Saturday, December 27, 2008

Lamb and Cous Cous

Check out my cooking blog here. I made this dish last night and it was fantastic!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

White Christmas

The fun continues:

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GRAND RAPIDS MI
329 PM EST TUE DEC 23 2008
MIZ051-056-057-064-240430-
/O.UPG.KGRR.WW.Y.0021.000000T0000Z-081225T0800Z/
/O.EXA.KGRR.WS.W.0012.000000T0000Z-081225T0600Z/
MONTCALM-OTTAWA-KENT-ALLEGAN-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...GREENVILLE...JENISON...GRAND RAPIDS...
HOLLAND
329 PM EST TUE DEC 23 2008
...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 1 AM EST THURSDAY...
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GRAND RAPIDS HAS ISSUED A WINTER
STORM WARNING FOR SNOW...WHICH IS IN EFFECT
UNTIL 1 AM EST THURSDAY. THE WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IS NO LONGER
IN EFFECT.
SNOW WILL CONTINUE TO HEAVY AT TIMES ACROSS DURING THE EVENING COMMUTE.
ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE TONIGHT.
THE SNOW MAY TAPER OFF TONIGHT...BUT IS EXPECTED TO RETURN ON
WEDNESDAY WITH ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATIONS. STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS
BY WEDNESDAY EVENING OF 6 TO 10 INCHES ARE EXPECTED.
A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR HEAVY SNOW MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER
CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF
SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN
AN EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL...KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT...
FOOD...AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.

Great weather if you are a polar bear!

Winter Weather Advisory, Tuesday, 23 December 2008 16:36

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GRAND RAPIDS MI
1136 AM EST TUE DEC 23 2008
MIZ051-052-056>059-064>067-071>074-240045-
/O.CON.KGRR.WW.Y.0021.000000T0000Z-081225T0800Z/
MONTCALM-GRATIOT-OTTAWA-KENT-IONIA-CLINTON-ALLEGAN-BARRY-EATON-
INGHAM-VAN BUREN-KALAMAZOO-CALHOUN-JACKSON-INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...GREENVILLE...ALMA...JENISON...
GRAND RAPIDS...IONIA...ST. JOHNS...HOLLAND...HASTINGS...
CHARLOTTE...LANSING...SOUTH HAVEN...KALAMAZOO...BATTLE CREEK...
JACKSON



1136 AM EST TUE DEC 23 2008
...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 3 AM EST
THURSDAY...
SNOW WILL CONTINUE THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH TONIGHT. SNOW
ACCUMULATIONS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES ARE ANTICIPATED TODAY WITH AN
ADDITIONAL 1 TO 2 INCHES ANTICIPATED TONIGHT. PRECIPITATION COULD
BECOME MIXED WITH SLEET... LIGHT FREEZING RAIN AND LIGHT RAIN
WEDNESDAY BEFORE CHANGING BACK TO SNOW LATE WEDNESDAY.
A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW
WILL CAUSE PRIMARILY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SNOW
COVERED ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES...AND USE CAUTION WHILE
DRIVING.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Winter, the General and the search for red table wine

It is a cold, wintry day here in the Enchanted Mitten. As I type this, the external air temperature is a 10F. The windchill index at GRR is a bone chilling -15F. The photo to the right of this text is one of the spousal unit taken earlier today as we worked to clear off the snow from our back patio. Samson, our rescue GSD, appeared once again impervious to the cold. He was outside frolicking in the snow while we cleared away the snow. We had about 8 inches of snow fall last night, so we had some digging out to do. We have a plow service do our driveway, but I still needed to clear the walkway to our front door, as well as the walk to our side door. The snow that fell was light and powdery, perfect for skiiing and perfect for blowing and drifting. As I mentioned a few sentences ago, the windchill here is -15F, so there is plenty of wind to cause the snow to drift. I cleared the two walkways of snow a little before noon and had to repeat the procedure a few hours later because of the drifting that occurred. Yep, this is a Mark 1 Mod O winter day if I ever saw one.

Earlier this afternoon, the Maven called me out for not updating this blog since last Tuesday. Well, I have been busy. I am working on two big projects, one for Boeing and the other for Lockheed Martin. Both of these programs are in full swing and they are taking up much of my time. This is also the time of year that GE directs each employee to draft an input for their annual performmance review. GE has everybody submit their performance evaluation in the month of December, so people are scrambling to get them written and submitted before we shut down on 24 December. This is the second year that GE has been "running the show" here in Grand Rapids, so this process is still a little new to everyone. Before GE bought Smiths, annual performance evaluations were done on the anniversary of your hiring, so the work was done over the course of the year, not all in a month. My supervisor tasked me and the other technical manager in my department to help him write the performance evaluations of the technical leads. To be honest, wirting these evaluations has not been that hard, rather it has been time consuming, I have actually worked overtime the past two weeks in order to meet our self-imposed deadline to complete the evaluations bt 24 December. I am happy to report that this task is now completed.

Now, on to
the search for red table wine. Our friends at Art of the Table were tasked to help us determine what kind of red wine we want to serve as part of our daily evening meal, or at least at meals were red wine is an appropriate beverage. 12 different bottles were selected, based on our past tastes. Dee and I prefer our red wine with a little bit of heft. Well, last night we had our first trial bottle with Stay in Bed Stew. The wine was Domaine Monpertuis, a French Vin de Pays du Gard. It was a good first showing, but the wine was a little young. One bottle down and 11 more to go.

I worked a half-day today and then began my Christmas break from work. I spent a good part of the remainder of the day running errands and shopping for the next few days. Check out how those meals turn out by going here.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Blackhawks big winners on special road trip

Yet another reason why hockey players are better than most people:


Blackhawks big winners on special road trip
Without fanfare, Hawks are there for their GM

Rick Morrissey

In the wake of the news

11:40 PM CST, December 14, 2008

It began with the rarest of elements in professional sports: silence. No press release. No major announcement. No photo opportunity. Just the quiet of people doing a nice thing, the right thing.

Blackhawks general manager Dale Tallon was murmuring prayers over his father's casket a half-hour before the wake was to begin. The family was saying its goodbyes to Stan Tallon, a tough, big-hearted guy who liked helping troubled kids. Dale's mother, Julie, was there. So were his wife, Meg, and their two children, Lauren and Kristen.

Dale Tallon looked up and noticed a few members of the Hawks' front office wandering into the funeral home. That's odd, he thought. This is Gravenhurst, Ontario. They're supposed to be in Chicago. In the whirl and clatter of his emotions, Tallon was having trouble connecting thoughts.

Then he saw some Hawks players walking through the door — Adam Burish, Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Cristobal Huet. On and on it went, fresh-faced kids and battle-scarred veterans. Coach Joel Quenneville and his staff. The trainers. John McDonough, the team president, too.

"I told my mother, 'Mom, the team's here. The whole team's here,' " Tallon said. "She said, 'You've got to be kidding.' She became 6 feet tall all of a sudden. She went from one emotion to another, a complete 180. She went from distraught to all of a sudden having a little fire in her eye. She was a little excited about it."

Sports sections are filled with stories about angry, greedy, self-absorbed athletes. There's a simple reason for that. There are a lot of angry, greedy, self-absorbed athletes. So you tend to notice when a group of players goes the opposite direction, especially when it's done in a near whisper.

On Nov. 22, the Blackhawks beat the Maple Leafs 5-4 on Dave Bolland's goal in overtime. Rather than take a chartered flight back to Chicago, the team decided to stay in Toronto, practice the next day and then make the 110-mile trip north to Gravenhurst for the wake. That's how it came to be that two busloads of Hawks personnel walked through the doors of a funeral home in the middle of Ontario on a cold night.

No acclaim. No hubbub. Just a nice thing, the right thing.

No one is exactly sure how the story got out. Some of us media members received an e-mail detailing the feel-good story of a professional hockey team going the extra miles for their general manager. It mentioned how one of the buses stopped at a McDonald's after the wake — millionaire athletes stopping for Big Macs! — and how the townsfolk were shocked to see the players walk through the doors. The McDonald's happened to be giving out trading cards, including Toews' and Kane's, with Happy Meals.

Most of the e-mail was accurate. Some of it — like the description of the buses being "rickety" and unheated — wasn't. And the players didn't vote unanimously to go to the wake. They were told they were going by management. Not that it matters.

"You might have expected a lot of complaints from people, but I didn't hear one," wing Patrick Sharp said. "It was the eighth day of a seven-day road trip, so I think a lot of people had that Sunday booked with their family, their kids.

"The obvious reaction would have been complaining and guys upset about it. But it wasn't. Everybody was onboard."

The e-mail spread like wildfire, the way forwarded e-mails are wont to do. Tallon heard from friends in the U.S., Canada and Europe who had seen it. The International Herald Tribune picked up the story about the hockey team with a heart.

Why did it resonate with people? Because it answers a deep desire for our faith to be restored in athletes. Some of us don't like where the sports world has taken us. We don't recognize ourselves in most of the people we root for. We don't see humanity in them. When CC Sabathia signs a $161 million contract with the Yankees, he might as well be from Mars.

The behavior the Hawks exhibited by going to the Tallon wake is behavior that good, normal people exhibit in everyday life. We're surprised when athletes do it.

We're not quite as surprised when hockey players do it. One of the truths in professional sports is that hockey players are different.

"A lot of us are Canadian, from small towns, and even the American boys are from small towns," Tallon said. "We kind of just do our jobs and do our business and stick our nose to the grindstone. That's a Canadian trait. Canadians just do their work.

"Just like this story. No one really came out and talked about it. It just started picking up a life of its own. The players went to the wake. They didn't brag about it. They were happy to do it. They're normal people. They don't think that highly of themselves.

"That's a nice trait to have. This group especially. Don't forget that some of these guys are first overall ( NHL picks), third overall, seventh overall. Some of these kids could have been a little full of themselves, given their draft position and what they've done. We don't have that on our team. It's really nice to see."

Tallon tried talking to the players in a side chapel at the funeral home but got choked up and couldn't finish. He said he still gets teary-eyed thinking about their gesture.

The Hawks bused back to Toronto and flew home that night. Quietly. Kind of hard to picture Terrell Owens going with that flow. Then again, it's kind of hard to picture NHL players putting up with Owens.

Stan Tallon died at 80 of Parkinson's disease. He had been a fine hockey player in his own right, playing briefly in the American Hockey League, and he had continued competing until he was 68. His son said the old man would have been tickled by the Hawks' show of force at his wake.

"He would have had a smile on his face," Dale Tallon said. "He would have been elated. He loved hockey players."

We do too.

rmorrissey@tribune.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Sunday, December 14, 2008

$1.509 and a few other rambling thoughts...

OK, I have been a bit of a slacker this week. I last posted on my blog last weekend, just before the Army-Navy game. The Mids handed the Cadets their heads, beating them like an old drum to the tune of 34-0. While I was enjoying the football game, Princess was trying to sleep off a nasty bug. Dee was not feeling well Friday night and she went downhill from there. She fought this bug for four days, and missed two days of work. I did my best to nurse her back to health, but there was little I could do other than feed her crackers and Gatorade. I was also waiting to catch whatever she had, but so far, it would appear that I am a carrier.

On Monday when I drove to work, I saw an electronic sign at a local gas station and
the price jumped out at me. A gallon of regular unleaded fuel was $1.509. H thought I would never see a gallon of gas for less than two bucks, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it for a buck and a half. By the end of the week, that same gallon of gas was back up to $1.759, so there is still volatility to the proce of this commodity. $1.759 a gallon is a lot better than the $4 we were paying this summer, and some of the oil analysts are saying that a gallon of light sweet crude might go for less $40 a barrel. Earlier this year that same barrel of oil was being sold for $147.27 in July. I suppose that this would be a good week to top off both of our vehicles.

This week will be busy at the General. There are a few "deliverables" which I must complete to forward on to our customers, plus most aviation companies shut down the week of Christmas to New Year's Day. Certainly, I am not complaining about being busy as there are a lot of people out there whose jobs are tenuous or non-existent.

Super Mom is due to arrive in a little less than a fortnight. The blogosphere in the Enchanted Mitten is abuzz with anticipation for her and the Tot to arrive. We are hoping that Super Mom can drag herself away from Lake St. Clair and spend a few days in Kent County. Details are sketchy, but as they develop I will let you know.