Food Poisoning

Frost Damage in AZ

Our Ficus tree after a weekend of below freezing weather. Typically they are green year round.

Water show at home?

We opened our bathroom door and noticed that there was water all over the place. There was probably half and inch of water on the floor. My first thought was "Did our pipes freeze and burst?" since there have been a lot of people with pipes bursting due to the cold weather we've had in AZ lately. But I soon discovered that there was a leak coming from the hot water valve under the sink. You can see the old valve in the picture with the plastic knob. The plastic had broken and water was leaking from there. Quick trip to Home depot and I came back with a much better quality ball valve that only needs a quarter turn to turn off the water. I'll be changing out all of our valves so that they don't break again. Good thing this didn't happen while we were on vacation etc. It could have caused some real damage and mold problems.

World's Largest Video Screen?

Picture of the water show at Bellagio over the holidays. Microsoft just used the water show to give further hints to their vanishingpointgame.com You can watch the show here. It's actually pretty cool. They use the water spray to serve as the screen for a projector. Definitely not HighDef but possibly the world's largest. You can also watch the youtube videos of Loki and the vanishing point game here.

Mahalo Roy

We got a coupon in the mail to eat at Roy's and receive a complimentary Santoku knives and a cutting board. Since I'm a sucker for a coupon, we made reservations at Roy's at Opentable.com. As a side note, we've found that only 1 restaurant has ever read the comments that you can leave for the Maitre d' and that was Ming Tsai's Blue Ginger in Wellseley, MA. Christy is deathly allergic to nuts and everytime we make a reservation, I put that in there. Only Blue Ginger has ever relayed that info to our server where she made sure we know which dishes had nuts in it. Sorry for the digression. So after spending a minimum of $75 in order to get the knives, our server tells us that we got the last one. Not sure that is true but as long as I get them, I don't really care.

The knives are okay. The quality isn't that good and steel is not that sharp. In the picture, I have our Wusthof Santoku knive (black) in there as well for comparison. I highly recommend that knife which costs more than the dinner. Funny thing is, we actually don't even need these knives. We could probably use the cutting board. Maybe I could sell these on ebay but a quick search shows you can buy them at HSN.com for $15. Maybe next year I'll use one knife as a white elephant Xmas gift.

New Toy

Our Xmas gift to ourselves was a new DSLR Camera -- The Nikon D40. We haven't really had much time to play with it. I'm sure we'll have lots of time to practice come June. Ken Rockwell has a pretty nice review on his site and a recommended user guide.

One thing this camera has as compared to the Canon's is Auto ISO. Auto ISO is where the camera will automatically increase the ISO value so that the camera can keep the programmed shutter or aperture. This way you don't have to keep setting and resetting your ISO values.

Dim Sum Vegas Style

Out of all the times I've had dim sum, I don't think I've ever paid more than $11 a person. And I was stuffed. Vegas casinos are now cashing in on dim sum with their all-you-can-eat buffet. Bellagio charges $49.88 for their buffet. Notice, it doesn't include a beverage. This is similar to spending $30K for a luxury car to only find out that the floor mats are extra. I'm sure the tea costs $5 a cup. Even their normal buffet is only $34.


Not to be out done, Wynn charges $48.88 for theirs. Might be worth it just for that extra lucky 8.

Private Helicopter for Xmas

Nothing like getting an RC Helicopter for Xmas. The Picco Z is the smallest and lightest with Auto-stable technology. Overall, it seems to work pretty well. The helicopter has 2 channels so you can only control up/down and left/right. Controlling it isn't as easy as it looks but overall still pretty easy. Our cats aren't even really spooked by it. I was expecting them to attack it as it flew by but nothing. They acted like they've seen miniature helicopters before. The helicopter is pretty resilient and holds up well to crashes. There's even a user group with modifications for this thing.

Good thing I don't work for Dell

Christmas came a little early this year. I finally finished building a new Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz PC with 600 Gigs of Raid 5 storage, 7600 GS Nvidia graphics, and 2 Gigs of DDR2-800 RAM.


Here you can see the gigantic Scythe Ninja heat sink.



So while Dell can build a PC in about 2 minutes, it took me about 5 hours.

I hate waiting in lines and I love a great deal

I'm sure most of you have shopped at Target but the next time you go, check out their credit card reader. This has got to be one of the best ones in any retail store. You don't have to read any directions, or push credit versus debit. Just insert your card, sign your name, and then take your card back. There's no press yes to confirm the amount. The machine is smart enough to know it's a credit card versus a debit card. I especially hate the ones in the supermarkets where they ask you a million questions, or at gas stations where they try and sell you a car wash. I once saw this older man, swipe his card 4 or 5 times because he didn't answer the questions fast enough or it didn't register his swipe. You might as well write a check if you are going to slow down the line that much. Okay I'm exaggerating there.

Also, Office Max will give you $3 for each printer cartridge you bring in and you can use up to 5 in a visit for a total of $15 off a $15 purchase. Staples has had something similar but they usually don't take Canon ink which is what we have.

Early Xmas presents?

Riley left us a nice present on the rug. Unfortunately it's not the type of present you can't wait to wake up and open. Originally we had bought those cat pheromones so they wouldn't scratch on the door or leave presents. The cats still scratch on the door although now at 6am instead of 4 or 5am and they haven't left us any gifts in a long time. So it seems that the pheromones don't quite work. The pheromones did run out during this last episode but I think the gift was Riley getting even for not being fed until 7am.

Thanksgiving mistakes

We cooked turkey for thanksgiving and had a few friends over this year. We've cooked turkey twice before without any problems but this year we screwed up twice. Well rather I screwed up twice. The first was that the bottom of the turkey wasn't fully cooked. I attribute this to our new convection oven. Convection cooking cooks things more uniformly regardless of the rack position and faster because of the better heat transfer. However, this didn't quite work because we were roasting in a v-rack where the bottom of the turkey was being blocked by the roasting pan. Next time, we'll either flip the turkey half way through or roast on a flat pan.

The other problem we had was that I didn't remove the giblets. Well the exact problem was that I didn't find them in the hole that I thought they'd be in. Instead I found a gravy packet which threw me off. I thought they had replaced the giblets with this gravy packet. Well turns out the giblets were actually in the other orifice. You can be sure that we'll never make this mistake again. The picture above is actually from thanksgiving in 2003 when we were in Boston.

Priceless Art

The Phoenix Art Museum had its grand re-opening this weekend where they had free admission all weekend long. They opened up a new modern art wing that had an interesting firefly exhibit. Basically, it's a completely dark room lined with mirrors and strings of little lights hanging from the ceiling. It's pretty cool except for the fact that you are paranoid of hitting the wall as you walk around. They also had an Asian art section, evening dresses from the century, Ansel Adams Gallery, Cowboy Art section (we skipped that one), and some other cool modern art.

UFO sighting?

Out with the old....


in with the UFO?

Apple pie assembly

Nothing like apple pie from scratch. Even the pie crusts were home made. Although they were a little too crumbly. Probably didn't add enough water.

Apples from Chelan, WA by way of Costco.


A mound of chopped apples, sugar, butter, cinnamon, and salt provided by Christy.



The final product!

Cheap construction

Whenever it's really windy out, you can always here the ventilation flap inside making noise. The reason is that the vent opening to the outside doesn't have a door. Probably not the best thing when it's over 100 degrees out too.


Well after some tinkering around with some sheet metal, I was able to create a flap that will hopefully prevent the wind and hot air from entering the house. The white in the picture below is clear caulk that hasn't cured yet.

Bathroom remodel

This one fortunately cost under 20 bucks and will hopefully prevent the kitties from kicking cat litter out of the box and more importantly not let them pee outside of the box. Our previous one didn't have the cool bubble lid and door. The problem with introducing any new bathroom is that your cats might prefer their old bathroom more and boycott the new one. After finishing the bathroom upgrade, I was a little nervous since the cats had not used it or even gone to check it out. Let's just say I've never been more excited to wake up and see some logs in the litter box.

4" nail but no 5" nails

We had a roof tile fall off during a storm. Luckily no one was under it. I thought putting it back up would be easy enough but turns out that my 4" nail was just a little too short to hit the roof. Turns out that Ace hardware doesn't sell anything larger than a 4" nail. So a little improvising led to a piece of wood screwed to the roof and then I nailed the tile into that. Hopefully the wood lasts. All of this looks easy enough minus the fact that you are 20 ft up in the air.

Cologne for Cats?

This is our last hope. The cats demand to be fed at 4:30am and won't take no for an answer. They scratch and body slam themselves into the door. Hopefully this cat pheromone plug-in diffuser will do the trick. Will let you know in 4 weeks if it worked or not.

Nothing like a glove to catch those fly balls

Caught a Giant's game while vacationing in SF. Even rode the slide in the huge coke bottle in the stadium.