Journal

food funk

Because of stress and boredom at work I have been in a sort of uninspired food place. Simple things this week, but after shopping in places for Shannon's Valentine's Day present(s), I gave myself some time to just wonder around the Dahl's on Ingersol (cause I knew I wanted to use veal or lamb). And after wandering around for a while it started to come back, connecting ingrediants together. I think I got it now. I got some green onions, red onion, mint, plums, some veal and some lamb. I think this'll be good...of course I'm just guessing since I'm not actually using any sort of recipe, other then I've heard lamb going with mint and plum....

I think it will be good, we'll see.

What a day to take the car in...

So I'm hanging out at work waiting for the shuttle driver to come get me, cause i took my car into get it's oil changed...

I also decided that I should go home early today...but...well...kinda hard to do when my car is all the way across town.

Oh well...at least my car will be nice a clean for a little while.

*twiddle*

Adam's Show

So Adam is having a show...I said I'd post this yesterday, but didn't get to it.

I have bought art from Adam in the past and have been happy with my purchase.

Super Hyper Extra Boredom!

So as some of you may know, our external webserver fell down several times near the end of last week. So I have spent the majority of this week setting up the new webserver to take over.

We're going from Windows 2000 to 20003, and everything else is remaining the same, same version of Coldfusion (even though there are newer versions out there).

So apprently IIS 5 doesn't have much in the way to export that you can then import into IIS 6. so I did this by hand. 80 some odd entries (a lot of forwards a lot of shared IP addressing). So the last few days at work have been mind numbingly boring. Copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, typey typey.

So ColdFusion is setup, IIS is setup, the certificates are on both machines now. Only thing left are the Ip addresses and moving it into the same ip address space as the current server. this way all the firewall and access permissions will be all setup and ready to go.

So Saturday, Brandon and I will be in at work and we'll have, hopefully, little to no downtime and retire our almost 5 year old webserver, which has, no lie, dual pentium xeon running at 1.1 ghz...so it's not the quickest thing in the world.

Hopefully this will pick up the spead, althought the database backend is still old and even older then this server, but is a quad processor...

Oh well...so this last few weeks has been the first time I've been called in at night, in a very long time, and this weekend will be the first time that I've worked a weekend in a very very long time...

Next week We're gonna go see Andrew Bird up in Ames, Next Month is busy with Shannon's Birthday (3/12), me going to see Panic! at the Disco (3/16), and also going to see the Lion King (3/18), and maybe going to see Ben Folds (3/9)

Taxes are done!

So, between the two of us, spending money that we really didn't have to spend, and efiling it cost us about $45. Certainly better then going to a tax preparer. TaxAct is the way to go (Yes I know, my dad works there, so maybe I'm not unbiased). It took me around 3 hours to do both Shannon and my taxes.

Shannon had a bit too much money taken out of her checks so, she owed just a little bit on federal and got a bit back on state.

For me, I got a nice hefty chunk back, between my deductions for the house and the motgage and the student loans and all that.

Of course all this money goes towards the wedding...so...uh...yeah

This weekend we're moving the websites from a 5 year old server (almost) to one that's still under warranty. Yay for working on Saturday!

Game night!

So we had a game night again last night. I baked some sugar cookies, bought some snacks, cleaned up and we got ready.

So we were watching the incredibles on TV, when Jerry showed up, and we decided to build a fire.

Josh and Lindsay showed up and Courtney too...

We ended up playing Trival Pursuit DVD Pop Culture 2. It was fun. It was Shannon and me vs Josh and Lindsay vs Jerry and Courtney. In the end, Shannon carried our team (70% of the weight), and we won. (woo!) With Josh and Lindsay in second.

Afterwards, people started heading home.

So a fairly short, fairly small and fairly quiet game night...but still a good time.

1 Year Anniversery at Sage

So yesterday was Shannon and mine 1 year anniversary. I got a happy phone call from Shannon when she came home for lunch because of the flowers that I had sent to her office. I'm glad they arrived while she was actually there, cause they could've showed up when she was at lunch. So that worked out.

After I was done for work, for the day I came home and waited for Shannon to get done. She got home at around 6:20 and went and got ready for our 7:30 reservation.

So over the night we talked about things going on in the next couple of weeks and then started to talk about our past year together. It was nice.

We were immediately seated and they took our coats and hung them up for us. The atmosphere was nice, some world beat or techno music playing above, but not in an obnoxious manner. We noticed the cool pattern of what looked like tiles on the floor and how old the building was (electrical conduits visible on the walls). It had pleasing colors and dark wood chairs and tables.

It certainly had wonderful smells and I was looking forward to the food.

We studied the leather bound and embossed wine list (which was enormous) and menus.

Our waiter came over and took our drink order. Shannon had a coke and I had a glass of Zinfandel, Cline, Ancient Vines. I don't remember the year. But it was good, mellow and not too overwhelming. Shannon wasn't a fan, but she usually isn't.

We studied the menu and everything really sounded good.

So we ordered and started off with a small plate of frog legs in a interesting sauce. Neither of us has had frog legs before and they were pretty good. The meat was not as tender as the tenderest of chicken, but sort of the same consistency. I think the flavor of the frog was over whelmed by the flavor of the sauce, which was quite tasty. It was a rich mix of flavors so much so that I really couldn't identify any one sort of flavor...it was kind of odd for me.

Second we each had a Salad. I had a Spinach salad which Sage's website describes as:

baby spinach, red onion, candied walnuts & red grapes tossed in a sherry vinaigrette topped with schwarz & maytag blue cheese

Shannon had a goat cheese salad, with a vinaigrette. My salad was quite good. A very good combination of flavors and the vinaigrette was really danced across the tongue. the combination of the flavors were very balanced and just made it a very over all enjoyable experience...and the bleu cheese was quite good...but then again, I'm a huge fan of bleu cheese.

On to the main course. I had the Pork which Sage's website describes as:

grilled niman ranch double chop with a watercress, fingerling potato, crisp apple 'salad' tossed in a blue cheese vinaigrette & a cider reduction

And Shannon had the Chicken which Sage's website describes as:

free range & herb roasted served with whipped potatoes, roasted mushrooms and green beans with pan juices

The pork was baked and just fell right off the bone and was very tender with light tastes, but the pork flavor glowing right through. The sides were quite good, with a interesting mix of flavors and textures that was quite good.

I ordered a second glass of wine and had a Firestone Riesling.

My little taste of Shannon's Chicken and the chicken flavor really stood out above anything more. The whipped potatoes that I also tried were very good too.

Then came dessert. Shannon had a Chocolate Mousse Cake and I had the chocolate Trio. Shannon's mousse cake was quite good. It was a layer of mouse on a soft cake and it combined really well. The Chocolate Trio was quite good. First they had a triple layer chocolate mousse with white, milk and dark chocolate layers. This was very good. The flavors were there with each layer and they were soft and fluffy. Quite enjoyable. Next in the trio was a small scoop of chocolate bourbon ice cream. For Shannon, it started off good, but then when the flavor of the Bourbon came forward, she made the "I don't like that" face. I think it was interesting. It wasn't a full blast of bourbon but a light push of it. It was pretty good. Certainly something that only a small scoop would be quite enough. Next up was the valrhona napoleon:

jivara peanut crunch. layers of dark and milk chocolate, fresh raspberries and caramelized peanuts

This was very good. The dark chocolate was very rich and the fresh raspberries brought out quite the flavor in both themselves and the chocolate. Shannon's bite left her with a big smile. I was quite happy too.

The presentation over the night was really good, and quite amazing with the desserts. Things carefully put together to be pleasing to the eye.

Overall it was quite an enjoyable experience. I would certainly go again. How does it compare with places like Mojo's, La Mie and my one experience with a guest Chef at Mosaix? I'm still mixed. I certainly didn't feel like I had been cheated on the price (without tip it was a shade over 100$).

it's always fun

It's always fun to drive into work, thinking that your server is hosed, to find out that when someone removed the keyboard, monitor and mouse from it, they didn't hook up the remote KVM device too it...

So the server is just sitting there with a keyboard error...

Oh well...sleep is over rated I guess...