Thoughts for today...

Went to the grocery tonight... I picked a parking space that was across from one cart return and completely behind the return on another. You'd have to be pretty freaking lazy not to go ahead and put your cart anywhere around there without just putting it in the cart return.

I came out of the grocery and every car on my row was gone except mine... and not one but TWO carts were pushed into my car. Both leaving dents and dings.

I really guess I shouldn't be surprised. There's a lot to be said for personal responsibility but it's definitely NOT something the majority of people have a clue about any more. It's a thing of the past. Lazy dependence is now the rule.

Twins!

You might remember the mug on the left from an earlier post late last year. It was my first real wahine mug that Dan found somewhere near San Francisco. Well I got a surprise Saturday in the mail when I got another one from Lois in Boise.



The one from Dan is on the left and the new ones from Lois is on the right. They are the same design but are probably done at different times.

The one on the left is stamped Japan on the bottom and there are no marks on the one on the right. I think maybe the one stamped Japan is probably older but I don't know for sure. The lettering and some other features are less worn on the one Lois found but that just indicates it's probably seen less use. They also have different eyes.

The glaze jobs differ a bit too.

Very cool. Now I have a set!

Thanks Lois!

Recent Tiki Finds

Here's an interesting find Bear made at Goodwill:



It dates all the way back to March of 2001.

It's a pretty hefty well-made mug. The screenprinting is a bit cheesy with the whole "Kumoniwanaleia" thing but at least it dates the mug and helps start a story. Feel free to let me know how the part was if you were there.

It seems like Bear find as many (or maybe more) tikis than I do these days. I'm trying to keep up. Here's one I found at the local "antique" store a few weeks back:

It's a nice Ku replica brought to us from the KC Company in Alea, Hawaii (and of course was made in China.)

The Truth About The Bitter Truth

A few weeks ago my coworkers (we'll call him Karl) had to go to one of our offices in Sankt Wolfgang, Germany for a few weeks.


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A while back I came across a line of bitters from a company in Germany called The Bitter Truth. I figured maybe he could get me some while he was over there. We looked it all up on the internet and found the "retailler" for Germany was called Drinkology. It was 45 miles away on the other side of Munich but not exactly next door... in a town called Pullach.


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Karl, the kind and adventurous soul, set out to Pullach to shop for some bitters. He took the train to Pullach and set out with his trusty iPhone as a guide to find the Drinkology store. I think after 10 minutes or so of walking through the rain he was beginning to wonder if there was a store.

After a few more minutes the rain let up and he found himself at the address... a residence. Ooops.



Well... we're there now. Might was will ring the bell and see how things go. Luckily Stephan was home and even though it was a bit out of the ordinary he sold Karl was able to obtain some Lemon Bitters.



You can't get much closer to the source than this. Thanks Karl!



I used some this evening instant of my normal Angostura or orange bitters to make myself a Manhattan. It has a wonderful aroma of lemon zest and a lively lemon taste that's lightly spiced (not candy-like). It really brightens up the drink.

This really makes we want to check out the rest of the products from The Bitter Truth. I still can't find them anywhere here in the Atlanta area. Maybe Karl will have to go back to for more :)

Lunch!

Mmmmmm.

Looking for cheese...

Update 2:21 PM:

While they have TONS of cheese and lots of Wisconsin cheese they had no Brick Cheese.

So far we have not located Brick Cheese in Atlanta.

:(

Mmmm... Squash

I was out mowing the yard this morning and my neighbor brought me some nice yellow squash and a zucchini right out of her garden.

Looks like I know what I'm cooking on Sunday evening :)

What cats do while you are at work...

Not much.

Finally!

They've finally eased our drought restrictions and I can wash my car again!

I guess this means I need to order some more Zaino.

Now that people can use water again and use will go up, do you think municipalities will lower the rates? (since they had to raise them to make $ when we weren't using as much water).

Tiki Read

Here's a good article over at the WSJ about tiki drinks: Better Tiki Than Tacky

It's an almost lost art that you're really better off trying at home unless you find yourself at a place that specializes in doing it right.

(Thanks to Otto at the Tikievents list for cuing me in!)

Cleanup

I just booted up my old PowerMac 7300/180.

Then all the extensions started marching across the bottom of the screen... then OneClick loaded... Whoa! Now I find myself constantly trying to right-click on a one button mouse. Ugh.

The purpose of this is to salvage my data on here for backups. I'll probably keep the mac somewhere as it's the only thing I have right now that will read any of my old SCSI drives that are Mac formatted.

In the meantime I've also cleaned up two older PC's for recycling. I cleaned the drives off with DBAN and then installed a small linux distro. I've used both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. For some reason I couldn't get Puppy to boot off the hard drive on the old AMD K6 (It was suggested that I needed a "K9" for that) but I got DSL to install just fine... and it's fast too. I'm impressed how these tiny distributions identify all the hardware and just work... even with my unknown 10T ethernet cards that I once bought for $5 off eBay. These are old but they boot, find the internet and find google. I wouldn't try to watch YouTube with these but they might be good for someone.