“I made these fantastic pizzas tonight. I’m finally getting a pizza that’s flavorful enough to share with friends.” – Gary

Jim Brown caught up to me on the way in to work today, and took this video… I didn’t know he was grabbing it or I could have done some wheelies or something… cest la vie, maybe next time… don’t blame me for the music, turn it down if kids are around :> but it is rockin’, and seems perfectly timed to the ride, thanks Jim!

Andrea and I had a great date yesterday, while the kids had a sleepover at grammy’s new place: Mellow Mushroom, including Andrea’s favorite beer (Blue Moon) and me winning both Hera and Zeus AND Rosenkoenig (oops don’t mean to brag); home to watch Crash (study in racism) and Haunted Mansion (silly but colorblind); then SNL with Natalie Portman. The best part was our reminiscing about the anti-motivational talk from the droll leader of the bagpipes at a demonstration at the Exploris museum:

• q: Do you march in any parades? a: Ha you must be kidding – this is the learning band, we’re lucky if we can stand still and play.
• q: How many of you are from Scotland? a: Not me. I dunno, Frank? I think Frank is 5% Scottish.
• That’s called the drone pipe. For obvious reasons.
• Now let’s have the drums play by themselves. Nobody ever seems to care about the drums.
• The bagpipes have an extremely limited range. They can only play (8 or 9?) notes. So you’re not going to hear anything too fancy.
• q: How do you harmonize? a: We can’t harmonize at all, really. Next question?
• For our final number we’re going to play Amazing Grace, a song that people ask for a lot; I don’t know why, it has nothing to do with bagpipes.

Flew up to Chicago for a 24-hour ABB work assignment at Exelon (a bit of a disaster), and decided to try to pull off a quick hello at Tim and Tara Dull’s house. It was good to see them. What a great bunch! Tim is biking to work, Tara is back working, helping families with adoptions. The kids are all playing baseball. Tim got us a round of Italian Ices, I had kiwi-strawberry, yum. We talked about a possible future Outer Banks outing, now that they are officially “it”.

Typical me fashion, I drove a LOT of extra miles finding my way around, but I made my flight back – all’s well that ends well. Now if I can just get the software humming… ha! reproduced and fixed…

From the “good guy” dept…
Came home to a short – electrical not theatrical, suxx0rz – I poked around a very small amount, unplugging everything and retrying the breaker to no avail. I gave my neighbor Chris a call, as he had worked his way through college as an electrician, and his wife said he would call back after the kids were in bed, but he showed up at the door a minute later. He pulled the cover off the breaker box, swapped wires around to isolate the problem from the box, went inside and started checking outlet wiring, ran down to the crawlspace under the house and followed all the wires there to check for pinches or staples, under there he determined where the home run was upstairs, back upstairs he opened up the home run, which was the main light switch panel, determined which of the connections was to blame, connected all the good connections, turned on everything to see what wasn’t working, found the one light that wasn’t working (the light over the kitchen table), completely disassembled and inspected that, reassembled it when he didn’t find anything, went back to the main panel and concluded it was either in the wall or between the two adjacent wall panels, took off the adjacent panel, and located the place where a live wire was shorting against ground. And all that while I told him I didn’t want to take up his time and he was on a ten minute timer. That was the most productive ten minutes I’ve ever witnessed! Thanks Chris, I gotta think up a way to pay ya back for that one!

Play find-the-short…

My friend Larry was courteous enough to be born on New Year’s Eve, as well as having cultured in himself the ability to be a most excellent host. These facts conspired to bring about a great New Year’s Eve party. He decided on a casino theme, and spent his birthday daylight building a craps table. There was craps, blackjack and texas hold’em for everyone (no real money changed hands, we promise!), as well as more than enough alcohol for three times the crowd (which was large!). The Merchant’s parents were there, and charming Tom attempted to drink the whole party under the table. He almost succeeded! And we’ve all almost recovered. ‘Til next year!

I used to bike 13 miles to work in Florida, when I was a younger man, and I’ve been talking about biking to work here in North Carolina since we moved up 5 years ago. All talk, no action, until this past Friday. Our office moved from an impossible 20 miles away to a cakewalk 7 or 8 miles. So Friday and today were successful runs at biking to and from work. Hills are a bear! I’d say the 7 miles are roughly equivalent to the 13 flat Florida miles.

Jim Brown, the guy that keeps the servers humming at work, has been my inspiration – he’s been riding to work for years, he’d have to do my run 3 or 4 times every day to be satisfied. We’ll see if I can give him a run for his money any time soon.