ramblings

Ingredients

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• 1 1/2 oz fresh-squeezed lime juice
  
• 1 oz simple syrup
  
• 2 oz vodka
  
• rimming sugar

Shake the lime juice, syrup and vodka over ice. Wet the rim of the martini glass with the squeezed limes and rim with sugar. Fill.

Aviation

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• 2 tablespoons (1 ounce) fresh lemon juice
  
• 1/4 cup (2 ounces) gin
  
• 1 tablespoon (1/2 ounce) Maraska maraschino liqueur
  
• 1/4 teaspoon simple syrup
  
• 1 cup ice cubes

Garnish with maraschino cherry or pitted fresh cherry

Fabulous....5 star...perfect for summer. (Need to keep around more ginger beer.

Ingredients

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• About 1 cup ice cubes
  
• 1/4 cup (2 ounces) reposado tequila
  
• 6 tablespoons (3 ounces) ginger beer or ginger ale
  
• 1 teaspoon crème de cassis
  
• 1 lime wedge

Preparation

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In 11-ounce highball glass, combine ice and tequila. Top with ginger beer, then slowly pour in crème de cassis (it will settle to bottom). Squeeze lime wedge over, then drop wedge into drink and serve.

We have been on a buying spree of these things...so thought I would do the standard ratings on them:

Must Have
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+ Cherry Pie = tastes just like tart cherry pie from grandma...well, maybe not quite...but still durn tasty.
+ Tropical Fruit Tart = mmmm...piña colada-y...with nuts.


Very Good
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+ Lemon Pie = tastes like Hostess Lemon Pie...me likey.
+ Apple Pie = tastes like Hostess Apple Pie with more cinnamon in it.
+ Key Lime Pie = accurate to reality...with a bit of a distraction from the nuts.



Good
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+ Pecan Pie = tastes like eating uncooked crisp (for apple crisp)...which I like, ymmv...but I would rather have pecan pie.
+ Coconut Chew = coconutty...not really sure what is going on here.
+ Chocolate Coconut Chew = does taste like haystack cookies....but with nuts mixed in. Good but the nuts diminished it for me.


Take It Or Leave It
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? Peanut Butter = meh
? Ginger Snap = tastes accurate, if not more potent ginger....but it just isn't my thing.

Well, the last 4 tanks I have filled (or if you want to slice it differently: 1.5 months, 1950ish miles) I am now averaging 35.98 mpg.

Which means I am getting an improvement of 31.9% over my pre-hypermiling mpg. ...which means every 3 tanks of gas I buy - I get a 4th one for free. NICE!!!!

Well, the plastics recycling at the Eastside Coop we told you about seems to be running stronger than ever - in fact it is a war zone trying to get into the parking lot during the plastic recycling window.

However, I need to post to list off the changes to the recycling program. It had been a month or so since I have done a dropoff - so maybe these changes have been in effect for a while...but....

• They now accept #3 and #7 plastics.
• #1 plastics now have to be separated into clear and colored.
• #2 plastics now have to be separated into clear and colored.
• #3 thru #7 plastics no longer need to be separated from one another...they all go in one bin.
• Still open Saturdays: 10AM-2PM and Thursdays, 3-7PM

PS: No, they haven't updated their website to reflect what I witnessed today...not sure what that means.

This morning on the way to work my iPod played "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" by The Jayhawks, back to back - one copy from their Smile album...the other from the Dawson's Creek soundtrack. I was startled by this, thinking an error had happened - not even knowing I had two copies of it. Turns out I do...in a playlist of 2256 songs. So the odds of that happening are .04%.

This iPod (an ancient 3nd Generation, OS v2.3) has quite a penchant for doing a "double shot" of artists. Obviously with some of the artists we have where we have about 100 of their songs it is not that surprising...but it seems to have an amazing skill of making this happen on artists where I only have one album.

I have read articles from world-class statisticians discussion this issue where they said it is purely human perception that iPods do not pick randomly...but that that is just the human mind's need to create patterns....AND I know from statistics class that given enough time, the improbable becomes the probable...........but....it just seems too weird.

Pisco Sour
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2 oz              pisco
1/4 oz           simple syrup^@
1 oz             *fresh-squeezed* lime juice
1/2               egg white
1 dash          Angostura bitters

Combine and shake everything - except the bitters - over ice in the shaker. Shake very vigorously for about a minute - you need the egg white to froth up nicely.

Fill a lowball over ice. Finish with a single dash of the bitters on top of the froth.

Bueno!!!!

Exercise is always a lot easier when you don't keep thinking about the fact that you are exercising. This is where orienteering can really pay off...you basically run a 5k and don't even realize it. So my goal this summer is to do more running/training - but really the only reason I am doing that is to improve our "race" times in orienteering.

[Speaking of race times: I gotta tell some back story. Last year we were doing an orienteering event we chose the intermediate 4k course with 8 waypoints. Coincidentally, starting at the same time as us was a (guessing) 16-year-old girl named Katie (or at least that is what the back of her varsity track warm-ups said)...she was running the more advanced 8k/16 waypoint course. The gun sounded - all three of us were off. We quickly forgot Katie as we went about our business. Until 50 minutes later when Katie crossed the finish line at the same time we did. WHA?!?!? She went twice as far and found twice as many hidden mappoints as we did in the same time?!?!?! ...we aren't the fattest Americans out there or anything - we usually think thought we can be competitive... Gah!]

With gawd as my witness I will never be Katied again!

Well, for the first event of the year THIS year we tricked out with all our exercise electronics and headed out. (After all, how do you know if you improved if you don't have any stats?)

2010		2009
Terrace Oaks Park Green Course 4.1k, 8 waypoints Checkpoint Distance Time 1 ?? 7m34s 2 ?? 19:36 3 ?? 8:22 4 ?? 5:13 5 ?? 6:47 6 ?? 3:46 7 ?? 9:55 8 ?? 9:48 finish ?? 3:09 TOTAL 4.84 miles 74:10 Sorry, I need to learn how to run my Nike+ ...I didn't do any lap splits to mark where the waypoints were at in the run so I can't tell you the distance of each split. Heart Monitors he: 1308 calories, HR: max, 199 (108%) / average, 162 (88%) she:		Terrace Oaks Park Brown Course ?k & 10 waypoints (can't remember but 2010's was 3.5k and 7 waypoints) Checkpoint Distance Time 1 ?? 5m34s 2 ?? 7:19 3 ?? 5:11 4 ?? 6:15 5 ?? 13:07 6 ?? 3:33 7 ?? 5:38 8 ?? 7:54 9 ?? 7:27 10 ?? 9:51 finish ?? 3:10 TOTAL ? miles 74:56 Sorry, didn't bring the Nike+ last year
MNOC splits MNOC graph		MNOC splits MNOC graph

Huh. I don't know if there is anything to learn from our time similarity (difference?) between 2010 and '09. Without knowing the actual distance last year (after all, it seems like it must have been longer than this year's since it had so many waypoints - but maybe not). Gotta keep better records....to know if we are making any physical - or mental / skills - improvements.

PS: Someone is going to ask "Why did you run 4.84 miles for a 4.1k race?" Well, since they don't know how you are going to get from waypoint to waypoint they actually just report the "as the crow flies" number. So maybe we did well...maybe we took the longest possible route of anyone out there...who knows?...but 4.84 miles is what we had to run, in our opinion, to make the most direct route with the fastest time.

I was going to post a the final day pictures of me in Cozumel on Facebook....but I can't figure out which one is me - and don't want to get sued by A&F.

I had 4 goals when I bought my new car....and the most important one to me was "gets better than 30mpg". ...and yet that was the only one I failed to achieve when I purchased my tC. Well, no more...

About 6 months after I got the tC I started applying full-on hypermiling techniques to driving it. (However, with that many tanks of gas already having been averaged up it took quite a while - another year! - to bring the lifetime-of-the-vehicle results up.) After 19 months, I am now officially over 30mpg for the life of the car!!!!!!

In fact...the increase in gas mileage purely from hypermiling? 17.3%!!!!!!!

Bro#3 and I went out for some mid-winter golf refresher, indoors at Bunkers.

I shot an 82 at Troon...got my first ever eagle. Again, just like every time I golf a PGA level course.

While fat-fingering the standard (complete-lack-of-ergonomics) Comcast remote (Motorola DCT 3412) I discovered a feature that might make life a lot more livable with this piece o' crap DVR interface of theirs.

While in playback mode if you hit the [Page Up/Down] buttons you get longer skips than the basic 30s forward/7s reverse:

   [Page Up] = 5 minute (forward) skip
   [Page Down] = 5 minute reverse skip

You can really burn through a show when it is crap - or to get back to the position in the show where you were at when the DVR forget to remember for you.

PS: I am not sure if this is a new feature or what...but I am seeing reports of new features being rolled out - not that I have seen any of these they are talking about personally yet.

PPS: If you never did activate your 30s skip yet...do it....never watch a commercial again.

Wow! I got - I think - my first useful piece of chain-email. (I snopesed it and it was amazingly enough true! http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/stroke.asp). Perhaps the doctor in the family will chime in here if my info is off-base - I don't want to be spreading misinformation if the Internet is wrong...but that never happens, right?)

This email purported that one could minimize a stroke's effects if - and only if - you got the victim to the hospital within 3 hours of the event. HOWEVER, the big problem with this is that very people know how to recognize a stroke having just occurred.

So here is the mnemonic to help you question whether you need to rush to the hospital IMMEDIATELY:

Test the first three letters of the word "STRoke" by having the suspected victim:

S = SMILE
T = TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (coherently) (i.e. "It is sunny out today.")
R = RAISE BOTH ARMS

...if they fail any one of these tests....get medical attention immediately.

More info:
   CDC on Stroke Prevention

Miniver Cheevy, by E.A. Robinson