Legos, Legos, Legos

My wife thinks I'm crazy being a 33 year old, married man wanting to play with Legos. Well, I have news for her...I AM crazy! In my effort to build up a Lego town, I've started looking for bulk Legos as the most cost effective way of getting random parts to build buildings and such. I've found some on eBay, but with shipping costs and having no idea what I'll get, I went to Craig's list and found some Legos yesterday. I bought a big box of them and have started sorting them to see what I got. Unfortunately, there is a lot of junk in there. Junk being non-block parts and non-Lego parts. The non-Lego parts (some Mega Blocks) are far inferior to Legos in terms of quality. The process of sorting is very slow as I have to examine every part; most Lego parts say "Lego" right on the "stud". It is, however, in my nature to sort things like this. I figure another day or two and I'll have this box sorted and it will be time to find more.

Awful service

My wife and I went to hear a jazz band at a local restaurant last night (the band lead is the head custodian at her school) with a few of her friends. Having been to this restaurant before to here this guy play before and having experienced awful server, not to mention mediocre, over-priced food, we made sure we ate dinner first (I even had a candy bar right before we left so I'd get my dessert in). So, we get there and a waitress didn't even come over to us to take our drink order for 30 minutes. Then the food order wasn't taken for another 20-30 minutes (I can't recall exactly). If that wasn't enough, the food arrived about 1.5 hours after we got there (I had dessert only which arrived about 30 minutes before everyone else's food).

I'm not sure why the service was so awful, but one of the wait staff profusely apologized and said that in the 10 years that she had been there (on and off), it was never this bad. I kind of find that quite hard to believe as that was our second (and last experience) with that restaurant. One of our friends and my wife complained and the entire meal (6 people) and drinks was provided free of charge. The waitress that apologized said that next time we come back, we should ask for her and we'd have a great meal. Hmmm...fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me....fool me three times? I don't think so.

Our community (an area of San Diego) has 3 Italian restaurants, with this being one of them. We enjoy another one, but experience sub par service (we got smart and remembered they have free delivery). I guess we might have to try the third one or maybe we shouldn't push our luck.

I've never had to work in food service, so I don't know what it is like, but it seems to me that if part of your job depends on tips, you'd do your best job so you are rewarded (monetarily).

Simple means to energy conservation

After repairing my refrigerator and then seeing the movie An Inconvenient Truth, it dawned on me that people probably have several appliances in their house that aren't running efficiently and simple solutions might exist. In the case of my refrigerator, the blocked up grill probably caused the refrigerator to run twice as often as needed. If other people did the same thing, it could be a real energy saver.

And on the topic of the movie, I was so pissed off when I left the movie on how arrogant our current (and some of our recent) administrations have been. Al Gore presented very compelling facts about global warming. One that really got me is the fuel efficiency standards here in the US. The major push against raising them has been the big auto manufacturers that can't make money where you have Honda and Toyota making money hand over fist and making more efficient cars. There is a good reason I don't buy American cars...it's all about protecting jobs instead of making a quality product. I'm not saying I don't buy American, but I buy quality products that provide value; if it is American, great, if it isn't, oh wel..

Fixing a refrigerator

Lately I've noticed that that the freezer part of our refrigerator wasn't keeping stuff completely frozen despite cranking down the temperature. What do I know about refrigerators? Turns out, I know enough about mechanical/chemical engineering to be able to understand a diagram of a heat exchanger. I took off the top panel of the refrigerator (a lot of the mechanical stuff is on the top of this unit), looked around, looked at the little diagram showing how it worked, and saw tons of dirt. I figured that before I called an appliance repair person, I'd take a look to see what I could do. I vacuumed out the grill to the condenser and as I did, I felt a blast of air coming from the other side of it.

I said to myself, "holy cow, it can't be that easy." Well, knock on wood, I looked in the freezer this morning and the ice pop that was mush last night is much more solid. So, I might just have fixed my refrigerator. I'll keep my fingers crossed!