Lovely Evening - sort of food review

Today was bad.  Moose hit a new low in terms of growing older and not able to do things he used to do, I was dealing with caffeine withdrawal, with the attendant headache and general blah that comes, traffic sucked... just a general bummer of a day.  But then...

Found a new restaurant on GrubHub (Alameda Brewhouse).  I order their soup and a Reuben, Roger ordered a Salmon BLT.  Everything we got was incredibly good tasting - the Whiskey Crab Bisque was rich and thick, the Reuben was thick enough to remind me of east coast delis, with bacon sauerkraut and housemade potato chips that were crunchy and salty and perfect.  Roger's sandwich was good enough that he had a hard time saving a little for Moose, and considering that it had two out of three of Moose's perfect foods (salmon and bacon), it's a good thing he managed to. Everything was perfect, even the sourdough bread that came with the soup.  But mostly, it was just that everything was comforting.  It was a spiky kind of day, and the food just sort of smoothed out the edges and made the world livable again.  You can't ask for more than that from a meal.

Some days...

So, I'm sitting here, watching Rachel Maddow, when my mouse suddenly dies.  It's one of those battery powered ones, and I tend to go through a couple of batteries a month, but it never gives a warning - the pointer just disappears.  No big, it just needs a new battery, but...

As I'm installing the new battery, the screw comes loose from my eyeglass earpiece.  Now, I'm blind enough that even installing a battery can be iffy without my glasses, but Roger was good enough to grab the mini-screwdriver for me, and fortunately the screw was still there, just unthreaded, so no big, except...

I've mentioned my issues with my bladder, right?  I'll be sitting there, perfectly fine, and then all the sudden, if I don't pee in the next two seconds, it's going to be overflow time.  And of course, I can't stand up quickly, because the same muscles that need to tighten one way to stand up, need to tighten in the opposite direction to keep my bladder from doing an "Ok, everybody out of the pool!" Still, no big, there's a reason why I've got extra towels and a Swiffer handy, but then...

I get back from my mad dash to the restroom... and my glasses fall off the table, onto the floor.  I think the universe realized it had pushed its luck as far as it could, though - the glasses remained intact. 

Frankly, I'm thinking it might be an early night.

Hamburger Helper?

When Mom was here, we made up a batch of meat mix - portioned it out, made a couple of meatloafs, some homemade meatballs... even portioned up some larger sized balls for cabbage rolls.  Of course, that was being way too optimistic for Roger and I - expecting us to unfreeze the balls *and* have cabbage on hand at the same time?  Never going to happen. 

So, we finally broke down and reformed the balls into a meatloaf for Sunday dinner tonight.  Oddly enough, the minute that the fridge was opened and the thawed meat mix came out, *someone* was off my lap like a shot, and in supervision position in the kitchen doorway. He wanted to make sure that Dad shaped the meat correctly, apparently (or that no stray meat got away.)  He's thoughtful like that.

Memory Well: Summertime A&W

Roger's hometown has an actual A&W stand, with the carhop service and picnic tables down by the creek.  They send out specials on Facebook, and today's brought on a wave of nostalgia to Roger, Daniel and I.

I miss having an actual A&W around - the combo KFC/Taco Bell/A&W is an abomination and doesn't count.  Aunt Sherri worked at the one in St George when I was a teen-ager, and I used to love to visit her at work - get a Mama Bear and a Root beer Float in one of their classic glass mugs.  When you get the root beer float just right, you get the ice crystals forming around the edge of the ice-cream, where it's half ice cream, half root beer and all delicious...  And the foot long Coney Dogs.  I have no idea what was in the coney sauce, but I still crave it, 30 years later. 

And the statuary from 70s fast food places - Mama Bear, Papa Bear from A&W, JB's Big Boy, the huge rotating bucket of chicken on top of the pole at KFC...  I miss tacky architecture.  We do have the Brown Jug on Sandy (a strip club where the whole building is shaped like a jug of moonshine), but for the most part, we just don't have odes to bad taste anymore.  Although the Portland Building does resemble a really tacky box of chocolate, so that's something...

New Computer Blues

Old Faithful was finally giving up the ghost - it was a good workhorse computer, but it was having problems restarting and the battery would no longer charge, so it's being relegated to another room as a backup spare, and we brought in the "new hotness".  Essentially the same computer, just 3 or 4 years newer (the HP Envy 17", if anyone is interested.) 

There are a few superficial differences - rather than Beats audio, it's Bang and Olufsen (sounds the same to these ears), the power cord is on the left side rather than the right, I'm going to have to convince the new hotness that no, Microsoft Edge is not my preferred browser no matter how much Gates is bribing you to think so... but the main issue is my monitor.

See, I don't really use my laptop as a laptop.  I use it as a component for the DeciPrise 5000 - I've got a separate keyboard/trackball/monitor that I hook in because I hate trying to type on a chicklet array or mouse around using my finger, and my eyes are bad enough that I *need* a 27" monitor and sometimes that's not enough.  I've got it all set up on a roll around table that is the perfect height for my comfy armchair - it's probably an ergonomic monster for anyone else, but for someone who is online pretty much 18 hours out of the day, it works really well.  Especially since when I was still working from home, I could just unplug my home laptop, plug in my work laptop and keep going... Until...

The new hotness only has two dongle slots (I know, they've got a technical name, but they're dongle slots) and no VGA slot.  There's an HDMI slot, but my monitor is not set for HDMI because I've had it just about as long as the "old busted" laptop.  I've got an adapter ordered and coming in, but for the next couple of days, I'm going to be squinting.  A lot.  So please be patient about any misspellings - I can't really tell the difference between letters, and I'm going to be relying on touch typing a lot.