As mentioned in the previous post, my sleep schedule was so thrown off that I did not fall asleep until 5 am and was in the shower by 9 am because there were breakfast plans with DC and Co from Frederick, MD at 10 am.  We decided on Breadwinners for convenience and expediency.  It was one of the few times I have been seated within 2 minutes of arrival, but we were seated underneath vents, fans in the atrium section that buttressed against a huge planter and the door that opened into the indoor seating section so we were victim to a constant, loud humming noise.  The four of us ordered egg-centric dishes; a custom omelet, Farm House Scrambler, Leo's Favorite and I went with my staple dish, the Farm House Benedict.  They were definitely generous with my ham portion, and the fruit was really fresh for once, but the Hollandaise sauce was an odd vibrant, almost neon shade of yellow and the texture was off.

The (paraphrased) line of the morning: "Isn't chicken (slices/chunks) in an omelet redundant?".

We returned to the house, and while DC entertained the Co. from Frederick, MD, I researched firework show options for later in the night, prepared dips for snacking, ran errands and read on the panda couch most of the afternoon until the 15 - 20 minute heavy downpour occurred at which point I recalled that my windows were cracked open. Luckily, the windows were barely cracked so there were no more than 10 or so water droplets on the passenger seat.  My second thought was whether we would be able to see fireworks tonight.  

We skipped lunch because breakfast was so filling.  Dinner was at Frankie's because we again, went for convenience.  It is even closer to us than Breadwinners.  It was at dinner I noticed how clear the skies were as a result of the rain and 'fireworks watching' plans ensued.  We decided on the Fair Park show because it is the largest display in the Dallas metro and the show's producer is renowned. 

The Friends of Fair Park didn't exactly hire just-some-company for its Independence Day event, opting instead for the first family of fireworks. The official pyrotechnics producer for U.S. presidential inaugurations since Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, the Grucci family started its fireworks business back in 1850 with Angelo Grucci. Born in Italy, he moved to Long Island in 1870. The family business has been passed down several generations since to the current company heads, Donna and Felix Grucci, Jr.

This year’s Fair Park Fourth will be the event’s biggest display to date. According to Chief Pyrotechnician Tom Brown, Friday night’s program takes four days to set up once the truck hits the location, with 160 man-hours spread among a team of six pyrotechnicians (meaning you better damn well clap after your 18 minutes of dazzle).

Fireworks presentations of this magnitude are not simply pre-produced and shipped out to the more than 50 July 4th programs the Gruccis are organizing across the nation. Friday’s show is tailor made using a song list submitted by the Friends of Fair Park, which will include clips from such patriotic gems as Birthday by The Beatles, Beautiful Day by U2, and Yankee Doodle & Grand Old Flag by John Philip Sousa. Sousa. I believe he won American Idol a couple years ago.

After 26 hours are spent choreographing the program to pop and sparkle at all the right high notes, everything is boiled down to a well-timed script du jour. This year’s show boasts 444 firing cues, each of which could contain any number of shells hitting the sky. The largest shell is eight inches in diameter, which works out to roughly an 800-foot blast once airborne.

We entered through Gate 2, drove along Washington Ave for what seemed like a mile, and parked along the perimeter close to Gate 12.  The group decided to not enter the Fair Grounds into the 'recommended view sites' because according to the map below, we would be in an equally prime viewing - slightly west of Gate 12 since it was nearby the Fireworks launch site.  The fireworks display was breathtaking; the magnitude of the burst size, the vibrant colors, and the quantity of fireworks created a grandeur, hyper visual stimulating show. 

Only drawback was the amount of time spent in the car to exit the fair grounds took twice as long as the fireworks show, but without any doubt, tonight was one of the more memorable and more elaborate fireworks show I have seen.

My most memorable fireworks shows were when my family lived in White Plains, NY.  My parents worked insane hours at the local Crowne Plaza on Hale Ave, so what this meant is that we stayed on the 11th floor for the second half of the week, every week for a few years.  Watching the firework shows from our room was always amazing.    

I wonder how much the US workforce productivity declined this week.

Today was an interesting day.  I woke up this morning feeling today was going to be a great day.  My mgr and his wife went to McDonalds the night before and they gifted me with THREE Kung Fu Panda characters, which he brought to work this morning.  I immediately unwrapped and perched them on the common cube (crate) wall we share.  Four more characters, and the set is complete.

I made reservations for Charlie Palmer next week.  I've read good recommendations on yelp (among other sites) and listened in envy when co-workers praised the various yummy dishes from several visits.  They have set expectations very high, and I would love to be able to agree with them.

After work, I had 1 and 1/3 frozen margaritas and way too many chips at Chuy's.  Luckily, I was reaching full satiation point that I was very nonchalant about the fact that I received the wrong dish.  I asked for chicken enchiladas without cheese, ranchero sauce on top with two servings of rice, and no beans.  Instead, they delivered grilled chicken breast dressed with ranchero sauce, and one serving each of rice and beans.  Chuy's incorrectly delivers my order one out of every 6 or 7 visits, which in most cases, would irritate me, but I like the frozen margaritas, freshly fried thin tortilla chips, and people watching atmosphere too much to swear it off.  And they are always apologetic, and return with my correct order within minutes.

I got home about 20 or so minutes after my wonderful, thorough, and dependable cleaning lady, Gladys left.  I could smell various cleaning products from one end of the house to the other, and I thought it prudent to do a general scan of the state of the house.  She does not disappoint.  If I were a messy, unorganized person, I would easily request her services every other week, but since I make a good faith effort to pick up after myself every few days, if not, then at a minimum I do every Saturday, I've decided to set up a monthly arrangement with her. 

I played on the computer for a bit, read for a bit, and then watched TeeVee before falling asleep for a two plus hour nap.  I woke up refreshed and was attentive enough to sit through a late dinner with DC's parents at Grimaldi's.  Either I was not as hungry as I thought I was, or I have visited frequently enough that I was not impressed, just satisfied with my experience tonight; the service and food were not memorable.

My sleeping schedule for the weekend is thrown off because of the nap earlier and I will probably pay for it tomorrow because I have breakfast plans.

My Fairy Bit MimoBot came moments ago courtesy of the UPS man.  I had no idea the delivery people in brown uniform made deliveries past 8 PM.  I checked the UPS tracking link several times at work (shhh!) throughout the day in anticipation because the target delivery date was today, and I was slightly discouraged coming home to a barren front step and more so as 6 PM, then 7PM rolled around without a package on the doorstep.  The delivery instructions explicitly requested that the package be left on the doorstep, no signature required.  I was mentally prepared to go to bed without MimoBot in hand.  Luckily, I was working in the office trying to fix a virtual memory leak issue, and the office is within hearing distance of the door I could barely hear the gentle knock, but the disturbance of the gate swing caused my ears to perk.  I ran down the stairs, opened the door, and scanned the entire front mat to find a small cylindrical shipping tube. 

I ran back up the stairs, fought and wrestled with the packaging before getting my hands on the actual thumb.  It is cuter in real life than online, and it works!  The drive comes with fairy bit themed screensavers, games, sounds, and images and the other characters' theme in the core series 2. 

I love technology packaged in ‘cuteness’ and I cannot wait to delve into all the sounds and images this weekend when I am not assistant hosting.

Now if I could only figure out how to resolve this virtual memory leak issue, I could also learn to tolerate my laptop again.  It has been so fickle from the moment the hard drive encryption process was completed a few weeks ago.

FADI’S

I really enjoy Fadi’s; I like the hummus, the salads, and the overall atmosphere/decor, though sometimes it teeters on the slightly noisy side - the people at tables speaking to one another competing with the music.  My co workers introduced me a few months ago and thank goodness, I would never have thought to go because it is in a shopping strip by the service road, and it is so close to Chuy’s, that when I am craving reasonably priced food nearby the house, I pretty much have Chuy’s on the brain which means I do not notice any other restaurants en route.  And I digress.

Back to Fadi’s Mediterranean.  It is a buffet style set up where you select your dish/platter, go through the line selecting items based on the quantities of salad, veggie, and/or protein based on your dish/platter, or select individual items a la carte as your go through the line and then pay.  As far as I can tell, everything is made fresh daily from the salads to the baked goods to the hot food items.  I love the crispness and acidity of the veggies in their cabbage salad and ‘house’ salad, but I appreciate the red pepper hummus and pita too.  Those three items alone make the trip worth it; however, by the time lunch time comes, I am so hungry I tend to over-eat.  What this means on a Fadi’s trip is that I indulge in a cooked veggie, usually eggplant (slightly too oily) and a protein, usually chicken, or lambshank and then I enter food comatose late afternoon.  I do not learn my lesson evidently.

Fadi's Mediterranean Grill
3001 Knox St # 110, Dallas

(214) 528-1800

FLAVOR ICE

RG and I ran a quick errand to CVS for blank CDs and trail mix when we came up with the brilliant idea to get Flavor Ice popsicles to place in the breakroom freezer for a refreshing afternoon snack.  Popsicles are the perfect afternoon sugar pick me up and makes me very nostalgic for my youth.  I could not even estimate the number of popsicles I consumed as a kid, way more than my mom was ever comfortable with, that I know.  Silly I thought it would only take 1 hour and half at most for 16 slender packages to freeze, but by COB, they barely reached slushie state.  I would have to wait for tomorrow.  I have no patience, sigh.

I cannot even begin to explain my complete disappointment with my most recent visit to Villa 0, which as far as I am concerned will be my last visit.  My first visit there was absolutely fabulous until the very end, but forgivable since we were there well within three months of hard opening.  These minor, but noticeable ‘kinks’ should have been resolved by now.

We were a party of nine celebrating a birthday lunch.  We made reservations ahead of time and were seated immediately upon arrival.  The lunch atmosphere differs from the evening service by 110%.  There were a few other patrons slowly trickling in and out through our 1 hr 45 min stay, but it was pretty dead by uptown/park cities lunch standard.  Evening service is mad hectic due to the crowd surrounding the bar.  The crowd eventually starts to spill over towards the dining area, and the staff is relegated to weaving between patrons in the bar and the tables in the dining area. 

My party arrived in three groups, and we collectively decided on two orders of Portobello Fries served with a tangy, southwestern type of ranch side.  The fries were delish.  And most of the table seemed to agree, except for the one person that admittedly did not like mushrooms of any sort in any preparation style.  He found it ‘tolerable’.  The quality of service and food steeply declined for the remainder of the meal.

The menu is accessible with predictable, run of the mill Italian dishes (pizza, chicken parm, Italian salad, etc) in addition to a ‘create your own pasta’ option; select pasta, sauce, and protein, or veggie.  We varied in our main course selection; 3 Seafood Risottos, 1 Veal Milanese, 1 Grilled Salmon, 2 Chicken Parmesan, 1 Grilled Chicken with Veggies, and 1 Pasta/Meatball/Vodka sauce.  I was moderately displeased with the Seafood Risotto because the risotto was VERY al dente (almost crunchy), the shrimp were overcooked, and there were muscle shell pieces embedded into the risotto.  However, the Veal Milanese and Pasta/Meatball/Vodka sauce dishes went over very well.  The Veal portion was so ginormous that the first comment was appropriately, ‘Is that the entire baby cow?’.  The staff managed to bus one of the dishes away without first asking.  Luckily, it was boxed and not thrown out.

The worst part of the meal was dessert service.  The staff took a long time to return for our dessert orders, longer to package to go chocolate mousse cake orders, and we find out two or so hours later, after returning to work, when we opened our FOUR dessert boxes previously stored in the refrigerator, anticipating each was filled with a slice of cake, they had packaged the WRONG dessert!  Our dessert boxes contained a soupy mess of MELTED chocolate ice cream.  Who in their right mind would ask for to go orders of ice cream in the HOT TEXAS HEAT?  On principle, we returned to Villa O to retrieve 4 cake slices.  The final transgression was the poorly packaged dessert.  If you are going to pipe whipped cream on the cake slices, please make sure it is not a soupy, separated mess and do not use over ripened, bruised strawberry chunks as accents. 

Villa 0

4514 Travis St Ste 330

Dallas, TX 75205
(214) 780-1880 

A weekend of tasks completed in preparation for hosting guests the following weekend:

• Eyebrow threading
• Deposit check
• Hair cut
• Grocery shop
• Cleaned house
  
• Watched Persepolis
• Picked up household items at Target
• Laundry
• Washed my car
• Worked out

Pompeo
3227 McKinney Ave Ste 103
Dallas, TX 75204
Phone: (214) 979-0440

Persepolis was a very enjoyable cartoon drawn in black and white, which taught me about a small sliver of Iran's history through the eyes of a young girl that is eventually sent away to Vienna, and returns to a new Iran.  It is best summed up by Newsweek:

Marjane (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes as a child and Chiara Mastroianni as a teenager and adult) is a Bruce-Lee-loving 9-year-old when the story starts in 1978, just as the shah is about to be overthrown. The horrors of his regime have oppressed her leftist intellectual family, but their hopes for a free society are dealt an even crueler blow when the Islamic Revolution's theological police state comes to power. Marjane's story takes her into exile in Vienna, where, as a teenager, she falls in with posturing "nihilists" and discovers first love (hilariously), betrayed love (even funnier) and the loneliness of exile. Returning to Tehran in the 1980s, where holding hands in public is penalized with a fine or a whipping and the female models in her art-school drawing classes are hidden under burqas, the chain-smoking rebel falls into a depression, then rouses herself to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger," then falls into a bad first marriage before going into permanent exile in Paris (where Satrapi now lives and works). This bare synopsis doesn't begin to convey the imaginative breadth of "Persepolis," the richness of its characters, the wit with which it encapsulates a huge amount of historical detail or its breezy flights of fancy, which include heavenly discussions between God and Karl Marx, Marjane's otherworldly advisers. Through all her adolescent torments, Marjane is counseled by her earthy, beloved grandmother (the great Danielle Darrieux), a wise, sophisticated and foul-mouthed mentor whose memorable, full-bodied personality belies her 2-D pen-and-ink profile.

I love scented products.  I make an effort to keep the number of scented products I use daily to a minimum so that they do not combine into an overwhelmingly repulsive odor.  Lately, my hair product of choice is Kerastase Oleo-relax serum, it has a subtle scent and controls my layered ends from frizzing out in unruly ways.  I use it exclusively in the summertime since it is light and not as sticky as Biosilk Silk Therapy.  I tend to use Biosilk Silk Therapy in the fall and winter because I do not mind the stickiness as much, and after a summer of the oleo-relax scent, it is time for a change. 

Speaking of scents, I recently purchased another bottle of my all time favorite perfume – J’Adore Dior.

J’adore by Christian Dior is a sparkling fresh floral bouquet that is deeply sensual, totally feminine...and as contemporary as you are. It exudes top notes of tangy mandarin and ivy leaves, softened by the champaca flower, the heart of rare orchids, roses, and violets, with a base of damascus plum, amaranth wood, and blackberry musk.

I am in my comfort zone, and less tensed through the workday in this scent.

I did not leave the house Saturday.  I alternated between watching TeeVee/movie, reading Newsweek, and taking naps.

I did not eat out once this weekend because we wanted to make use of the remaining food in the refrigerator and pantry before embarking on another trip to the grocery store.  I am seeing higher grocery bills like the rest of america, but I am very fortunate that it does not eat more than a few percentages into the monthly food expenditures.  I realize this is not true for many families out there.

In another meager attempt to rein in my spending, DC and I exchanged one of my blockbuster movies for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 days.  Despite the number of awards, and high accolades, I do not know if I agree with the reviews and praises.  Granted, it was a unique storyline set in a country I am not familiar with, but I think this film won awards based on the lack of other movies it had to compete with, and not so much that is was good on its own accord.

There was so much dialog that the pace seem really slow, and thus I was bored.

Apparently the NT Times disagrees with me:

In “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion, the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who, one wintry day in the late 1980s, helps her roommate with an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania when such procedures were illegal, not uncommon and too often fatal. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

Reliable Realist (RR)

(Just visiting? Take the free test and determine your personality type!)

Reliable Realists are down-to-earth and responsible-minded. They are precise, reserved and demanding. Their most prominent quality is reliability and they will always make every effort to keep any promise given. Reliable Realists are more quiet and serious persons, they do not talk a lot but they are good listeners. They sometimes seem reserved and distant to outsiders although they often have a great deal of wit and esprit. Their strong points are thoroughness, a marked sense of justice, doggedness bordering on pigheadedness and a pragmatic, vigorous and purposeful manner. Reliable Realists do not dither about if something has to be done. They do what is necessary without wasting words.

This personality type not only expects a lot of himself but also of others. Once Reliable Realists have set their mind on something, it is difficult to persuade them otherwise. They do not like to leave anything to chance. Planning means safety to Reliable Realists, as well as order and discipline. They have no problem respecting authorities and hierarchies but do not like to delegate tasks. They are certain that others would not deal with them as conscientiously as they do. In management positions, they are very task-oriented - they make sure that things are well done; however, they do not have a great deal of interest in personal contacts at work.

In relationships too, Reliable Realists are reliability itself. As partners, they are faithful and consistent, well-balanced and sensible. Security and stability are very important to them. They have little time for extravagances and flightiness. Whoever has them as friend or partner can rely on them for a lifetime. However, it takes quite a while for Reliable Realists to enter into a relationship or friendship. They have little need for social contacts; they therefore take great care when choosing partners and friends and limit themselves to a small but exclusive circle which meets their high demands. They tend to show their closeness to people who are important to them by deeds - their partner should rather not expect romantic declarations of love.

Adjectives which describe your type

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Training was arguably beneficial.  Did I learn anything material? Not Really.  Did I learn 'lingo'?  Yes, but I find acronyms and 'specialized' lingo unnecessary for my type of work.  Let me qualify, I think using the tools, techniques and methods taught this past week would be detrimental and counterproductive.  I am over it.

I returned to work today, and I missed my team so much more than I realized.  We've established a camaraderie that makes coming to work as fun as 'work' can be, if you understand what I mean.

I went to Perry's for lunch with one of my favorite team members.  Delish caesar salad and divine pork chop.  The pork chop is always generous in size, but this visit was the most generous.  I placed, at most, a 1/5 dent into a the pork chop and ate half of the asparagus spears.  I ordered the tomato soup with crab as well, which never came.  That was fine because I was stuffed beyond capacity.  Ridiculous gluttony.

The afternoon was slow, but after work, we went to the standard weekly happy hour location that is less than a 5 minute walk from my building, not to be confused with the bi-monthly happy location.  Two cranberry vodkas later, a few of us went to swirll for the final visit, bottling the zinfandel.  This was more uneventful than last week because the lady assisting us with the bottling process could not figure out how to convert our jpeg image into a usable format for their label creating software; one hour later, when she make a sample label for our review and her boss' review, her boss said we were not allowed to proceed mass production as these labels would consume too much printer ink.  We, as a group, purchased two batches of wine, and several bottles along the way, yet she did not hesitate to deny our creation.  Our group decided to not create a label for our wine, but did seal the top.  We left swirll by 8 PM.  I would never return to swirll on my own dime.  I am DUNZO with swirll.  Bad customer service.

DC and I made the 9:45 showing of The Fall at the magnolia in west village.  I was thoroughly confused through the first 3/4 of the movie, and it was too very lengthy of a movie to be confused in, so I constantly fidgeted.  The girl was cute, but difficult to understand at times.  Active listening was key.  The other main character did not seem very developed and well thought out to me.

Definitely time to retire to the bed to fall asleep to a random show on national geographic, or something comparable.