I survived my birthday celebration

Yesterday we went to the local Red Robin to celebrate my surviving 62 years, and the quantity of food was almost unsurvivable. Since pictures speak louder than words time for the two pictures I took of the meal.

Mrs. the Poet had a bacon cheeseburger with “only” a quarter pound patty, and an iced tea with a side of sweet potato fries. She wasn’t able to finish her fries or burger. We also got the large stack of onion rings, and brought a third back.

Now I don’t recommend this as a steady diet, but for a celebration, it rocked.

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Just got back from another adventure in overeating

I had money left on my gift card, but not enough to pay for two to eat at Red Robin, and getting Mrs. the Poet out of the house is pretty much a futile effort unless the ride comes right to the front door. So not enough money on the card for two meals and not enough money in the bank account to pay for another Lyft both ways added up to lunch by myself.

Something else it added up to was trying not to waste food, as I was inundated with fry refills and soft drink refills. Depending on how big those glasses were the amount of Diet Coke I swam through went from a half-gallon to a gallon and a half, this was on top of the 750 ml “cup” of coffee I drink every morning, and my kidneys have been singing arias in praise of getting thoroughly flushed out. My bladder on the other hand has been plotting my demise as it strains to provide temporary storage for what the kidneys are so happy to flush through. Then add trying to get home and take care of an errand on the way to the DART tarantella and I left the house at 1300 and got home about 1900, still stuffed from lunch/kidney irrigation. After spending a while on the toilet letting my kidneys flush continuously to return my fluid balance to something close to normal, I sat down to compose this post. Yay, for the post.

Now, I’m pretty much at a stalemate on the design of the Sprint-T with no budget to buy any more parts or raw stock. Also at the point of freezing the design for the A-MOD SCCA racer unless someone gives me a different engine. I have too much time to think about things and not enough money to do things. That is a dangerous combination, because eventually I turn into Wile E. Coyote pursuing the Road Runner. Or as I called it over on the Driveway Engineer page on FB I go into Mad Scientist Mode. And going into Mad Scientist Mode is doubleplus ungood. And how about that, the spell check doesn’t recognize Newspeak spelling.

Well, I’m tired and I still have stuff to do on the computer and the Internet, so this is time to put this to bed.

Changing Internet provider

The week-long outage and the failure to deduct that week from the bill, combined with a WiFi router limited to 25 Mbps or 50 Mbps through the RJ-45 jack, pushed me to check out Spectrum for our internet, phone, and TV service. Part of the problem I have been having has been with the router bottleneck, and part of the problem was the old equipment not working with my new laptop, but the biggest problem was not refunding money when there was no service. There have been 4 service interruptions of longer than 24 hours and not one adjustment of the bill to reflect that. What really made me decide to change was losing everything for a week, 25% of the service period, and no adjustment of the bill. That is theft and fraud in my eyes.

And of course my mind has been wandering around the place thinking about various vehicle projects I could be doing if I had money. Besides the Sprint-T I have been thinking about a SCCA A-Mod Solo racer, with several variations for powerplant and drive train. I looked at everything from a 670cc Predator V-Twin to the LS1 from the Dale Truck, with a couple of other motorcycle engines thrown in for good measure. I only do that when I’m bored or upset, and Thursday night I was both.

And I’m back, sorry. The battery on the laptop doesn’t last very long and it shut down in the middle of composing this and then I had to leave for meeting a family friend for dinner that turned into an overnight stay with my daughter and her family. Dinner was a cheeseburger with enough meat to feed an Ethiopian family of 4 plus two orders of fries and all the Diet Coke I could drink, while Mrs. the Poet had the quesadillas and tea. I’m slightly embarrassed at the size of the burger, but anything smaller was on the kids only menu, or like Mrs. the Poet’s dinner on the appetizer menu. I really wanted a burger, so that’s what I got. And in a few more days I’m going to get a similar one for free for my birthday. Where’s that eye-bulging emoji when you need it?

Thursday was significant

As I type this it’s Friday night, but by the time I post this it will be early Saturday morning. Not that the date is meaningful, but the original headline was “Yesterday was Significant” which would be wrong when the publication date was Not Friday.

Anyway, first thing we did was get our taxes done, and apparently the IRS charges for a paper check since Trump took office. After paying for the preparer we are going to net just under $200 back from our 8.5K taxable income. Be still my beating heart! I have given Mrs. the Poet until the end of March to get the plumbing fixed before I take $100 and get an engine hoist to build my hotrod with. Until then she can spend everything on plumbing and I won’t care, because I don’t think I have any chance of building that hotrod without winning the lottery. But because I can’t let the dream die without a fight, if she doesn’t get the sink fixed I get an engine hoist. This is incentive to actually get the sink fixed and not just flounder around not getting anything done.

Then we wandered around the Half Price Books store across the parking lot from the tax place, but neither of us found anything to tickle our highly-refined fancies so we left without spending anything. By that time it was verging on 1600 and we still hadn’t had lunch, and we were thinking about doing dinner after shopping. So instead of wasting time at the nearby mall we decided to combine lunch and dinner in what cold be best described as “too much food, the sequel”. The place we went had ½pound cheeseburgers, so more than Mrs. the Poet could eat without discomfort in a single meal. I had the house specialty burger, and Mrs. the Poet had a mushroom swiss burger from the build your own menu. We split a salad that was basically an eighth of a head of iceberg lettuce drowned in bleu cheese dressing, fried onions, and bacon bits, as an appetizer. There were also several refills on the fries and drinks (Diet Coke for me and unsweetened iced tea for Mrs. the Poet), and we followed that up with what they called a Mountain Mud Pie for dessert, which was your garden variety Mud Pie under about 6″ of chocolate ice cream, drenched in chocolate and caramel sauces and whipped cream. We split this as per the menu suggestion. The only problem was the ice cream was frozen so hard that we crushed the pie trying to scoop it off to eat. But it was all good and if you live near a Red Robin I strongly suggest going on a fast for a day or two before going to eat there.

On the date comic strip me is on, we are still on coffee and introductions in Rayne’s kitchen , so I think the arc will extend well beyond this week. And her name is Olivia.