Tony’s Journal

HOLY COW I am going to Europe.

?!

Yeah so Matt and Charlie have been planning this trip to Hungary for some time and had been inviting us. We didn’t pay it much mind, honestly, because a) it is unusual for us to go anywhere outside Wake County, and b) . . . well, this part has already been put into comic form in which Ean discusses the plans with Charlie and Matt; the comic explains this better than I can.

But then the wheels of progress were slowly moved by a still mysterious force* and the lads booked themselves a trip by cobbling together 2 tickets out of their friend CJ’s frequent flier miles. (* the force is not so much mysterious as it is Ean, I think) Once those guys were booked, there was no reason for us not to. Well, except for the fact that I am super conservative with money, always saying things like “I am out of money” when really it is more like “if I spend some more money I am going to get all whiny because I am not saving as much as I wanted to.” I am currently trying to put a lot towards retirement while simultaneously paying down some substantial but manageable credit card debt.

I can’t speak for Billy, but I can speak for me when I can say that I convinced myself to go by asking myself a question:

Which will I regret more in a year, 5 years, 25 years: spending a couple grand that I wasn’t planning on, or not going to Europe?

So that sealed it. Billy and I got on the horn with Ean on Saturday night and synchronized our flight plans (HOLY CRAP 9 hours across the Atlantic and 10 in the other direction, plus a leg on each end in each direction). We will be there for 9 nights and 8 days, not counting travel days.

Where is “there?” I don’t know, somewhere in this general area. I know that we are flying into and out of Budapest, and we are gonna visit a couple other cities (Vienna and Prague have been suggested). We’re not gonna try to hit up too much; quality over quantity, you know.

I am excited to visit Austria. It’s about damned time I got some use out of my 5 years of high-school German. Also there is a cemetery there where a freaking all-star cast of musicians are buried: Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart (part of him, maybe), Schubert, Strauss(es), and most importantly, Falco.

Luckily everyone in Europe speaks English, so I hear, so that will be comfortable. I just need to buy a hat with USA #1 all over it, stars and stripes, etc.

Anyway, should be good. Jokes about ham and math in a foreign land!

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Yeah, I forgot about writing about New Orleans, but I did put photos up:

Here they are

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I know where I want to build a vacation home. I will sit on the porch in a white suit, with a cigar.

Right here.

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What the hell?

Okay, so everyone remembers the old TV ads with Orville Redenbacher. I saw a new one the other day and thought to myself “that’s weird, I thought he was dead.”

He is. The dude has been dead for 12 years. And they just CGI-ed him into a new commercial. It’s horrifying. It looks completely unnatural. The idea as I understand it is to make people who remember the old commercials — like me — go “hey, that’s cool, I remember that dude, and look what they can do nowadays with computers!”

Instead, it’s more like “cause this is thriller, thriller night, girl I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try.”

By the way, even though it’s paramount to carefully make it look like undead Orville is actually in the present day, they just slap a iPod on him. And he dances around like. . . it kind of has a Weekend at Bernie’s feel.

And yet! Someone at corporate headquarters watched this and said “yes, this is a good thing to put on TV.”

See for yourself!

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So! For the first time in a long time, I threw stuff together to cook an actual dish. I am always throwing stuff together for meals, but not often actually cooking a meal rather than assembling it.

Last week we went to Cappola’s, and the lads bought some calzones, and I thought to me: “man that calzone looks delicious and not nutritious.” This planted the seed of thought in my head: I Should Make A Calzone That Is Healthy Enough That I Will Eat It.

I bought an onion and a green pepper at Kroger. Mandy took me there, as we had been driving around aimlessly and that gave us an aim. I don’t usually like Kroger on account of it smells like the unwashed masses, but they have cleaned that place up a lot, turns out. I choped the onion, Mandy chopped the pepper, and I skilleted that up for a while to soften the cell walls or cell membranes or the ribosomes or mitochondria.

I cooked up some chicken with some Montreal Steak Seasoning. This is an okay thing because a steak is a lot like chicken inasmuch as they are both meat. Marinated that and grilled it up.

Made some pizza dough. Tip: don’t forget to add water or else you be staring at the bowl trying to remember why your dough is not so much dough as a bowl full of flour with a small lump in the middle.

I let the dough rise for a bit, made two sizable circles of dough, and heaped some chicken, onions, and peppers on there, and topped with with some mozzarella cheese. (Low fat, of course, but not fat free. Fat free shredded cheese is basically made of plastic. When you cook it, it turns into tie wraps.) Then I went ahead and folded them over to make that famous half-moon shape, tried to pinch the edges together with a fork, and slashed the tops a bit to allow steam to get out.

I put them in the oven at arbitrary heat for arbitrary minutes.

When they looked good and done, I pulled them out and sliced one open and ate it and OH MY GOD IT WAS DELICIOUS. A++++++ will make again.

I am proud that I threw something together and it worked. I mean, there was little chance that it wouldn’t, based on what went into it, especially since I am a dude who can make a cheesecake without failure. But still! I feel a sense of accomplishment.

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