The Five Guys at Randhurst showed up as "now open" when I checked their website this morning. I took advantage of this by heading up there for lunch.

It's more expensive and more food than I should have on most days, so I probably won't go there that often. But it certainly tasted good! :)

So as I was standing on the concourse eating my dinner at one of the condiment stands -- dinner consisting of a foot-long hot dog with everything except peppers and a pepperoni calzone, the dinner that nutrition forgot! -- I was more than a bit surprised to see someone walk up to the dispenser and squirt ketchup onto his Connie's deep-dish pizza.

I don't eat ketchup on pizza. Katie -- who eats ketchup on Katie -- doesn't eat ketchup on pizza.

This guy, well...

Well, if they hadn't delayed the start of last night's Cubs game by 35 minutes waiting for a phantom thunderstorm that apparently missed the ballpark -- we had about two minutes of rain and they covered the field at about 6:55 PM -- they might have finished the game on schedule. As it was, the rain arrived in earnest after the seventh inning and I left. They played another half-inning before covering the field for the final time. But the Cubs won and my fantasy first baseman hit two homers, so I did ok. :)

The official messiest food at the park has to be the chili dog nachos that are new this year. Burp.

My changes to the initialization for our tab control all seem to be working fine, so I've checked them into ClearCase. Yay!

I have, I think, successfully preserved my about-to-expire United Mileage Plus miles by having lunch at the pizzeria across the street and paying for it with my Discover Card that's linked to the Mileage Plus dining plan. We'll see if the miles show up in my account. And it was pretty decent pizza.

jeff_duntemann is joining us for dinner tonight. He must like us, because the menu for tonight is "leftovers". :)

It was a frustrating day at work today, so I made brownies tonight.

This doesn't make work any less frustrating, but the brownies were certainly tasty. :)

Normally, when I get ready for lunch, I take the ten minute walk to the Buona Beef across the street, order a burger, fries, and drink: total cost $7.14 after our recent sales tax increase. I'm annoyingly predictable.

Today, however, I'm still waiting for Godot to deliver the file that I need to do some testing. And since I'm expecting to have a relatively light dinner this evening when daisy_knotwise and I bundle the kids up and head down to Bensenville for the free concert by the Buckinghams (one of the better of Chicago's 1960s rock groups), I figured that what I really wanted was the pizza buffet up at Perry's in Park Ridge.

So that's where I went. I had a nice salad from the buffet with their excellent creamy garlic dressing (which I had to ask the waitress for, since there aren't enough slots on the buffet for all the types of dressing), then some sausage and pepperoni pizza.

My favorite of Perry's pizzas is the barbeque pizza: sausage, pepperoni, bacon, and onions on barbeque sauce. They haven't had it on the lunch buffet lately, I'm assuming because business has been relatively light and they'd just as soon not put it out to go mostly untouched. But there were a lot of people hitting the buffet today, so the pizza was frequently running out. I heard someone ask when more pizza would be up and the owner told them that there'd be a half-sausage, half-pepperoni and a barbeque pizza up shortly.

Cool! I could wait for that. So I watched the horde descend on and demolish the half-and-half when it came out, waiting for the barbeque pizza. The pizza cook put it in the window, I stood up to head for the buffet, the owner picked up the pizza --

And the cardboard circle it was on folded in half, dumping the pizza on the floor.

I sat back down. The owner said, "Put another barbeque on."

Cool. I could wait for that. And I did, as I read my newspaper. :)

It was a rather long and slightly more expensive lunch than usual, not counting the thirty mile round trip on the expressway.

But the pizza was good!

I gave the other guys in my group the chalk talk on the new functionality I'm building. We'll see how things go, but at least I was able to explain to them what it was supposed to do and how it would make their life simpler. One fellow objected to my building an intermediate class that would require an XML renderer on top rather than just handing him his XML directly. This led to an interesting discussion of code reuse vs. efficiency. I think that the way that I'm constructing the intermediate class, the efficiency argument is moot -- that is, the overhead of allocating an array of many objects is going to be swamped by everything else that's going on. But we'll see after I'm done when we get around to benchmarking the process.

This was followed by lunch. A lot of lunch. An enormous bone-in ribeye with a variety of sides that we passed around, including french fries, onion rings, broccoli, and some absolutely wonderful parmesan garlic macaroni and cheese that I want to figure out how to duplicate.

Then we had dessert. I wisely turned down the piece of chocolate cake the size of a small house and had the piece of carrot cake that was the size of an outbuilding. It too was wonderful.

In a little bit, I'm going to waddle back over to Northwestern Station and catch my train home.

God knows when I'll want to eat again. Not soon.

Katie really, really likes the little Graduates corn snacks. They're sort of like Cheetos for toddlers. But daisy_knotwise noticed a while back that when she's been eating them, she starts misbehaving a lot, so we stopped buying the things. That worked pretty well, except that Katie grabbed a can of them in the Wal-Mart recently and Gretchen remembered that she liked them, but not the subsequent misbehavior, so she went ahead and bought more of them.

And Katie gradually chowed her way through the can, misbehaving all the way. *sigh*

Last night, I picked up the empty can and carefully read the list of ingredients again, looking for anything suspect. The last ingredient on the list was "annatto color extract". So I went off to Google and found that a number of people have bad reactions to it, which might just explain the way Katie misbehaves after eating it.

(This is not to say that I trust everything I see on random websites that I google up, but rather to say that I'm willing to let them confirm my own observations from time to time.)

So just because it's a "natural" ingredient, it doesn't mean it should be on Katie's diet.

And from now on, it won't be.

Last night, Carol and John came up from Mukwonago to see the new baby and grab dinner, which was a lot of fun. We also got to cope with the toilet's flush mechanism breaking and the hotel's repair guy not answering his pager. The nice lady at the desk made a temporary replacement with paper clips which sort of worked for a while. It seems to be better now that I complained again this morning after the paper clips gave way some time last night.

Notice for sweetmusic_27: we had lunch at Michael's Frozen Custard. Good burgers, fine custard, and really stupidly good hot fudge. *sigh*

Now daisy_knotwise is off to the back room to take a nap with Katie. Julie's just finished a bottle and is sleeping it off in her bassinet in the front room here.

I think her eyes are blue, but they pick up so much color from everything else around (much like mine on occasion) that it's hard to be sure. This room is very beige...

We've only been living around here for 12 years or so. You'd think we'd have investigated all of the local restaurants by now. Well, not actually.

Last night, we continued the quest for a new Chinese buffet by heading up to Rand and Arlington Heights Road to try out one that is next to the now-closed Hancock Fabrics. It flunked. It was decidedly mediocre, although it was the second consecutive Chinese buffet that we went to that was serving flan.

Last weekend, we thought we'd try some of the alternative fast food. On Saturday, we went to Photo's Hotdogs at Wolf and Kensington. It passed the test for burgers -- at least, that's all we tried -- so it goes on the rotation. It certainly smelled right when we walked in there.

On Sunday, we planned to go to the Gyros Factory at Wolf and Central, but they're closed on Sunday. So we hit them for lunch on Saturday this week. Unfortunately, the gyros were a bit bland and dry, the burgers a bit small and also dry. Nice folks, but I wasn't thrilled by the food, so we'll probably not go by there again.

Ok, living here in Des Plaines, we're hunting for a better Chinese buffet. Our current favorite is the one in the bank building at Oakton and Lee, but there's room for improvement, as two buffets that we preferred have closed -- the one at Mt. Prospect and Rand as well as the King's Buffet at Golf and Elmhurst.

The problem is that a buffet that features a lot of sushi, shrimp, and crab isn't what we're looking for as I'm unlikely to eat the first and unable to eat the last two items. So the New China Buffet at Golf and Milwaukee is a bad choice, as is Senoya a bit further west on Golf.

Anyone know of something else in the neighborhood that would suit?

If you're looking for lunch (or maybe dinner, or maybe several dinners), by way of Instapundit, here's the Texas BBQ Monster Potato.

I suspect dinner at the food court tonight ahead of the WindyCon meeting won't be nearly as appetizing.

I picked up catalana at the train station and we headed out to Chili's where we met daisy_knotwise and Katie. After moving to a larger table because of the combination of baby and crutch, we ordered dinner and started our adventure. We waited quite some time after placing our orders before the waiter came back with a menu and told me that they had run out of the country fried steak. I looked at the menu and ordered a burger.

Several minutes later, the manager came by and told me that the kitchen staff was confused and that he had found the box of country fried steaks. Did I want that or did I want the burger? I asked for the steak, he apologized, and eventually food appeared.

Nicely, they did take my dinner off the total bill. :)

daisy_knotwise and I dropped by House of Szechwan, a new Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood and pronounced the food good. They did some unusual things -- for instance, my orange beef was served on a bed of noodles along with a bowl of rice -- but nothing that made me go "Ick!" The hot and sour soup wasn't the best I've had, but it was certainly serviceable, if more hot than sour.

After that, we ducked up to Home Depot where I found the right filter pad for our furnace humidifier. It's now installed and I predict that humidity levels in the house are about to improve abruptly.

We knew it was coming, because someone wants to build a bank on the property, but we didn't know when. Yesterday, when we tried to take catalana there for a postponed fajita dinner, we found that our favorite Mexican restaurant, Taqueria Fiesta, had finally been forced to close.

If we're really lucky, Salud -- the owner -- will decide to open up again somewhere else in the neighborhood. They originally came to the area to serve the fairly large Mexican population in the area, but the food was good and affordable, which meant that it was a great place to eat.

Our favorite local Mexican restaurant, Taqueria Fiesta, is closing next Saturday. Apparently, the owner of the building has sold it out from under them so they can build another bank on the site. That'll be the eighth one on Elmhurst Road between Oakton and Golf.

Frankly, I found the place much more useful as a Mexican restaurant.

daisy_knotwise and I tried out Armando's Pizza tonight for dinner. The crust was good, the sauce a bit skimpy (but if we hadn't tried a pizza with extra cheese, maybe that would have been better). The large pizza was enormous and about half of it is currently in our fridge.

We'll probably try them again, but in a pan or stuffed version instead of thin crust next time.

I came home last night and found that daisy_knotwise was lamenting the notable lack of spring-like weather. (And if you think she was annoyed, you should have seen fuzzbucket_cat trying to duck underneath the cold gale blowing in the back door!) However, I had a cunning plan.

We'd agreed to go out for dinner and I told her that I wanted to take her somewhere that would be a surprise. I drove to downtown Des Plaines. "Are we going to Leona's?" she asked.

"Nope." And I turned into the entrance to the new development downtown where I'd seen the sign for Cheeseburger in Paradise on my way home last week.

Ok, it may have been artificial spring. It may have lacked the ambiance of the original restaurant in Lahaina, Maui.

But it beat the heck out of the alternative. And there was live music on a Monday night.

And the onion strings were really good.

I went over to Rich's mom's house and knocked off eight games of APBA baseball today, splitting them to remain at .500.

daisy_knotwise asked if I wanted her to make stir fry or if we should go out for dinner and have the stir fry on Monday. Since the cleaning lady is coming tomorrow, I voted for fewer dishes, although -- in one of those perverse bits of logic that I occasionally come up with -- I ended up suggesting we go to one of the local Chinese buffets. (Gretchen's stir fry is not a Chinese buffer, nor is a Chinese buffet Gretchen's stir fry.)

When we got there, we discovered that the Chinese buffet had morphed into a Cici's Pizza, a buffet pizza chain that we weren't familiar with. I shrugged and suggested that we try it, since we've been looking for new local pizza to replace the pizzeria that closed due to a fire.

It's pretty much decent buffet pizza and the price was certainly low enough -- under $13 for both of us with sodas. The deep dish pizza was the best of the lot and actually worth ordering as carry out, with a lot of good spicy pizza sauce on top. The Caesar dressing for the salad had a nice bite. And the cinnamon rolls I had for dessert were really good, suggesting that they were probably really bad for me. :)

They also had an arcade in the back with an air hockey table.

I doubt we'll eat there often ourselves since there is better buffet pizza available about 20 minutes away at Perry's, but I might take the baseball league there for dinner under the right circumstances.

daisy_knotwise will be off to ISFiC's annual Picnicon up in Deerfield momentarily. Hope to see such of you as are in the Chicagoland area there!

(And many thanks to Gretchen for backing us up on this.)

I was sitting inside, reading e-mail and playing solitaire, when daisy_knotwise noted that the Bakeline plant not far from our home was baking something wonderful with apples and cinnamon. And the wonder of wireless networking means that the laptop can come out on the patio and I can just keep putting the red 7 on the black 8 (or something like that).

The good news is that aromas have very few calories.

Meanwhile, the cats seem happy that we're out here with them. I think.

We weren't going anywhere, but we'd read the review of Pilot Pete's in the Chicago Tribune and figured we'd head out to the Schaumburg Regional Airport and give it a try.

The decor includes a corrugated tin ceiling ("Look! Quonset the Hut!"), vintage posters, and large airplane models hanging from the ceiling. The menu is good-sized, with a number of sandwiches, salads, and entrees. I had the meat loaf with French onion soup, while daisy_knotwise had the cranberry-orange pork chop special and a salad. The soup was excellent as were the pork chops; the meat loaf was a bit salty -- not a surprise given the cheddar cheese and olives in the mix -- and might have been improved if I'd chanced trying the portobello mushroom gravy that it's normally served with. The twice-baked and garlic mashed potatoes were both just fine, while the steamed broccoli and carrots had been steamed a bit too long, but no more than I've seen at a lot of places.

Gretchen took one pork chop home so that she'd have room for dessert. The creme brulee was ok, but the warm apple crisp and ice cream was excellent, with signs of actual apples in its ancestry and not too sweet.

With tax, tip, and non-alcoholic drinks, we were just shy of a $50 tab, but it was a good meal. And you get to watch the light planes taking off and landing, which is a novel floor show.

Ok, after listening to yesterday's truck test, I've tried to fix up five tracks, mostly for level correction and reverb fixup. I'm really hoping this all balances this time.

I'm thinking RAM for dinner, probably a Tuscan Meatloaf sandwich, maybe a burger. There's a special on burgers tonight. And they're half an hour away...

daisy_knotwise, catalana, and I went to the Outback Steakhouse over on Higgins for dinner before dropping her at Union Station because the restaurant was close to the highway. Due to the odd configuration of parking, they have a complimentary valet service. I didn't pay much attention to what was on the ticket left in the car at the time, but noticed it as I was taking it out tonight:
( Oh, really? )

I went to Gand for Chris Proctor's fingerstyle guitar workshop cum concert, sponsored by Taylor Guitars. Damn, he's good. We'll see if I can actually incorporate anything that he spoke of in my own playing.

Afterwards, I met daisy_knotwise for a very late dinner at Omega. Although we were sitting in the non-smoking section, we were enveloped in smoke. I have no idea where it was coming from. I still stink.

On the way home, I got stopped waiting for a train, directly behind a car that wasn't about to pass its next emissions test, if the amount of unburned hydrocarbons coming out of the twin tailpipes was any indication.

I'm sure my throat will forgive me eventually.

shsilver recently recommended a new hamburger restaurant, Cheeburger Cheeburger, that opened in Glenview and was the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit by the Billy Goat Tavern. The good news was that they got to stay open; the bad news was that they don't get to open more franchises in the vicinity.
( Menu inside )