Carterpants

It seems like every summer tends to slip away before we notice, but this last month zipped by at ludicrous speed. We decided to put the brakes on the schedule train for one weekend and do nothing, literally. One weekend with no obligations, to-do lists, etc.. We glanced at our upcoming weekends schedule and quickly realized we were completely booked until mid-September!!

We celebrated our lazy weekend with a few recipes from Jillian’s new cookbooks (if you ask nicely I just might type them up for you!) A nice and light crab dip started things off while we waited for the hoisin-glazed, BBQ baby back ribs to cook up on the grill. I was a bit leery about this hoisin recipe on two accounts: the instructions called for 4 cloves of garlic mashed into the sauce, and they wanted you to simmer the ribs in water first. I swallowed my doubts and gave the original recipe a fair shot. Sure enough this process produced some of the most tender and juicy ribs I’ve ever had! The sauce was amazing and certainly gave the dish a very oriental flavor. I packed away nearly 3/4th of the slab they were that good.

Oscar and Tito even had a few nibbles.

So… I couldn’t go the whole weekend without getting one project knocked out I decided to tackle the inevitable integration of Window 7 to my main computer. You see, Final Fantasy 14 is hitting the market late September, and I’m going to be all up on that shit ASAP. One minor issue though.. only the PC version of the game hits in September, the PS3 version doesn’t come out until NEXT MARCH. Are you kidding me?! So I’ve had to accept the fact that I will be running Win7 just to play this game.

No biggy right? That’s why I bought this ridiculously large hard drive and partitioned it out.. some space for Fedora, some storage space, and a little slice for Windows. I knew some day I would get back into PC gaming so why fight it right? Oh, but we’re talking Windows here so that means there’s bound to be a fight. Sure as shit this glorious blast from frustration-days past spews across my screen during the install process:

Its like I never left

Fabulous. I haven’t even picked the partition to install on and ka-boom, Windows is already making me shake my head and smirk.

After a few reboots the install process hobbles along to the partition screen. I’m presented with my available options and expect to see that cute little slice of disk I’ve quarantined just for such an occasion… but I see nothing. Nothing? Wait WTF I purposely kept my logical partitions smaller than my physical partition for this specific reason! Since Windows refuses to read the ext3/4 file system I had to reboot back into Fedora to double check my partitioning scheme.

Well shit.

Sure, I left the logical volumes and volume group smaller than my physical volume… but that does you no good if you format the entire physical drive as ext4!!!! Damnit!

Instead of formatting my drive and losing all the sweet customizations I’ve done over the last 9 months I decided just to visit good ol’ NewEgg and order the smallest SATA drive I could find. Looks like this adventure will resume next weekend!

To celebrate the Day of the Fasha (the what?).. the Fasha… (oh the FATHER, right) we’re going to have a grill-out at our place. Hopefully the weather cooperates, seeing that it hasn’t in the last few days. Going to try something new on the grill today, Hot Sausage Burgers and Cheesy Bacon Bombers, along with the tried and true beer brats, cheddar brats, and home-made potato salad (sorry, I can’t give out that recipe for fear of my life!)

Hot Sausage Burgers

Mix it all up (minus the buns, Einstein), mold into 1″ thick patties and toss them on the grill. Since you’re working with pork here be sure to get these to at least 160 degrees internal temp. When they’re almost done slap on the slice of mozza’ and enjoy.

Cheesy Bacon Bombers

Mix it all up, make 1″ thick patties, grill them to your liking. Using the pre-cooked bacon allows you to cook the ground beef to your desired doneness, otherwise you’d need to ensure the bacon was completely cooked as well.

Mother nature decided to dump some significant rain on us this weekend, so a majority of my yard work plans were snuffed out. We decided to run some shopping errands instead and get some house work done. On-call wasn’t bad at all, which means I’m doomed next week. We did have a power outage scare but they were able to get our backup power systems on-line before stuff started to shut down. We even got some kabobs grilled up on Sunday afternoon just to show mother nature she can’t keep us down forever!

This weekend was busy, only in the regards of we played hard

Saturday we finally got a game of OOTS in at Rob’s place. Before we started Rob took Ulmer and I through his mountain bike trail carved out of the woodlands behind his house. Now, I’ve not rode a bike in literally 10 years so I was taking personal bets on what bone I would break. We made it back alive but slightly winded.

We implemented some rules aimed at reducing the game time, however that didn’t seem to help much. Another 7 hour game with 6 players! There was more PVP this game (due to yours truly) and the end result was closer than anticipated, but I believe only 9 points separated 1st from last.

Sunday we went to Dale’s to celebrate Margy’s birthday, a la pork chops and cold ones. I brought over my homemade BBQ sauce for its first test. The Sweet but Sassy was a hit, but the Death sauce wasn’t quite worthy of the name “Death”. Looks like its back to the drawing board for that one, but it was still very tasty.

Sounds like J and I will be hitting the midnight premier of Harry Pooooter! I’ll let you know how it is!

After a few tweets/FBSU’s (Facebook Status Updates) about grilling out today, I got a few PM’s, @replies asking what I use to season my burger? Apparently some people are very passionate about what goes into their burgers, so here we go..

Jim Baldridge’s Secret Seasoning
Salt, cracked black pepper, dried onions, garlic powder, dries rosemary and thyme.

Cayenne Pepper (from Archer Farms even!)

Cajun Mix from Gourmet Blends
Salt, brown sugar, chili peppers, garlic, onions, paprika, dried bell peppers

I toss 1-2 Tbsp each of Jim’s and the Cajun Mix along with 1/2 Tbsp of Cayenne into a Magic Bullet cup, mix it all together for a few seconds and work into the ground beef. Let the burgers sit in the fridge for at least an hour to absorb all the goodness.

Before tossing them on the grill give them a light brushing of Worcestershire.