The tooth that has been giving me trouble lately caused even more problems today. The crown has detached itself from the post. This isn’t good. I’m off to see the dentist at 11:45 to have this temporarily cemented back on. The last time we “temporarily” cemented it back on was in September. For a temporary, it lasted quite a long time.

Jimmy, an online friend, wrote this in a recent blog entry. It’s quite possibly one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

*Gay Male Rule Number #1: You are not a strong black woman

When I got home from Beth and Paul’s on Sunday, Allison, my downstairs neighbor came out to see me. Her great aunt died, and she’s off to Chicago for a few days. She will be back Sunday night, but I’m leaving for New York on Sunday morning. This has caused me some heartburn. As a backup plan, my coworker Suzanne said she could keep Reggie if necessary. I hate to do that. Reggie would be in great hands, but he’s going to be in a strange environment.

This morning, I got a call from the president of our SalesLogix business partner. Jim was inviting me to a seminar on the new SalesLogix mobility platform in New York on Wednesday. This is something I really need to investigate. So now I’m going to be staying in NYC until Wednesday afternoon. While it’s good to be in NYC, it also means I have another night where Reggie will be staying with people he doesn’t know.

Enough. Reggie is going to stay with Beth and Paul. I hate to impose on them. At that same time, I know he’s going to be in good hands. He’s comfortable there. He wears Buddy out. And he loves his Aunt Beth. More importantly, I won’t worry about him being there.

Tuesday night in NYC, our vendor will be taking me out for dinner. I’m hoping that Maria in our New York office can find us reservations at one of Bobby Flay’s restaurants.

I got a letter on Saturday from the US Department of Education, congratulating me on the rehabilitation of my student loans. Now that they’re out of rehab, two things have happened. First, my loans have been sold to a bank. Second, and this is the big one, any negative information regarding my student loans is being removed from my credit reports.

This is a good thing.

It turns out that I’m not alone with my car radio problem.

(link)

It looks like I’ll be visiting a Honda dealership later this week.

Tonight, in addition to the good eats, I’ve been enjoying a bottle of Prosecco. It’s the $12 stuff from Best Cellars that I really enjoy.

Lest you think I’ve been drinking it straight up, you may rest assured that it has been used with some good OJ to make a fine cocktail.

I mentioned the stew meat in my previous entry. I had no idea what to expect.  It was just beef stew meat. What was I going to do with this?

Any fan of Alton Brown will tell you that any cut of meat, properly seasoned and prepared can be…

Good Eats.

I took the stew meat and cut it into smaller pieces. It landed in my dutch oven with some olive oil, salt, and pepper. I browned the meat and let it cook a bit. Next, I added some chopped onion. After the onion started to cook, I added some flour to allow the soup/stew to thicken. Unfortunately, I added a bit too much flour and it sucked up too much of the beef fat. I added some beef stock to fix this problem.

Next, I added some carrots, celery, and a quart of beef stock. Then I allowed it to simmer a bit. Then I added a bit of tomato paste.

Finally, I just allowed it to simmer a bit. After a while, it was good and hot. This soup was ready to serve.

I garnished the soup with some chopped celery and served it with a big hunk of Italian bread.

This challenging ingredient certainly ended up being… Good Eats.

After running around with my battery yesterday, Reggie and I went out to Beth and Paul’s house to hang out with them and the boys. I ran into a bit of a snag. After getting the battery installed, the radio in my Civic is saying ErrE. So I thought I’d just listen to my iPod. Problem: dead battery in the iPod. Ack. We survived.

As always, Beth had incredible food. She always inspires me to cook well. I took my new knife with me and helped her prep some of next week’s food. We were then joined by their coworker. She had some lemon mustard chicken in the fridge waiting to be cooked, and of course, it was fantastic. Along with some roasted carrots, it was a sweet meal.

After that, we started watching some TV. Paul and Beth have this bad habbit of getting me hooked on certain TV shows, such as Gordon Ramsey’s F Word, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, CSI Miami, and 24. This time, we started watching Doctor Who. We ended up watching about six episodes, and I’m hooked. Now it’s set up on my TiVo as a season pass.

After a few episodes, we ended up crashing for the night. My intent really was to drive home last night. Heck, I hadn’t even brought my pillow with me. But I slept in the guest room. When we were calling it a night, I asked Paul about the Pug distribution. I offered to take Buddy and Reggie and then he took Brutus. We’ve learned from experience that we should not separate Reggie and Buddy. If not, they’ll both be scratching at the door all night until we let them back together. Once they settled down, they were fine. I liked having both Pugs with me like that… until the sun came up at 6:30 and they decided to play. And play they did. I took them outside and they both did their business. Then we tried going back to bed. That was pointless. So I went downstairs and watched some TV. Of course, we all slept on the couch. When Paul got up, we ended up watching a few more episodes of Doctor Who.

As we were watching Doctor Who, my work laptop, the X41, started making funny noises. Then all of the sudden, it blue screened. I tried getting it to boot but had no success. It appears that my hard drive has crashed. I had a ton of work to do. That wasn’t going to happen.  It sucked

Reggie and I made our way back to Boston and stopped in the office to get my spare laptop. Well, it’s not really a spare. I just use it to test software. Compared to the X41, this T43 is fucking HUGE. But it’ll suit my needs until we replace the drive in the X41. Reggie got to meet the VP of our New England group. He also got to meet one of the estimators in the same group.

It’s been a long day, and I’m just winding down the week. I made a trip to the grocery store.

Have you ever looked at an ingredient and tried to figure out how you were going to use it? I had no idea, but I knew I would use it. It was beef stew meat. Right now, I have an amazing beef vegetable soup going on. It’s quite tasty, but very hot right now. It’ll make some good lunch this week.

Anyway, I have some stuff to do before wrapping up my weekend.

It’s been an interesting morning so far. At 10:00, my phone rang. It was Walgreens Pharmacy. It turns out that my bag got switched with one of my coworkers last night, and the only way she knew it was my bag is that she found my prescription in the bag. My business card wasn’t even in the bag. So I went to meet her in the city and switch bags. When I got into my car, it wouldn’t start. It turns out that the battery was dead. I knew I’d need to replace the battery pretty soon, and today was going to be that day.

My upstairs neighbor jumped my car and I got going. I was able to meet said coworker and we were on our way. When I got home, I ran into the house to bring Reggie in and instinctively turned off the car. That turned out to be a dumb move because my car wouldn’t start again. Another jump was necessary. So I found a battery at the auto parts store, but they don’t install them.  The garage up the street would install them but they didn’t have them in stock. So after a trip back to the auto parts store, I went back to the garage to get the battery installed.

All told, today’s little adventure cost me close to a hundred dollars. But now I have a decent battery that should last me a few more years.  The only problem now is that my car radio doesn’t work. I’m sure I’ll figure out something there. Hello, iPod.

Now, I’m going to pack up Reggie and we’re going to head out to Beth and Paul’s house.

I’m writing this at a moment when I’ve had too much to drink. At the same time. I’m feeling really good about my job and especially about my
company. Tonight was our internal operations outing. To say we had fun is an understatement. Tonight… I’m not the story.

In any company I’ve ever worked,  I’d be lucky if a VP knew my name. Tonight, I bowled with (and got my ass kicked by) not one but two vice
presidents. Yeah, we had fun.

This is a moblog entry.