Category: Diary (Page 23 of 38)

Tonight I cooked one of my standard recipes and it turned out pretty good:

Ingredients:

• pasta (penne)
• 3 Italian sausages
• 1/2 head of garlic, thickly sliced
• 4 sun-dried tomatoes
• a bunch of asparagus, cut into 1.5 inch lengths
• olive oil, red chili flakes, oregano, wine or chicken stock

Algorithm:

• Put a big pot of water on to boil.
• Extract the sausage from the casings and dump into a large saute pan, on medium heat. (Your choice of saute pan should be governed by the fact that you will be adding the cooked pasta to it to toss with the sauce.)
• Potchki with the sausage with your favorite stirring tool to break it up into small pieces.
• Cover the saute pan and turn to low heat to render the fat out.
• Put the sun-dried tomatoes in a bowl with a few tablespoons of water/olive oil to cover and blast on high in the microwave for a couple of minutes. Put aside to continue soaking.
• Uncover the saute pan and if necessary, spoon off excess fat. You want to leave some in the pan of course, but if the sausages are a bit on the blubbery side this will be a necessary step. Use your judgment.
• chuck in the garlic to brown along with the sausage. Potchki some more.
• Whoops – forgot the chili flakes. Toss a sprinkle in now. Potchki. 
• If the water in the pasta pot is boiling, toss the penne into the pot.
• turn up the heat under the saute pan to medium.
• Toss the asparagus into the saute pan, and swish around. If you can scorch the asparagus a bit that’s good.
• I usually add a shake or two of oregano at this point.
• Take out the re-hydrated tomatoes, shake off the water/oil, and slice each into 8ths. Toss in the pan.
• Lots of brown bits forming in the pan? Good. Deglaze with a splash of wine or stock, potchki with the stirrer and get the pan shiny and the brown bits into the sauce.
• Add the rest of the stock and potchki a bit, then turn the heat down. You want to reduce and thicken the sauce to coincide with the pasta reaching al dente or whatever your desirable texture is.
• When the pasta is done, drain and add to the saute pan.
• Toss. Serve promptly.

I really wanted to like Bella Luna. For some time now we’ve been searching for a special restaurant, somewhere we could go for our anniversary every other year. Whilst living in Auckland, NZ, a place called “Four Steps To Heaven” fit that bill nicely, until it closed. In Marin, CA, there was “Frantoio”. So far we haven’t found anywhere in Las Vegas that could be said to fit the bill, but we both had suspicions that an Italian restaurant called “Bella Luna” might be it.

Alas, it was not to be.

Seeing as today *is* our 7th wedding anniversary, we hopped in the car and drove off to find the restaurant. After taking the wrong turn and deviating slightly from our intended path, we found the restaurant. Located in a unit in a corporate office park, it felt a little weird, but on the inside it felt a little more welcoming, despite the plaster tile ceiling. The decor was mainly yellow with blue glass accents.

Well – this isn’t a restaurant review, so I’ll just say that Lurch the waiter was a little disconcerting, and before we were halfway through our meal, all the other guests had left and we were alone in a pool of circling waiters. It *was* a Tuesday night, we didn’t expect a crowd, but the effect was a little… uncomfortable. I really didn’t enjoy the dish I’d ordered, although I thought Lisa’s order of risotto was pretty good.

It wasn’t really the food, or the service, or the decor. It just wasn’t *right*. So we’re still searching. Maybe by next anniversary we will have located a suitable venue.

Normal work day. After work, will try to get some music/singing done.

I have to thank Lise Solvang for reminding me about the Moomin books by Tove Jansen. It turned out that Lisa had never heard of them, and as they are a favorate part of my childhood, I order a few on Amazon.com: Comet In Moominland, Finn Family Moomintroll, MoominSummer Madness, and MoominValley MidWinter.

I’ve been reading a chapter to Lisa as a bedtime story, and we are both enjoying them very much.

Yesterday being Sunday I decided to do one of my pending house chores and run some more CAT5e cable through the walls. Yup, I know it’s hard to imagine how our house could need more network cable, but long-time readers may remember that when we designed our network in discussion with the contractor people, we deliberately omitted the living room from the list of rooms to get network outlets.

The reasoning went something like: We’re going to be watching TV and eating dinner in the living room, so who needs the Internet?

Well, since then, there’s been some developments. We’ve heard about: Tivo boxes record video signals on hard drives that get their TV schedule info through the ‘net; Hi-fi audio players that will sit in your audio rack and play MP3 files from computers on your local network; xboxes that will play film and game DVDs and download addition information over the ‘net – including the possibility of multi-player games…

Not that any of these devices are in our near future, as far as we know, but things happen fast these days and we wanted to be ready. Hindsight is usually pretty clear. Besides, it *would* be nice sometimes to sit on the couch in the living room and work on a laptop. The couches are comfy.

Anyway, after some measuring of the distances involved, and taking an inventory of all the left-over bits and pieces in my spare part boxes, I drove off to Home Depot and bought 500ft of CAT5 cable, a bunch of RJ-45 connectors and a crimping tool, and some wall-mounted faceplates with pluggable sockets.

I could go into more details here but I won’t. Consider then available on request.

I think I had to make a total of 5 trips into the ceiling cavity to run cables. This might possibly have been reduced to 4 had I known in advance that I would have to drill a new hole in a horizontal stud in order to feed the cable down one wall.

Anyway, now we have a new LAN port behind the couch, as well as one behind the TV in the media bay. Digital convergence can now arrive – we are ready!

Later:

Arm and leg muscles very sore. Clambering about in rafters resulting in aching limbs. Should have predicted this.

I tested the new LAN drops by moving my laptop from port to port and checking we had connectivity. We do. Looks like my beginner’s style of crimping RJ45 connectors is acceptable.

Trying to think of pun involving “crimping my style” but can’t make it work.

We’ve had a quiet few days, and we’re dreading going back to work tomorrow. Lisa has recovered from the cold, but there’s no doubt about it – I’ve come down with it. I was hoping to avoid it but really, I’m not prepared to pay the price that would be required. As it is, I seem to have got off lightly, but then again, Lisa is predicting I’ll feel worse over the next few days. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s nearly 2002. There are fireworks planned for the Strip right about now (midnight), but I don’t think ‘m not sure if we are going to be anywhere suitable to view them. Maybe we’ll catch them on TV. [rushes outside]

…OK, turns out we could see the fireworks on the Strip from next door’s back yard. If we only talk to our neighbours but once a year, I guess the first few minutes of the new year are a good enough time to do so.

Happy New Year everyone.

Due to careful research & planning, Lisa had come up with a really good schedule of flights for D&T, with the only drawback that the flight out of Vegas left at 6:00am. Given the strict nature of airline security these days, we figured if we got up at 4:00am and left before 4:30, this would allow enough time to drive to the airport, check in, and not be worried about security delays.

As we drove up to the terminal, we remembered that one of the drawbacks of the new security measures is that we couldn’t go with them to the gate. Only ticketed passengers are now allowed to go through to the gates. So we ended up dropping Derek & Teresa off at the curb instead of going in with them.

After an uneventful drive back home, we went straight back to bed and slept until 10. We heard later that all went well for Derek & Teresa and so that was all right.

Stan and Jeanne came around, Lisa made a fantastic salad, and I pulled the jars from the fridge and cooked up the pasta & sauce.

Once again, the meatballs were a hit. There’s something about my mother’s recipe… anyway, we had a great evening.

Everything was cool until I had to get up in the middle of the night and throw up everything I’d eaten the previous day. This happened four times, at roughly 2 hour intervals.

There’s just no good way to put that.

I spent the day in bed, feverish. Nothing would stay down. Not even water.

I was very afraid that I’d poisoned everyone with my meatballs, but as it turned out, everyone else was feeling fine. The next possible suspect was something I’d eaten at the Paris buffet? I didn’t recall eating anything distinctively different from the others, but it seemed possible at least.

By the next day I was feeling a bit better, and beginning to eat and drink a little, although still being a little cautious.

Lisa, however, was by now thoroughly under the weather with the cold virus introduced to us courtesy of Derek & Teresa. I feel this was probably inevitable, despite the best efforts to avoid this.

The others decided to stick to the planned schedule, and Lisa drove the others into town to spend some time at the Hilton at the Star Trek Experience (see above). This was something I wouldn’t miss out on, seeing as I had done it earlier in the month with James & Sue.

The original plan was that they would eat out at a Teppanyaki restaurant at the Hilton, but at some point in the late afternoon Lisa rang, informing me that they’d be coming home for dinner as the restaurant was booked out until 10:00pm.

We’ve been promising Derek a teppanyaki meal for some time now, but it looks as though it will have to wait a little longer. In a way, I’m happy about this, because I kinda like teppanyaki style and I would have been a little sad to have missed out.

Instead, Lisa cooked a tri-tip I think. I didn’t have any, I was still feeling a little delicate.

Monday night, by special request, was Grill. This was fine by me, I was almost feeling back to normal, and had half a steak.

I want this documented: Derek ate one (1) steak, two (2) chicken breasts, and five (5) hot dogs. He was heard later, complaining that he’d eaten too much. I have no sympathy for him.

A week later, we’re back at McCarran picking up Derek & Teresa. They spent a week with us before spending Christmas with Teresa’s folks, and then heading back to the East coast.

Again, we did our homework, and sketched out a bunch of fun things to do while they’re here and we’re on holiday. One of these things we crossed off our list immediately: on the way home from the airport, we stopped in at Leo’s Celebrity Deli and had dinner.

Basically, it was a very relaxing week: We watched lots of TV, read a lot, ate a lot… and played a lot of Pool.

Derek and Teresa also tried their best not to pass on the nasty cold they were suffering from.

After a day or so we discovered that this was Teresa’s first visit to Las Vegas, so we quickly added a casino tour to the schedule.

We arranged for Stan and Jeanne to come for dinner later in the week. A request: I must make the spaghetti and meatball recipe that was much appreciated the last time I made it. Okay, but to save time I made the meatballs a few days early, sautéing them and putting them back in the sauce and into the fridge in jars.

We’ll always have Paris

So one afternoon we jumped into the car and drove to Paris… at least, the parking building of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino. Despite having replicas of the Arc de Triomphe & Eiffel Tower on the premises, Paris is actually one of the smaller casinos on the Strip. 

It was too early for dinner, so we walked next door – that is, next city block: these hotels are deceptively big – to The Aladdin, which is – you guessed it – another casino. It has suffered financially (i.e., not made a *big enough* profit) from being architecturally gambler-unfriendly.  For a start, the main entrance is raised up so that you have to walk up some stairs to get in. It’s actually a very pleasant bunch of stairs, given that the clusters of date palm trees give the whole area this wonderful sweet smell… When you get to the top, there are three “main entrances”, only one of which leads to the casino proper. The other two lead you into a wonderful indoor mall called the  Desert Passage. It’s similar to the Forum Shops in that it has an artificial sky, but different in that the sky effect is rather better done. Also the shops in the mall have facades designed evoke a middle-eastern merchant street. If you stop in a corner and listen, you’ll hear atmospheric background loops – birds twittering, goats bleating, carpenters working, water lapping… beats typical mall muzak hands down. It’s all really rather well done.

If you walk through it at just the right time, you can experience an indoor thunderstorm. Yeah, it’s tacky, but it’s pretty cool. And free.

If there was one shop we wanted to be sure of introducing Derek & Teresa to, it was “Build Your Own Bear“. This is a shop where you can get on to the production line, choosing a “skin”, then stuffing it, dressing it, etc. It looks like a lot of fun.

After walking through the Dessert Passage – we weren’t in time for the indoor thunderstorm, unfortunately – we found ourselves back on the Strip. And there’s one of the problems – you can enjoy the Aladdin without ever stepping foot in the casino area. Nice for us, not so nice for the Aladdin. The Aladdin has recently gone bankrupt and changed owners, so I expect the nice aspects of the architecture to be changed to be less attractive to the non-gambler.

We walked back to Paris and got in line for the buffet – sorry, that’s “Le Village Buffet”. It was 5:00 and in fact there was no line, and we got in at the Lunch rate.

At the risk of turning this dispatch into a non-stop food review, let me just say that the Paris buffet is pretty dam’ good. Pricey, yeah, a little, but here’s the strategy: go at 5:00 and pay the lunch rate, then at 5:30 they start putting out some additional “dinner” items. By which time you’re ready to go up for a third main course…

Derek discovered another cool thing about the Paris buffet – it has bathrooms. This is unusual, because the norm for these all-you-can-eat places is that you have to leave to find a bathroom and then they don’t let you back in.

After dinner, we walked across the road and wandered around Caesar’s Palace, the Forum Shops, and the Bellagio. It would have been good if while we were walking around the Bellagio’s artificial lake, the fountain would have done it’s thing.

On the way out of the parking building we saw the Bellagio fountain display kick into life.  Oh well.

The Las Vegas Strip can be pretty overwhelming, but there are some fun things to do there, if you know where to look. It helps if you have a native guide. I’ve been lucky in that the first few times I encountered the ‘Strip was under the reassuring guidance of Lisa’s Dad, Stan. Following his example, we discussed options and figured out a strategy in advance:

We’d go off-strip to the Hilton and check out the Star Trek Experience installation there, then park at the Mirage and hit it along with Caesar’s Palace and Treasure Island. At one of those places we’d grab dinner at a buffet.

Embarrassingly I succeeded in getting lost on my way to the Hilton – there are some roads which just don’t go where you expect them to. So much for pretending to be the “old hand” at navigating around the city. So James & Sue saw a little more of the town on either side of the Strip. No big deal.

Eventually we found the Hilton, parked, and found the right place to get tickets for the Star Trek Experience. Discount for Nevada residents, ha ha. (Have I mentioned recently how great it is to have a Nevada Driving License?)

There are many, many “entertainment rides” and such like associated with the major hotels in Vegas. Rollercoasters, 3D motion rides, etc. All basically designed to appeal to the younger tourists and get you in the front door of the casino.

The Star Trek Experience at the Hilton is a little different. For a start, it’s not just a “ride”. There’s a museum with exhibits like real props and costumes from all the different TV series and movies; a timeline showing how the different threads and plots from the various episodes mesh together; and a restaurant called “Quarks” where you can order pretty normal food but with intriguing names such as “Tribble Nibbles” “James T-bone”, Frozen Gagh, Romulan Ale, or my personal favorite: the Wrap of Khan.

There is also a motion ride, but it is actually kind of enjoyable, well integrated into the whole Vegas thing, and it is preceded by a live-action scripted segment that is *very* well done, quite unlike the usual “sit down, belt up, and put on your 3D goggles now” kind of thing. Spoiler: (swipe with mouse to read):You actually get to stand on the command deck of the Enterprise! It’s kind of a Mecca for serious Trekkies.

After all that, it was a bit later than we’d planned, so after several attempts at parking at the Mirage (one day, Stan, I must ask you for the secret of how to park there without getting lost) we headed straight for the buffet for an early dinner.

The Buffet at the Mirage is a good one – it’s mid-priced, and does have crab legs, but best of all, it has absolutely the best mini creme-brulee’s ever. I have never managed to have just one.

After dinner we walked down the Strip towards Treasure Island to see if the Pirate Show was operating. As luck would have it, it wasn’t. The pirates were “on holiday” until Christmas Eve. Normally there’s a live-action show with actors, with a pirate ship and a British galleon that sails around into a bay and then gets sunk. It’s actually really cool. But this evening it was not happening, and we had to make do with seeing what the artificial bay looks like when the water is drained out of it. Bonus: we did see a little mouse sitting on a floodlight. Very cute! I guess he was keeping warm. He was pretty fearless.

We took the tram back from Treasure Island to the Mirage, then popped North to the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace.

The Forum Shops are basically an indoor mall, but there are some nice aspects to it, such as the two animatronic shows. They’re designed to entice you to go on the 3D-motion simulator ride, but hey – it’s free entertainment. And some of the shops are pretty good: the Virgin Records Megastore for example. The F.A.O. Schwartz toyshop for another.

After that, we were all feeling pretty tired, and we drove home and flopped into bed.

Lisa’s hip had been giving her some trouble recently, so she decided to skip the trip to Red Rock Canyon and catch up on some work at home. The rest of us packed some extra water and a snack, and put our walking shoes on.

Red Rock Canyon is about 30 minutes drive away from Las Vegas. You basically go South on 95, exit on to Charleston Blvd and head West into the hills. Eventually you come to this valley nestled up against the mountains, filled with canyons and large sandstone outcroppings. It’s pretty cool. A favorite location for filmmakers apparently.

We pulled into the car park – there were about 4 other cars there – and walked through the cactus gardens to the nearby cluster of buildings. These turned out to be a toilet block and an information kiosk set into a landscaped section of land.

The valley is boarded to the West by tall vertical cliffs, and these were lightly dusted with snow. There was a chill in the air even though the sun was up and felt warm on my skin.

After walking through the natural science displays and dioramas – quite a few stuffed animals in there – we found out what the landscaped section was about. It was a tortoise habitat. No critters to be seen, unfortunately. The explanatory panels informed us that most likely the tortoises were all hibernating.

From the information lodge there’s a 13 mile loop scenic drive that you can take around the valley. This seemed like a good idea. As we drove slowly around the one-way loop, we could see that there were numerous places to stop, get out of the car, and trek around the outcroppings.

At the first place we stopped, a couple of friendly squirrel-type critters came out and fearlessly checked us out. Unfortunately for them we didn’t have anything to feed them with, and it probably isn’t a good thing to do anyway. Given their boldness I suspect people do feed them anyway. They were very cute.

There was a walkway down from the car park that gradually changed from a graveled path to jumbled rocks, requiring serious free rock climbing gear to get much further. There were no fences or anything, just a sign that said, “Use proper equipment when climbing. No responsibility taken etc etc…”

We walked as far down as seemed safe, then stopped for a few photos. It was difficult to get a sense of scale. The creviced landscape seemed to “flatten out” as you look. Then we’d catch a glimpse of some climbers with ropes and everything, and realise that the rocks were a lot further away – and larger – than they appeared

At the highest point on the scenic drive there is a lookup stop. It is not that high up when you look around at the cliffs and mountains behind you, but the view was still pretty good. You get a good appreciation of the size of the sandstone outcroppings when you see them in there entirety, nestled in the valley.

There are some great canyons on the South side of the valley that look like a lot of fun to scramble around in, but the sun had dropped behind the mountains and it was getting pretty chilly.

The scenic drive actually looked like a rather good loop to cycle around. One day I fully intend to do that. Of course I’ll have to get a bike first. And then put in some preparatory exercise!

I think we fired up the outdoor gas grill that evening and had steak, spuds, and salad. Kind of a Summer meal, but what the heck. It smelled good. It tasted good.

Here’s the thing: The only reason not to grill in the Winter is that it’s cold, and it seems a shame that the waste heat doesn’t go to warming up the house instead.

The rest of the evening was pleasantly spent watching _Barry Lyndon_ on DVD.