Christmas Cards (a little late)

Today I found some mail that my cleaning lady "hid". She's got this habit of stacking...well, anything that can be stacked and some stuff that can't be stacked....like shoes. Anyway, she stacked my mail UNDERNEATH a magazine, so there was a letter and a bill that I haven't open in over a week. Argh.

One of those letters was from my parents with my acknowledgement (alright, OUR acknowledgement even though we all know who picked out the card!) for winning the card picking contest with the best Christmas card of 2010. It reminded me that I haven't posted my favorite cards of the year, so here they are:

This card has some three dimensional-ness to it that you probably can't see in the scanned version. It's from Bill the Bear and Nadine...his...long time companion? They've been together for like 10 years or something and live together but aren't married and aren't planning on it.

You just gotta love a snuggly dog right? That's just cute. This card was from my buddy Joisey Ken's mother-in-law Vicki, whom I've met several times, including at Ken's wedding and she's just a great person.

This one is MUCH cooler in person due to the sparkely snow on the path and the fence posts. Very cool. It was sent to me by Wisconsin friends of mine, Gherud and Tracy. Nicely done.

And the winner this year, from Naperville Greg and Kleveland Kim, this deer card! The ornaments dangling from the antlers are really little stones on the card itself and are very cool. There's a back story too because Greg, a hunter, shot a buck in December and was pretty jacked about it. Lots of good meat, or so I've heard, was taken from the kill. Ahem. AHEM! Maybe some will find it's way to me.

Pleasant interruption

Today was a typical Monday, though I had an earlier start than I normally do on a Monday (especially following a Bears game!). It was sort of rolling around and included getting my haircut, but there was still much to do including cooking ribs and going to the gym (annnnnddd there was some work I needed to do as well).

Butttt, I got a call from Naperville Greg and Kleveland Kim telling me they were in the hood! KK was getting her taxes done, so NG came over and we hung out. Actually, the ribs couldn't wait so I had to apply the rub and get them started, especially since there's a 4 hour cook time! So anyway, NG and I caught up and when KK was done, we picked her up and got some coffee. It was a great break and fun to catch up. What great folks. Annnnnd I was still able to make the ribs and hit the gym. Work? Well, that's going to have to come tomorrow.

LL wanted a public correction on my comment about Lent being a catholic thing. Lent is for all Christians, but they celebrate it or experience differently. Noted.

Some wedding progress

Oh how I needed another day this weekend. I'm beat!

Some wedding progress was made this weekend with the signing of our contract with the hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico and we emailed out our "save the date" postcards. Yep, we emailed them. Soooo much easier. It contained a nice picture of us and the relevant info that we know at this point. We also set up an email account just for the wedding responses and such. We'll send out regular invitations I imagine, but I'm not licking the envelopes (for you Seinfeld fans).

Not much in the way of revelations to write about today. Next week starts Lent for Catholics and it's a time of year that I actually look forward to, except for the fasting from meat on Fridays. During the week I'll go to church at least once and try my best to follow the fasting rules. I flip the giving something up for Lent theme around and try to do more positive stuff instead. If there's a particular bad habit that I think I could do without, I'll ponder giving it up, but usually it's doing something positive. Other than going to church during the week, I'm not sure what the action might be this year. There are still a few days to figure it out, but even if I think of something well into Lent, just the act of making a positive change for any period of time is good.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Gastronomic events

Last night was a gastronomical event, what's become synonymous with ESDNM. We went to Sapori Trattoria for a fixed price....the only word I can use is smorgasbord. More on that later.

Tuesday we went to Sun Wah, a Chinese barbecue place with great food in large quantities for not a lot of money. Possibly the most amazing thing is that they have Goose Island Matilda beer, 22 oz, for $6.50. It goes for $8 a bottle at the store!!!

Anyway, here's a picture of the food from that meal. Bbq pork, roasted duck, shrimp stuffed eggplant and duck and pork with shrimp stuffed dumplings. Yum!!! It was all great, but the eggplant was pretty phenomenal.

On to our experience last night. It started at 7 and there was room for 38 people. We were fortunate enough to get 3 of the last 6 spots available and had to reserve ahead of time. The food was outstanding and the wine was constantly flowing. With every move from section to section of the menu, we had a new wine from the same vineyard that I believe the owner said had 1,000 year old vines which his family has harvested for the last 160 years. Wow.

Here's the menu. The pumpkin pasta was unbelievable and the tri-meat ragu was cooked for 18 hours!! The meat dishes were fantastic too....fall of the bone tender and just delicious.

Even the table was set up nicely, complete with rose petals. The good thing about having three people (ESDNM, LL and me) was that they brought servings for four!! Boy did we eat though.....probably a bit too much.

He's not completely useless.

ESDNM cooked dinner tonight as we had great food last night and have a big night planned for tomorrow night as well. Can't have good food three nights in a row. Ha!! Seriously, we stopped by Whole Foods and bought some veggies and then went to Jewel for some meat. He did a great job cooking some really delicious butternut squash, asparagus, salad and pan fried strip steak. Good eating.

Though we just had one client meeting today, it was a good one! Very excited to help this client out.

Here are a couple of pictures from this weekend.

Here's a single I hit. It looks sunnier than it really was. That infield was like playing in a parking lot....super hard.

Scoring from second! If you look closely, you can see the ball coming into second base at the top of the picture. We used optic yellow balls and the throw is coming in just above the "s" in Pepsi.

The Prognosticator

It's been a few years since I first wrote about Adesso, but not too long since my follow up entry calling for it's demise before this past winter. The other day, while I was in Phoenix, LL went by and saw that it's closed! You can't put one past ol'Joe.

However, the place across the street, Nabo's, has been closed due to multiple health violations. And yes, I've eaten there probably a hundred times. Guess it's not REALLY that hard to put one past ol'Joe.

Tonight ESNDM is in town and we went back to what is becoming a favorite on the list of great restaurants in Chicago: Sun Wah. It's great Chinese food, especially the duck dishes, but they had some outstanding food in general from the shrimp stuffed eggplant (yes it's possible) to BBQ duck (though we had roasted duck) to duck and shrimp dumpling soup. Yum!!

Soooo sore

Boy, I thought I was sore yesterday (and I was), but today it's a little worse and the plane ride didn't do anything to help. Oddly, my shins hurt a bit and so does the arch on my left foot. It's the first time that I can remember for those two things.

While we want to go to AZ and play games and win, six in one day and five in a row without a break starting at 8:00 a.m. is a bit much. Fortunately it was overcast all day so we didn't have to deal with sunburn or severe dehydration.

This pic is of the sunrise. Yeah, sunRISE. Ugh.

My entry from Saturday summed up the softball day, 4-2 with one hour off over a seven hour span. After starting 6-6, I went 5-14 to hit .550 on the day. In the last game the shortstop made a nice play on a ball I hit up the middle otherwise I would have hit .600, which is sort of a benchmark for me. Not bad for the first tournament of the year.

Thursday and Friday we went golfing though and played a course on Friday called The Stadium, which is a TPC course and where they held a pro tournament just three weeks ago. Here's a look at the famous Stadium Hole par 3.

I guess it takes 2 months plus to take down the stands that encircle the hole. Pretty cool.

I really liked the little cactus. Cacti? The little spikey things.

Here I am on the picturesque par 5 15th hole. It was a great weather day and a beautiful course. The temps were in the 60's, so I opted for a long sleeve shirt under my golf shirt.

This rock is famously called Tiger's Rock. His ball was behind the rock and he solicited the help of the gallery to dig it up and move it. They have since changed the rules on moving "loose impediments" to limit it to you and your caddy.

Look at this beautiful fairway and hole!

I just thought this was a cool picture.

The very nice sunset.

Long day of softball

Since I'm traveling tomorrow and I don't get in until 10:00, I thought I'd post today.

It was an early, but fun day. We were one of two games at 8:00 in the 19 team tournament. Clearly the early start hurt us as we were down 14-5 after 3 innings. The GOOD news was that for the first game I was 4-4 with three runs scored and two RBI (2 of the first 5). After the slow start though we came back hard but ended up losing 19-18 and had the tying run on third base. Ugh. So close. That meant we were going to have to play something like 10 games during the day to win it all. Tough task.

We made a good run though by winning the next 4 games, 18-0, 14-12, 19-16, and 16-11. We played and beat teams from Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque and I'm not sure where the other team was from. Then we played a team from Illinois who is in the same weekly league and we lost 14-7. For the day I hit .550 and made some nice plays at first. One play was on a foul ball by the dugout in which I slid and made the grab just before the dugout fence. That got quite a few "attaboys" from the guys.

Six games anytime of the year is a long day, but it's especially tough in February when we haven't played a tournament yet or even league play! The team we lost to in the first game was from Phoenix and already played in two tournaments plus play every week on the fields we were playing on.

Still, all in all it was a great trip. Two fun rounds of golf and six games of softball. For someone who had a nasty back spasm last Sunday and had two trips to the chiropractor and masseuse just to get ready to play, I can't complain.

What a day

The morning alarm came ungodly early today: 5:00 a.m. The early hour was compounded by my lack of sleep, even though I went to bed at a relatively early hour (before 11). Just tossing and turning and thinking about getting up early and did I have everything or not. Ugh.

So I got up at 5 and was ready to leave the house by 5:30. LL was awesome enough to drive me to Midway. She's unbelievable!! That's why I love her.....or at least one of the reasons. My 7:15 flight to Phoenix left a little late and we got into Phoenix a little late, but overall a fairly painless trip.....oh yeah, except for the absolutely AWFUL movie I rented from Redbox and watched: Machete. You may think it was a hacker type movie, which it was, but it starred the likes of: Robert De Niro, Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson and Lindsay Lohan. Seriously! And the movie SUCKED!! You can see why I thought it would be worth a dollar though.

Brian the Pollack picked me up at the airport (he took an earlier flight so while I was arriving he went and rented our car). We headed straight to the golf course, thanks to me changing into my golf attire while waiting for my bags. The course, like most of Arizona, was pretty dry except for the fairways but played really nicely. We really enjoyed the course and ended up playing with a guy from Chicago and in fact near where Brian lives! Weird coincidence.

Not only was it my first round of the year, but I was also trying out three new clubs and a new putting stroke. Though I struggled with the distances on the clubs, my putting stroke, courtesy of a Phil Mickelson instructional DVD, was working really well. On the back nine holes, I only had 13 putts on my way to four over par. The front nine was more of a struggle, but it was mostly my new clubs going a lot further than I was expecting. It was a fun round and I shot 85 while Brian shot 87.

Tomorrow is a TPC course called The Stadium. The pros held a tournament there just last month, at least I think it was last month....well, recently at least.

Getting Better

Sorry about missing yesterday. Not much to report unless you're interested in my use of tissue and the products with which I fill them. Yeah, it was that kind of day. After 11 hours of sleep on Monday night though, I felt a bit better this morning. The medicine for the day was 3 ibuprofens and icing my back. Oh, didn't I tell you? I hurt my back on Sunday night.

How could that possibly be? You're sick. What the heck were you doing?

Well, the team with whom I'm heading to Arizona later this week had a practice on Sunday night in a dome. The practice didn't start until about 9:45, so around 7 I sucked down some Dayquil and headed out. The Dayquil kept my symptoms under control, but unfortunately, towards the end, my back started to spasm. It was awful and I couldn't even bend down to pick up a ball. So around 11 I had to call it quits and head home. Fortunately I already had a chiropractor appointment and massage scheduled. Serendipity!!

Before my appointment in the afternoon, I took some more Dayquil because all I could think about was how my sinuses were going to be during an hour of having my face down on a massage table. Again, Dayquil came through for me! The stuff works!

After my adjustment, I sat waiting for my massage therapist. Then this guy shows up and says, "Joe?"

Yeah.

"Hi, I'm so and so (I don't remember his name). I'll be doing your massage today."

Um, where's Rachel?

"She doesn't work here anymore."

Now I've only had 4-5 massages in my life but they've always been by a woman. If I have a choice of someone rubbing their hands on me, I prefer it to be a woman. But I was in pain and I have a big weekend coming up with two rounds of golf and a softball tournament, so I needed relief.

Well, the long and short of it is that the guy did a great job. More than half the time was spent twisting my legs like a pretzel to stretch out my lower back in various ways. By the end of the massage my back felt great. It was a little sore this morning, but I've continued the ibuprofen and ice treatments. Wednesday I'll go back for an adjustment and probably electric stim since the masseuse is booked already.

Hopefully tonight I'll be able to sleep well again and at least my cold will be gone. First thing Thursday morning, I'm off to Phoenix!

Cold has settled in

Two straight nights of little sleep for me as my cold has taken root. Ugh. Being sick sucks.

Last night though was a good night as my parents and LL's parents got to meet for the first time over dinner. We met up at White Fence Farm, a big restaurant specializing in fried chicken. Seven of us, including LL's sister, sat in a huge booth and chowed on chicken and corn fritters. Even though I was sick, my symptoms were under control with medication, so I didn't feel awful. Today though I feel much worse, probably due to another night of fitful sleep.

LL is staying out in Joliet with her folks as she goes through a weekend of wedding dress shopping. Since I've been up coughing and hacking all night, it's probably for the best. Here's hoping tomorrow brings some relief.

Allergies

The changing weather caused a flare up in my allergies and gave me a sore throat which has made me feel a bit under the weather the last few days, hence the limited posts. Hopefully it will clear up today and my energy will recover this weekend.

The average temperature for all of February is about 38 degrees and we're running slightly ahead of that mark for the next few days. After a day or two in the 50's and 60's, I don't think I can go back to weather in the 20's anymore. It would just be too deflating.

Random Thoughts

The other day, just after the gym, I looked down at the odometer in my car and it said 111,333. Not significant in any other way other than an interesting number. The car continues to run well and I'm hopeful of getting another couple of years out of it, maybe to 150,000. I really like not having a car payment!!

February 4th, which was two weeks ago, has the most number of below zero days of any day all winter, at least in Chicago. Today it was 52! On February 4th here it was again close to zero, but probably closer to 10 degrees. Still, a nice two weeks which included two feet of snow!

Someone commented on Facebook about seeing a robin the other day. Some time ago I remember telling a buddy of mine that it's no big deal to see a robin in the winter because they stick around. Then I found out that they actually migrate south. Now I find out that while many migrate, many also don't. Seems kind of odd behavior for a bird. Shouldn't they do one or the other??

V-Day in Pictures.

Sorry about the delay in getting my post up today. Just too damn busy. Guess that's not a bad thing with this economy. Part of my being busy was due to going to softball batting practice at some cages in the suburbs (about an hour away) and a church meeting this morning at 7 a.m. That early morning meeting is only once a month and it totally messes me up. Fortunately I was able to take a 20 minute power nap which seemed to catch me up.

On to Valentine's Day pictures! We went to Yoshi's Cafe, right around the corner and where we went for our first Valentine's Day dinner.

They had a fixed price deal going where you get to choose from various dishes and dessert is included. Also included was a rose! They have them right up front and give them to the ladies (or the guy who seems the most feminine) on their way to the table. It's a nice touch.

Here's the menu. Hopefully you can click on it and get a better view. We chose the sushi and shrimp tempura as an appetizer over the Japanese dumplings under a dome of Parmesan cheese. Seemed like we made a good choice.

As an appetizer, LL chose the duck with little round potatoes like eggs in a nest of fried noodley things. Pretty cool display and it was delicious. She couldn't finish so I got some!!

I had meat and meat! Beef ribs and sirloin steak. Delicious!!! The veggies weren't really good, but they were a minor part of the dish.

And here's our dessert! Chocolate cake in a bed of raspberry sauce with a white chocolate covered strawberry. Awesome!!

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Pictures to come tomorrow!

Christmas Card Picking 2010 version

First things first, Saturday night LL and I hit the Ditka Dome in the suburbs to collect money for the Super Bowl squares fundraiser my team had (I was the big winner!!) and to play in the dome for the first time this season (which started in November I think). Anyway, I sucked in the field, which is why I don't like playing in the dome. The lighting is awful and at third base the light is directly in your eyes so the ball is backlit which makes it look like it's in a slightly different position as it approaches you. So I didn't make a single play at third. Ugh. My shoulder held up fine and I throw with very little discomfort now.

The second batch of ribs which I made on Saturday didn't turn out quite as good as the first batch on Friday. The problem, I think, was that I put in a bit less juice on Saturday because there seemed to be too much on Friday. Why mess with it when you have something awesome? I'm not sure. They were still better than anything I've done on the grill though!!

Sunday was Christmas Card Picking Day at my parents' house. If you don't recall, this an annual event they've held since 1973. The family gathers and we vote on the best Christmas card that they received that year. Family picture cards are eliminated and usually cards with writing on the outside are eliminated. The winner receives a letter of congratulations and the card is then framed and hung on the wall at my parents' house. Yes, they have 37 or so cards hanging on the wall.

Bee, my sister, talked some smack last Monday in my blog about winning this year. As it turns out, Bee was the runner-up. My other sister has started her own competition and Bee was runner-up with a different card there as well. Always the bridesmaid.

The winner this year was the card Laura and I sent! Laura separately picked out and sent them a nice card too and it made the final 11 or so, but didn't make the cut to the final three. Since we both signed each other's names in the cards, we really had two entries. Perfectly legal by the way.

So here were the final two combatants. The card I sent is on the left, the picture of the dog. Dogs always beat deer Bee!!

Now THAT'S the way to spend a Friday.

It was a pretty good day I must say. Some work was scattered through the day, as usual, but LL works from home on Friday, so those days are always better. We had a nice, high protein breakfast of eggs, a little meat, beans and cheese. The usual, but still delicious. Lunch was a high protein bar to give me enough energy for my workout, which followed in the late afternoon.

Before I left for the gym though, I prepped and started cooking a slab of ribs. It would be hard for me to tell you how good these ribs were tonight. Fall off the bone delicious and clearly the best ribs I've made by far (the track record is rather short however). The recipe I used combined three or four recipes including my mothers of all people who was hiding her recipe from me for some reason. More on the ribs later.

My trip to the gym was great because it started off with taking the buckets from someone who was trying to save their parking spot because the poor baby shoveled it out a week ago. Don't worry, I was responsible though: I put the buckets in a recycling bin down the street. Ha!

The protein breakfasts and lunches have given me some pretty good strength at the gym. Last week I bumped up my bench pressing 10 pounds on my first rep of 10 (after 5 reps at a lower weight to warm up) and 10 pounds to my second rep of 10 as well. Overall I do 35 reps and I've really gotten stronger in just a few weeks! The weight loss has come along yet, but if I have more muscle mass, the weight loss will come.

Back to the ribs. So I cooked these bad boys in the oven and cooked a sweet potato as well. The spud went along with the ribs very well. So here's the recipe:

Cut slab of ribs in half.

Apply your favorite rub (I kept the same recipe for mine).

Place each half in it's own pan (bones up to start) with enough apple juice to just cover the bottom of the pan with the ribs in it. Yes apple juice. You can use water, but I like AJ.

Cover the pan with tinfoil.

Cook for 90 minutes at 250 degrees.

Flip ribs and check fluid level in the pan.

Cook for another 90 minutes.

Flip ribs. Apply barbecue sauce liberally to the ribs.

Take off the tin foil if there's still a significant amount of liquid in the pan.

Cook for another 30 minutes but up the temperature to 300.

Flip ribs. Apply barbecue sauce liberally to the ribs.

If there is still a lot of liquid, drain some off, but not all of it.

Cook for another 30 minutes but up the temperature to 350.

That should be it! Fall off the bone deliciousness.

Now the Blackhawks are on TV!

Mish-Mosh

Every once in a while I think of this song and just crack up. Today someone posted on Facebook that it was running through their head. Love it!

Today I had a business lunch downtown with a banker and made a fatal mistake: I ordered the lentil soup. See, it's freezing here so soup was a natural. And the soup was good, that's not the problem. What I failed to think about was the sodium content. Ugh. My tinnitis has been going CRAZY this afternoon because of it, to the point where I'm not motivated to work....or do much else. Sigh.

The day was jinxed from the get go as I received a call from Ricardo telling me that the heat was out in the office. That's twice this week, so a call was made to the landlord instead of just the maintenance guy. We'll see if the problem is solved, but I'm working from home tomorrow anyway.

The Mad Greek

Not sure if you're a fan of Zack Galifianakis or not, but I find his dry humor absolutely hysterical. Well, I just found out that he's got a short series of internet episodes called "Between the Ferns with Zack Galifianakis". Absolutely hysterical. If have a few minutes, watch a few of these. There's nine of them I think.

It's super cold in Chicago again today with a high around 15 or something. Ugh. This evening I'm heading out to Naperville to see my folks and have an indoor softball practice, though it's mostly just batting practice. In two weeks I'm heading to Phoenix for a tournament, so the swing had to be down.

Just a short entry today. I think the cold is numbing my noggin' a bit.

Family Jewels

Not sure if you saw this video or not, but it took me by surprise. It's one of those CBS Cares commercials, for a somewhat odd topic: testicular cancer. Now, there's nothing funny about testicular cancer, but this commercial was a little over the top. When the guy says, "Why give a diamond when you can give the family jewels?" I almost lost it. There had to be a better way to deliver the message.

For her birthday, LL got one of these alarm clocks. I have to say, it's pretty damn sweet to just have to open your eyes to see what time it is. No need to turn your head or focus; it's all there on the ceiling. Now we need one that will tell us the temperature outside too!

There haven't been any signs of people trying to save their shoveled out spots with chairs or anything in my neighborhood. However, there was one woman over by my gym who did it. I parked across the street in another free spot, went over to the two spots that she saved (possibly someone else saved the other spot, I'm not sure) and I tossed away the buckets and 2x4's she used to save the spots. I've gone on record as calling this an indefensible position. Show me your permit from the city. Can I just block the street in the summer too? Where's the line drawn and what's the logic behind it? Indefensible. If you don't want to deal with shoveling snow and losing your spot, either A) get a parking spot in a lot or B) don't move your car or C) move somewhere where it doesn't snow. After my workout, I saw the woman put a bucket on the car that was parked there. My only regret was that I didn't take the buckets!