Since I won’t undergo the oral procedure until after St. Patrick’s Day I was thinking of possibly having one last hurrah before I am unable to drink for about a week or two (that in itself is sacrilege). This includes massive imbibing in Guinness… and of course we can’t have festivities without some good Irish food. Corned beef anyone? I’m sure I could dig up some other items to prep during the day as well.
And guess what? It’s on a Saturday… only person that I know of that has to work the next day would be Milady and obviously we wouldn’t keep her up too late ^_^
So… what are your thoughts on this? Interested? Not interested?
If so I will also be needing to look at a new piece for the tap as a pressure release seems to be stuck open and has been temporarily fixed with a band aid… literally a band aid is on there keeping the pressure valve closed.
Oh yeah, for some of you who might be noticing the Guinness monster on the sidebar… that is the new Guinness Fund & Other Activities donation button. ^_^
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next Tuesday I go in for my final fitting and whatnot. Making sure that the bite lines up and all of that other crap… and then I have about a 2-1/2 week reprieve before everything comes out in one shot. Saturday, 24 March at 8am is the day where I will be in immense pain but also will be very happy thereafter. Allegedly this is only going to take about three hours… but I think it will be longer… who knows.
Cache… I still have not had the chance to ask the big question about being in the room. As it stands now, I seem to be going into the same room every time and it’s pretty fuckin’ small… so I’m thinking maybe not. I’ll see if I might be able to get a camera brought in though for pictures during… but we shall see.
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the trade deadline has passed…
Todd Bertuzzi went to Detroit…
And I sure as hell that Giguere and Bryzgalov remain healthy for the rest of the season and into the playoffs because Anaheim just traded out Michael Wall (a rather good goaltender for their AHL affiliate) for Brad May, formerly with Colorado
more info soon…
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today is the day from hell for hockey fans around the league… the last day of trading before your roster is locked in for the final six weeks of the season. And so far there have been some interesting trades happening…
Georges Laraque from Phoenix to Pittsburgh for a forward and an eighth round draft pick***
Bill Guerin from St. Louis to San Jose for a first round draft pick and future considerations
Martin Biron from Buffalo to Philadelphia for an undisclosed draft pick
Ty Conklin from Columbus to Buffalo for an unannounced trade
Gary Roberts from Florida to Pittsburgh for Noah Welch
and rumors are swirling about Anaheim possibly being in the hunt for Todd Bertuzzi or Jason Blake
*** apparently it is being pointed out that there is no longer an eighth round in the draft. It has been revised to a third round draft pick.
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This is pretty much the win-loss records each team must meet to at least score the minimum number of points to make the playoff cut this year… some teams are pretty much close to total elimination…
Washington Capitals… Chicago Blackhawks… Phoenix Coyotes… Florida Panthers… St. Louis Blues…
So take a peek… and enjoy it (figures from James Mirtle’s blog)
Western Conference (95 points)
1. Nashville – 3-14-1
2. Detroit – 4-14-1
3. Anaheim – 6-12-1
4. Dallas – 9-12-0
5. Vancouver – 9-11-0
6. San Jose – 9-11-0
7. Minnesota – 10-9-0
8. Calgary – 11-9-0
9. Edmonton – 14-4-1
10. Colorado – 16-3-0
11. St. Louis – 17-3-0
12. Phoenix – 20-1-0
13. Chicago – 20-0-0
14. Columbus – Eliminated (max 93)
15. Los Angeles – Eliminated (max 90)
Eastern Conference (93 points)
1. Buffalo – 3-17-0
2. New Jersey – 4-14-1
3. Pittsburgh – 9-12-0
4. Ottawa – 8-11-1
5. Tampa Bay – 9-9-0
6. N.Y. Islanders – 11-8-1
7. Atlanta – 10-7-1
8. Toronto – 12-8-0
9. Carolina – 11-7-0
10. Montreal – 11-6-1
11. Boston – 14-6-1
12. N.Y. Rangers – 14-5-1
13. Florida – 16-3-0
14. Washington – 17-1-1
15. Philadelphia – Eliminated (max 81)
Obviously, the key for Anaheim is to try to win as many of the 9 remaining games against their division rivals… Dallas, San Jose, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The other games are just icing on the cake ^_~
EDIT: okay… it seems that nine players around the league are being sent through 24-hour waivers before being demoted to farm teams. Most of them are names I don’t know… but there are a few that stand out for me:
Marc Chounaird (VAN) – he used to be fairly decent… enough that I recognized the name… but his numbers have not added up this season and that has a lot of Canucks fans screaming for his head.
Petr Cajanek (STL) – this guy proved to be good enough for St. Louis to have him sign a multi-year deal with them… but now that St. Louis is all but out of the playoff race time to free up some cap space for some possible interesting trades that could take place in the next 24 hours.
Micheal Leighton (PHI) – started the season with Anaheim… got bumped down and picked up by Nashville off of waivers in November. Bumped down again and picked up by Philadephia off of waivers in January. Not our best back-up goaltender… and we don’t need him since we happen to have two healthy goaltenders currently and a nice back-up by the name of Wall. ^_^
Jason Krog (NYR) – Krog… Krog… Krog… why do I know that name? Do you recognize it? If you flashback to before the lockout you might recall him wearing an Anaheim jersey back when they were the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim for a couple of years. He wasn’t bad… but he wasn’t great either. During the lockout and the year following the lockout he played over in Europe and came back into the NHL this season with Atlanta where he didn’t quite play as well as hoped. Got bumped down and picked up by New York in January off of waivers.
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So the trade deadline is fast approaching… 27 February is the last day of trading. The one big trade thus far has been Peter Forsberg from the Philadelphia Flyers to the Nashville Predators. Not a big fan of Nashville… and the trade was an expensive one for a player who is questionable in terms of his health. He’s been having foot problems for the past year or so that still aren’t working out for him.
Anaheim is rumored to be looking at a couple of different players around the league but unfortunately they don’t have any first round draft picks that they can give up… if I recall they gave up their first round pick for 2007 to Edmonton when they got Chris Pronger last summer. I’ll cover more on the Anaheim in a moment though…
As we are approaching the end of the regular season, and some teams that started out hot are sinking quickly… and some teams that started out crappy have definitely picked up a head of steam. Unfortunately for some of those teams that are picking up the head of steam, it might be too little too late. One case of this are the St. Louis Blues. They were the worst team of the Western Conference and the word suck could not even begin to describe them… but something has happened and they are within ten points of the eighth playoff spot and a little over 45 days until the end of the season? It’s possible…
So if you are St. Louis… you have the opportunity to take a run at the playoffs with the current line-up OR decide to pass this year and you start dumping players that are going to be unrestricted free agents (UFA) this summer and get some young prospects and draft picks to start fresh. St. Louis does have some really good players on their roster, sadly it was not an easy task for them to win early in the season due to poor coaching and the lack of communication amongst the players on the ice. But as I mentioned before, several of those players are going UFA after this season and will likely get picked up by other teams who would be willing to pay for these players.
Personally? I’d start dumping and trying to pick-up draft picks as quickly as possible. Less than a week until the trade deadline? Yeah… time to start getting trades out there… and not to have the asking prices for these players too high where you are going to get screwed this season and in the post-season when the players are no longer with your team and you got nothing for them.
Now moving on to the Anaheim Ducks… this was the team that you would have to beat in order to prove yourself at the beginning of the season. They had it all… offense… defense… and two really good goaltenders. Then things started to fall apart around the end of December when they had several key players go out with injuries. They struggled for about a month before the All-Star break and have yet to fully recover even today. Anaheim still is playing a physical game but their offense seems to be slipping… and a lot of mismanagement of the puck when they have possession.
Another issue is when they are on the defense they seem to be creating one hell of a clusterfuck in their zone. One player on the opposite team should not be able to skate through three Ducks players and shoot the puck on net… if not score. This is a breakdown on all accounts. Could it be that Anaheim is suffering the burnout coming into the end of the regular season? It seems like it from where I am sitting. They are still a great team but it’s possible that they don’t have what it takes to make it through an entire season on the top and their playoff performance will suffer as well because of this.
Here’s to hoping for a big turn around in the next month and a half…
And one last bit of hockey news before we move on. This one came across my hockey news feed this morning and I nearly fell out of my chair laughing… it reminded me of the final game in Slap Shot… Goalie ticketed for lewdness after mooning fans
And we move from hockey to cooking… an odd transition I know… but what can ya do, right?
Yesterday I received in the mail some more cookbooks that I had ordered up a couple of weeks ago…
Charlie Trotter’s – a cookbook by Chef Trotter that encompasses all courses of a meal…
Charlie Trotter’s Meat and Game – a cookbook that focuses on meats… lots of meats. Poultry, some fish, and animals of the four-legged variety. Can I just state for the record that black truffles and caviar are not going to be a regular item within my kitchen? Why? Have you looked at the prices for that stuff? One black truffle would kill me financially… don’t even think about the white truffles… those are even more expensive.
One good thing is that some of the recipes are calling for black truffle oil… something somewhat easier to get hold of than the actual truffles…
Charlie Trotter’s Desserts – nothing but desserts… think I might have to have a dessert gathering one evening just to test some of these out.
The Farallon Cookbook – yet another cookbook but this one is from the San Francisco restaurant. Ingredients that are not as off the wall as the Charlie Trotter books… and definitely not as difficult as the one’s from El Bulli… this is a book that I think I will definitely give a shot at attempting the stuff in there.
So what does all of this mean to everyone else? Well basically it means that I have a lot of guinea pigs for testing out foods on. Ha ha… suckers… :P
But don’t worry… I have co-workers to torture… I mean taste my cuisine…
But this also means that I’m going to be going after some different approaches to this year’s OMGWTFBBQ and the way that they are prepared. I am fully willing to set shit on fire too… was toying with that a bit the other night when I failed at properly preparing the crocodile tail fillets. Seems that shit will get overcooked rather easily. Who the fuck knew? I know I didn’t. So it’s now a matter of spending money of different fish just for testing purposes… but nothing overly expensive ^_~
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Okay, went in today for my second impressions. A bit harsher than last week’s impressions but apparently got some good impressions that will make the new teeth fit in quite nicely.
Have an appointment next week for wax molds and whatnot. Thankfully that one is in the afternoon so I’d only miss like the last thirty minutes of work instead of having to leave halfway through the day to return for a couple of hours…
And here is the big one… the day that everything is taken care of will be on a Saturday. The dentist is at another office on Friday’s and is technically off on Saturday’s… but he’s making an exception in this case and has warned his wife ahead of time. But we are looking at about another three weeks or so for the final procedure. Didn’t get the chance to ask about documenting that day yet. Dentist had to head over to another patient…
Will update more later on if I get the chance…
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So last week was the major news of the orthodontic procedure that is going to be taking place in the coming weeks… and this week something not as major but rather an unexpected twist in this thing I call my life…
I am known for the long hair on the top of my head with the short hair on the sides and back, right? Well… as of Friday that long hair has been cut off. So bloody short I can’t even run my fingers through it…
So why was it cut? Alcohol was a contributor I’d say… but also the fact that I knew it was getting out of control. The last bleaching of the hair did some pretty nasty damage to my hair that didn’t seem to recover properly and was just getting worse as time went by. Why not start with a fresh head of hair? And no… had not clue that Ms. Spears was pulling the same crap that night as well… was kind of annoyed to see that on major news networks on Saturday night… so she cut her hair. You don’t see everyone going apeshit when I cut my hair off…
And that’s about all my news from this weekend… tomorrow I go back into see the dentist and will try to get more of a timeline that we are working with and will let folks know if interested.
My weekend mainly consisted of running around in World of Warcraft trying to collect all fifty Coins of Ancestry for the lunar celebration in-game. This included trying to get into Horde territories… deep within Horde cities… not a fun task when one is not part of the Horde. As of yesterday I had forty-nine of the coins. The last coin is going to require some assistance from Cachecrash for me to get through the door since he seems to have the key.
But nothing screams paranoia like being stealthed walking through high-level dungeons trying not to catch aggro from the mobs in there. Almost caught the attention of some hellhounds in one dungeon yesterday but somehow they decided to keep going after stopping and staring directly at me for several seconds. Had the finger on the “dash” button… and knew that I were to go I’d have to fly and not stop for anything… no matter what. Ahhh… how I do love Blackrock Depths. Hated that one more than I did Blackrock Spire. And don’t even get me started on the upper levels of Temple of Atal’Hakkar that was nothing but dragonkins and whelps.
I’d like to point out to Cache in case he was wondering… died only twice on this entire journey… and that was to corpse-drag myself through Orgrimmar back to the Valley of Wisdom. Thunder Bluff was one of the easier places to get in to… took the North Lift and hightailed my ass to Elder Rise. Somehow the Horde gave up on the chase… until I decided to leave the place. And let’s just say that a group of about twenty Horde guards were all piled up dead at the bottom of the lift due to a nice long fall as they were trying to chase me. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing so hard. Thunder Bluff just became a lot more unguarded thanks to my antics. Of course Undercity was the easiest since no one really guards the entrance until you get past the throne room. Would be curious though to use the transporter there to go to Silvermoon City… am curious how quickly one might be able to run through Silvermoon City before getting one’s ass handed to them by the Blood Elf guards ^_~
Hey Cache… think we can take that one group in WPL now so I can get my key for Scholomance?You’re 66… I’m 64… should be an easy quest, right? We just need to kill the one bitch… and try to fend off the other crap around her. I’m sure we could pick off the group bit by bit to quickly get to her…
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In this post I’m writing about the gift that I was supposed to open on February 14th but only got around to opening last night… and there’s more but I’ll post about that later on… it’s about the food (or lack of food) prepared on the 14th…
It seems that the spark is still there after nearly six years of being married and being together for almost eight years in July when she is willing to plop down the money on something that is a hobby of mine… and not only get me something I will enjoy… but something quite expensive that I will enjoy as well…
I present to you El Bulli Volume 3: 1998 – 2002
The bloody thing is an eleven pound book of wonders and amazement. I’ve got the cd-rom that came with it with me at work right now so I can start to go through the recipes to figure out what I might want to attempt in the near future. This series of books is a chef’s wet dream… the dishes that are in here are so intriguing and beautiful one cannot begin to fathom where to start in the books themselves. I am just glad that the books were translated from Spanish to English. If you were lucky enough to get the original books when they started to come out then they came in only one language… and if you didn’t know Spanish you were kind of fucked.But what exactly is El Bulli? El Bulli is the restaurant owned by renowned chef Ferran Adria. This man has pieced together some of the best takes on food over the past couple of decades. His food is adored by foodies around the world… you just have to travel to Roses, Spain to enjoy it.
The El Bulli books started to come out with the volume I now own… and Chef Adria then began the progression backwards to 1983 over a course of three volumes. Since then he and his team of culinary artists have put out two more volumes to cover 2003 – 2005 (the 2005 book has not been translated into English yet) and all the volumes of El Bulli come with a cd-rom of the recipes and more… like a progression of how that dish came to become what you see within the book.
For me I’ll probably start over in the desserts and work my way into the entrees.
Fellow foodies… the grail is here… and it is known as El Bulli…
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So here are the steps that I am going to be going through based upon what I recall from yesterday’s conversation with my dentist…
1) full x-rays and initial impressions of the teeth and jaw line (did this yesterday)
2) verify the impressions are still good after the crap is gone from my jawline (infection… yummy!!!)
3) check molds and compare to my bite pattern… there is a slight overbite and we have to make sure nothing will get in the way and whatnot…
4) prepping my jawline for the massive trauma it’s going to undergo… and being the process of bone grafting in case I want to get implants done at a later date. Would rather have done just in case I do decide to do that rather expensive procedure.
5) the final day… this one will be an all day process I am figuring. Full extraction of everything in the mouth… put the bone grafts in place… and install the healing dentures. This is one that some folks are curious about because I will not be fully under… not unless I wanted to pay out an additional $600 on top of the bill that I’m already going to be paying… O_o
So how much is this going to be costing me (and Milady too)? The total after insurance deals with their part is $4,820.00
I knew it was going to be pricey going into this… just didn’t realize how pricey. But it’s better than the “over $10,000 without insurance” that was brought up yesterday. I nearly keeled over when I heard that figure.
But what about eating? At this point in time I’m not sure what I can or cannot eat… currently I am living on soft foods that are not requiring a lot of chewing. Minimal chewing is good for me… ^_^
Eventually I’ll be able to start eating things like steak again… and (here’s the shocker!!!) desserts. Will I though? Probably… because I won’t have that worry of what might shoot through my jaw in pain.
As for what I will be able to eat immediately AFTER the procedure… I am going to guess not much. Soup… apple sauce… baby food… that kind of stuff. Hmmm… wonder if I can live on apple sauce and KFC’s mashed potatoes only? Will probably be going alcohol and tobacco free for about a week as well for the entire healing process…
So that’s about all I can think of for now…
a) to those wishing me luck… thank you. I’m not brave for undergoing this procedure… I’m stupid for letting it get this far. Just a wee bit of clarification on that ^_~
b) I’m hoping to have the final procedure done on a Friday… that way I can have two days to rest and heal up before having to deal with work.
c) as much as I’d love to have this documented somehow visually… not sure what they will allow. I’ll ask though… maybe Cache will want to be the photo guy. Definitely no video of this one… no one needs to hear me screaming like a little girl. Besides, this is going to be an all day thing I think.
d) if people are curious about updates once we get a final date in place, I’m sure Milady will be glad to give them. I’ll be hooking her up with an account on here so that she can post as well if she wants to. And given that we are literally around the corner from the office, I’m sure she could use the time way from my screams of pain for a while to grab a bite to eat and do whatever. Cache doesn’t want to be around during the aftermath (you pussy!!!)… but we’ll see. And Sally would probably be willing to help Milady out if she needs to run errands for anything.
That it? I think so… any other questions… please let me know and I’ll post up answers when I can…
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