crossrhodes

Guess who’s 4 months old today? I know, she’s getting so big already. I wish they could stay as newborns a little longer.

Think your back to school shopping list is long?  Wait till your kids go to college!  It gets longer AND more expensive!  We walked out of Walmart yesterday with 2 shopping carts full and another full cart at Target.  We’ve already spent $1100 on James’ supplies, laptop included, but that does not include books yet and a couple more big ticket items like a backup hard drive and TV stand.

Of course, we’re not buying everything new.  We got a TV on craigslist.  He’s inheriting his uncle’s microwave, my dishes, towels, etc.  And some of the items on the list will differ per person.  i.e. Not everyone needs a rice cooker but James IS half Asian.  He had to have one =)

I’ve compiled a list from several sources, including Walmart, the new student committee at Drexel, and a list James found online. Click here for my College Shopping List in MS Word or PDF.

We came back from Florida last Friday where it rained and rained… and rained… the entire week we were there! On our way to the airport, a storm cloud hovered above. “Hover” is putting it mildly. It moved in circles! We were stopped in traffic, praying it would not touch the ground. I’ve been in an earthquake, but never a tornado!

Our flight was delayed for 3 hours. We waited on the runway for 15 minutes. We waited at baggage claim for an hour.  We waited until midnight to finally eat dinner. And of all days to not feel well, Layla picked the day of our departure to have gas. She just cried and screamed, cried and screamed!

At the airport, Don and a million other people parked themselves next to any available power outlet to plug in their gadgets. There happened to be several outlets behind an empty gate counter where he and others plugged in their laptops. They obviously did not look like airline agents but people kept coming with questions about their flights. One guy was nice enough to look up flight info online and Don even lent his cell phone to some lady.

Every time Don goes to conventions (we were in Florida for LandWarNet), he brings home all kinds of promotional doodads, including a small siren flashlight that he attached to Layla’s swing mobile. You can see here how much she enjoyed it.

It’s so much fun having a baby in the house =)

JAMES:
Mr. College Bound got his new laptop today!  Have I ever mentioned that he has never had an Internet-connected computer in his bedroom?  He has a desktop PC up there for homework, games, music, etc., but we have a rule against a TV and Internet in kids’ bedrooms.  He uses the desktop downstairs, in an open room, when he wants to go online.  If he had a TV or Internet in his bedroom, we would forget he lived here!  Well, an always empty refrigerator would remind me there’s a teenager in the house =)  But he’s an adult now and will be leaving home in a couple of weeks.  We got his laptop set up, installed anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, and he’s already surfing the net in his bedroom.

LANI:
Just before I helped James with his laptop, I was pulling my hair out over my own technical issues!  I upgraded my blog platform (WordPress) last week and am still tweaking it little by little each day.  I’d like to change the design but I don’t have a lot of free time anymore.  Then yesterday, before I could defrag my hard drive, I had to first free up at least 15% of space!  (I have less than 8GB of space left.  Yikes!  And I haven’t even bought my hard drive camcorder yet!)  To make a long story short, I must have deleted a registry key when I purged my hard drive which caused problems in Outlook.  After hours of trial and error, the fix required finagling with the ever-so-delicate Windows registry.  It’s been years since I’ve done stuff like this but I’ve still got it!  Once a geek, always a geek =)

DON:
The ultimate in geekness is spending the next 2 nights (graveyard shift) drive-testing the wireless infrastructure of the greater New York City metro.  He’s literally driving around NY/NJ to test sites at the major airports, subways, etc.

P.S. I don’t completely understand what you do for a living, honey, so feel free to correct me if I misinterpreted.  It’s not every day I give you permission to correct me =)

On our last night in Fort Lauderdale, we drove an hour to Miami to an Argentine restaurant for dinner.  Now, you know I eat almost anything and will try everything once.  We ordered a parrillada (a mixed grill) for two of chorizo (pork sausage), beef short ribs, flank steak, chinchulin (tripe), molleja (sweetbread), and morcilla (blood sausage).  You’re drooling just from reading this, aren’t you? LOL!!!

Okay, let’s go through some of them.  I enjoy tripe in stews and dim sum, but I’d never had them grilled whole with the “stuff” (bile?) still inside.  It wasn’t pleasant.  BTW, sweetbread has nothing to do with pastry.  It’s an edible gland, either the thymus or pancreas, that is common in European diets.  I enjoyed it’s crispy outside and tender inside.  I thought I would enjoy the blood sausage, too.  There’s a Filipino dish of pork stew cooked in its own blood that’s quite good.  But the blood sausage (aka, black pudding in England and boudin noir in France) must be an acquired taste because I could not get the hang of its texture.  It tasted fine but, for the same reason I’m not fond of American meatloaf, it lacked texture.

Don did not touch the tripe or blood sausage.  He ate a piece of sweetbread not knowing what it was.  It tasted just like sliced sausage.  I may try blood sausage again cooked differently from another country to see if there’s a difference, just as there are differences in any variety of sausages. I will stick to the tripe I know, in stews and dim sum.  But at least I can say I’ve tried it.

So far, in one week in Florida, I ate for the first time: kidney (in an Irish kidney pie), sweetbread and blood sausage (a la Argentina).  As I write this blog at home, I’m chowing down on a Wendy’s cheese burger, wondering which parts of the cow are in my meat patty.