I ended up having to work 2nd shift on Thanksgiving. I was a little bummed about not being able to celebrate with my family, but I do have Christmas and New Year's off this year.

I bought a frozen Boston Market meal to have for dinner, but I didn't need it. The nurses over in the ICU had a complete Thanksgiving dinner, including a turkey that they made at the hospital in a roaster. They had a bunch of food left over, so they invited me and the pharmacist over to fill up a plate. I had some really good sweet potato casserole and cranberry sauce. I wanted to grab a glass of sparkling grape juice too, but ran out of hands.

Later in the evening, the pharmacist's family stopped up to see the new pharmacy, and they brought along two very full plates from their Thanksgiving dinner. They had made a turducken along with some awesome mashed potato and more pies than Baker's Square. I wasn't sure which bird I was eating, but it was all very juicy. They said the final weight of the three birds was 35 lbs plus three more pounds of stuffing for a grand total of 38 lbs! The ricotta pie with fresh blueberries and raspberries was a great way to end my second dinner.

By the end of the night, I was beyond stuffed. I think I may have even ate better than my family. I went from having a frozen dinner zapped in a microwave to two homemade dinners. I might have to work on Thanksgiving every year.

We got the results back today at work from the inventory we had done a few weeks back. It ended up being only about 3% more dollar-wise than last year. It is still a significant amount of money tied up in inventory, but that is the cost of running a hospital pharmacy. My boss is happy with the results because it essentially matches last year's levels when you factor in inflation. I was kind of hoping to be at or below last year's levels, but I think a little more support from and education of the other members of the department is needed first.

I was watching Good Eats last week, and the whole show was about the sweet potato. Alton made sweet potato waffles, which looked really good even though it seems like a strange dish. I might have to dig up the waffle maker from the basement and try that one out.

The other recipe from the episode that look fairly straightforward to make and really delicious was his sweet potato pie. I decided to try and tackle this recipe, and it gave me an excuse to finally buy a vegetable steamer that I was eyeing over at Bed Bath and Beyond.

The pecan topping is just crispy enough and the syrup drizzle makes it quite sweet (I snuck a taste while it was cooling). I opted for generic/fake syrup instead of the $9 for a 10oz bottle of pure maple syrup at the grocery store. While it may taste really good, $9 just seemed a little steep for a supporting ingredient. The vegetable steamer worked great. I will have to test it out on broccoli in the future. I haven't tasted the pie yet as it was late when it finally cooled and I got around to cleaning up the kitchen. I plan on having a piece for breakfast tomorrow, so I will let you know. I have never had sweet potato pie before, so I have my fingers crossed that I will end up liking it.

The other night I decided I wanted to make something to take into work on Tuesday. I scoured my cookbooks and the Food Network site for ideas. Then I remembered I took a book out from the library last week "Two Dudes One Pan" and there were some really good looking desserts in there. I chose to make their pumpkin pie bars, which are essentially a piece of pumpkin pie in bar form. They are perfect for serving pie to a large number of people without having to make/buy several pies. Here was the final result with a little whipped cream on top:

The graham cracker crust cooked a little too long, but it was still really good. Everyone at work loved them and they were completely gone by 11:00. The second shift crew didn't get any, so I promised them I would make another batch soon and save some for them. I will have to either buy the book and copy a few more recipes out of it before returning it to the library.

Actually it is, but in this case not so much.

While at Home Depot last night with my dad, I saw that dimmable CFL's for recessed lights had dropped in a price a little. I have been wanting to try these out in the lights in my room, but didn't feel like shelling out $15.00 a bulb in the process. I picked up two to test them out. When I got home, they did take a little longer (only about a minute) to warm up to full brightness compared to the other two recessed lights. When I tried dimming the lights though, the two regular bulbs dimmed like before, but the CFL's barely dimmed. When I got really low (about 25%) on the dimmer, the bulbs went completely out. I guess I will have to wait until they improve on the technology of dimmable CFL's. Luckily my dad will be able to make use of them at work on some lights that are not on a dimmer, so it wasn't a total waste of money. For now I will just have to stick with putting these types of lights in my regular lamps.

We had quite a night at bowling tonight. Everyone was on top of their game and we took all three games and the series pin count from the top team in the league. Granted they were giving us a 99 pin handicap, but that was mainly because one of their players has a 202 average. It didn't help that one of their guys was absent, so his totals were entered as his average minus 10 for all three games.

The one guy on their team was a bit of a sore loser and tends to get all pissy when the pins don't fall his way. (pun intended The other guys are okay, but sometimes they all take the games a little too seriously. They knew when we started up this year that our league was strictly a social league, and that most of us were average players at best. By teh middle of the second game, two of the three guys had pretty much given up for the night and started throwing gutters and using there other hand to throw the ball. They still had a chance to take the game and even the third at that point, but I guess they didn;t really care.

The handicap system sucks sometimes, but it does even out the field when you have some players that are really good. In theory, if all players get close to their average, the games should be pretty even. If the low team has a good night and the high team has a less than stellar night, the advantage goes to the team that was helped by the handicap. Fortunately for us we had a good night and they only had a so-so night. Hopefully they will be in a little bit better mood the next time we play them.

My first game was average. Things picked up a bit in the second, and then they leveled off in the third. I was able to convert a bunch of spares tonight, which helped keep my totals up. Strikes would have been ideal, but I will gladly take the spares when I can get them. Let's keep up the good work in the coming weeks before we take a break for the holidays.

I think it may be about time to do a wipe and reload on my laptop. A few weeks back I started having issues with Office and my printer. The programs would randomly shut down while I was working on a document, and my printer wasn't being recognized at all. Now I can't even open Word or Excel, which makes it a little difficult to access my movie database, wish list, and bowling stats among other files. I tried using the built in recovery software, but that didn't solve the whole problem. Next I tried to reinstall Office, but the install program wasn't to remove all traces of the current software before reloading. In general it has also been acting a little sluggish.

I'm pretty much left with starting from scratch again with the computer, which won't be such a bad thing. It will be nice to have a clean slate once again and purge any unnecessary programs and files. Life will be a lot easier this time around since I now have an external hard drive that I can retrieve all of my pictures and music from. With the weather forecast being pretty wintry this week, this may be as good a time as ever to do it.

I do hope it manages to warm up just a bit sometime next week, as that would make putting up the Christmas decorations much more enjoyable.

Last week I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC. When go into and out of commercial they play a song as the camera pans around the studio. I heard a song last week that I have heard a bunch of times before, but never knew the name of it. From the little snippet I heard, I swore it was a song by Styx. I tried looking it up on iTunes, but I was unable to find any song that sound like the one I heard. I determined it more than likely wasn't one of their songs, but couldn't for the life of me think of a band that sounded similar to them. The light bulb didn't click on until I was getting ready today when for some reason I thought of REO Speedwagon. They kind of sound like Styx. Maybe it could be them. Crazy? Weird? Stupid? I don't know what; maybe a combination of the three? After a quick scan of their page on iTunes and I found it:

"Roll with the Changes" by REO Speedwagon

Enough weird confessions from me. On to see 007.

Stupid me didn't make sure his camera batteries were charged before the party so I wasn't able to take any pictures.

Political Justice
This guy in North Carolina was sick of having his McCain sign stolen from his front yard, so he hooked one up to a electric pet fence power supply. A nine year-old got quite a surprise when he tried to take the booby-trapped sign. The father's excuse is the biggest load of bull shit I have ever heard. While I don't agree with the guy's political views, I admire his ingenuity and think the kid got what he deserved.

Theater Hypocrite
Some theater operator is refusing to show "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" in his multiplexes even though they are currently showing Saw V. What is it about this country and its acceptance of violence, while fearing anything that has to do with sex? The guy refuses to comment when asked about this and why "The 40 Year-old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" were not banned from the theaters.

The best part of the article is the footnote:

"...this past weekend an audience full of children and pre-teens expecting to see the G-rated "High School Musical 3" at one of Miller's theaters in South Jordan, UT were surprised when the beginning of the R-rated "Sex Drive," which features nudity and swearing, was shown accidentally. But at least they didn't see Seth Rogen in his underwear."

Nothing is going right with my Halloween costume this week.

The socks I ordered got delayed and won't arrive until Monday or Tuesday, which isn't much help considering the party is on Saturday. I am also not having much luck finding a gold/yellow head and arm sweatbands at any store around here. I can find red, blue, black, white, and pink, but no gold.

I will have to figure something out soon. The weekend is coming fast. Anyone care to guess what I am/who I am going as? Here's one more hint:

Yah mo be loving this video.

I know it is a little late, but better late then never.

This past weekend continued a tradition started seven years prior when I was at the University of Toledo. We (my family) decided to camp at Cedar Point over my fall break because we like to camp, we like Halloweekends, and it was a long weekend for me. Over the years we have been lucky to have decent weather with very little if any rain. Sure their have been cold years and windy years, but generally they have been nice. This year was no exception, with the weather being pretty nice during the day and only slightly chilly in the evenings.

It was busy when we got to Lighthouse Point on Friday afternoon, but we eventually got to our campsite in the "newer" circle. While setting up the camper, I discovered that the overhead lights were not working. My dad and I determined that there was something wrong in the DC converter in the camper. The outlets still worked as they are on AC power, but the lights and furnace use DC power. Fortunately I remembered to bring my space heater I got while living down in Ohio City working at St. Ignatius.

The park was a lot busier on Friday night than I expected.A lot of schoold must have been having fall breaks or the people were out because the weather was dry. My sister and her husband met us up there along with a bunch of my brother-in-law's coworkers. It nice to see that he actually has some normal friends. We managed to get on a bunch of rides and into most of the haunted attractions. Fright Zone was good as usual, although Carn-Evil and Terror Island were lacking int he Screamster department. I banged up my knees pretty good when I walked into a barrel on Terror Island that was hidden in some heavy fog. Riding Millennium Force at night is pretty neat because the island is very dark and foggy. It is also cool to see people walking around out there so close to the ride. The highlight of the evening happened in CornStalkers, which is head-and-shoulders above Werewolf Canyon. It has a great sign, an awesome theme, spooky environment, and is well staffed. One of my brother-in-law's coworkers stuck his entire head into the outhouse and got a blast right in the face. We couldn't stop laughing because they really had the mist going strong that night.

Saturday was busy as usual. My brother and I got in early and got a ride on Maverick. By the time we got to the front of the park, it was starting to get a little busy so we skipped Millennium Force. We hit up Iron Dragon, Wildcat, and Wicked Twister before stopping at the arcade. We have been banking up our tickets for a while now and after playing a bunch of games, we decided to cash in big. Our 5,000+ tickets quickly turned into a remote controlled monster truck, an RC tank, a green stuffed monkey, two Cavs bears, a couple of shocking trick pens, a exploding can of nuts, a pair of fuzzy dice, and one rubber snake. The fun started on the way back to the campsite for lunch as we starting walking through the crowds. The comments we heard were amusing:
"Hey! He has a tank!"
"Jeez!"
"How are they going to ride any rides?"
"Did you guys buy that."
After lunch we took a break from the park as it was getting really busy. When we went back in later, we stopped for brats over near the Wildcat. The rest of the evening was a bit of a wash because of the number of people in the park. The bridge over at Terror Island was taking on water and sitting quite low in the water. It was attracting some attention from the suits, but people were still allowed to walk on it.

We opted to head towards Millennium Force on Sunday morning for an early ride. The line was son short that we hit it up twice. Trips on Maverick and Mean Streak were next, where I was surprised to see all three trains running as the park wasn't that crowded yet. My dad and brother rode Dragster next. I sat it out because I just wasn't feeling it that day. Another stop at the arcade before a quick couple of laps on Gemini, which was actually running both sides, was done before calling it a weekend.

Overall the weekend ended up being a great time. My ankles were killing me because of all of the walking and I zonked out in the car on the way home. Aside from the unexpected crowds on Friday the lines were as expected. In the end I am only bummed I didn't make it over to Raptor or Club Blood. Hopefully we can keep up the tradition next year and have as great or better a weekend.

I really wasn't feeling it tonight as I was driving to bowling. I hadn't gotten a good night's sleep yesterday and was still a little tired from the weekend.

All of that changed though as soon as I started throwing balls down the lane. I don;t know what happened, but I had three very solid games this evening. Most of the time I am lucky to get two decent games and one stinker, but tonight was completely different.

I started off strong with a 136 in the first game. Things really took off in the second game, and I managed to get a personal high of 184. Only two open frames will help you get a score like that. I cooled off slightly, but still had a very impressive 3rd game ending with a 148. My average in the low 120's is sure to bump up a bit next week.

In the end I managed to rack up 13 strikes and 8 spares during the series. Sometimes I am luck to get 4-5 strikes in a series, so I was shocked to see that I somehow threw 13 of them. The team ended up losing two of the three games because of the massive 91 pin handicap we gave the other team. It's tough to overcome such a high number because that is almost like bowling against a team with one extra "player". Let's hope I can maintain this success in the coming weeks and through the end of the season.

I didn't realize my account was going to expire soon, but as you probably noticed, it did. In case you weren't able to see the last entry, click here.

The weekend up at Cedar Point was good. The weather was nice, the crowds were a little heavy, and my ankles are killing me from all the walking. A more thorough update will follow soon enough.

The title speaks for itself:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1833365

Step 3: Enjoy.

Time to cool things down a bit.