite change of tone when he took the floor. While the mayor and city council seem like what you’d expect from members of a new local government—average, everyday people who go to Rotary club meetings and little league games and happen to have a lot of free time—Commissioner Pitts sounded like he was up to some old-fashioned politicking. The gist of his long-winded speech was that the county manager’s proposal, orally presented, as is Fulton’s wont, was vague in some areas, he was confused as to the intent, and he’s very sorry. Though I hold his excuses suspect, especially his repeated statement that he doesn’t know what the other commissioners are thinking, I can believe he was confused: the vote appeared to have been along party lines, so he probably just didn’t think too hard about the implications.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about the parks. I disagree with Mayor Galambos’ philosophy that the parks have already been payed for by the people of Sandy Springs, since there’s a lot more taxpayers in the county than those who added to Fulton’s problem of having too damn many cities, but Commissioner Pitts did raise an interesting issue in that not all the parks were payed for by taxpayers at all. Allen Rd Park, for example, was, I think, a gift from GDOT from land they ended up not using for I-285. Hopefully they can work something out without pissing everyone off.

I did not present David Cantrell’s proposal for putting a rotary in where Johnson Ferry, Mount Vernon and Roswell Rd meet, mainly because someone else in attendance had a serious proposal for opening up parts of those roads to two-way traffic in order to make a “circle of traffic” through that abortion of an intersection. His plan sounded like something that could maybe work.

And now, on coffee. So far I’ve tried two of the coffees that my parents sent me: a batch from the Toledo-Labateca region of Colombia and another from Hacienda La Minita along the Tarrazu river in Costa Rica. I wasn’t terribly fond of the Colombian one, but the La Minita was pretty nice. I decided today to take a shot at the coffee equivalent of wine-tasting, cupping, with three of the Community Coffees and some La Minita from Martinez & Co. that I had handy. I’ve posted some photos of the process on the photo browser. It’s a bit different from just making a cup of coffee: the idea is that you put the grounds, about twice as much as normal, right in the cup, add boiling water, let it sit for a minute or two and go from there. Of course, I don’t have any of the tools that one expects from this process, so oversized mugs and a measuring cup took the place of six ounce cups, and teaspoons took the place of a flat cupping spoon, which I guess is meant to more evenly break through the stuff floating on top as you take your first sip. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I didn’t much care.

My opinion of the Colombian coffee didn’t change much. I don’t really know how best to the describe the taste, but it feels very heavy. While some coffees might delicately waft through your senses as you slowly sip them, this one skips all that froufrou crap and just punches you right in the teeth. It also had a sour aftertaste, I suppose initially hidden by the mucky, woody foretaste. Surprise! Acidity! It’s ok overall, but really not my favorite thing ever.

The two Minitas were similar, of course, the main difference being that Community Coffee roasted theirs a little darker. I think the Martinez one won that round, since its lighter roast better brought out the bright overtones on the chocolaty taste. They were both good, though, and either one is a pleasure to wake up to.

The Kona blend had the most interesting taste of the four. As you can see in the pictures, it was the only one to develop that creamy stuff on top, which I’m sure means something. The first sip has a creamy taste and feel, along with some sweetness and something that reminded me of flowers. Later sips, as it cooled down a little, weren’t nearly as exciting, the tastes giving away instead to charred wood. Maybe it’ll be better when I don’t have a big pile of grounds sitting in the bottom of the cup.

I have no freaking clue what Coke even does anymore.

We switched vending companies at work, dumping the half-assed operation out of Smyrna (though I suspect we got rid of them not for half-assery, but rather because the lady who stocked the machines talked funny) in favor of the full-assed operation that rents us the pod-coffee thing. One side-effect that I suspect will soon sink in is that these people are going to be a bit more serious about our Coke machine being owned by Coke: they’re aren’t about to put Mountain Dew in it. I tried using this machine today in the hopes of getting some Minute Maid orange juice (sold out), and I noticed a product I didn’t recognize: Vault. All I could make out from the tiny picture on the button is that the can is green, and green means citrus. However, citrus isn’t exactly well defined; my question when greeted with this flavor is whether it tastes like Sprite or Mountain Dew. Coca-cola makes Sprite, and they have Mello Yello to compete with Mountain Dew, so I had no idea what to expect. The can itself clarified with a slogan, “Drinks like a soda, kicks like an energy drink™,” and it does, in fact, taste kind of like Mountain Dew. Mello Yello has never been as huge as Mountain Dew, as far as I know, so I guess this is Coca-Cola’s next attempt to compete. It doesn’t have that same unhealthy glow as Surge, which makes it much less interesting, and I suspect that it’ll eventually go the same way.

Speaking of things that are gross, Coca-Cola will soon introduce another stupid product to unsuspecting consumers: Coca-Cola Bl?k, the carbonated beverage that fuses Coke effervescence with coffee essence. Mmm! I can’t find an ingredient list on the website (though it’s possible that I just can’t navigate it. Why do web designers think that Flash is a good idea? I don’t appreciate sites making noise, moving unexpectedly or overriding my browser’s behavior for things like links, scrollbars and blocks of text. I want to be able to open things in a new window. I want to be able to copy and paste text. I want to be able to use my mouse wheel. Don’t give me your pile of shiny shit just because you can only think of one use case.), I have a suspicion that “coffee essence” means there aren’t any actual coffee beans in this product, other than the same ones they process to put the caffeine in Coke. Really, Coke guys, this stuff sounds disgusting. And your website sucks.

Since Bl?k was first introduced in France, there are two exciting halves to the website. The French half is perhaps the better use of Flash, creating a sort of web-based acid trip of flying bubbles and flashing fractals in which the actions of the mouse through the nonsensical, plastic landscape alter the sights and sounds, handing the user the reins to a merry-go-round spinning out of control. But then it gets stupid and just has a bunch of floating bubbles telling me (if I remember French right), that I should drink the stuff in the afternoon and don’t worry about the tent. The English site just sucks. It plays some smoove jazz while I navigate among the useless pages, and that’s about it. The winamp-esque visualization at the bottom is notable, but only because it keeps looping the same anemic animation whether there’s any sound playing or not. It’s depressing to watch.

I’ve had a few people ask me how the corned beef turned out, so I guess I ought to post that here. It actually turned out pretty well. I managed to fit about four potatoes, a few carrots and a couple stalks of celery (celery isn’t something I would have boiled, but it seemed like a good crock pot ingredient) underneath the slab of meat and the cabbage. I added the spice packet on top of everything and poured in a cup and a half of water, which probably wasn’t enough to cover the potatoes, but, as the meat cooked, the fat layer melted off, creating a nice oozing, bubbling mess for the potatoes to cook in. The cabbage came out looking a bit rough, since it didn’t get any of that bonus liquid, but it was still soft and tasty after adding the usual splash of vinegar. In all I’d say it was a success.

Sean was the only to come over to share in the feast, which was probably good, since it turned out there was about enough meat for two and a half people. After that there was a Fraggle Rock viewing (it was a little late for The Quiet Man, and Sean had to run), and I wandered off to the bar for some cheap (well, cheaper) Guinness and a couple of shots purchased by the bar’s proprietor and the group of strange women sitting next to me. Though the Irish themselves have over the years been finding that the choice of the Irish pub was always one of availability and that they could go to more upscale, trendy locations instead, I prefer the sort of place closer to an Irish pub, where everybody knows your name and all that. The ‘burb was crazy-packed that night, and the usual musical offering of some guy on acoustic guitar playing classic rock songs had been replaced by three guys on electric instruments doing more or less the same thing. They, like everyone there, turned up the instruments too loud for such a small space, but it was so crowded that it didn’t matter so much. In all, it was a good time for everyone.

Back to Guinness, you know those bottles with the rocket widget inside? I bought a six-pack of those for Friday and, besides that nagging fear that the widget is going to end up in my throat, how are you supposed to recycle those things? I don’t know whether the glass recycling process can handle the widgets, so I’ve been pulling them out with some pliers before tossing them in the bin. I also cut off the shrink-wrapped label, mainly to avoid questions about whether or not there’s a big chunk of plastic in all those bottles I’m trying sneak into the recycling, but I’m not sure if maybe that’s necessary, too. I don’t know whether plastic makes things complicated or not.