jasonbutler42

The Fatted Calf is for sale!

Recieved from their mailing list this evening:

Message:
The Fatted Calf For Sale?

Yes, it’s true. After 21 years as owner of the legendary restaurant, Kathy Sellenriek is ready to pass the torch.

So if you or someone you know is a die-hard calfburger fan that might be interested in taking over the tradition, please contact Kathy at 314-726-1141.

For full details on this story, please visit our website www.FattedCalfBurgers.com

Thank you!

The Fatted Calf Management

Let’s hope they get someone worthy to buy them because I sure would miss those Calf Burgers!

My sister has finally found a place to live! i mean, a place that isn’t my house! Alice is with her and her son right now at Our Lady’s Inn.

This is a huge step for my sister, and it’s exactly what she needs. Hopefully she will come out of this adventure with the life skills necessary to make it on her own (and not need to live with me any more!).

I proud of her for getting this far, and good luck to her in starting the rest of her life.

I was recently contacted by my father and half-sister from California through MySpace. The internet is weird like that and I half expected this day would eventually come. So come in, look around. There’s probably not as much information here as you’d like, but we’ll be exchanging information as time goes on. Feel free to leave a comment saying, “howdy!”

You can reach me through Jabber or Google Talk as jasonbutler42@gmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasonbutler42.

I mentioned in a recent tweet that the Rocktoberfest labels were printed.

This was an insane amount of fun to do and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. However, the actual Rocktoberfest in liquid form was less than stellar. I think it needs to age a little more and hopefully the it will carbonate more before the Rock Band party on Feb. 24.

Next up is the Irish Stout. I’m thinking something Star Wars related.

A few folks from work have convinced me to go to PAX 2008 this year. I ma continually fascinated by the Penny Arcade story – two guys who made a comic and got unbelievably famous. It reminds me of why I love the democratic nature of the Internet where, unlike the natural universe, the choicest gold nuggets actually float above the flotsam.

So I have a ton of stuff to do before PAX this year:

• Register for PAX (before March 31)
• Book a flight
• Book a hotel
• Buy a Nintendo DS (I hear there’s lots of waiting around and time to be killed)
• Set Alice up with a blog of her own
• Plan my other family oriented vacation (I’m thinking of renting a house on the beach for a week)

Much of these items require cold hard cash, and I hope my impending promotion brings with it some big bucks. Finding out that I’m at the bottom of my pay grade was more than a little disheartening. Also, not having traveled much at all in my 28 years, booking a flight and a hotel seems an arcane sport, like bow fishing or quiddich. The airlines freak me out, especially with all the changing regulations and maneuvers regarding electronics. I’m hoping my travel companions, who actually do have a great deal of travel experience, can help me out because this kind of stuff is so far out of my comfort zone it would, under normal circumstances, prevent me from embarking on a trip like this at all. But this is PAX. This is a chance to see some amazing stuff and coagulate with members of my species. If I’d given this thought I would probably have said no.

I forced Alice to read Gabe’s last post about his anxiety. It struck a cord with me and I knew it would resonate even stronger with Alice. Hopefully she can take solace in knowing that there are other people out there who get into cyclical worry cycles. For me, Gabe’s other post about not wanting to get lost and just wanting to stay home was more indicative of my personal neurosis, albeit farther from the bell curve than my own. As a result of Alice’s exposure to Gabe’s openness she stated, “Maybe I should have an online diary.” Yes. Yes, you should. So now it’s on my TODO list.

I was in Target last night getting a present for my son’s preschool gift exchange lost in hunger when my attention was brought to the cashier who was having difficulty ringing up a product ahead of me. She said, “The system says I can’t sell this until tomorrow…” After someone with authority came over, who happened to be the brother of one of the guys I game with, they politely explained to the lady that they really couldn’t sell it to her until the next day.

All I could think was, “It would be trivial to go download a torrent of that CD and not have to get hassled.” I mean this customer had cash in hand ready to participate in the American dream of funding some performance artist and was rejected.

In other Christmas related news I’m pretty much all done with prep work. Almost all the gifts are wrapped and need to be ribboned and bowed. I think Alice is going to buy one or two more, but I have all my stuff bought. I’ve purchased more Transformers in the last month than I think I owned my entire life.

Gabe over at Penny Arcade’s latest post echo’s my feelings about gaming:

“I realized I don’t play games for the challenge. I don’t need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls “new art”. I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don’t play games to beat them I play games to see them.”

I’ve been playing through Half Life 2 Episodes 1 & 2 in God mode for this exact reason. It’s the story and the experience. It’s like being inside a movie. Unless it’s a game like Portal where the entire point of the game is figuring out the puzzle, I prefer to just see what’s there.

In other news, I finished my 9,000 piece puzzle and it’s finally mounted. It looks hot.

I’m of course referring to the Decepticons, not the Autobots. It struck me this morning that almost all the Decepticons in the Michael Bay movie are either military or law enforcement. I guess this was also the case with the originals too, but my memory is a little bit fuzzy. I wonder if this stems from the fact that military and law enforcement are the only two professions authorized to use deadly force and is therefore evil or if authoritarian types are as generally loathed in Hollywood as we already suspected.

The original Transformers had much more time to flesh out (and even introduce) characters than that afforded by two hours of fighting robots. There were dinosaurs, rescue vehicles, and all manner of civilian cars, trucks and whatnot – at least on the Autobots’ side. I don’t specifically recall any Decepticons other than Soundwave (the tape player) and Starscream who reprised his role as the boot licking lackey perfectly in the movie.

I would love to see a breakdown and analysis of the entire original cast to see who Hasbro thought was “good” or “evil.”

Here’s the menu for Thanksgiving:

• Roast Turkey
• Gravy
• Sour Dough Dressing
• Corn
• Mashed Potatoes
• Brown and Serve Rolls
• Green Bean Casserole
• Barbecue Green Beans
• Candied Yams

This doesn’t even include desserts or beverages but I’m thinking New Belgium’s 2 Below along with some Epic Brew Unfiltered Wheat.

I really like cooking. I love to prepare as far in advance as possible and execute perfectly the day of the event. It’s a challenge involving Gant charts leading up to a 3 p.m. go live. It’s as much a time keeping challenge as it is a cooking challenge.

But it’s also a lot of work. I mean obviously it is, duh. But it’s as much work preparing for the plan as it is executing the plan. And I’m feeling lazy. I made Andrew pizza rolls for breakfast (huzzah for a toaster over) because my kitchen is atrocious. today is the day when we are supposed to clean and prep the whole house for the rest of the week. We need to rake also. So today will be crazy busy. But hopefully we can maintain the house the rest of the week and get everything done.

It’s still all worth it. There’s almost no other time of the year when I can justify spending so much on a meal, both in time and money. And it’s always exhausting, but in a good way. So here’s to getting it all done!

Oh, I also finished my 9,000 piece puzzle yesterday. I plan on getting that sucker mounted sometime before Thursday too.

I’m totally getting into the Thanksgiving spirit, and by spirit I mean my love of spending multiple days cooking for a meal that will last all of two hours (maybe). I’m going to be working on a menu in the next day or so. Does anyone know if there is an open recipe xml schema out there? I’d like to start using this site as my recipe cookbook in the hope that when ubiquitous computing happens I won’t have to waste time entering my favorites.

In site news I removed the internal trackbacks I had and revamped the 404 page since I still can’t get canonical URLs to work, and by still can’t I of course mean haven’t actually put any effort into it. Why can I just sit around and stuff fixes itself, eh? I apparently still have a ton of 404 errors being produced, but most of them are from Google and Yahoo spiders. You too can follow my 404 RSS feed if you are so inclined. Or just weird.

I started playing more Kingdom of Loathing again. I really dig those folks in the Lucky 888s. I was overjoyed to see them still active after my lengthy absence. Not that I was in anyway some sort of glue that held them together. Just that, well… you know how the internet is – you gain amazing seniority by being around for more than a month. The Lucky 888s are just about the coolest people I know online and hanging out with them in a stick figure MMORPG is somehow comforting.  I’m blue_canary in the game if you ever drop by.