Last night’s results not withstanding, I guess I did fairly well at the bridge club this past year as I won the Spitzer trophy for best average performance for a non-life master. I think. At least that is what I was told it was for. They calculate this based on “Master Points” won versus games played and only include those who have less than 300 Master Points at the beginning of the year. I had around 50. Now I have around 90.

Anyway, I think it is more important that I had fun all of those games. Also, I certainly could not have done it without good partners.

I was once mistaken for a local food critic, the one who does Eating Ithaca, but I am by no means a professional. Still, I recently visited two new local restaurants and they were almost polar opposites in every way.

The first place was Northstar. It was hopping and we thought maybe lets go somewhere else. The host convinced us otherwise saying, well summarized here by me, you will be seated here before you could get somewhere else. And we were. The menu had a host of very promising vegetarian friendly dishes. They also have a very wide selection of alcoholic beverages. On the other hand, no where on their many menus do they list any non-alcoholic drink choices. The table was very interesting, in the unique not expected in a restaurant but not in a bad type way. We ordered drinks and an appetizer. The appetizer came quickly and was tasty – it was an upscale version of tofu wings which was the main reason we went there. When the waitress came to collect the plates from the appetizer she then realized our drinks were missing. A couple points deduction for forgetting our drinks but she got many of them back for eventually remembering. The dinner was also very tasty and I look forward to going back and trying the other entrees we didn’t get.

The other establishment took the place of a very nice restaurant that we miss. It was recently opened but we were the only guests the entire time we were there. They offer a variety of repackaged upscale comfort food that is all the craze right now. Kind of a reaction to economic depression I guess. Neither of us liked the food. One dish was neither hot nor melty as had been advertised. The other dish contained only a few kernels of the advertised corn. Neither of us left feeling that comforted. We have no plans to go back.

So I was trying to figure out how the government could make new jobs that don’t threaten existing jobs while resulting in real output. Street cleaning and other similar ideas came to mind but all seemed rather limited in actual output. Then I thought, what if the government had some of those collecting unemployment farm government land to produce food to feed those living below the poverty line. They could farm using old fashioned methods, no fertilizer, no pesticides, no herbicides, no irrigation, no heavy farm equipment, just hand planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting. Then the goods can be distributed to food pantries to help them feed the hungry. I always heard we could feed the hungry if we tried, now here is an opportunity. Too bad it will never happen.

This year we had thanksgiving at a friend’s house in Ithaca. She had like 13 people at her house. There were 4 kinds of potatoes, 3 kinds of stuffing, 2 kinds of cranberry sauce, a giant Turkey, and much much more. We brought Field Roast from the Grain Meat Company which was as tasty as their sausages. We also brought a salad and gravy. Everything was really good. I hope you all had a good thanksgiving with lots of family and/or friends and lots of good food.

Things have been a little hectic with planning a move to Chicago, finding a place to live, fixing up the house for sale, formalizing an employment agreement, and doing all the other normal day to day stuff that comes up. Fortunately, there have been no major hiccups in anything. Even the garden has been doing well as I harvested broccoli from it earlier this week. The indoor garden is also doing well, I think the Jalapeno will flower soon. I need to fly out to Vancouver again, which is not so cool. But I am looking forward to a nice relaxing couple of days and lots of Thanksgiving leftovers to eat.

The Democrats want to do something so obviously the Republicans need to go out and scare people that it is a bad idea. What is the latest? The Democrats want to move some prisoners from Guantanamo to mainland U.S. What is the Republican response? Their response is that moving prisoners from Guantanamo to mainland U.S. will put civilians at risk. Hogwash and poppycock. It is too bad that Republicans pander to mindless automatons rather than someone who can rationally think about a subject. Seriously, if a terrorist wanted to get back at the U.S. because of those prisoners, do you think they would care where the prisoners were being held? The terrorists were upset at the U.S. over the Israeli-Palestinian problem and they attacked New York City and Washington D.C.  which are, on last check, very far away from Israel or Palestine.

In reality, it has nothing to do with the prisoners in Guantanamo and everything to do with playing partisan politics – a dangerous game that only hurts the country. For another example, the Democrats want to fund renewable energy and energy efficiency research. So of course the Republicans are against it and scaring people by telling them it will increase utility bills (I agree it will, but best estimates indicate only by a couple of dollars rather than the hundreds of dollars the Republicans claim). Which means that rather than the U.S. being at the forefront of this research, countries like Germany, China, and even Saudi Arabia (a country that certainly does not need any renewable energy or energy efficiency) are all spending more than the U.S. is. That is what the Republican efforts are doing – hurting this country rather than keeping it at the forefront. And that is why the Republican tactics scare me.

So I have been told about how great this TV show is and how great that book series is and how great some movies were. What I wonder is where people find the time to do all of these things. Between enjoying life with my girlfriend, giving Oliver, Julius, and Lucy the attention they need (which is unfortunately less than they deserve), taking care of the little things like cleaning the house, food shopping, eating, etc., I hardly have time to keep up with The Big Bang Theory. Sure we watch several movies a month, mostly from Netflix, and sure I probably work more than I should, but it doesn’t seem like that would give me enough time to watch Survivor, Heroes, Fringe, Lost, etc. Maybe I have my priorities wrong, but it doesn’t seem like it.

On a different note, how unusual is it for a dog to want ice cubes? Oliver will beg for an ice cube. It seems weird to me. But he really enjoys them.

Indoor cat dreaming of what it is like out in the wilderness.

So here we are trying to figure out what needs to be done to put the house on the market and what do we find? We find water damage in a storage closet in the basement. A storage closet that stored a bunch of my middle school through college things I just couldn’t throw away. My mom’s comment was that the junk we accumulate sometimes finds it’s own way of throwing itself out. Anyway, we call a plumber in and he doesn’t think any pipe is leaking, rather that it is a leak from around the tub caused by back splash from the shower. I am a little dubious about his analysis and his solution which was to put an ugly coat of silicon RTV around all the edges. Unfortunately, there are no signs of where the leak is actually originating, so his professional analysis is all we have to go on. On the other hand, it was Laura who last correctly diagnosed a plumbing issue rather than a professional plumber. Maybe I can get here to look at the problem.

The old limerick don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the communist party was running through my head the other day. It must have been a bastardized version of the line from The Producers (1968) because I cannot find an original reference to it. The thing that got me thinking about the limerick was that I am certain there are communists who believe it with the same conviction as those who believe abortion is murder or the earth was created only a couple thousand years ago. Now there are some conviction that I just cannot accept as being in any way logical and there are those that I can accept as having some internal consistency. Then I realized that my convictions are just as crazy. Convictions like that open minded people would believe in liberal ideals. I am not sure if there even are open minded people. Just people who figure they came to their conviction through rational thought. Another one of my convictions is that I don’t think I should have to pay for anti-virus software. I mean, if someone is selling defective software that could damage the users computer or allow identity theft then isn’t it there responsibility to fix their software? So my compromise was to use a free anti-virus program. Specifically AVG’s free program, which was recently at version 8.5. Then I got a pop-up message saying they were discontinuing support for AVG Free 8.5 and that I needed to upgrade to version 9 for like $50. WTF was my first response. I don’t want to pay for anti-virus software. Maybe I should finally ‘be a smarty’ and switch to Linux. But I figured I would look to see if there was another free anti-virus program available. Well, there was and interestingly enough it was AVG Free 9.0 which you can get here. I understand commercial efforts, but it still pisses me off when they try to scare you into spending money. Well not me. And Micro$oft shouldn’t expect me to run out and upgrade to Windows 7 any time soon either.

Grumble … grumble … grumble …

Sorry about the lack of posts recently, but I have been too busy to even right down some random thoughts. I traveled to Vancouver and to Long Island last week. The Bills actually won a game. My girlfriend is being courted by many different potential employers and is having to travel way too much. Work is very busy – it is our best year ever in terms of sales and there is still two months to go. The old Astrowars gang want to regroup but I still think it will be without me. My dishwasher slightly flooded the kitchen and the washing machine sounded like it was going to fail. I wore a tuxedo for the first time in a decade (the black tie wedding of a cousin). There is more, but I am forgetting what it is right now.

On to the nice thing to say. I have not had good things to say about Maguire Ford in the past. See here. Well there was another problem with my car and so I took it into the dealership. For what must be a first for me, they fixed the car in the quoted time, for the quoted amount, and cleaned the car as well. Now for any normal repair shop that would not be so significant, but it pleasantly exceeded my expectations for Maguire.