What I Got on My Vacation

Here's something of a throwback post, a few of the shirts I picked up on the last couple of vacations!!!

First up is a couple of shirts I got from last year, while we were in Tennessee. Pigeon Forge, in addition to all the arcades and mini golf and go carts, has several gift shops competing for your business. One we stopped into had 3 for $10 tee shirts advertised. Not all of them were, the better ones went for more.

I'd done an inventory of my shirts not long before we'd gone, and discovered I didn't have any red shirts. Found this one with the Smokies memorialized on it.

The rest of these are all from this year's trip to Texas. First up is also the highest price tag on this whole post from the Johnson Space Center.

The next three all came from our final stop in Galveston. One of the things we kind of look for while vacationing is restaurant chains we like that you just don't find here. One of these is Cici's Pizza buffet. Looking on the map, discovered one of those there, and just a bit over from it was a Goodwill. My wife had taken a little joke of a purse that kept spilling stuff out, so she wanted to go in to see if she could find anything. Shockingly, she did!!! I had the thought of looking for another shirt while we were there, but I ended up with three!!! First up has nothing to do with Texas, except for the fact that it is Sheldon's state of origin. It's a little small on me, but I couldn't resist!!!

The next couple are quite retro, but both in excellent condition. The one from 2009 is about as quintessential Texas as you can get, and also a color of shirt I don't have much of in my wardrobe!!!

The last one has two sides to it, and is also pretty Texas, with the longhorn skull on the front.

The back has what is now my only Harley Davidson branded shirt, along with Walker, Texas Lawyer, whatever that is!!!

In other news, I really have far too many tee shirts...

At Long Last, My Search is Over

Back when I was around 11 to 13 years old, my father was working as a field serviceman for an electronics company. Sometimes during summer vacation he would take me along on service calls. This one time we were out on a call in West L.A., and around lunch time my dad asks me what I'd like to eat. Pizza, I reply. Can't go wrong with pizza, right??? One of the guys at the customers' place says, "There's a good pizza place a couple blocks up called Chicago Pizza Works, you should go there." It came recommended, so that's where we went. At my tender young age, I didn't know from Chicago pizza, I though pizza was pizza. Little did I know. I learned that day, and my world was forever changed. Chicago deep dish, thick as a cake, with just a skin of crust, with cheese, sauce and toppings swimming within. Angels wept. Quite simply, it was the best pizza I'd ever had.

Around the time my firstborn was about the age I was at the time of my pizza awakening, it occurred to me that with the advent of the internet, I could find the place and return. I easily found the address, and packed up the family for an amazing lunch. We made it out there, only to discover that it was long since closed. I had built it up to them pretty much like the first paragraph, and I was disappointed. That seemed to set off a pattern of disappointment, with every place claiming to have deep dish pizza actually having fill-up-on-bread thick crust.

So, this was another huge attraction for this year's vacation trip to Chicago!!! We're going to go to a get a genuine Chicago deep dish pizza in Chicago!!! More than one to choose from, but from the Yelp stars and proximity to our lodging, Giordano's won out.

Ended up being the evening of the day we'd gone up to Milwaukee to see The Fonz. I'll give a bit of the back story, since I've not done a lot besides high points and the Six Flags Great America fail. The night we got there, we ended up about two hours later that the time we had planned on, thanks to the crap bag car rental I'd booked, Payless. Do not rent from them. Rat bastards stranded us at the airport for more than an hour, and told baldfaced lies every time we phoned them. It ended up being around 2 in the morning when we finally got checked into our room. The next morning was the pass in review ceremony, fairly bright and early to get there on time and get parked, in the hall and everything. After that, the man-boy had liberty until 1900 hours. We went to lunch with my parents and him, he selected Steak & Shake, which we had enjoyed on our last Florida trip. Following that, we went to see Jurassic World. The wife & I both dozed off a little bit during that, and we ended up bailing out a few minutes before the actual end, because showing up AWOL on his first day would have been a bad thing. One other main thing the fresh faced sailor wanted was his laptop and his MP3 player. It was not allowed in boot camp, and subsequently could not be handed off to him on base, but could be given to him at the airport before his departure to South Carolina... at zero dark 30!!! After the few hours of sleep the night before and the theater nap, I got another couple hours in, then back to O'Hare. Thank you to the USO for having a lounge there were I was able to meet up with him for the hand-off!!! Turns out that military families are allowed to pass airport security to be with the servicemen until they actually depart, so I ended up hanging out with him until around 0600, then Chicago traffic back to our lodging and FINALLY a bit of sleep. Another sleep deprivation experiment!!! Got up around 2:00 in the afternoon, and headed up to Wisconsin. Got turned a bit on the way back, and added probably another hour or so to the drive, and finally made it to the famed Giordano's. It had started raining on the final part of the drive, after being overcast all day.

One thing to know about a true deep dish pizza, it will take a while in the oven. After the side trip short cut detour, everyone was already hungry. In addition to the pizzas, we also got an order of mozzarella sticks and cheese garlic bread. I don't know if I've ever seen this kind of perfection in mozzarella sticks, not in the flavor or construction, but in the serving temperature. Usually they come out flaming hot and, unable to be resisted, burn the taste buds off your tongue and the skin off the roof of your mouth, but these were perfection in edibility!!!

That first pizza pic is now the lock screen on my phone.

My parents got a small Chicago Classic, that has pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers & onions. I could take or leave the 'shrooms, but I don't do green peppers, they have a lingering after effect on me for a day, quite unpleasant, even if I'm fine with them while downing them.

We got a medium Meat & More Meat, that has pepperoni, salami, sausage & bacon, and a small Bacon BBQ Chicken with BBQ-basted chicken, bacon & balsamic onions, with BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce. Oh. Oh yes!!! Truly AMAZING!!! It was SO good, but it's a lot. I may have only had one slice of each, or perhaps I split a second slice of the meat masterpiece with my wife... or maybe I put away a whole second slice by myself!!! It was a pizza lovers' utopia!!!

We had enough leftovers for something like three more meals, and reheating didn't diminish the magic!!! They also will ship out frozen pizzas for a fairly reasonable price (considering they aren't that cheap to begin with, and if you were to factor in airfare to Chicago, it's a relative bargain), something I will likely do at some special occasion in the future.

So what was the verdict of the rest of the family??? After hearing me go on about Chicago deep dish pizza in such glowing prose for so many years, they agree that I did not oversell it!!!

Feed My Frankenstein

Subtitle: The Great Linux Experiment




As you may recall, my oldest boy got many computer upgrades for Christmas. This resulted in a rather large pile of old parts. A couple of weekends ago,I decided to apply some trickle down (or, if you prefer, trickle up) technology upgrades. The younger's comp is rather sluggish, so I decided to upgrade it's hardware. One of the old memory modules bumped it up to the coveted 512 range. The old video card also gave way to better things. I did both of these at the same time, and was rewarded with no video signal. After much trial and error, things worked right, with one exception: Windows decided that the changes were significant enough that it could be a whole new system, and demanded re-activation. OH yea, as an added bonus, in the course of these changes, it lost the network card and sound card drivers. Long story short, (or short upgrade long) it took several hours to do a relatively simple upgrade.

After all that, you'd think I'd have had enough. Not so, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided that there was more fun to be had with leftovers. I think it may have been the fact that it was a rainy afternoon. Still having a perfectly viable motherboard and processor as well as extra video cards and smallish hard drives without number, I ventured into the basement storage area. From the dank depths, I retrieved a computer I had trash picked a few years back. Primarily I had got it for the case itself, as well as the A drive, which I never seem to have enough of, even though they are almost never used. Having acquired it from out of the rain and never done a thing with it, I first connected it and fired it up. Worked just fine, although it was an interesting history lesson. It was running Windows 95, which I have no experience with, and featured ISA type cards, as well as a passive heat sink on the processor. After a bit of snooping to see what was contained therein, I unceremoniously yanked out its innards, and was shocked at how well the motherboard fit in its place.

For an operating system, I selected a free downloaded Linux version called Ubuntu. You download it and burn it to a CD, insert it into a CD drive before the operating system has started on any computer, and it runs "live" without being fully installed on the hard drive from the CD. I've been wanting to try this for a while, and here was the perfect opportunity. It takes some time to start up, but it was an impressive and quite different experience from Windows. Upon starting, it immediately recognized the video and network cards. The sound card, I know worked at least once, but not having any media on this computer didn't have much chance to explore. Many idiosyncrasies that I have yet to completely work out, such as not seeming to be able to access the A drive to save or retrieve pictures (Or any other) files from, and the pop-up blocker that came on when I attempted to add a picture to this post. Also, Java and Flash would need to be installed. Since I'm running it from a CD, there is no point in attempting this right now. A lot of the things that it comes with work remarkably well, such as the spell checker, which tells me every time I misspell a word.



Running from a CD causes some delay in running. I have attempted several times to install it on the hard drive. It acts as though it installs fine, but every time afterward, it gives a message of boot drive failure. Don't know why. I'll try the users forum and see if anyone has an answer. After I see if this will post from Linux.