Junkii’s blog

New-Q

After several years of cobbling together the replacement parts on our old BBQ, we decided this year to just go for it and get a new one. Isn't it purty? All shiny and stainless.

Works like a charm too. Last night we had chicken wings and they were oh so good.

It's gonna be a wonderful summer.

The-BBQ-er

Not sure how long these will stay posted on the web, but check them out. Some wonderful photoshop work here merging Muppets into Movie Posters. Really brilliant! I think this is my favorite, but there are many greats.

Rowlf as Ray

When it comes to these two cooking reality shows, honestly, there's no comparison. We watch both of them, but really, only one of the shows has any real merit.

Hell's Kitchen is pure trash. It's about backstabbing, dirty laundry, and cheap editing tactics to extend the show to a full hour. The chefs never create their own food, and they can barely cook the menu given to them. It just seems so contrived too - any time they start to get ahead, have chef Ramsay shout and swear at them to get them flustered so they'll mess up. It's a simple recipe, but thankfully, it's fun to watch. It's like junk food. We love it, but we know it's bad for us.

Top Chef Cookbook

On the other hand, Top Chef is like a fine dining experience. There's a bit of drama, but the focus is really on the food - with 15 chefs who actually know what they're doing in a kitchen and who continue to stun us with their creativity as, week after week, they make new dishes from the most obscure ingredients. We don't get it in Canada until a few months after it airs in the US, but when we do, we like to savour it. We're only about 5 episodes into the new season - which is already on episode 10. But no rush. This is like a good wine, and it only comes around once a year.

Last week at Costco, we stumbled on the Top Chef Cookbook, which has some of the best recipes from the first three seasons, plus loads of info about a really great show and the contestants. Haven't tried anything for it yet, but you can bet we'll be using it the first chance we get to do some fancy cooking.

A few years ago, Mel and I bought tennis rackets and had every intention of making tennis a regular part of our summer workouts, but then Mel hurt his knee and the intensive lateral movement in tennis was too much for him. We had to set it aside for a while.

Well now, a year and a half after knee surgery, Mel is pretty much 100% and today we grabbed the bikes and took a ride over to a nearby tennis court to give it a whirl.

I'm happy to report that his skills hadn't deteriorated since the last time we went out and, while it's taking a bit of getting used to, Mel's tennis skills are coming along just fine. We should be able to have a few games over the next few weeks if we can keep up the practice on a regular basis.

I love summer. The gym is great, but it's so nice to work out in the fresh air!

I can't say I'm a huge fan of the Olympics - I generally don't care much for sport in general - but I am quite impressed with the new crop of athlete uniforms on offer from the Bay (er, sorry, HBC.)

They've strayed a bit form the standard Red and White, incorporating a few additional colours this year like green and blue. I think it looks really sharp. That and the use of Chinese design elements make the look quite substantially different from the designs of previous years. I might have to pick up one or two items before Canada Day.

You can see for yourself in the following video showcasing the designs.

Hbc Beijing Olympics

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Just mentioning the clothing wasn't my original intent for this post. I really wanted to show you the ads for the new line that have been appearing on the telly lately. They're quite creative, but they aren't widely available on YouTube yet, so it's hard to show you.

Basically, you've got a black background and a few people dressed all in black so you can't really see them. An athlete enters and starts to do his/her thing (eg. hurdling) and then the people dressed in black catch the athlete and hold him/her (imitating a freeze frame) while the camera rotates and the athlete starts moving again. It's a really cool effect. Kind of like camera trickery, but more low-tech.

You can check out two of the spots on HBC's website - just click on the "Design Inspiration" link at the bottom right and you'll be able to see the ads. I'll try to post them on this blog if they ever appear on YouTube.

On Wednesday, I had my remaining three wisdom teeth removed. The surgery went well, and wasn't at all traumatizing. There were some tense moments, but I just kept reminding myself to relax and breathe. Didn’t feel any significant pain at all, just a couple of minor pinches when the surgeon was injecting the freezing.

The top two teeth came out very easily - it took less than 10 seconds each - but the lower one was a bit more complicated, as expected. The surgeon made an incision in the gum, separated the roots by sawing the tooth in half,  then extracted both sides.

I got my Tylenol 3 prescription filled after the operation and came home to take it easy. Recovery hasn't been too bad - especially with the powerful pain killers they provide - but I do find I'm always hungry. It's hard to get full when you're restricted to soft foods. I had Ron pick up a rice porridge (congee) from Chinatown for dinner last night, but I still woke up starving at 5:30 this morning.

I'm going to try to take some more solid food tonight. We'll see how it goes.

The latest shoes are giving me enough support and preventing over-pronation. So in theory, this should help to ease any knee pain I get from running. I'm going to ease into it though, gradually building up my running time. Don't want to overdo it.

I'm also gonna go get a deep tissue massage to loosen up my hip and IT band. Hopefully all that will make for a good summer of running.

There are few beers I can't drink. I tend to avoid your basic North American lagers like Molson Canadian and Coors, not because they taste bad, but they're just so bland there's no point. But truth be told, I'll drink pretty much any beer if it's the only thing on offer. But really, I prefer a good British ale. And more than anything, I like a good stout - Guinness, for example.

Grossout-Stout

So lately, just to prove to myself that Guinness is the best stout, I've been sampling some of the other stouts on offer at our local liquor store. And I recently came across this "beer" from Ontario (I use the term loosely) - a smoked Oatmeal Stout made by Trafalgar.

I love stout, I love Oatmeal beers. I generally like food that's a bit smokey. So I thought, why not? Because it's fricken' undrinkable, that's why!

This stuff is vile. The smokiness in the aftertaste is ridiculously potent. You could as easily drink a bottle of liquid smoke. It kicks in about 2 seconds after I finish a swig and it sends shudders down my spine. It makes me cringe.

And if you have any doubts about how truly awful this is, you should know that I threw out half the bottle. Lord knows I tried to finish it - I hate to waste alcohol - but I swear it wouldn't have stayed down.

Do not buy this beer. You've been warned.

Mess-O-Wires

The electrician who wired our house did a sub-par job to say the least - or maybe it was the meddling of previous owners. Heaven forbid we should slander anyone unnecessarily. Regardless, over the course of the last year, we discovered that some of the receptacles and switches that weren't working – a heater in the second bedroom, the bathroom fan – were either wired incorrectly or not at all. It was a simple matter to correct those faults, and we pretty much got everything working without any trips to the ER.

Well, maybe we got a little cocky.

There was one 3-way switch that never really worked properly, and after successfully fixing the bathroom fan, Mel got it into his head that he was going to fix that switch.

Well, it turns out the junction box on our main floor, where the power for that broken 3-way comes in, is a very busy junction box indeed. And given that 3-way switches are already complicated to start with, it didn't take long before efforts to fix the switch turned into a desperate hope just to put things back the way they started.

Things got out of hand, and this was on a Sunday evening when the sun was going down. We toiled together in the last of the dying light but to no avail. We had to leave the power off in that junction box and wait for the next opportunity to fix the mess.

The situation didn't get any better over the following week either. We grabbed a volt meter and started trying to sort out the mess, but with work and evening appointments interfering, our wiring skills weren’t strong enough to finish the job. Finally, Saturday we woke up and took a fresh approach - wiring everything individually and making sure we knew what each set of wires was for. Once we had that info, the job got easier, but there were still hitches, and we almost gave up. But after a very timely 'Eureka!' moment, we realized our mistakes and got it all working again – including the 3-way switch that started the problem.

Not sure this captures just how much of a headache the wiring mess became. By the end we were ready to pull out our hair. But there is an up-side. Now we have a much better understanding, not only of how wiring works, but more importantly, how it works in our house.

Of course, with every up there’s also a down. Turns out the initial problem with the 3-way switch was caused by a broken switch. A trip to the hardware store and $3 could have solved in 20 minutes what it took us a week to do.

Oh well. What doesn’t kill us…

For those who have been following my sneaker-saga...

When we left off, I had given the treadmill a whirl and found that the mild motion control provided by my Mizuno runners kept my IT band from paining me too much. Turns out they didn't eliminate the pain completely though, and I found descending stairs on the day of the run caused me some discomfort, and that, the following day, my knee was a bit tender.

This morning I trekked off to my orthotics guy, who put me on a treadmill to record my gait. With freeze-frame, he showed me how the Mizunos were still letting my right foot roll in too much and he suggested I find a sho with more motion control.

My New(est) Shoes

So off I traipsed to the shoe store, returned my Mizunos and picked up a saucy new pair of Saucony sneaks. I go back for another gait-recording session on Thursday afternoon. The orthotics guy also suggested I get a deep tissue massage of my right thigh/hip to help loosen things up, and to apply heat to it before I run.

This is a lot of work! Running better help me drop those extra pounds that keep hanging around or else I'm gonna be pissed.