Miscellaneous Weekend

It's been a very busy weekend. We've done lots of stuff. We went to Kites on Ice. It was a lot of fun. You go out on the frozen lake (I'd never done that before!) and watch all of these internationally known kiters do their stuff. The kites are massive and some of them can do really cool stuff with their kites. It's fun to see all of the little kids and the various puppies that are there. There was a gorgeous Husky. Matt and I realized too late that we should have brought May. But it was probably for the best. She would have had to walk a lot and she doesn't like that so much these days.

We had a nice V-day dinner too. We cooked lobster, which came out very nicely. And we cooked some amaretto tarts that wer excellent.

As part of our V-day festivities, we re-purposed our coffee-table. It got damaged when we moved and it's never been quite right since then. So we took off the top and put the two ends on top of each other to make a very nice bookcase. Then we put up our new coffee table this morning. It looks darn good and we didn't lose any storage space.

We also danced for about an hour today. We're getting way better at it. Now we can do Light Mode stuff without too much trouble. We're still quite white though.

Raspberry-Topped Amaretto Tart

from: CookingLight.com

Ingredients
Crust:
1/4 cup vanilla wafer cookie crumbs (about 6 cookies)
1 1/2 teaspoons butter, melted
1 teaspoon sugar
Cooking spray

Filling:
1 cup 2% reduced-fat milk, divided
3 tablespoons sugar
5 teaspoons cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 large egg yolk
2 teaspoons amaretto (almond-flavored liqueur)
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Topping:
1/2 cup fresh raspberries
Fresh mint sprigs (optional)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°.
To prepare crust, combine crumbs, butter, and 1 teaspoon sugar, tossing with a fork until moist. Divide mixture evenly between 2 (4.75-inch) ceramic crème brûlée dishes coated with cooking spray. Press mixture into bottom of dishes. Bake at 350° for 10 minutes or until lightly browned; cool completely on a wire rack.

To prepare filling, combine 1/4 cup milk, 3 tablespoons sugar, cornstarch, salt, and egg yolk in a medium bowl, stirring with a whisk. Heat 3/4 cup milk over medium heat in a small, heavy saucepan to 180° or until tiny bubbles form around edge (do not boil). Gradually add hot milk to sugar mixture, stirring constantly with a whisk. Place mixture in pan; cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly (about 5 minutes), stirring constantly.

Remove pan from heat; stir in liqueur and vanilla. Spoon custard into a small bowl; place bowl inside a medium ice-filled bowl for 10 minutes or until custard comes to room temperature, stirring occasionally. Remove bowl from ice; spoon custard into prepared crusts. Cover and chill 2 to 6 hours.

Uncover tarts. Arrange 1/4 cup raspberries on top of each tart. Garnish with mint sprigs, if desired.

Nutritional Info (1 Tart(
CALORIES 307 (29% from fat); FAT 9.8g (sat 4.4g, mono 3.1g, poly 0.7g); PROTEIN 6.2g; CARB 47.6g; FIBER 2.3g; CHOL 124mg; IRON 1mg; SODIUM 279mg; CALC 175mg;

Valentine's Day Comes Early

I found the most wonderful thing at Target today … Apple Sour Altoids! They're in one of the sour-type tins, but it's got red on it. They're very very tasty. Even better than the citrus variety.

I also made Matt his Valentines day present. He's already opened it because we're celebrating this weekend. So I don't mind sharing what it is … It's a jar with some of our pictures facing outward all around. Its filled with candy, so the picture gets pushed to the outer-most bit of the jar. It turned out very well if I do say so myself. Matt gets a few cute pictures for his almost-barren cube and some lovely Valentine's Day candy. Everybody wins!

A Normal Day?

I'm ready for a normal day today. I just want to do my normal stuff and not have to spend time on the phone with tech support or anything like that. All I want to do is get some work done and clean up the place a little.

I need to run some errands too, but I'm not sure I can persuade myself. It's freezing cold outside and my car is burried under about 5″ of new snow. And since I can run them tomorrow, I may just beg off that.

We're going to try to go to Kites on Ice tomorrow. We'll go for sure if it's a nice day. But if it's not, we may wait 'til Sunday. According to The Weather Channel, Sunday actually looks like a better day. Well we'll see.

It's Alive!

My precious computer is back to the land of the living and it's actually functioning better than before. This sort of thing always makes you want to re-examine your backup strategy. I backup once a week, but there's always some stuff I'd lose. I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Obviously, I'm in an excellent mood.

ARGH.

Your morning should never start out with a “Blue Screen of Death.” It just does not bode well. Yes, folks, sadly, that is what awaited me this morning on the pretty little laptop when I got up. A big ol' uninviting blue screen with aliased text and threatening language full of hexadecimal codes and warnings. It said that something was wrong with my computer. Now, 1.5 hours later, I still don't know exactly what. It seemed to be a hard drive failure. But my Indian friends at Dell seem to think Windows screwed itself up (a likely cause, I'll admit). And so now, I'm waiting while the computer does the check disk operation. Hopefully my hard drive is OK. I mean, I backed up last week, but a lot can happen in a week.

I'm trying to keep a good sense of humor about it. It doesn't really help in these situations to get all fiesty and upset. You just make mistakes and do dumb things. So I'm looking at it as a very good anecdote. Positive Positive Positive.

This is Clealy a Bad Idea

Ok, naming your kids after yourself is sure way to guarantee your kid will be in counseling later in life, but this kid is going to have real problems. According to Fox News, Jon Blake Cusack decided to name his kid Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. He probably though it was a cute idea or some way he or his kid could be different. Unfortunately, on the playground, being just means you get you get your ass kicked. Moreover, when you name your kid after yourself, everyone including the kid gets the impression that the jr. is supposed be the little copy of the dad. When picks his own path, everyone’s disappointed. Not only is this kid going to be expected to follow in his father’s foot steps, he’s really going to be expected to be a little geek. Can you imagine what would happen when this kid worked for a law firm, what would his cards say. Running for public office is totally going to be out of the question. “Yes, I’m version 2.0 and I want to be your next congress man!” Doesn’t really work now does it?

Why can’t we just give our kids their own name. If you want to name your kid after yourself, fine, just don’t make him a laughing stock in the processes. What sounds cute now when PCs are relatively new is going to sound really stupid when this kid turns 50.

Chicago Trip

OK, so I needed a new sportsbra. One of the best of the best is made by Nike, but here's the problem. They don't just sell it anywhere … it's sold almost exclusively at Niketown and at their online shop. Well you don't really just buy a bra online w/o knowing if it'll fit you properly or not, so Matt and I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to run to the nearest Niketown in Chicago (why didn't I think to do this when I was in Denver??). We reasoned that since it was a Sunday … Superbowl Sunday no less … that things wouldn't be that crowded. We were right! It was an excellent day to visit Chi-Town.

We drove to Madison Avenue and visited a few shops there (Niketown among them). Along the way we saw a car on fire, which was pretty interesting. After that, we went to Schaumburg (with a minor detour or two, thanks to not really knowing our way around) and hit Ikea . I scored a $40 coffee table that I will decoupage with something … sometime. It's pretty neat. And some other stuff. After all that was done, we had a leisurely dinner at Bahama Breeze. It was a pretty good restaurant … maybe a weee bit over-priced, but I had excellent shrimp and a great Bahamarita (yes, that has tequila in it!).

No crowds, no muss, no fuss. I love Superbowl Sunday.

Pretty Puppies!

We watched the IAMS Eukanuba Tournament of Champions this evening on Animal Planet. I'm a bit of a closet dog-show nerd. I really love to watch all of the pretty dogs prancing around. The dogs on there are absolutely gorgeous (not that I don't have a special place in my heart for mutts). The working group are my favorites… the Samoyed, Akita, Malamute, Huskie, Newfie, and Kuvasz are all in that group. They're excellent doggies. Miss May belongs to the Sporting group. I like loads of them as well. A very cute little dog called Coco who is a Norfolk Terrier won Best in Show. I will admit that he was a fine dog, but I really feel like dogs should be a good deal bigger than cats …