Bill Roper's Journal

My annual required training for work is now completed. Yay, me!

I have also fixed all of the bugs that popped up in the scan from the static code analysis tool. Also, yay, me!

And I found the bug in the compile of an older feature branch that was introduced when we mixed the new jar from their project with their fixes for the static code analysis tool with the old branch that doesn't have those fixes yet.

In other news, we decided to make superburger for dinner tonight. I had figured that we would have potato chips with it, but when I was looking for the cranberry pecan chicken salad at Sam's Club to bring back for Gretchen, I found a tub of their loaded potato salad, which includes sour cream, cheddar cheese, and bacon. It is very good.

It is also a three pound tub of this stuff. I foresee a lot of potato salad in the near future.

We missed having it for St. Patrick's Day, but Gretchen managed to acquire a lovely corned beef late last week that became tonight's dinner. I stopped at the store and picked up several things, including a loaf of Turano Rustic Rye. The rye bread turned out to be really good and a lot of the loaf has been consumed.

Between that, sauerkraut, and green beans, I am *very* full.

*burp* :)

Today's lunch was the Beacon Tap's Breakfast Burger. This is a hamburger patty served between two mini-waffles and topped with hash browns, split link sausage, bacon, and a fried egg, with a drizzle of maple syrup. Oh, and onion rings as the side.

It was good. There are burgers that I like better, though, so I probably will not order it again.

And, no, I did not quite finish it. But there wasn't a whole lot left.

Having gotten a recommendation from a friend of ours, we've had a fair number of meals from Pancho's Burritos over recent months, as the food is good, the prices are reasonable, and they have flour tortillas that don't contain sulfites (so far). The problem is that it's a longish drive, as they are around the corner of Golf and Higgins.

Recently, I noticed a new Mexican place in the strip mall on the northwest corner of Golf and Algonquin, Tacos Jerez. They make their own tortillas which appear to be quite safe, the food is good and similarly priced to Pancho's, and a whole lot closer.

Getting into the lot if you're coming from any direction other than west on Golf is a bit of a challenge, but it can be done. So if you're in the area and looking for Mexican food, you might want to give them a try.

Today we met for the second time with the lawyer who is going to prepare a will for Gretchen and I. It is embarrassing to admit that the *first* time we met with this lawyer was pre-COVID. It is somewhat *more* embarrassing to realize that we originally met with the lawyer at some time before our trip to DFDF as guests. However, a lot of good progress was made today and the lawyer has promised that he will track us down and we will complete the process this time, no matter how hard we work at disappearing.

In other news, when we had guests last week, one of the things that we made plans to serve was salad. When I discovered that Mariano's was running an excellent sale on Kraft salad dressing, I decided to pick up a number of promising things that we don't normally keep in the house. One of these was their Asian Toasted Sesame dressing. This turns out to be remarkably similar to the dressing that was used on the Wonton Chicken Salad at the late, lamented Sweet Tomatoes, a salad (and buffet restaurant) that I liked a lot.

We still had bags of salad leftover from the festivities, so Gretchen suggested that we could just add chicken. And that's what I picked up at Mariano's this evening, along with everything else that we needed and had run out of (it is remarkable how fast a half-gallon of milk can vanish around here). I prepared my salad with the sesame dressing, Gretchen used ranch, and we were both very happy.

The evening's entertainment (other than switching to the Cubs game to see if they were really going to continue playing in a thunderstorm -- hint, there was one out in the bottom of the ninth and *nobody* was going to stop this game) was watching "Stars on Mars", which continues to be entertaining. After that, we decided to try an episode of "Crime Scene Kitchen" which is a baking show where the contestants have to figure out what they are supposed to bake by looking at the debris left in the kitchen by the celebrity chef judges. It turns out to be a good bit of fun as well, although I start to believe they should come and reconstruct things after our kids are done baking some day, because there is certainly enough stuff left around to sort through.

But we are working on teaching kitchen cleanup. It's a work in progress...

We had our slightly-belated St. Patrick's Day dinner tonight, with a lovely Vienna corned beef flat, mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and sauerkraut. The mashed potatoes were a concession to the kids, who are fonder of those than they are of boiled potatoes, while the sauerkraut is a concession to me, as I'm fonder of it than I am of boiled cabbage. It was yummy.

I got very little done today, as I slept quite late after two days of driving, but I *did* get the vanity cabinet in the kids bathroom fixed today, as I reinstalled the door that I had removed before it fell off. Some wood glue in the screw hole should help deal with the tendency of that screw to loosen up, and I removed everything from the lower cabinet, some of which stuff has been there for a *very* long time for no good reason. I threw out the things of obvious non-value; the others can be sorted by kids and Gretchen and dispatched to either better places or back under the cabinet if that's where they really belong.

In other news, Gretchen made contact with our small equipment repair place while I was traveling. It turns out that they have shifted to mobile work after the pandemic. They arrived today, pulled our snow blower out of the garage where it has languished this winter, installed the replacement primer bulb that I had purchased that would have been *way* too much work for me to do without a workbench, and then cleaned and tuned up the machine, so it will be ready for next season, when I expect *much* more snow than we've had to deal with this year.

Yay!

Happily, the big snow storm went south of us. This disappointed Ruby the Dog, but not me, as I was the one who would have ended up shoveling this mess.

Gretchen and I ran out to Charcoal Delights for lunch today ahead of the not-a-snow-storm up here. As I pulled into the parking lot, I looked at the sign on the door with dismay. Not because they were closed, but because they had posted new hours and were going to be closed on Sunday in the future.

This was a bit of a shock, because we had gone to Charcoal Delights for lunch on Sunday at least two or three or more Sundays every month since we moved to Des Plaines. But they, like many other businesses, are having staffing problems and when that happens, Sunday seems to be what gives.

So we're going to have to find a new place for lunch on Sunday.

Drat!

I've eaten rather too much today. I'll try to do better than this tomorrow.

That shouldn't be too difficult. :)

Gretchen has been complaining about the light from the overhead fixture in the family room, while I've noticed that the light from the three fixtures in the hallway downstairs has become increasingly dim. Today, I pulled out the ladder and (with help from Gretchen and K) did something about it. The three hallway fixtures each contained a very old Phillips LED bulb and a dead compact fluorescent. Those were removed and replaced with a pair of 100 watt equivalent LED bulbs from Amazon. The hallway -- well, it does not *quite* look like a small nuclear device is being detonated when the light switch is flipped on, but it is easily one of the brightest areas in the house. The family room fixture turned out to have one good LED bulb and one burned out compact fluorescent that was replaced with another of the Amazon bulbs.

It's now much brighter downstairs and a lot of dust has been cleaned out of the fixtures.

I have been gradually working my way through the assorted leftovers in the refrigerator and we have now essentially finished the Christmas roast, finished the leftover chili, used up the leftover pizza fixings from last week, and greatly reduced the amount of corned beef. This is good, because actually consuming the food means that it will not go bad and get thrown out while I am at GAFilk. (This is not to imply that Gretchen doesn't eat leftovers -- she may well eat more leftovers than I do, but there are certain leftovers that are going to stay leftover if I'm not here to eat them. :) )

I have a ludicrous number of things to do tomorrow before I depart for GAFilk on Thursday morning, but since I am off from work, there's hope.

Today I went out to Mariano's and spent way too much money on groceries for the weekend. But we are now prepared for all of our meals between now and Christmas Day inclusive. (Except that the store was out of King's Hawaiian Rolls, so I will run to Jewel over lunch tomorrow and see what I can turn up.)

Yesterday, we tried out the Member's Mark Chicken Tortilla Soup from Sam's Club, along with grilled Havarti cheese sandwiches for dinner. I liked the soup quite a bit, as it was thick, spicy, and had lots of chunky bits; it was just a bit spicier than Gretchen was up for, as she is recovering from a bad digestive reaction to some leftover Kung Pao Beef from earlier this week. But it -- the soup -- is definitely on the list of things that we will try again. :)