Off to stuff my face, Happy Thanksgiving

And a pleasant Thursday to the rest of the world. I’m not going to bore you with a recitation of traditional Thanksgiving dishes I hope to consume, just assume if you know of one that is generic across the US I will probably consume some today, plus some Texas-specific dishes like Jalapeño corn casserole. This is kind of a group dinner with one person coordinating the menu and sides, someone else cooking the turkeys and other meats (smoked brisket is a popular Texas Thanksgiving entré) and the rest of us bringing the assigned sides.

We finished the Egyptian Run and brought back the Pyrite Cube of Great Power and up next is the barbecue and followed by Glorious Training! (trope stolen from dozens of anime and specifically Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki a goofy web comic that hasn’t updated in months but the creator assures me will update “soon”). I really need to upgrade my blades and pistols skills and also develop the Observe skill. I forgot to include that at character creation, so I will spend Karma points and nuyen to get it now. The group decided to go out for dinner and bought me some too, which was nice of them because I think I’m down to about $15 until the end of the month in my checking account, and while we have food at the house last night was the first calamari I’ve had in years. Of the group I had the cheapest dinner which gives you and idea of what kind of dinner they bought, everyone else had a pound of snow crab plus something else, and I got some of that too because who really eats that much crab in one sitting unless they have been starving all day. I should also mention for the sake of full disclosure that I had calamari since the last time I had crab of any type, so I was out of practice at extracting the meat from the shell.

So to recap, Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers, happy Thursday to everyone else, and all you still hanging on from when this was a bicycle safety blog, this is a good day for a ride.🚴‍♂️ 👍🏼

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What are you thankful for?

I do a lot of complaining, but here at Casa de El Poeta we still have a lot to be thankful for. We have enough to eat even when it’s not the most exciting food in the world, we have a house that’s paid for even if it needs a ton of work done to it, and in spite of my complaints everybody’s health is pretty good. We may have some aches and pains affecting the quality of our lives, but we are alive and mostly doing good.

So we are pretty grateful for our situation here.

And wishing as good or better for all my readers and friends.

I feel like the turkey we just ate, stuffed

Well we ate good on Celebrate American Genocide Day II. I actually had to skip the pumpkin pie this time (no room on the plate after getting apple, cherry cheesecake, and peanut butter pie slivers). Someone brought a creamed corn dish with jalapeño peppers that was absolutely out of this world. There were 3 different kinds of dressing including a vegan one made by my daughter visiting from Scotland. We even had canned cranberry sauce. It just isn’t Thanksgiving without “purple good stuff”.

And for those wondering what the II means, think October 12, 1492 and subsequent anniversaries as I.

PSA, Opus

Recovering from my Turkey Coma on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well yesterday we went to my daughter’s house for round 2 of Thanksgiving dinner. This time the turkey was smoked instead of oven-baked. [old joke]Smoking a turkey is really difficult, do you know how hard it is to keep one lit?[/old joke]. We also had Loaded Baked Potato mashed potatoes, country-style green beans, stuffing, and they threw in a quart of gravy from the turkey vendor. So we had a pretty decent dinner.

I have been really enjoying my HD TV since I found the Velocity channel. Near as I can tell from the last three days this is an all-car-build channel. There have been several marathons for different build series like the one currently playing of Overhauling which is a program where they find some pretense to haul away a person’s car and completely restore it or complete an unfinished project. I also watched a Bitchin’ Rides marathon where they make show-quality cars…

Watching these car-build programs gets me fired up to work on the Sprint T. I have been considering possible donor vehicles for the drivetrain. Someone brought up Toyota full-size pickup trucks with the 5.0 and 5.7 DOHC V8 engines and automatic transmissions. The engines are a bit on the wide side and will probably hang out from underneath the sides of the hood, but the focus of a T-bucket is the engine. Most of the other potential donor vehicles are also V8 pickup trucks, or V8 luxury cars. One that also sounds interesting is the Hyundai Genesis sedan with the 5.0 liter V8 and 8-speed automatic and possible 4WD from the factory… And don’t forget Corvette, Camaro, Challenger, Charger, and Mustang late-model performance cars. And in addition to those are the plethora of crate engines and transmissions available. Decisions, decisions. I’m looking for something on the order of 600RWHP/ton with a weight around 1600 pounds wet. Obviously I’ll take lighter if I can get it, and more horsepower, but I don’t want to give up low-end torque for racing. Basically this is going to be a huge go-kart that will never get out of low gear on most autocross/Solo racing courses with instant throttle response, brakes that never give up, and tons of grip into, through and out of the corners.

I haven’t given up on building a computer model to run in GT4, but I have hit a brick wall on the formatting for the car file. Nobody that is willing to tell me knows, and nobody that knows is willing to tell me how. All I need is the file format and the variables, I can do the car performance programming myself, and I have someone who can build the graphic model. I really want to drive the Sprint T at the Nürburgring, but there ain’t no way I will be able to ship the car there to do it IRL, so it will have to be simulated on the PlayStation. And I have several variations of the car I want to program in, the full street version with the soft springs and shocks and the skinny hard compound tires, the Goodguys version with the high performance street tires and tuned springs and shocks, and the SCCA Solo version with the 14″ wide wheels and the soft, wide slicks and the tuned springs and shocks. The SCCA version also runs tires that drop the car by 2″ in ride height without changing the suspension settings, so the CG also drops by 2″ and has to be entered into the performance programming.

Getting back to that new TV, you would not believe the difference in enjoyment going from the dinky SD TV to the 32″ HD TV I bought Wednesday… which I think I might have mentioned a time or two already. I mean it ain’t as cool as a good bike ride, but watching TV without bands of purple and orange going up the screen is pretty cool. I don’t know what was dying in the old TV, but it was worse running through the tuner than it was going through the composite in with the audio jacks. We had a couple of days without AC a few years back that took the stuffings out of the old TV.

We are having our annual post-Thanksgiving potluck at church this evening and I have to shower and get ready, so this looks like a great place to stop, proofread, and edit the post before hitting “publish”.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet