Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

I am not necessarily convinced yet, but pretty close to it that The Benner household (of Cedar Park) needs another set of luggage, particularly a roller-bag of medium size.

We have two HUGE roller-bags, one medium and I think a pair of small (overhead sized ones).

Then I have a couple of duffel bags, one very large blue one that I got from one of my Aunts (David's sister) the other is green, I bought it at Academy that makes a great overnight bag.

I however also happen to take the green duffel with when we go to Michigan as space is limited in the car when we drive up (because the dogs have a lot of luggage, crates, chewies, beds, etc). When I take it to Michigan I manage to pack about a week's worth of clothes into it.

That is what I did for the trip to San Francisco, I managed to pack enough clothes to make it to Saturday. However, that means that I don't have clothes for Sunday or Monday.

I didn't think it would be a big deal to find a laundromat near the hotel, and I was right.

I found, BrainWash, it is a laundromat and a Cafe.

I had originally thought about dropping stuff off there on Friday morning, however that didn't work out. So I am going to head down there in a few minutes. Google maps says that it is only .5 miles away, so I am figuring about a 10-15 minute walk, depending upon how lost I get along the way.

Gina and I had fun yesterday, I will try to blog about that from BrainWash.

Once again I am faced with the fact that I have neglected my blogging. Course, I am not the only one

Work has been busier and busier, so I haven't had the opportunities that I usually do to log during lunch. I mean, if I managed my lunch hour a little bit better I could watch clips of The Daily Show, eat my sandwich and blog. Maybe I will try that tomorrow, course I still haven't quite learned to chew bubblegum and walk at the same time.

Jeremy is back in town.

He picked up a copy of Halo2 the other day at Fry's. We saw some videos on YouTube on some pretty impressive Lego Mindstorms the other day, so yesterday we went to Toy's R Us to see if they had any kits. Well, as with most sought after items Toys R Us was found to be lacking what we wanted.

Anyway, off and on over the last few days we have been playing Halo 2 after work, I have been lucky enough to beat him more often than not. However, he is getting better, while I am more or less just staying at the same skill level. However, neither of us are anywhere near being what one would probably call "Good".

I bought Stratego a few weeks back. We played a couple of games of it last night, I won them both. I hadn't played that game in probably 15 years or so.

We played a game of Scrabble after that, Jeremy beat me.

I brought my laptop home tonight and decided that I would boot up and blog a little while I am on the couch. Unfortunately, I am fairly I cannot bring myself to work on the specs that I should work tonight. I have been writing up specs for the last two days. While not overly, overly detailed specs it has taken a toll on the old mind. Especially since I have been fielding other requests here and there, interruption while writing specs or documentation tends to be more of a drain than one would usually think.

Anyway, I brought the laptop home thinking I would work a little bit, but that doesn't look like it is going to be the case.

I bought "Babylon 5: The Lost Tales" the other day. I had seen that there was a new Bablyon 5 DVD a few weeks ago and had spent the last few trips to Target and Wal-Mart looking for it. I finally found it at Best Buy, otherwise I was going to have to buy it online.

I have it on the TV right now. So far the storyline of the first lost tale is building, nothing critical has happened yet. I am not sure how the tale is going to play out just yet.

Anyway. Let me tell y'all a little bit about what happeneed this past weekend.

I dragged Gina out of the house on Saturday. (Pretty literally.)

The original idea was to drag her out of the house grab breakfast and maybe see SuperBad. However, that isn't how it played out.

We ended up going to The Salt Lick for lunch. Now, going to the Salt Lick from our place up here in Cedar Park is like an all day adventure, particularly since we didn't leave until about 10:30 almost 11:00. We had a good time at Salt Lick, we stopped on the way to pick up some Beer and Wine Coolers, since the Salt Lick is BYOB.

On the way out of the Salt Lick I saw that they had a small easel setup with these little maps to some wineries around there.

One of the little maps had something interesting on it "High Quality Olive Oil".

Gina and I have had some great olive oil from this place up north, a Spanish olive oil. (I can't spell the name of the place, but it is like Fugarelli's.)

So, we decided that we should follow the map and see where the adventure leads us. We ended up at this little ranch where they make their own olive oil, cold press, right there on the premises. They even grow most of their own olives. It is a working cattle ranch that also grows olives and grapes (for wine), they make their own wine on-site as well.

The olive oil was fantastic. I mean it is hard to describe, but as cheap as I am let me tell you I had no problem paying $19.99 for a bottle of olive oil that is probably about 1/8 the amount of olive oil that I get from CostCo for $10 or $12.

Anyway, they had some very interesting boutique type stuff too, mustards, jellies. However, the interesting thing was the balsamic vinegar, they infuse it with pears or lemons. We bought the one with pears. We also bought a couple of bottles of wine, a bottle of Sangria and a bottle of Tejanti.

It was a fun time, we made it home at about 5:30.

Well, I am getting sleepy, so best that I call it quits on the blogging for tonight.

Till tomorrow, while I blog, eat and watch The Daily Show.

Laterz

Gina's dad bought a pork roast the first day we were up here and left it in the fridge. So Gina cut some chops out of it last night and I grilled them up using some of American Spoon's Apple Cider grilling sauce. They tasted great, I did overcook them just a little.

The American Spoon store in Charlevoix was the first stop we made on our adventure yesterday. They had some great tasting samples out, different jams, jellies, spreads and grilling sauces. I sampled a number of them. Gina and I had spent a bit of time being couch potatoes watching TopChef yesterday and one of the winning dishes were these pork chops with an apple cider reduction sauce. So the idea of an apple grilling sauce with the pork chops sounded just too tasty to pass up.

They also had some other wonderful stuff. Gina talked me into tasting the Chili-Lime grilling sauce as well, it was excellent. The clerk suggested that we try it out with chicken. I think I will save the Chli-Lime until we get back to Texas.

It looks like today is going to be another beautiful day. I had been using this spray-on SPF-30 stuff, it was nice applied easy wasn't really greasy, but the whole bottle seemed to run out pretty quickly. While we were out we bought some more sun screen, I am going to try an SPF-45 and see if that still lets me get some sun.

As we walked out on the pier that extends just beyond where the Pine river meets Lake Michigan, I enjoyed some tasty taffy that we had bought from a candy store on the main drag of shops in Charlevoix. Oh yeah, we had stopped and had a really good lunch at Scovie's a little deli and pie shop on the drag, we had the apple crumb pie after lunch. It was just sweet enough, but I think it could have used a little bit more cinnamon.

Well, I need to go and grab some breakfast and get ready to sit out on the dock.

Laterz