End of the Year Update

End of the Year Update
It really is the end of the year, all 365 days.

Wowie kazowie.

Time went by almost as fast as my MINI Convertible takes turns on a dry road. Of course, we haven’t had much in the way of dry roads where I live lately.

I took some time off from the blog in December. I ran into a spell where I had the time but no inclination to write a posting. I suppose I could make one of those New Year’s resolutions to post on a more consistent basis. I could; but, I won’t because I know that I would break it rather soon, before February started, I think.

Part of my spotty posting in December was caused by my dull live style. There is no drama in my life to speak of. Since I am between girlfriends and have been for four years now, I am not certain that I want to use that term. It is very difficult to find a way to create something worthwhile when all I have done that day is two loads of laundry, completed the daily Sudoku puzzle [moderate difficulty], and read in a book. If I stretched that as much as I could, I might be able to fashion a four or five sentence blog posting.

As I have said before, I have no drama in my life.

One can always hope for a more exciting 2011. I will.

Doctor D and Me
I went to see Doctor D this month for my once every three weeks visit.

Doctor D said I am fine and that is about all she will say about my medical condition. Doctor Karen said the same thing for almost two years.

Being fine is good I guess, especially when you consider the alternatives.

We talked about the City of Hope Medical Center second opinion regarding my condition. Although she wouldn’t come straight out and say, “go ahead and let them operate. Remove that portion of your liver and we won’t have to worry about it,” she certainly came very close to saying that.

She also said she would have a third opinion before she had surgery. All of which raised questions in my mind about surgery and surgeons.

Doctor D gave me a Christmas gift of sorts.

She said since I was doing so well and all that we could skip our regular schedule appointment between Christmas and New Year’s and go back on schedule in mid-January. I could even skip a prescription round of the Xeloda if I wanted to skip it.

I skipped it.

When I saw Doctor D, I also saw the oncology clinic nurses. Wendy and Vhrunda each gave a bug hug; Vhrunda gave me several big hugs and that was epic. They loved the Fairy Tales brownies [brownies. com] I left with them. The brownies are among their favorite sweets that I leave with them from time to time. I think they reluctantly agreed with my request that they consider sharing the brownies with Doctor D and Doctor Maddurri.

Nurse Jackie and Me
I see Nurse Jackie once every six months when I go to the Colorectal Surgery Clinic for a follow up appointment.

This time around I ended up seeing an annoying resident doctor. I don’t think he is a bad doctor. He just had an annoying habit of saying everything was “fantastic.” That was going overboard; not everything can be fantastic; a traffic jam can never be fantastic for example. He said I was doing fine, just like Doctor D said I was.

When he finished up, I asked to see Nurse Jackie.

Nurse Jackie was surprised when she popped into the examination room since she wasn’t scheduled to see me. I said that I was fine and that I wanted to give her a Christmas card and some brownies. This was totally unexpected and she greatly appreciated the brownies.

Nurse Jackie gave me a big hug and she left the room with a great smile on her face.

Christmas
Doug and my former wife came to my flat for Christmas Dinner. I went to their house for Thanksgiving.

I cooked another great turkey. I would have preferred to have tried a ham for Christmas. Unfortunately, Doug doesn’t like American hams; he only likes Spanish hams which he says are cured much better.

Being the good father that I am, I went to several specialty markets in search of a Spanish ham. I knew I was in trouble when almost all of the butchers that I spoke with either had a completely blank face or quickly said no. They said they had some truly wonderful and flavorful American hams.

We had a Butterball turkey instead and it was perfect.

I could tell it was perfect because no one spoke while we were eating and Doug had a healthy sized second serving.

I couldn’t find a frozen mince pie to bake this year. I ended up with a semi nontraditional Christmas Dinner dessert. I had a slice of fudgy wuggey cake from Giuliano’s Delicatessen. Everyone else had pumpkin pie.

Fixing the Flat
I had chance to meet Dave the Plumber this month.

Dave is a very good, professional plumber who knows what he is doing. That is refreshing.

I finally decided to make some plumbing repairs to the flat. What I thought were simple repairs turned out to be rather complex work. Most of the repairs had to do with replacing faucets and valves that were almost fifty years old. The old stuff came when the building was built.

The repairs took Dave two separate sessions to complete. I would have preferred a shorter time but I’m very happy Dave took his time and did the jobs correctly.

Dave probably saved me from a hot water heater failure. The last plumbers who weren’t really plumbers used a combination of hot water copper tubing, perfectly fine, but connected the tubing with a zinc fitting, very bad. The connection was well along in electrolysis and would have failed sometime soon. Part of my flat would have been flooded.

Dave also replaced all of the parts with American made, solid brass or solid copper fittings. These parts were more expensive; but, as Dave said, they will last much longer. He figures that ought to last another fifteen to twenty years.

That’s way long enough for me.

Perfect.

I celebrated my new plumbing repairs with a long hot shower.

The MINI and Me
It was Christmas time and I couldn’t forget Alex the Sales Pro from South Bay MINI.


Alex and I share many loves in common, mostly driving fast sporty cars and chocolate. I could have to order of fondness inverted though. I had thought about brownies but reconsidered. The brownies would be loved, savored, and enjoyed by Alix and at the same time would have possibly wreaked havoc with her New Year’s Eve party dress.

Instead, I gave Alex a Hershey’s chocolate tee shirt. It is dark brown, naturally, with the words chocolate printed all over it. Alex loved the tee shirt.

The tee shirt was a much wiser decision.

The Novel
I think I mentioned that I stared writing a novel once before. At this point, I have absolutely no idea if this writing effort can ever bear fruit or outside readership. I finished what I thought was the first novel and asked Doug to give me his thoughts on it. Doug has worked as a writer so he should know something about writing.

While I was waiting for Doug to give me his comments, I started on a second novel. Right now, I am about 580 pages into it. I think I will need another 300 or so pages to finish everything that I wanted to cover in this book in the series.

Doug finally got back to me with his thoughts. He thought I had too much dialogue. That was a great suggestion. I can either take some dialogue out or add more narrative. I will got back and add more narrative to the first novel.

I had already planned to write a prologue that set the stage for the beginning and provide some background. My initial estimate of the prologue was probably close to one hundred pages. I’ve also been writing more narrative in the second novel as I go along now.

My plan for the novel is to finish the second one first and complete the rewrite or add narrative to the first. Then, I will rewrite the second novel with a goal of finishing both by the end of March.


Happy New Year


Be well and stay happy.

The Riders Club

The Riders Club
Doug and I went to the Riders Club in San Clemente, California for lunch on Saturday. I was at school making my course material copies before the start of school on Monday. I do this because the photocopier is usually down when the instructors need it most.

It broke down on Monday.


The Riders Club is a new, primarily hamburger, restaurant. It does have some other food like a salad and carnitas I believe. Doug and I had hamburgers. It is a very small place. I think it can seat probably twenty inside and maybe another ten to twelve outside, assuming the weather is nice. It is a come as you are place and there are no reservations.

Compared to one of the major chain hamburger places, it is more expensive. Our bill ran to $26.00. This compares very favorably to The Counter. You pay extra but you have a much better dining experience with fresher foods and a wider range of add-ons to choose from.

The Riders Club operates on a similar to The Counter where you can customize your burger with a bunch of add-ons. We both rated it better than The Counter since it is owner operated and not part of a chain.


We both loved our hamburgers. Doug added a fried egg and bacon to his. I added avocado and Havarti cheese to mine. I had planned to add Swiss cheese to mine until the cashier suggested that Havarti would taste better with the avocado. That was an excellent recommendation by the cashier; my hamburger was superb. The burgers are one third pounders and are made with only fresh meat.


Doug liked the place because they serve Coke in a glass bottle which means it was made in Mexico with the old traditional formulation that uses cane sugar and nor high fructose syrup. The Riders Club also has about two dozen craft and microbrew beers on tap. I could be wrong on the number of beers but they have a lot to select from.

For those of you who live in Southern California, you should try Coke in a glass bottle.

The only drawback to a fine roadhouse hamburger is parking. There is almost no onsite parking to speak; ok, there are four parking spots that are best suited for small and very small cars only. I drove the MINI so parking was not much of a problem for us. It would have been a real challenge if Doug drove his Honda Accord. Street parking is not much better, in part because of road construction in the immediate area.

Overall, we would give The Riders Club 5 Napkins, our highest rating.

I will probably go back to The Riders Club in the coming months. I have Saturday morning class so I am half there after I leave school.

Restaurant Ratings
We have given 5 Napkins to the following hamburger restaurants:

The Original Tommy’s Hamburgers [a rare 6th Napkin for the original Rampart and Beverly location in Los Angeles]

Fatburger

Teaching
I had my first class on Monday. It is State and Local Government. This class was a real pleasure to teach and I think it will be one of my best classes in a long time. They are lively energetic and seem to want to learn and appear willing to work unlike my last class.

Of course, I may be wrong in my initial appraisal. Lord know how many times I have been wrong before.


Be well and stay.

November by the Numbers

November by the Numbers
November was an interesting month for me as far as numbers go.



I had no MINI driving with the top down hours this month. It was cool and cloudy for part of the month and then I had a nasty cold that hung for close to two weeks. I almost drove with the top down yesterday but I had just seen Molly the Stylists and I felt that I owed her at least a day before her efforts were lost. The MINI did end the month with 8,102 miles on the odometer.

The blog had a sharp drop off in visitors from September and October. That happens from time to time. Someone finds the blog and then there is a brief spurt of activity generated by a viral message from friend to friend and then they go away.

The blog had 311 visitors who viewed 433 unique pages. Still, it was a good number especially since I dropped the Woman of the Moment feature four years ago. The Woman of the Moment was and still is the biggest draw to the blog with about 70 to 75% of the page views depending on the month.

I think I may have mentioned that I started writing a novel, sort of out of boredom I guess more than any other reason. My first effort produced one that was just over 600 pages long. I need to go back over it and polish it more; I need to add more narrative to help explain things plus I need to add a prologue to help set the whole story.

Right now, I have let the first novel rest while I pound out the second one in a series. I am ambitious if nothing else. I have got about 430 pages written in the second round. I hope to finish it by the end of the month.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1
I went to see the seventh film in the series this week. One of my instructor friends from school went to see it during a Wednesday midnight showing. His wife is Potter fanatic so she had to see it at midnight.

I figured that I could wait since it wasn’t going to be gone in two weeks. My friend said it was the darkest Harry Potter film he had seen. He was right. It certainly was dark. I did miss not seeing Hogwarts in the film. It sort of reminded me of a couple of old classic Western films, HIGH NOON and John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS. Doug could probably identify a Kurosawa of French film that may have influenced the Potter film.

I saw the film in an IMAX theater. That was incredible except for the insistently loud sound system. I know that the sound has to be set for the theater on the assumption that the house will be full. The sound, at times, hurt my ears. It could have been turned down without killing any of the impact since there were less than thirty customers in an over 700 seat theater.

I do recommend seeing the film and see it in an IMAX theater if your ears aren’t as sensitive as mine are now.

Holy Irony and Molly the Stylist
I went to see Molly the Stylist yesterday since it was the first Wednesday in December.

One of my objectives was to give Molly the Mr. Goodbar miniatures that I received over the Halloween period. She loves Mr. Goodbar so I saved them for her. Unfortunately, I left them in my refrigerator. I remembered that fact when I walked into the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in the Belmont Shore section of Long Beach.

Molly asked for an iced vanilla latte. I went for the simple brew, medium sized decaf. While I was waiting for Molly’s drink, I noticed there was a nice chocolate croissant in the display rack. I got that for her as well since she loves chocolate.

It was hard to tell if she was happy or upset with me about the croissant because she had her mouth full of croissant at the time. I’ll go with happy


The photos of Molly that appear in the blog were taken a year ago. I asked if I could take a new photo. She said no because her hair was not looking good. I thought it looked very nice but what do I know; Molly is the professional stylist after all.

Holy irony Molly! A stylist who’s hair was not looking good.


Be well and stay happy.