I’ve been wanting to check out this place since it opened. We finally made it there this evening. The food was fine (Brian and I both had sandwiches). We ordered mac & cheese for Jake and it turned out to be deep-fried macaroni and cheese wedges, so they obviously serve a lot of health food there. Healthy or not, he ate it. If we go there again, I’ll have to remember to order a mixed drink. Our waitress’s answer to my question “what kind of white wine do you have?” was “Chardonnay”. They don’t exactly have a large wine list is what I’m trying to say.
bathroom remodel: days 35 & 36
Between yesterday and today, I finished painting the bathroom! It’s so nice to be done with that. Brian spent a lot of time on the vanity over the weekend and is making good progress with it. I guess my work here is done until the vanity is ready. Besides it, we have to put in the new ceiling (no small task) and install all of the fixtures. Still a lot of work left to be done, but at least the bathroom almost looks complete.
beef & wine
Yesterday was a busy one. After I got off work at 2:30, my mom and I ran to Somerset to pick up a side of beef. After splitting the meat between the two of us, I crammed ours into our little chest freezer (I really need to get an upright freezer soon) and then loaded Jake into the car to run for wine supplies. Someone told me that Oak Spring Winery moved from the Galleria to the Westwood Plaza, but I’ll be damned if I could find it. I really needed supplies, though, so I took a chance that the new Thomas Feed Mill wine store (can’t remember the name) would still be open and ran to Windber. Luckily, they were open till 6:00 (it was 5:45 when I arrived), so I was able to buy some bottle sanitizer.
I spent the evening washing bottles and then we bottled my last two batches of wine for the year. We did a Petit Verdot wine kit which was quite tasty already and a batch of Strawberry-Zinfandel that I made from a recipe. I used red zinfandel rather than white zinfandel this time so it’s a little drier than usual, but still quite good. Anyway, that gives me over four cases to put in my wine racks come Monday night. Good thing–they were starting to look a little sparse.
On Friday, I also reserved the five Selection Limited Edition wine kits for 2006. Cheers!
collateral
Brian and I caught this movie on HBO the other night. I used to totally love Tom Cruise. So did my mom. We used to go see all of his movies at the theatre whenever a new one came out. Not so, anymore. He’s kind of fallen out of favor with me with all of the Scientology crap. I still think he’s a good actor (though he can’t grow a beard to save his life. maybe he should take some vitamins or something.), but I don’t like him enough to shell out my hard-earned cash to see his movies. But, if one should be showing for free, I’ll probably watch it.
This was a great movie, though. It is a story about a contract killer (Cruise) who hijacks a cab driver (Jamie Foxx. hoo-rah) and makes him drive him around the city so he can kill a bunch of people on his list. This was my first Jamie Foxx movie. I rather liked him. I remember watching him on In Living Color way back when. He’s turned into quite a good actor.
The Flick Filosopher has much to say about this movie so I might as well not even bother trying. You can read a good review here.
odd thomas
I finished reading this novel yesterday while waiting for Jake at his karate lesson. I rather enjoyed it. It’s the first book from Dean Koontz that I’ve read in a while and I was wondering how it was going to be. After reading a bunch of his books, I noticed that they all sort of had the same theme so I pretty much gave up on worrying about his latest releases. This one was pretty close to his usual theme, but had a slight twist at the end that made it a good read. I’ll have to check out some of his other recent books now.
I’m too lazy to write a synopsis of the story right now, but it is typical Dean Koontz fare complete with bodachs, killers, and ghosts. (oh my!) Having read quite a few Koontz books, I’d say this is now one of my favorites from him. Apparently there’s a sequel to this novel, called Forever Odd. I’ll definitely be checking that out at some point.