Recently in personal Category

Jen and I made some nice Eggs Benedict for breakfast this morning, even making the hollandaise sauce from scratch. It turned out quite nice, but a lesson was learned: do not make hollandaise sauce, buy it.

It was a huge pain; whisking the egg yolks, adding cubes of butter, repeat. All this in a dish that is set in a saucepan of water over heat. You have to make sure that the sauce doesn't just turn into scrambled eggs.

When we first tasted it, it just tasted like melted butter... ick. But once we added lemon juice and salt and pepper, it started to actually taste like hollandaise sauce. In the end we also added some corn flour to thicken it, which is probably cheating, but oh well; it did the trick. From now on we will be purchasing pre-made hollandaise.

Jen and I celebrated New Years Eve at the James Joyce Irish Pub in Baltimore.

They were serving a five-course meal that included soup, salad, appetizer, main course, and dessert. Here's what I had:

1. Lobster bisque
2. Tomato and avacado salad
3. Smoked salmon sushi roll
4. Crabmeat crusted baked Alaskan halibut
5. Rustic apple gallette

We shared a table with the Monday night pub quiz team.

Just before midnight everyone went outside and watched the fireworks from the Baltimore Inner Harbor. Dinner was excellent and a great time was had by all.

I arrived home from work today to find in my mail box what appeared to be a summons from the Anne Arundel county Sheriff's office. Now I knew that I had not missed or been late on any of my rent payments, so surely it could not be regarding the state of my lease. None the less, I felt uneasy.

Upon opening the envelope, however, I discovered that this was indeed a summons, and that I had not paid my rent on May 1, and ultimately owed them approximately $1800. At this point I began to have what can only be described as a Huge Fucking Panic Attack™. I started fumbling to get my bank's web site loaded in Firefox so that I could verify that my last rent check had indeed cleared. I check my accounts religiously, so I knew the money had been withdrawn some time ago, so what the...

Oh... looks like this summons was delivered to the wrong address. Right apartment number, wrong building. What a relief. By this time my face was pretty much soaked with sweat, but what a wonderful feeling to know that this summons was not for me.

On the way to work tomorrow I'll drop the summons off at the leasing office so they can give it to the poor schmuck that didn't pay his rent this month.

Tonight I learned that too much Famous Dave's Devil's Spit bar-b-que sauce can be a bad thing. I made a small pot of pulled chicken with a leftover boneless chicken breast and a butt-load of said sauce. I've had the Devil's Spit burger at Famous Dave's on several occasions, and each time poured extra sauce on it, but I never found it to be as unbearably hot as it was on my pulled chicken. Most likely I just used way too much of it. It would probably be better to make the pulled chicken with a milder sauce, and maybe add a small amount of Devil's Spit. My next endeavor will probably be grilling some burgers (on my George Foreman grill) will just a tad of Devil's Spit sauce on top. Mmmm... now I'm hungry again.

Well our apartment has had a flea problem for the last couple weeks. To give some background, we got two kittens in early June. They were checked out by a vet before we brought them home. No fleas. A couple weeks ago, fleas started showing up. Our cats don't go outside, other than the few times they've been out on our balcony.

So last week we took the cats to my parent's house and bathed them thoroughly in the backyard. We inspected them many times over the next few days, and didn't find a single flea. During this time we also flea-fogged our apartment, put plenty of flea poweder on the carpet and furniture, vacuumed many times, and finally steamed cleaned the carpet before we brought the cats backs. They also had shiny new flea collars before we brought them back in.

The kitties have been back for a few days, and they have fleas again. Now the apartment manager says it's our cats' fault that the fleas are there. She also says that there haven't been any other complaints about fleas; even though one of the receptionists told us that there have been other complaints.

The apartment manager says she is going to call Orkin, but she wouldn't give us an estimate on how long it's going to take, and she was generally shitty to Jenny about it on the phone. It's probably for the best that I wasn't the one who spoke with her, because I may not have been able to remain civil.

If we don't here anything in the next day or so, I'm going to keep hounding her (the apt. manager) until this is taken care of.