#82 – Throw out all of my old pots and pans and start cooking on all stainless steel cookware.

Over Labor Day weekend, Dave and I were in California, but my family was staying at our apartment in Chicago.  I believe it was my sister-in-law, Katrina, who made vanilla pudding that weekend in our kitchen, and it turned out to have flakes of Teflon in it.  They didn’t eat the “Teflon Pudding”, but my Mom did start to worry about us dying from cancer from eating Teflon.

So thanks to an early Christmas present from my parents, we were able to go out and buy a very nice new collection of stainless steel cookware.  I wanted to go the stainless steel route because the high performance, quality and durability.  I am hard on pots and pans.  Obviously I can not be trusted with non-stick cookware.  I will use the metal spatula, I will.

There is a bit of a learning curve in cooking with stainless steel – like preheat the cookware, and don’t turn the burner all the way up unless you want to boil water – but I’m getting the hang of it.  When I follow the rules, I haven’t had any issues with food sticking.  And I get to use all the sharp and pointed tools I want.  I am also learning to cook more with my cast iron skillet and my new cast iron griddle.

We did throw out all the old scratched Teflon cookware.  Hopefully we didn’t eat too much of it.

No, no, I haven’t given up on blogging.  I just lost the password, of course!

Dave INSISTS that I not use passwords such as “12345″ for this blog and bank accounts and whatnot, and it’s hard for me to remember the 20 digit randomly generated passwords Dave comes up with.  Heck, I couldn’t even tell you my own home phone number right now without looking it up in my cell phone.

Anyhow, here I am.

Dave and I have been throwing around the idea of canceling cable for a couple months now.  Sounds like a fine idea, be we just can’t seem to bring ourselves to actually do it.

We do watch a lot of TV, but then we always end up watching the same things over and over again.  It’s to the point that we can’t just turn on the TV at 2 AM for a healthy dose of Forensic Files any more, because we’ve probably already seen that episode…twice.

And with me being sick for the last couple weeks, I have to be honest and say that I am more than a little burnt out on TV.

Really the motivation for canceling cable is in the money.  Cable is expensive.  And without cable, we can do things like read books and talk to each other.  But then, we have to entertain ourselves by reading books and talking to each other.

I’m curious to know your take on this.  Do you get by without cable?

Ok.  I’m starting to feel better and get back into the swing of things again.  I did go back to work last week, of course, but I didn’t win any awards for productivity.  Not that my job regularly passes out awards for anything, but you get the point.

I mostly have my voice back, and my cough is getting better every day.  I’m still tired a lot, but I’m taking it easy.

All the horrible things you hear on the news about swine flu…you should believe them.

Dave gets some major extra credit husband points for putting up with me these last couple weeks.  He has been exceptionally patient and kind.

Thanks for taking such great care of me Dave!  And thank God you didn’t get it.

Everyone knows that I am a bit of a germaphobe…nothing wrong with that.  I wash my hands a lot, I nag Dave to do the same, and to be honest I don’t get sick that often.

So you can imagine the horror when I was diagnosed last week with a probable case of H1N1.  That’s right.  You read correctly.  Katie has the swine flu.  Let the jokes commence.

The reason that it is a probable case, and not a confirmed case, has to do with the large number of cases in Chicago.  The doctor basically said that my symptoms are all consistent with swine flu, but they no longer conduct the blood test for confirmation because it is now so prevalent.   The one treatment option for regular flu and swine flu are the same, and expensive…Tamiflu.

The danger of H1N1 comes in the fact that your body’s immune system is pretty much down for the count.  So you are open to any bacterial infection that comes along.  The reason why people die (4 confirmed deaths in Chicago this season) from the swine flu, or any type of flu really, is because of the complications.  In my case, the complication is a bacterial infection in my throat and lungs.  So I lost my voice last week and may have coughed up a small animal.  I am on antibiotics to treat these things, and hopefully prevent pneumonia.

This last week has been a wreck, I tell you.  Or, more accurately, I have been a wreck.

The scariest part of this whole ordeal was fighting the high-grade fever.  As an adult, I have never had to deal with a 102 degree temperature.   And in my whole life, I can’t recall a single time (let alone a whole week) when I felt so much like someone beat the hell out of me with a baseball bat and left me for dead in an alley.  Being hungover is like one hundred billion times better.

And I don’t sit around and do nothing very well.  Missing six whole days of work has almost killed me.  So I am just about on the verge of stir-crazy, minus the energy to do any real damage.

MUST.  GO.  TO.  WORK.  TOMORROW…MUST!

That’s what Danica told me to do, so…

“Dave,” you may be asking, “why are there numbers on your car? And why do they look like they were applied by an amateur, on an area of the door only just wiped clean of dirt two minutes ago?” Well, I have a perfectly good explanation: you need numbers when you’re on the track!

I took the family car out for a NASA (National Auto Sport Association) “High Performance Driver Education” aka track day in early October.  The last time I did this was back in 2002 while living in LA. Fortunately autumn held off just long enough to have a nice weekend for driving, although there was a stiff breeze which cooled things down quite a bit.  Cool air makes a heavy car happy, and keeps your brakes from catching on fire.  Is this safe, you ask?  Of course it is!  They have a firetruck:

Plus, it turns out you can get insurance for this sort of thing.  $75 is all it costs to insure the G6 for an entire weekend of hot-lapping (keeping in mind the $1500 deductible).  I only went for one day, but I got a solid hour and 40 minutes of track time.

I had the least track-capable car in my run group, although not the slowest (at first).  Several other drivers were there for their first track day, and when you’re driving your $80,000 Viper on the track (which happens to be wet) for the first time, you might be a little cautious.  All told, in my group there were 3 Corvettes, a Viper, a Civic Si, a Lancer Evo, a 350Z, and a fully race-prepped M3.  I had a driving instructor ride along for one run, which was very helpful.  Her first comment was, “This isn’t the sort of car most people take to the track.”  Oh, but it’s a G6 GT.

This is me checking my watch to see when we get back on the track.  So what if it has four doors?  It had new tires and high-performance brakes, and the four-wheel independent suspension is tighter than the average sedan.  I was pleasantly surprised with how well planted it was, especially when transitioning from a fast right to a left at about 65 MPH.  The front-wheel drive is a bit of a handicap when trying to accelerate out of corners, although very safe and easy to control.  I never felt like I was going to lose control or go off.  The seat-belt never locked tightly though, and I had bruises on both knees the next day from bracing myself in the car.

That’s a 50 MPH turn right there.  There’s something therapeutic to screeching tires around a corner, then flooring the gas pedal all the way down the straightaway.  I was hoping to break 100, but only got up to 97-98 MPH in the strong headwind.  I’ve raced the little go-karts at miniature golf places plenty of times, but nothing compares to driving a full-size car around a real race track at speed.  Ideally I’d like to do this once or twice per year, but as I get more mature older, I’m much more conscious of the possibility of something expensive breaking.  At some point, it would be better to buy a genuine race car, something that we don’t depend on for groceries and vacations, but that’s another story entirely.

I have to thank Katie for taking all these wonderful pictures.  You can see some more highlights of the day here.  I should also thank her for being a good sport to let me do this in the first place (“What if you crash?”  ”I won’t.”).

Dave and I have not vanished.  I could blame technical difficulties for my lack of blogging, but I won’t.

Have you ever seen “Man vs. Food” on the Travel Channel?  It’s this really disgusting cable show were the narrator travels around the country accepting challenges to eat mammoth quantities of food or food that is ungodly hot.  He gorges himself on 72 oz. steaks, 6 lb. burritos, habaneros dipped in jalapenos, and the like.  It is the exact opposite of Weight Watchers.  I can not explain my fascination with this show, except to say that maybe I am living all my high calorie meals vicariously through cable television. Or that I just really like crappy cable.

Anyhow, several weeks ago we went to one of the last Cubs games of the season.  They had no chance at the playoffs, and they lost the game anyway.  It was fun to hang out at Wrigley Field for the night, despite the freezing temps.

Before the Cubs game, however, Dave and I ate dinner at one of the restaurants that was featured on “Man vs. Food”.

Lucky’s specialty is the overstuffed sandwich, which includes coleslaw and fries…on the sandwich. The challenge is to eat three of these sandwiches in under an hour.  Only if you eat all three sandwiches in under thirty minutes, however, is your dinner free.  We were not there to accept the challenge, but it was fun to completely blow my Weight Watchers points on food made famous by crappy cable!

#86 – Hem a pair of pants.

Funny story. I actually completed this task for the first time over Memorial Day weekend…yeah, a while ago. Then I wore the pair of pants to work the next day. I always wear sneakers on my way to work, as I walk a mile to the train. I have a collection of heels in my office that I can change into.  So it wasn’t until I was looking at myself in the full-length mirror in the office bathroom that I remembered you’re supposed to measure the hem while wearing the shoes you will normally wear with the pants before you actually do all the work.

Elementary school taunts of “high-waters” came clearly to mind, and I wore my sneakers around the office the rest of the day.

I have since repaired the damage and hemmed a few other work pants as well, so I’m calling this exciting chore complete.

#36 – Return all of the pictures I used for our wedding to my Mom and to my Mother-in-law.

As part of the decoration for the reception at our wedding last year, we framed 120-something of our favorite family pictures.

This required sorting through boxes of old family pictures, which I always love to do.  Of course it also required buying 120-something frames, 120-something mattes, cleaning 120-something pieces of glass, scanning seemingly 10 times 120-something pictures, and printing the best 120-something of them.  We totally blew the color ink budget for 2008.

It was worth it.

Big thanks to both Moms who let us rummage through boxes of old pictures and were patient with us when we didn’t return all those pictures until the second year of our marriage.

And now we have 120-something matching frames in a closet.

In true Dave and Katie fashion, we did not come home from California yesterday to a quiet apartment.

While we were away, my parents as well as my brother, Brian, and his wife, Katrina, all stayed at our place in Chicago.

Unfortunately, we did miss my parents this trip.  Brian and Katrina, however, spent last night in Chicago with us and are traveling home to Wisconsin today.  So with Michael and Katie, we all celebrated last night with a dinner out and a few drinks.

Yes, we have informed Michael repeatedly of how creepy he looks with a mustache!

And…NOW we have a quiet apartment…ahhh.