Caveat Emptor!

Last year we decided to start a yearly tradition of going to an OU football game each season with George. Last year it was OU at Iowa State; this year it was the OU at K-State game a few weeks ago. Our record so far is 2 - 0! We got to see OU beat K-State handily, in what was a very exciting game for the first half: 83 combined points in the first; only 10 combined in the 2nd.

While we enjoyed our trip to Manhattan, it was fraught with numerous adventures that taught us valuable lessons at every turn. Behold:

The Ticket Fiasco

We bought tickets about a week before the game on ebay, as we did last year. Unfortunately, we did not have the same luck. The tickets were not shipped as advertised and therefore did not arrive in time. The seller was also incommunicado. It was the day before the game, we were about to fly to Kansas City, and we had no tickets. One last look on ebay revealed a different seller who said we could pick up his tickets in KC, so we gave it a shot, and we scored. The guy was very friendly and organized, and it was a pleasure to do business with him. So if you're in need of tickets on ebay, check out bradinkc. We left him very favorable feedback.

When we got back (which is another story), we filed a complaint against the original seller. It turns out Paypal has a very nice system for handling these disputes, designed to get both sides to communicate and come to an agreement, and if that doesn't work, to allow a claim to be filed which Paypal then investigates. Unfortunately the seller was still incommunicado, so we had to file the claim. After 10 days, Paypal decided in our favor and reimbursed us the full cost for the tickets.

The Rental Car Scam?

We weren't sure if we wanted to rent a car for the trip, but when we saw it would only be $60 total from Budget, we went for it. The car itself was fine (a Kia Spectra), but when we turned it in, we were charged more than twice the quoted price. We went to the desk to ask about it, and the guy immediately saw the problem: we'd been charged the wrong weekend rate. He claimed that the computers sometimes pick the wrong rate on the weekends, and they only know about it if customers bring it up after getting their bill. Some weekends, he's seen as many as 8 out of 10 people get the wrong rate! He quickly changed our bill to the right amount, but the whole thing seemed a bit shady.

The Airline Torture

Our plan was to fly home Sunday afternoon on United, but about half an hour before the flight took off, they announced it was canceled because, when the plane was flying into KC, passengers noticed that there were cracks in one of the wings. Yikes! There was a mad dash to get into a really long line at the ticket counter to switch to another plane, but there were no other planes available on United. We tried switching to another airline, but even that didn't work. Eventually they announced United was flying another plane into KC just for us. The plane arrived around 5pm, but by 7:30 we still hadn't boarded. Finally, the captain came out and announced he believed it was illegal for him to fly the plane because he would exceed his daily duty time. United disagreed, and union lawyers got on the phone with United lawyers to try to figure it out. Around 9pm, the union lawyers won, the flight was canceled, United gave us a hotel voucher and said "Try again tomorrow." No one was happy, of course. We'd just spent almost 10 hours in the airport and gotten nowhere. So we tried again the next morning and finally made it home.

The Smartphone Realization

At one point while we were standing in line at the airport, they told us we could call 1-800-UNITED1 to switch flights. So I pulled out my phone, dialed 1-800 and stopped. I had no idea what to dial next. Wendy and I both have smartphones, with a keypad that doubles as a qwerty keyboard, so we no longer have the standard letter to number mapping.


I had never realized this. Despite the phone's obvious technical wizardry and sophistication, the embedded operating system, the built-in camera, the SD card, wi-fi, internet browser, etc, the phone just can't do the simple task of mapping letters to digits in a phone number!

We tried to figure out what the digits to UNITED1 would be, but when we called the number we came up with, an automated message invited us to call a different number for "stimulating conversation." We declined the offer. For future reference, the number 1 doesn't have any letters; they start at 2 and go three letters per number, except for 7 and 9 which have four letters. Now we know!


Finally, the weekend wasn't a total loss. OU won, and we got to hang out with George and with Wendy's family. But most importantly, George bet me a quarter that this weekend's OU-Texas Tech football game will see more points scored than the next OU-Texas Tech basketball game!

Summer Rundown

Here's what we've been up to recently:

* We got a new deck! Our old one was, well, old. And starting to rot. So we had it torn down and rebuilt. Here are the results:



* Wendy got me a super-cool birthday present a few months ago: a personal weather station. It measures wind speed, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, among others, and it connects to a computer. That, combined with a free service from Weather Underground, allows me to check the weather at our house over the internet. Check it out here.

It's a lot of fun to play with. Check out this chart from August. We were woken up by a morning thunderstorm. You can see right when the storm rolled through. Just before 7am, the temperature suddenly dropped, the air pressure started rising, the wind shifted direction, and then it started raining. Very cool!

* I took a continuing education class recently called Investigating Ghosts and Hauntings, taught by a local paranormal research group. It was very interesting, and as it turned out, a couple in the class were taking it because they thought their house was haunted. So we got to go and see the group perform an investigation. They used a staggering amount of equipment: multiple video cameras, eletromagnetic field meters, geomagnetic field meters, positive/negative ion detectors, random number generators, etc. It was quite a production. Nothing especially unusual turned up, but before we learned anything about the house we took a tour, and several of us felt that if any part of the house was haunted, it was the top floor. And we later learned that's where most of the unexplained events had occurred.

* Wendy's Mom came to visit a few weeks ago. We took a trip down to Chicago to see the Field Museum. We had planned on going on a Sunday, but thankfully the night before realized the Bears were playing a home game that day, so there wouldn't be any parking (the Field Musuem is right next to Soldier Field). We went Monday instead, and it turned out to be free admission day.

* Allergies have been terrible this year. I've wondered if it has anything to do with the trees around us; they produced a huge amount of acorns this year. We literally have a carpet of acorns around parts of our house. At times last month we could hear them fall onto our house and roll down the roof. Thank goodness for the gutter screens we put up last year!

They've come for brains. I'll give them... bullets!

Our Tivo has been working lots of overtime this summer. Last month it was busy recording hours and hours of Tour de France; this month it's the non-stop Olympics coverage. Since our Wii is connected to the same TV as our Tivo, there hasn't been much video gaming of late. But, that doesn't stop me from blogging about video games!

One of the greatest video games of all-time is House of the Dead 2. The premise is simple: kill as many zombies as you possibly can. What makes it so great?


Bad graphics
By today's standards the graphics are terrible. You know right off the bat that this isn't a high budget game. But that doesn't matter at all; the game is so much fun that the bad graphics actually fit right in.

Comically gross violence
By far the best part. You're advised to aim for the head to kill the zombies quickly, but if you aim for their body, they stumble from the shock, arms/legs go flying off, they'll have holes blasted completely through them, but they'll still keep coming. Which leads us to the next point...

Lots of green zombie blood
This speaks for itself.

Hilariously bad voice acting
There's no way to describe how superbly awful the voices are; you just have to hear them. Anybody can do bad acting, but to make it so bad it's funny takes some serious talent.

Staying power
I first encountered the game in arcades years ago; you used a light gun to shoot at the screen which was (and still is) way cool and tons of fun. I could never justify the time and money to get good at it, so I played it infrequently.

The next time I encountered the game was in college as a PC game, only this time it had been reformatted as Typing of the Dead. Now, each zombie had a word next to it, and typing the word correctly fired bullets at the zombie.


Again, TONS of fun!! Whoever came up with that idea is a genius. I was never able to finish the game, though, because it got too hard; towards the end you had to type entire sentences to kill the zombies, and my typing skills just weren't up to par.


Recently, it was bundled with its sequel, House of the Dead 3 and released for the Wii. The Wii is perfect for the game, since it allows you to use the Wii-remote as a light gun, just like the arcade version. I bought the game soon after it came out, plus I bought the Nyko Perfect Shot accessory to make the Wii remote even look like a gun.


This worked well for a while, but I found that the Nyko gun tired out my trigger finger too quickly. I then got a Wii Zapper and discovered that it's the way to go. It's not as cool looking as the Nyko gun, but the trigger is much easier to pull and using both hands allows for much greater accuracy. I am pleased to report that I have, finally, beaten House of the Dead 2! Once the Olympics are over I plan on starting House of the Dead 3.

And, the reason I wrote this blog post in the first place is that today I discovered another House of the Dead game is coming out for the Wii. This one is called House of the Dead: Overkill and there's a trailer for it here (if you enjoyed the movie Grindhouse, then you'll dig the trailer). Here's hoping Overkill is as much fun as House of the Dead 2.

Finally, a post about zombies just isn't finished until I inflict a super-lame zombie joke that Wendy shared with me recently:

What do vegetarian zombies eat? (scroll down)














GRAAAAAAAAINS!!!

Before and After

Fireplace and Mantel

Kitchen Sink and Faucet

Air Conditioner

None of these changes were cheap, of course.

Bank Account Before:

And After:

The Tell-Tale Clink

We've been prodded by grandparents to update our blog; so, here goes:

Last night as soon as we got into bed I heard: clink. It almost sounded like metal on metal. That's not a sound that our house usually makes, so I listened closely, and a few minutes later there was another clink. I mentally went through our house trying to figure out what would make that sound, but could think of nothing.

Finally, after the third clink I got up to investigate. I stood in the kitchen, waiting, and heard it again. It sounded like it might be outside, so I opened the blinds and looked out, but there was nothing except for empty streets and dark houses. By this time it was almost 1am, our house was totally dark, and I was starting to think we may have ghosts, or that people were in our house like the The Strangers previews that are constantly showing on TV.

Then, it clinked again, and I could tell it was coming from our dining room light fixture.


I turned on the light, heard it again, and climbed up on a chair to investigate. My first thought was that it was a bug in the light fixture, but there was no movement, no shadows, and when I unscrewed the light cover there was nothing inside.

Now I was stumped. I waited and waited but there were no more clinks. I decided that it was somehow fixed now that the light cover was off, so I set the cover on the floor, left a note for Wendy so she wouldn't be wondering what the heck was going on in the morning, and went back to bed.

And then, 10 minutes later, it clinked again. And again. And again. And I got up again and went back downstairs. With a bit of patience I was rewarded with another clink, and it was still coming from our light fixture, except now there was nothing but two light bulbs and the base that screwed into the ceiling.


Determined, I got up on the chair and carefully unscrewed the base and pulled it down a few inches -- as far as the wires into the ceiling would let me. From what I could see there was nothing there. Then, I tilted it towards me, and something small and black slid down: it was a bug. A bug in the attic had crawled down into the recessed area of the base, and when it tried to fly around it clinked against the metal. No ghosts. No horror movie characters. Just a bug. I squashed it, screwed the base back into the ceiling, and went to bed. No more clinks.

Here's what else we've been up to in recent months:

* There was another employee book sale at work, and this year we got a buy 1 get 1 free coupon, which meant it was 12.5 cents per book. We got 87 books for $11. Some of our more exciting finds include the following:

The Portable Dorothy Parker
Keturah and Lord Death
Dreaming in Code
Pattern Recognition and The Difference Engine by William Gibson
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Sagas of Icelanders
Howliday Inn

* The process of home improvement continues ever onward. Currently we're in the middle of getting a new mantel and glass doors for our fireplace, looking for a new washer and dryer, and having our front porch and deck washed and re-stained.

* Most everyone already knows, but in March we went to Greece for a week and a half and had a fantastic time. We went to Athens, Turkey, and a few Greek islands. My suitcase never made it there thanks to the opening of the new T5 terminal at Heathrow. After 3 weeks it was declared lost and I got a check for $600 and got reimbursed for all the clothes and toiletries I bought in Greece. It finally showed up on our front porch 4 weeks after it went missing! It worked out well in the end, since I got my suitcase and the money, but was a bit of hassle during the trip. We've emailed pictures to a bunch of people; if you haven't seen them and would like to, send us an email.

* The weather during Memorial Day weekend was fun. On Friday highs were in the 50s, on Saturday the 60s, on Sunday the 70s, on Monday the 80s, and when we went back to work on Tuesday it was back to the 50s.

* Our Wii has been getting a lot of playing time recently. We're both playing a lot of DDR, which is a lot of fun and a lot of exercise, and we just got Guitar Hero 3 and have started rocking out to it. I've also been killing lots of zombies thanks to House of the Dead 2 and 3.

February Adventures

We've gotten a lot of snow this winter. Just about everyone is sick of it by now. About a week ago, the Northwest Herald reported that we'd gotten 69 inches of snow so far; only 5.5 inches below the all-time record set during the legendary '78-'79 winter (Chicago got 89" that year).

Wendy and I have started to notice a pattern. Right about the time the snow melts to the point where we can see patches of grass in our yard, a new snowstorm hits. Today was no exception. We opened the blinds, saw a patch of grass, and checked the weather: 2-4" of snow expected over the next few days.

I snapped these photos from our bedroom window the morning after one the larger snowstorms this year.





A few weeks ago the total lunar eclipse occurred. I shoveled and de-iced the deck the weekend before (which was a lot of work!), just in case it was clear that night. We lucked out and it was! Unfortunately though it was only 10 degrees that evening. So we put on as many clothes as we possibly could, wrapped ourselves in blankets, sat outside with a mug of hot chocolate and watched as much of the eclipse as possible. I think we lasted about 45 minutes, which isn't too bad. But we were really, really, cold.



Yesterday we drove down to Chicago and spent the afternoon at the Field Museum. We were drawn by a special exhibit on George Washington Carver. In college, we went to the George Washington Carver National Monument just outside Joplin, MO. At the time we knew him as "the peanut guy", but we soon discovered he was a much more fascinating person. In addition to being a scientist, he was an artist, a great educator, a tremendous friend and inspiration to countless people, and he possessed great humility and a great love of nature. His greatest contribution, though, didn't come from the laboratory, but from translating the results of science into knowledge and actions that the poor farmers of the day could use. We enjoyed the National Monument so much that this past Christmas we stopped there again on our way to Oklahoma. We found they'd expanded the building and put in several new exhibits, including some interesting audio interviews (Carver had a very unusual voice).

When we got home after Christmas, we saw that the Field Musuem was having an exhibit on Carver starting in February. We thought it a funny coincidence and decided to go check it out. We were not disappointed. I was especially pleased that they had a few more samples of his artwork. A lot of his artwork was lost in a fire, but the pieces I've seen -- mostly of plants -- are really good. It's definitely worth the price of admission.

After the Field Musuem, I dragged Wendy to a comic book store in north Chicago called Chicago Comics. It was cool; they had a large selection of graphic novels. And it was neat to see some of the north-side. Parking, as you can imagine, was a big mess, and I swear some of the cars parallel-parked along the street were so close to each other there's no way they could get out. Anyway, just to make things even, Wendy then dragged me to a store so she could go clothes shopping!


Finally, for our Wii-loving friends out there, we've started playing a new game that's a lot of fun: Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure. It's flown under-the-radar a bit, but it's possibly the best third-party game available for the Wii. You play a young boy who wants to be a pirate, and the goal is to find treasure, but there are all kinds of puzzles you have to get through. It makes really good use of the Wii remote, and the puzzles are very clever. So far it's been a lot of fun.

Library Nirvana

It took two weekends, a lot of driving, and several trips to the store to find the right tool, but we at last have enough bookshelves for our books!

Several weekends ago we bravely ventured forth to the Schaumburg IKEA, determined to spend our hard-won Christmas monies on bookshelves. The overflowing piles of book boxes in our family room had simply become too much to bear. So we turned our gaze to ikea.com in search of answers, and one word leapt out at us, promising to solve all our storage needs. It was "Billy". We considered ordering online, but decided against it; we had to witness Billy in person. We had to be sure.

Thus we found ourselves in Schaumburg, IL. Knowing full well the magnitude of the task before us, we stopped first at Macaroni Grill, where we spent another hard-won Christmas present: a "gift card." After filling ourselves with eggplant parmesan and margarita pizza, we began our task. IKEA beckoned. Making our way through the turbulent throngs, climbing floor after floor of home furnishings, and maintaining a sharp, laser-like focus, we found ourselves amidst the Billy showcases. And it was good.

We secured our items and proceeded to checkout. Our plan was to have IKEA deliver the goods to us, but another, cheaper alternative presented itself. There was an on-site Enterprise store with vans available to rent. So we found ourselves driving back home not in our car, but in a full-size cargo van. After one hour to get home, half an hour to unload, one hour back to drop off the van, several minutes of being lost, and one more hour back home in our car, we had accomplished our goal. Bookshelves! At least, bookshelves in a box.

The next day, Sunday, saw us put the bookshelves together. We soon found this was the easy part. Getting them properly aligned and anchored on the wall was a task we left for the next weekend. Working well into the night the next Saturday, with the aid of dogged persistence, wooden shims, an offset screwdriver, and caramel-chocolate-chip cookies, we finally finished. The next day, another Sunday, we put up our books. And, again, just as before, it was good. Billy was right.

From start to finish:







With our books off of the floor and into their rightful place, I couldn't resist cataloging them via LibraryThing. The above shelves hold 346 books of all sizes, shapes, and subjects. We're not done cataloging, but we estimate this is about half of our total collection, with the rest scattered among smaller bookshelves throughout the house.

Sunday Breakfast

I like to make Sunday breakfast. I don't always cook Sunday mornings, but I would say more often than not I make muffins or pancakes or waffles or something. This morning, I made Four-Grain Pancakes, and they were so tasty that I knew I had an obligation to share the recipe with the world.

Here's my recipe, slightly adapted from one of my cookbooks. Next time you're hungry and you have some extra time for breakfast, make these. Seriously. You can thank me later.

Four-Grain Pancakes

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
This is the part that I think completely makes the recipe:
1 packet of instant flavored oatmeal
The original recipe calls for 1/3 cup quick-cooking oats and 3 T maple syrup, and you could certainly do that, but I used 1 packet of Quaker Weight Control Oatmeal in Maple and Brown Sugar flavor, and it is insanely good. The packet was about 1/2 cup of uncooked oatmeal.
2 cups buttermilk
I also did not use buttermilk, but soy milk made a fine substitute. I'm sure regular milk would as well, although you might want to use slightly less than 2 cups, since neither is as thick as buttermilk.
1/3 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten

In a large bowl, combine everything. Stir just until it's all mixed together - don't overmix.

Heat a griddle or skillet over medium-high heat. I use a non-stick skillet, and you'll definitely want to spray it with non-stick spray or grease it with butter for the first set of pancakes. You'll know the griddle is hot enough when you sprinkle a few drops of water on it and they dance around before evaporating.

Cook the pancakes - they should sizzle a little when they hit the griddle, because you want them to be slightly crispy on the outside. They'll take a few minutes on the first side and only a minute or so once you flip them. This recipe made about 16 pancakes, which is always enough to feed the 2 of us twice. So, four servings, I guess. Pancakes freeze really well, if you have leftovers. Just let them cool, put them in a ziploc and put them in the freezer.