V-Day Dinner

I don't think of myself as a good cook, but I do think of myself as being pretty good at following directions, and last night I followed some directions and came up with a pretty amazing meal.

My almost-wife has become pretty spoiled when I cook for her, so it's becoming ever harder to find things to make that impress her. Luckily, as I was looking though the circular for Harris Teeter I noticed they had lobster tail on sale.

Now, I know that lobster is not very filling, so I noticed they also happened to have some steak on sale as well. I then went and found some recipes for the lobster and for the steak, which included a crab sauce which I thought would go pretty well with the lobster.

I also made some asparagus drenched in butter and some lemon pepper as well as some red potatoes tossed with some olive oil. All in all it was probably the best meal I've ever made.

Of course I made some dessert too, but with all that deliciousness it was hard to save space for it.

Aside from the dessert, it took me about 45 minutes to prepare and cook all the food. It did take some good time management skills to get everything to finish at the same time, and having only one oven didn't exactly alleviate that problem, but other than that, nothing was difficult to make.

So, if you ever need to impress a girl with your culinary skills, I highly recommend making exactly what I did. It certainly wowed my pre-wife! It wowed me, too. I was really amazed at how well everything came out. I kind of wish it was Valentine's Day every day so I could make this meal again.

Broiled Lobster Tail

Steaks with Crab Sauce

Roasted Red Potatoes

Sorry, there's no link for the asparagus, I just used a bundle of thick asparagus cut into thirds (discarding the bottom third) with a half stick of butter and some lemon pepper seasoning in a frying pan until it tasted good.

Easy Chocolate Lover's Cheesepie (I know that 'cheesepie' sounds weird, but it's just like a cheesecake, which everybody knows and loves.)

Sorry there's no picture to accompany this post - we inhaled the food before I could get a camera.

Savings Bonds

I'm packing up my apartment because I'm moving in a week from today. While throwing away useless stuff, I came across a $50 savings bond from 1996. I would have been a pre-teen at the time it was given to me.

I was excited about finding it because buying a house is expensive and I could use an extra $50. I went online to see how much it was worth and realized it's only good for $40 and change right now. It doesn't fully mature until 2026.

So I guess my question is: is it worth waiting another 16 years for an extra $10?

It kind of seems silly to have a bond with a 30 year maturation date. I always thought the idea of a bond was to give it to a young child as a gift and then when they are actually responsible enough to use it, the bond magically matures. Eighteen-20 years seems like a better maturation date, but I'm sure whoever gave me the bond got a pretty sweet deal on it.

Disciplining Dogs

As I was walking to work today, there was a woman walking her dog. She was crossing the street and as she was in the middle of the cross walk, the dog decided that he or she did not want to go wherever his or her master wanted to go. The woman looked helpless in the sub-freezing weather as she pleaded with the dog to do as she wished.

She was clearly having a difficult time and she really wanted the dog to just cross the street with her. Of course, the dog had on a harness connected to the leash instead of a collar, so he or she was almost being encouraged to pull the woman.

As I was watching this, I couldn't help to think how fruitless her empathetical commands to her dog were. I wanted to take a rolled up newspaper to her nose and inform her how to properly train and correct a dog. Cesar Millan would agree with me.

She was painfully aware of the scene she was making with her dog, and as I passed her in the street, she said to me, "This is what happens when you get a dog that weighs as much as you do."

To which I wanted to reply "In your dreams, lady." Of course, that thought didn't come to mind until I had already gotten to work, and even if it came to me instantaneously I never would have actually said it.

This isn't even a slight to the woman's physical stature (she was absolutely average in size), more so to her inability to do simple arithmetic.

Honda Accord > Jeep Wrangler

So I went to the Caps/Pens game on Sunday. It was a pretty amazing game - Ovechkin got his first hat trick of the season to help overcome a 4-1 defect to win 5-4 in overtime.

This isn't a hockey blog though, so I'll get to the point. DC got a huge snow storm (huge for us, anyway - a little over 2 feet) and I planned on having my buddy come pick me up in his lifted Jeep Wrangler. Unfortunately, he couldn't even make it out of his neighborhood, so I had to pick him up in my Honda Accord.

Maybe I'll try some off-roading in my mid-sized sedan in the spring...

Beer Olympics

I was supposed to participate in a Beer Olympics today but due to the #snowpocalypse2 I am unable to attend.

Luckily, this works out well for my challenge of finishing my keg of Amstel in less than two weeks.

It's too bad I can't sneak the keg into the Caps game tomorrow...

The Best Possible Problem to Have

I close on my house in exactly two weeks. I move into my house in two weeks and a day. I have a kegerator with a keg of Amstel Light in it. I have about half of the keg left that I need to finish before move out day.

I accept your challenge.

File Attachments

I just got this awesome little diddy in the signature from somebody's email.

Besides the fact that the difference is probably negligible from the energy used transmitting a 10MB file versus an 8MB file, I think whoever made up this little "green tip" forgot that it uses CPU cycles (and therefore energy) both to make a zip file (compress) and to extract files from a zip file (decompress). In fact, I would posit that you use more energy doing this than is saved by zipping them in the first place.

But I guess every bit of green counts, right?

Dear Guy-in-the-Office-Next-to-My-Cubicle

I shouldn't be able to hear you eating. You sit 25 feet away from me and there is a glass barrier between us with only a door opening from which your masticating noises may escape. If you really have no manners and must chew with your mouth open, the least you can do is close your door.

I would close my door, but I only have a cubicle, and there's just an opening there, and I think it would look a little unprofessional (and ineffective) to put up a blanket to make a cubi-fort.

But, making a cubi-fort would be pretty sweet...

Thanks,

JF

Caps Mania

I've only gotten into hockey fairly recently. From the outside, you'd say that I am an Ovechkin bandwagon jumper. That is not necessarily true - I got into hockey because my almost-wife is a huge hockey fan and her parents have season tickets 5 rows off the ice. So, if you want to get into the nuts and bolts of it, I'm more of a significant other bandwagon jumper.

Anyway, this past weekend I got to see the Caps beat the Tampa Bay Lightning to tie a franchise record for consecutive wins. That was pretty cool. I'm hoping they'll win another 8 in a row to beat the Penguins NHL record of 17 consecutive wins set in 1993. Of course, to do that, we'd have to just about double our win streak. But why not? With the way we've been playing recently it's not going to be easy to beat us.

Of course, I hope the real win streak comes in June.