Bringing the Drama

so the party i was supposed to go to was canceled due to sickness. i stayed home and watched Clemson play a sloppy Peach (I refuse to call it by it’s corporate name) Bowl game and lose in OT. i’m also listening to my neighbors shoot fireworks while flipping back and forth between Food Network and some dude on ESPN who is going to jump a football field on a motorcycle. this leads to my “confession”.

a couple of months ago, i was over at Jacob’s house and we were watching tv. he and his wife told me they watch Food Network a lot. we watched an episode of Iron Chef and i was enthralled. i’ve been interested in trying to become a better cook lately. my grandfather’s culinary talent is tremendous, so i have the genes to be a good cook. i figure i could become pretty good in the kitchen too. so for Christmas i got a new set of pots (Stainless!)….finally growing out of the nonstick set from Walmart. i’m still trying to figure out what to do with the old set, i figure i can donate them to Goodwill or something. i bought a bunch of stuff to make Etouffee and Red Beans and Rice while i’m off for the holidays. i haven’t tackled those yet, only made 2 chocolate pies (and both came out great!). i did get the ingredients to make a homemade Apple Pie today, but with the canceled party did not make it. tomorrow though, tomorrow will be some cooking while i watch some bowl games.

anyway, i’ve been watching various Food Network shows lately, the other night staying up to watch a show where it was a competition between 5 chefs to make a Disney cake and one of my new favorite shows Dinner: Impossible. it’s so cool to watch people make stuff under pressure, especially when they get to use their creativity. i even like Alton Brown. so there it is…my end of the year confession, i’m a Food Network addict now.

the Australian guy made it over the football field! hooray!

the past couple of weekends, i’ve been able to attend some NOLA pro sporting events. i mentioned that my friend Andy was able to get us a couple of tickets to the Saints/Eagles game. it was pretty fun. it was the first game i had been to since the Falcons game last year. it definitely wasn’t the same atmosphere (i didn’t stand up much at all). we found free parking and had pretty decent seats. too bad the team couldn’t play defense. i even wore the same clothes i wore to the Falcons game and realized again nothing is able to be carried over from last season, not even luck related to clothing.

i’ve been wanting to go to a Hornets’ game for a while, but haven’t been able to find anyone who also wanted to go. last night though, the Hornets were playing the Cavs, so it was a little easier. Jacob agreed to go with me if i agreed to go watch soccer games with him. that was a pretty easy trade since i’ve already gone to watch soccer games. after a rather interesting time spent at the pub, we rode downtown to kill some time before the game. i hadn’t really been to the Riverwalk in years, so it was odd to walk around and notice how now instead of a legit mall, it’s more like an indoor tourist trap. it’s a lot of stores of touristy junk, not stuff like Abercrombie or Sharper Image anymore. we did get some beignets at the Cafe du Monde at the Riverwalk along with several Hawaii fans who were in town for the Sugar Bowl. we stopped by the Gap to see about getting a picture with Jim, but they only had one giant picture behind the counter and we were not able to go behind the counter to get a picture.

we stopped and ate burgers at Lucy’s (it was on the way) and then walked up to the game. the game was great, and the Hornets won by 10, and i don’t remember them trailing after the 1st quarter. they even had thundersticks set out for some of the seats in the upper deck.

the Hornets are a good team, and they played really well. the Cavs on the other hand stink. LeBron is good, but the rest of the team is not. we had decided a while back to go to the Celtics game, but now i think we may go to a few before that.

so Christmas Eve i brought the pie and it was awesome. it was gone within 20 minutes. i knew from going to my aunt and uncle’s at Thanksgiving that post meal there would be some video games involved. my uncle has been playing a lot of Halo 3, and really not getting that much better at it. to his credit though, he keeps battling. recently, my cousins or one of their friends bought a copy of Rock Band, so after dinner and presents, we played. nobody wanted to sing, so i figured, since we were all family, i’d get up and sing. y’all, it was awesome. well, it became awesome. initially, the first band included a guitarist who didn’t know how to play the guitar. we tried to give him some pointers, but he refused to listen, and kept going on about how he knew how to play real guitar, but this guitar was different. he also refused to play on anything less than medium because “it wasn’t realistic enough”. so basically we failed every song he played on because in Rock Band all three players have to perform well, or everyone loses. once we switched out guitarists for first my uncle, then my sister, we found our groove. we even got some crowd participation during “wanted dead or alive”. and who knew they edited “Sabotage” to remove the f-bomb? luckily most of the people in the room were watching the spectacle of the people playing and not listening to what i was singing (it was so dead on though!).

after my family and i got home, i gave gifts to both my sister and parents. i’m not really a big believer in buying wrapping paper, because i really only wrap 4 gifts a year, and two for Christmas, so buying a whole roll of wrapping paper just doesn’t seem cost effective. i know, i’m cheap (or so you think). i went with the traditional newspaper and duct tape. but wait, it gets better. i went to buy cards last week, but the cards i found were pretty lame. i decided to write haiku on the presents that related to the presents that were wrapped.

i had gotten my sister a full size Dwight bobblehead because she’s a HUGE fan of The Office. my parents’ gift was a different story. i had called them a couple of weeks ago to ask them for some suggestions, although i like coming up with gift ideas myself, i was having gift givers’ block this year. they couldn’t think of anything, and told me they would call me back in half an hour. when they called back, my mom said she wanted a memory card for her new camera she was getting, and my dad wanted to go to a hornets game. not exactly what i had in mind. so i let the ideas simmer for a couple of days. my friend Andy called me to ask me about newegg and whether it was a good site to order things from. he told me he was getting his dad a GPS. voila! my parents have been going on road trips recently, and my dad is a big fan of turning off of the main road when there’s a hint of traffic, which usually ends up in my parents getting lost. a GPS would be a great gift! i ended up getting the GPS and writing haiku on the package. they had no idea what they were getting, even after reading the haiku. it was a great gift, and probably the best part of Christmas for me.

so today i set about making another chocolate pie to bring to my family’s Christmas Eve gathering tonight. i had bought the frozen Pillsbury pie crusts, but upon opening them, i realized i’d rather use the graham cracker crust that i had since it had a plastic lid and the frozen ones did not. i started to make the filling. i opened the graham cracker crust and saw there were a lot of crumbs on the outside edge of the tin. i thought “hey, i’ll just flip it over carefully and get rid of them.” BAD IDEA! the crust fell out and shattered into several pieces in the sink. (!!!!)

using some quick thinking, i turned the heat down on the filling since i had just started to make it. i kept stirring it. i got the frozen crust ready. i waited the tense minutes for it to defrost then for it to warm in the oven. when it got about ready to remove from the oven, i turned the heat up on the filling. the filling thickened up and i poured it into the new pie crust. everything came out fine. disaster avoided…a Christmas miracle indeed!

i ended up shaving my beard on Tuesday in anticipation on getting a new work badge on Thursday. apparently though, i was not going to be able to make the scheduled badge appointment, and needed to either go earlier or later. unfortunately, the people working the badges don’t take reschedules, and i am having to wait until January. i found this out on Wednesday. so basically, i shaved for nothing. however, i did enjoy being able to touch my face after almost 7 weeks.

here are some beard pictures from the final week and the morning it was gone:

now for the super exciting OMG HOW DID THAT HAPPEN news….i got B’s in both my classes! i do not have to pay back my tuition reimbursement money! my combustion professor was merciful and kind for sure. the other final i took last friday i actually did pretty well on, so i guess the studying and equation sheet paid off. after a semester full of fist pounding, cancelling vacations, not hanging out with friends, and little or no sleep more often than not….it’s over. both classes count toward my degree. i was so glad the semester was over, i hadn’t really thought how great it would be to pass both classes, but it certainly is. i wasn’t so much upset about the possibility of having to pay back the tuition money as much as all that time i had put in over the semester not counting for everything it could have. i still think i’m going to take the spring off just for a break among other things. i haven’t decided for sure yet, but it’d be nice to be able to read books that do not involve equations. i had to talk to someone yesterday about the possibility of taking a semester off, and ended up finding out not only about how to go about doing that, but also about transferring credits. i’m very glad to have all that worked out, because i’d been wondering about it for a while.

last night some friends came over and we broke out the wii and played halo on the xbox. i used to play halo with these guys a lot and we were pretty good. last night we were losing team slayer games 50-9, 50-12, and 50-14. at least those are the scores i can remember. we did win one game of team ball which is basically run around with a skull and see who can hold it the longest. the whole time we just kept going “we used to be good!” or “we suck now!” it was a lot of fun though. even the gallon daiquiri Andy brought wasn’t bad, but i still like the white russian kind better.

Andy called today to tell me he has gotten two tickets for the Saints game tomorrow! i will be able to finally attend a game this season. and it’s only the final home game and really really REALLY important, so it should be pretty awesome.

i went to the grocery store last night and for the 2nd time in as many weeks, i wanted a cupholder on the shopping cart. there’s a Subway inside the Walmart that i go to, and i’ve stopped to get Subway before going home. pushing a cart is hard enough to start with when most of them are out of alignment and pull to one side or the other. last night i was pushing a cart that had a nasty pull to the right, so pushing it and holding a drink was a challenge. i just want a cupholder on shopping carts. it can even be retractable, i don’t care. with the increased abundance of food places inside of stores, i think cupholders should become options all consumers would like.

lately in NOLA, they’ve been having some problems making progress with the public housing buildings. right now the city wants to demolish some of the locations to rebuild better housing units. there are literally protesters from out of town coming in to protest the demolitions. they chain themselves to the gates of buildings, chain themselves to the fire escapes of set to-be-demolished projects, and for what? there have been residents who say they are cool with the demolitions, and they’re even helping design the new apartments. people who lived in the old buildings but now live in the new ones are happy about where they are living now! but no, we have hippie wannabes from out of town who want to come to NOLA to protest for people who don’t want to be protested for.

speaking of hippie wannabes, when Jacob and I went to Voodoo Fest in October, there were probably between 10 and 15 activist groups who were there to point out the problems with Louisiana’s coast line or housing or hurricane recovery. the first day we went on Friday, a few steps after we walked in, we were approached by a girl who was from Protect the Coast or something. she asked us if we had a few minutes, so we obliged. she told us how the coastline was eroding into the Gulf of Mexico, and how if we joined her organization, we could stop it. i did a research project in 8th grade about the eroding coastline, i know what’s going on. i know some organization that wants me to pay $20 to get a crappy green t-shirt with a bad pink logo on it is not going to make a difference. she asked us where we were from, so we told her NOLA. she was from California. i thought “well, that figures”. i’m tired of the people from out of town who don’t want to help anything, they just want to join activist groups and go around protesting or pointing out obvious problems. they should just go home.

last weekend i was going to attend a “wine/chocolate/board game/stay up late talking” party. before the party was planned, i had decided i would try to make Brandi’s MawMaw’s Chocolate Pie at some point over the weekend. it seemed easy enough, and i like chocolate. so now, not only was i going to make my first dessert from scratch (unless baking a cake from a mix counts as ‘from scratch’, and i don’t think it does), now i was bringing it for a party. i thought if the pie sucked, we’d just drink more wine.

first we start with the ingredients. notice, i went with the pure vanilla extract, not the imitation. my mom always had a bottle of the McCormick, so that was familiar. i bought a graham cracker crust because i could not find the Pillsbury pie crust in the pie/cake aisle (i know now it’s near the biscuits). i don’t have a pie tin anyway, so buying just the crust would not have worked out so well.

i went about combining the cocoa, sugar, and flour in the pot in preparation for the rest of the ingredients. if for some reason you get cocoa on your finger as your measuring and adding, do NOT lick it off. cocoa powder does not taste good…at all. in fact, you may end up like Tom Hanks in Big where he tried the caviar at the big company party.

and also, when you open the box of sugar, there’s no bag like a box of cereal, the sugar is just in there. so after i opened the box at the top, i realized i would have to tape the top of the box back, opening it the proper way with a notch in the side later.

once the mixture was set, i went about adding the 2nd set of ingredients. in order to use JUST the egg yolks, i thought a fork would do the trick. i was wrong. unfortunately this egg yolk sacrificed it’s life for the sake of the pie. i was not going to let it down. i pressed onward. i used a big spoon for the remaining yolks and it worked.

the mixture didn’t seem to thicken until ALL OF A SUDDEN which meant to pour it into the pie crust. the pouring went well.

i topped with cool whip lite and brought it to the party. it was not completely devoured because we also had cake and brownies, so no dessert could have been considered ‘The Best’, but the pie did draw compliments by those who ate it, and i don’t think it was the wine talking. SUCCESS!

(thanks Brandi!)

well, i finished my finals. i think i bombed one pretty bad, but i don’t feel upset about it. i’m just glad they’re over. it’s been a LONG week. today i woke up and wrote out an equation sheet of sorts for the final i took Friday. we were going to get the necessary equations, but we could make up one 8.5″ by 11″ sheet with anything else we wanted. so i went through my notes Thursday night and wrote down what i’d need, then made the sheet Friday morning. it ended up looking like this:

(sorry for the downtrodden expression….i was tired, and i was having to go take a final, it wasn’t the most exciting and happy time of the day) unfortunately the sheet contained a lot of stuff i didn’t need….i had only followed the given exam study guide! oh well. the final was easier than i thought it would be mostly because most of the questions were straight off of previous tests, which i had studied. anyway, i’m hoping to get credit for at least one class, but at this point i’m so burnt out, i’m more relieved it’s all over.

before i left to go take the final this morning, i bought Wilco tickets for Jacob and I to go see them in March at Tipitina’s. i’m pretty stoked about it after seeing them at Voodoo. i’ve never been to a show there before, only stood outside for parades, so seeing two shows (of Wilco no less) is going to be pretty awesome. and i was able to get all 4 tickets for under $30 each. thank you Wilco and thank you Tipitina’s! my total convenience fee was $15. take that ticketmaster! i’ve paid that much on ONE ticket for ONE show before.
i had said before if i had to get a new badge at work that i’d have to shave my beard. unfortunately, i got an email the other day saying i was scheduled to get a new picture taken for a new badge next Thursday. the original badge picture i got was good, so when i had to get my picture taken again a couple of years ago when i started working in New Orleans, i didn’t think it’d take the place of the old one i already had. i was wrong. the badge picture i have right now, and that is on the corporate internal website, is of me with my spiky hair and an expression like “this picture isn’t important.” not exactly the way you want to look to possible managers who see my profile and want to call me about a job. so i’m going to get a haircut sometime before Tuesday so that by Thursday i’ll be ready to take the picture. it kind of sucks because i’m off for the rest of ‘07 after Friday, two days from being able to fulfill the goal, because i could have let the beard go since i wouldn’t be going to work!

on a more serious note, 7 people i know at work got fired on Thursday. i have known 6 of them for a while, and consider them friends. we had gotten an email about some people being terminated for violating academic integrity or something, but it was pretty vague, so i had no idea it was people in New Orleans, and more specifically, people i knew until i was told on Friday afternoon. when i was told, i got weak in the knees and had to sit down. it was like a punch in the gut when i heard who it was. i called my friend Melanie on the way home and spent about 5 or 10 minutes of the 20 minute conversation saying “I don’t believe this!” i mean, one of my friends has 3 kids and he got fired because he didn’t want to name names, not because he was involved. i think they’re being made an example of, and what makes it worse is that it’s right before Christmas. it’s just not a good situation at all.

i have finals this week. not just one final, but three finals, for two classes. one is a take home portion, then one is a proctored portion, both for one class, and both combined count for 50% of my grade. we got 24 hours to do the take home. i got off work at 6 pm last night, ate dinner, and started at 7:15. i “took a break” at 4:45 am. seriously, i don’t know what the deal is, but i was probably missing the one equation or variable or whatever to make the problems easy. i got the first one i did in 20 minutes, i was rolling, ready to conquer the other two problems. eight hours later, i was spent, it was late, but i had found a way to get the 2nd problem done. i woke up at 8:45 and finished the last problem about half an hour ago. at least i get a respite today since i don’t have to take the proctored portion until tomorrow morning. i get to study. oh wait, i have another final on thursday. i hate finals.

however, the real reason i needed to post was to post a picture since i didn’t post one the other day when i typed about my beard. enjoy.

my beard is now beginning its 6th week of existence. only three more to go until the end of 2007. i’ve been called grizzly adams 5 times at work last week. is there another joke? i mean, come on, i know i work with some creative people, so i’m expecting better. speaking of work and my beard, here’s a story from Friday…

last week at work was a big review where a lot of high ranking people came to town. there was a staff meeting on Friday with some pretty high ranking people where they announced a restructuring of the team, and how they were going to divide responsibility between Denver and New Orleans. they went around and introduced the managers who were sitting at the conference table, the usual. then one of the higher ranking Denver guys says “could we take about 7 minutes and go around the room so we can put names with faces.” i thought “great, i hate having to do this stuff”. so since i was sitting at the front of the room, and everyone at the table had already said their name, etc, i didn’t get much time to get creative. i was in the 2nd row. i was nervous about what i was going to say. then the guy three seats down from me adds the tagline that “he goes to meetings”, so i thought, “hey, i can say something about my beard.” when it got to my turn to stand up and say something, i stood up, told everyone my name, that i was a designer on the service module, and then said “by the way, don’t remember me as the guy with the beard, because i don’t usually have a beard.” it was a success! the room laughed! one of the guys i know from Denver who was sitting at the conference table gave me the head nod as he laughed. even the head engineer for the service module laughed and asked “is it going to be changing soon?” to which i said “yes, in about a month.” then it went to the next person and continued. some of the other guys after me tried to ride my coattails, with “i’ve always had a beard” but nobody laughed. after the meeting was over, one of the Denver guys even came up to me and asked me about it. i got to tell him about how my friends were in a beard contest and i was just kind of supporting them and trying to grow my beard until the end of 2007. what i said had a better effect than i thought, and i got to get face time with people i probably would not have before.

i did get to talk to the head engineer after the meeting before i left, plus the guy i know from Denver for a while, and felt better about my job. some new opportunities might be coming up, so i’m anxious to see what will happen in the next couple of months.