Ahhh, it would have made the perfect dinner for a date!
But, it was with my family instead :(
Since my parents wanted to go visit my grandmother today and bring Stephanie and Brian along, we decided to go to The Olive Garden for lunch. At first, I wasn't too happy about the decision - it was basically Stephanie's request, and no one else was planning on having such an extravagant lunch or spending an additional hour (or more) in Toledo - especially with being on a tighter budget over the past few weeks, but we went anyway.
I was surprised to see that Olive Garden offered "various flavors of herbal and flavored" teas! When the waitress asked for our drink orders, I was the difficult one asking: "What flavors of tea do you have?" - at first, she thought I was asking about Iced Tea, but she also listed the hot teas. She seemed surprised that I asked about that, and half stumbled over answers for hot tea flavors. She started listing those annoying flavors of typical teas, "lemon," "honey," "orange," etc... But just as I was about to give in and order an "orange" tea, she said "earl grey."
I was quite surprised to be able to order earl grey at a restaurant... That's something that I've talked to James (dragon_sneeze) about - I just don't understand why restaurants don't offer more varieties of teas, and The Olive Garden is the first to break that trend.
I ordered the grilled salmon and herb (with steamed vegetables) for my entrée, which was superb. The rest of the family ordered that "never-ending pasta" thing - and just about every one ended up with pasta combination that they didn't care much for. I think I was the only one that actually enjoyed the meal (and I was the one who was really against going in the first place!)
Other Happenings
New PC - or a Pile of Bricks?
Okay, so after coming down from my unruly combination of being sick, doped up on day-quill, emotionally stressed over Cobol's passing, and Miki-ni making one some of the worst grinding sounds that I have ever heard it make - I decided to go back and make a second pass at building a computer through New Egg... This time, with my faculties in tact.
The Build:
1. The board: An Abit AA8-DuraMax (because I'm not an extremist, and it has the Socket T for the LGA775 Pentium 4 that I want).
2. The CPU: An intel Pentium 4 530J Prescott. 3.0Ghz, HT, 32 Bit.
3. The Memory: geil DDR2 533 1GB (2x 512 MB)
4. The Video Card: Rosewill GeForce 6200
5. The Hard Drive: Maxtor 200GB SATA-150
6. The Case: ATADC|Blizzard (think Power Mac G5 - image) with 400W PS.
Over all, I'm happy with this setup. I did a lot of research over the past 24 hours, and I'm reasonably certain that everything's compatible with the other devices... In reality, I won't know until I being assembly of the parts. I don't think that I forgot anything... I've got a DVD-RW drive to put in the case, I've got spare floppy drives, hmmm - and I think that's about all I'm going to really need... but, that remains to be seen.
I'm still baffled by the sale that NewEgg is having - it seems that the 64Bit intel processors are cheaper than the 32 bit ones (at least from what I was looking at). That *really* threw me off when I made that first order.
Now - if only NewEgg refunds my account for that stupid purchase I made yesterday...
Family
Grandma is doing fine - still in the hospital (until at least Wednesday) but things are looking up. Doctor Martinez stopped by while we were visiting with some cute doctor following him (probably an intern). Dr. Martinez was the one that said that grandma should be able to go home on Wednesday.
Summer Goals - Another Update!
I finished Whiteout today. Good book, I'd give it an 8 out of 10. The last quarter of the book was disappointing. If you read my last few posts on Whiteout, I mentioned that Ken Follett had shifted from a "Robin Cook" style of writing to more of a "Dean Koontz" style - and I'm not a big DK fan. Well, he did keep mostly to the DK style for the rest of the book, which is what disappointed me the most.
One of the other things that bothered me was the lack of depth of some of the characters - I never really felt like I "got to know" them - and there were some scenes that were just ridiculous. All the while, I really enjoyed imagining the different local that Follett chose for this book - especially the whole "winter" aspect, since I read this book in it's entirety during a steamy Michigan summer.
This was the first novel that I read by an author from the U.K., which was an interesting chance of pace. I had to look up some words, not because they were unfamiliar, but because the context was just so different between American English and Standard English that it baffled me. This was also the first novel that I read that was set the U.K. (Scotland to be exact) and one of the few novels that I've read that take place entirely in another country.
I must agree with one reviewer at Amazon: "I enjoyed it, but felt like I'd just read the literary equivalent of a Taco Bell Grande Burrito!" - he's just so right.
Whiteout - by Ken Follett (Hardcover) [Amazon.com]
Since my parents wanted to go visit my grandmother today and bring Stephanie and Brian along, we decided to go to The Olive Garden for lunch. At first, I wasn't too happy about the decision - it was basically Stephanie's request, and no one else was planning on having such an extravagant lunch or spending an additional hour (or more) in Toledo - especially with being on a tighter budget over the past few weeks, but we went anyway.
I was surprised to see that Olive Garden offered "various flavors of herbal and flavored" teas! When the waitress asked for our drink orders, I was the difficult one asking: "What flavors of tea do you have?" - at first, she thought I was asking about Iced Tea, but she also listed the hot teas. She seemed surprised that I asked about that, and half stumbled over answers for hot tea flavors. She started listing those annoying flavors of typical teas, "lemon," "honey," "orange," etc... But just as I was about to give in and order an "orange" tea, she said "earl grey."
I was quite surprised to be able to order earl grey at a restaurant... That's something that I've talked to James (dragon_sneeze) about - I just don't understand why restaurants don't offer more varieties of teas, and The Olive Garden is the first to break that trend.
I ordered the grilled salmon and herb (with steamed vegetables) for my entrée, which was superb. The rest of the family ordered that "never-ending pasta" thing - and just about every one ended up with pasta combination that they didn't care much for. I think I was the only one that actually enjoyed the meal (and I was the one who was really against going in the first place!)
Other Happenings
New PC - or a Pile of Bricks?
Okay, so after coming down from my unruly combination of being sick, doped up on day-quill, emotionally stressed over Cobol's passing, and Miki-ni making one some of the worst grinding sounds that I have ever heard it make - I decided to go back and make a second pass at building a computer through New Egg... This time, with my faculties in tact.
The Build:
1. The board: An Abit AA8-DuraMax (because I'm not an extremist, and it has the Socket T for the LGA775 Pentium 4 that I want).
2. The CPU: An intel Pentium 4 530J Prescott. 3.0Ghz, HT, 32 Bit.
3. The Memory: geil DDR2 533 1GB (2x 512 MB)
4. The Video Card: Rosewill GeForce 6200
5. The Hard Drive: Maxtor 200GB SATA-150
6. The Case: ATADC|Blizzard (think Power Mac G5 - image) with 400W PS.
Over all, I'm happy with this setup. I did a lot of research over the past 24 hours, and I'm reasonably certain that everything's compatible with the other devices... In reality, I won't know until I being assembly of the parts. I don't think that I forgot anything... I've got a DVD-RW drive to put in the case, I've got spare floppy drives, hmmm - and I think that's about all I'm going to really need... but, that remains to be seen.
I'm still baffled by the sale that NewEgg is having - it seems that the 64Bit intel processors are cheaper than the 32 bit ones (at least from what I was looking at). That *really* threw me off when I made that first order.
Now - if only NewEgg refunds my account for that stupid purchase I made yesterday...
Family
Grandma is doing fine - still in the hospital (until at least Wednesday) but things are looking up. Doctor Martinez stopped by while we were visiting with some cute doctor following him (probably an intern). Dr. Martinez was the one that said that grandma should be able to go home on Wednesday.
Summer Goals - Another Update!
I finished Whiteout today. Good book, I'd give it an 8 out of 10. The last quarter of the book was disappointing. If you read my last few posts on Whiteout, I mentioned that Ken Follett had shifted from a "Robin Cook" style of writing to more of a "Dean Koontz" style - and I'm not a big DK fan. Well, he did keep mostly to the DK style for the rest of the book, which is what disappointed me the most.
One of the other things that bothered me was the lack of depth of some of the characters - I never really felt like I "got to know" them - and there were some scenes that were just ridiculous. All the while, I really enjoyed imagining the different local that Follett chose for this book - especially the whole "winter" aspect, since I read this book in it's entirety during a steamy Michigan summer.
This was the first novel that I read by an author from the U.K., which was an interesting chance of pace. I had to look up some words, not because they were unfamiliar, but because the context was just so different between American English and Standard English that it baffled me. This was also the first novel that I read that was set the U.K. (Scotland to be exact) and one of the few novels that I've read that take place entirely in another country.
I must agree with one reviewer at Amazon: "I enjoyed it, but felt like I'd just read the literary equivalent of a Taco Bell Grande Burrito!" - he's just so right.
Whiteout - by Ken Follett (Hardcover) [Amazon.com]