Otterpop.Org

Never buy a house on a 3-day weekend.

We came home from work Tuesday to find that we had no water and no electricity. Not as much as a post-it on the door to say “hey, you needed to call already”. We ended up having to stay out at our friends’ house, as they graciously put us up for the night. Even though the utility co was closed for the entirety of the 3-day weekend, they still felt that it would be fine to turn everything off with no notice.

We called after-hours help, and they said there was nothing to do. Then they talked to Nik. Then they offered to come out if we paid them $125 in cash. Since I will not be shaken down by some two-bit wrench turner so that was not an option. It’s back on now, and we found that as unwilling to help as the utility was, Northwest Natural was incredibly helpful. They even sent a tech out at 8:30pm to take a peek at everything and show us how everything works. For no charge.

If cat boxes smelled like fruit roll ups.

but they don’t. they really, really don’t.
way to go kitties.

I came home from work tonight and caught part of Jeopardy. Things have changed on the show quite a bit, and not in a good way. First off, they now have an orchestral version of the iconic theme, and tonight they had a special category that was nothing but a sell-out. An entire column of questions about “Safe Driving Brought to you by Ford and the Virtrax Virtual Driving Simulator”.

All the questions were videos showing off their system while gluing giant Ford logos to the screen. Blech!

So Verizon finally rolled out the 5.0 software for the Blackberry Tour, f0r which we have been waiting quite some time.  I installed it, and it turned my phone into an electric paperweight.

More than 2 hours later, I finally fixed it. Had to restore it from the very beginning, and lost most of my data that was on it. Not a great start to the day.

I have a sinus infection that has had me down for the last several days. I missed all of the year’s best weather. Do you know what’s worse than having a sinus infection that burns and makes your hork up terrible things? MTV, that’s what.

It all started when the reruns on HGTV looped around to where I had seen everything. I changed over to see what they were reporting on a “news special” about explicit text messages that teenagers are sending around. The programming on MTV is about 55% commercials. I don’t want to buy any Proactiv, no matter how many times they want to try and sell it to me. Today has been far worse, since there has been a “16 and Pregnant” marathon. Even as sick as I am, I lay here and yell at the tv about how stupid some people can be.

I’ll take the sinus infection over the crap they call entertainment any day. I remember music videos and the occasional news show. I remember when The Real World started and it was a huge change.

So dearest wife and I decided to go to this great pizza place, Pizza Schmizza. However, It has apparently been closed for about a year or two. Lovely. In it’s place is Three Forks Wok & Grill.

To start, I ordered sweet potato fries.
They were okay, with 2 major exceptions. #1 is that they come with a terrible chili catsup. I found the flavor to be downright offensive. So I asked for some regular catsup. They told me they don’t usually have it. He found me a bit in the back however.
It came in what seems to be a salad bowl. The other problem is that they were so heavily salted that I had to wipe the salt off of each fry. It kind of ruined the taste. After a while, I started keeping it on the plate for visual.
Thankfully, the main course arrived. I had the Rice Wok with flank steak. I didn’t get the carrots I ordered in it.

To start, the steak was cooked competently. It was tender, juicy, and not overly seasoned. Pink in the middle, but not cold. The wild rice was blank and flavorless. The peppers and snow peas also seemed to have no real flavor. The only non-meat flavor that seemed to be from the almonds. The ones that were actually toasted and candied were decently sweet. I actually enjoyed those.

Dearest wife had the teriyaki tofu pad thai. She really liked it for the first 10 bites or so. The tofu was burned and overly firm. The mushrooms (which she generally loves, yech) were horribly slimy, and she described it as “like eating raw meat”. She said what left the worst taste in her mouth was the price.

The price is something to talk about as well. For the two of us, it was $29. That’s twice what it would have cost to go to Mucho Gusto, which is much much better overall. And the ambiance left something to be desired. The vase full of yucky lucky bamboo was cloudy  with a chance of meatballs.Eww.

So with that, the two of us went on our merry way, $30 poorer to our final destination of the evening… that bastion of romance and delight
We looked at trees in the garden center, and it was actually kind of fun. A fine date night in the books.

Final verdict for the evening: Overpriced, under-flavored, unappealing. The best thing on the menu was diet dr. pepper. Three thumbs down for Three Forks Wok and Grill. Run, don’t Wok away from Three Forks. Also, I’m pretty sure Home depot has better food.

I have a blackberry. For those unaware, your phone provider has the ability to “push” applications to your handset. You cannot delete these programs. You can hide the icon, but you cannot get rid of them altogether. They just added another program to this list, which really upset me. Grr. I now have a special hidden folder called “Garbage” in which I have shoved facebook, myspace, msn, bing, and this crappy “social beat”. Verizon needs a social beatdown.

We went out to the Glenwood (which is not IN Glenwood at all, but in fact on Willamette in Eugene.
I had the clam chowder to start, which was just plain terrible. It was watery and thin. It had some kind of spice in it that made it spicy-hot, but not spicy-flavorful.

For the main course, I had a cheeseburger, which claimed to be a Ninkasi Cheeseburger. As far as I can tell, it was a plain ‘ol beef patty. It had the recognizable shape of the stamped out frozen beef patties that I can buy at the grocery store. The taste was good. The Tillamook cheddar was delicious, and the bacon on it was great. The only real problem is that the bun was soaking wet. The kinda kills it for me.

Overall, I give it a C+. Everyone else seemed to like it though.

I do not desire to be anyone’s “fan”, fake “friend”, or whatnot. I do not want to write on your wall. I do not give a crap what you are doing right-this-minute. Most people out there put the twit in twitter.

I know this may sound somewhat contradictory from someone with their own website, but I’m not convinced that anyone really gives a crap what I think. I am not so conceited as to think that anyone really cares what the last movie I saw was, how I scored on such quiz, what 80s pair of shoes I am, etc.

Blech. Go outside, you self-obsessed narcissists.

We should have stayed in Hawai’i. Everything has been problematic since coming home. My iMac’s keyboard died (due to it’s desire to drink some water) and it was a royal pain to get a new keyboard for it. Nikki destroyed her iBook’s power supply by dropping it off the couch, and then all of a sudden today, the magsafe connector for my Macbook will not charge. I’m not sure if it’s the battery or the connector. I hope it’s the battery so it’s covered by Applecare. I don’t want to spend another $70.

I blew a tire on my car Wednesday night, and tried to get it fixed on Thursday morning. They wanted a few hundred bucks for the tire and their effort. I called around and got a good condition used tire for $40. That’s more my speed. I’d much rather re-use a perfectly good tire with some wear than put a brand new mismatch tire on my car and have it over-correcting whenever i try to steer.