Debbie and I were making our dinner menu for the week and managed to get every day filled except today - I had no idea what I wanted. Finally nearer to the end of the night I decided it was time to make another pizza. We were at the A&P already so I had to get the pizza dough from there. The toppings for tonight were fresh baby spinich, mushrooms and turkey pepperoni. I used the leftover Mario batali sauce from last week. The dough, although only $1.30 and not whole wheat turned out to be pretty good.

I’m going to get a bit more adventurous with my toppings I think. I like David’s grape tomatoes and other toppings - I should just make a list.

I’ve also been drinking a ton of chai tea. I used to rely on premixed packages, my favorites being Big Train Chai (the kind they use at No Joes), David Rios’ green tea chai (I got a sampler for Christmas one year) and the Tazo mix they use at Starbucks. I thought the premixes were the best since that’s what they mainly use at coffeehouses and that where most of my chai came from before I got sick of paying $3-$4 per serving.

I’ve been leaning more towards bagged chai tea and adding milk, honey and sugar myself and I’m starting to dig that better. Not only is that even cheaper ($2.00 for 20 servings) but I think it tastes better.

I remember the first time I had chai tea - it was in 1995 or 1996 and I got it because I was feeling experimental while studying at North Campus one cold night.

I got a message on the office voice mail Thursday night saying that HD in the old Powerbook was ready so I made plans to pick it up this afternoon. First thing’s first today though - spin class at 8:00am. Today we “biked” through Switzerland zooming by the Matterhorn and some other Swiss landmarks. Today’s class wan’t too tough because we had a sub and I didn’t find the instruction too tough although I sweated. My other issue was that her music selection was divided into two parts - classic rock and one hit wonders. One of her one hit wonders was Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild.’ I guess she had never heard of a song called ‘Magic Carpet Ride.’

After class Debbie and I made omelets side by side and then we ended up leaving for the mall around 1:30pm or so. We parked on the ground floor of Macy’s and went in.

The Apple Store was fairly crowded and after a short wait at the counter a “genius” was summond to return my Powerbook. He had me inspect it and then I paid for the repair which was somewhat hefty. $200 for the drive and $85 for the labor. $200 for a 60gig 2.5″ Hitachi drive is way overpriced but since these drives are not as accessible as one in a 15″ Powerbook I was stuck. Oh well.

After the mall we hit one of the best deli’s in New Jersey - Harold’s NY Deli in Edison. This deli was recommended to me by Ilana a few years back as an awesome place to eat at. About a year or so ago we finally made it up there and had a great time. Now it was ime for Lillian’s first trip there.

Harold’s is known for it’s huge sandwiches, awesome corned beef and cakes that literally measure about 3 feet high. It is also known for having the world’s biggest pickle bar which is stocked with slices of rye bread, a health salad, sauerkraut, kosher dills, half sours and sour pickles.

We were seated quickly and Lillian’s portable chair was strapped down and attached. We then placed our order - a Cel-Ray for me and a 13oz corned beef sandwich to split. I let Debbie hit the pickle bar first and then I went and loaded up on some bread to make more sandwiches with, a kosher dill, a half sour and some health salad. I let Debbie try some of the health salad and she was hooked. Then she gave me a piece of a sour sour pickle and then I went back and got more of each.

By the time I got back our huge corned beef sandwich had arrived and we went to town making smaller sandwiches out of the huge stack of corned beef. Later I got some Russian dressing and made a couple messy Reubens. We were able to finish one half of a sandwich and a bit of the other before we had to stop - there was just too much.

Near the end of our meal we watched as the table in front of me took delivery of a Harold’s triple decker sandwich which consisted of twin stacks of meat which measured about 3 1/2 feet high. It was for 6 people sitting at that table.

Debbie and I just finished off the last half of the sandwich for Sunday lunch - delicious.

Debbie phone has been on the brink of death for the past 2 months or so now. One too many drops had snapped the right hinge and at times the clamshell phone would bend backwards. This occured once when I was talking to Jay and I was lucky that I didn’t break it then. Two days ago however while Debbie was using the phone it complete broke into 2 pieces. Time to get a new phone.

I had actually planned to buy Debbie a phone for her birthday on Sept 26th. The Verizon rep told me that she had a $100 loyalty discount that took effect on October 26th so I packaged up a dummy box for her birthday and told her I would buy her a new phone after October.

It was planned all along that we would pick up a LG VX6100 since the VX6000 was such a great phone. Like my slightly upgraded Powerbook, this phone featured a myriad of new features while still remaining the same reliable phone. This one stored 60 photos insteadof 20 and featured a lense cover, a flash and a speakerphone. Since we knew exactly what we wanted we were in and out of the store fairly quickly. While Debbie’s phone was being set up I started playing around with a Blackberry 7250. The thing was awesome - not only did it have e-mail features but a decent web browser as well. I started pulling up viewaskew.com and I showed Lillian photos of herself from the gallery. If this thing had a camera and AOL IM capability it would have been perfect.

Not surprisingly this machine is pretty sweet. I do feel a huge speed difference and everything has been running very smoothly so far. I’ve got a ton of apps open and I haven’t seen my load average even hit close to 1.0. No pagein’s or pageouts. It’s just great. I guess I’ll be keeping this one and putting the old on up on eBay. This is the reason I keep the original packaging - it makes computers a ton easier to eBay.

Sadly the drive didn’t clone itself 100% by the time I had woken up at 7:30am. It got as far as copying the OS X System folder when it stopped because of a I/O error meaning that the hard drive was getting toasted again. After that I tried rebooting, resetting the PRAM again to no avail. I figured I did all I could so I left it at that.

We hit 9:00am mass which went pretty smoothly and afterwards I headed to the office. I had to get some work done before heading to the Apple Store at the Menlo Park Mall. The night before Kevin had e-mailed me and asked me to out up an announcement page for the Jay & Silent Bob Do Degrassi DVD signing in Red Bank on November 20th. Since the laptop was more or less dead I did the graphical work on the G4 desktop. Well - when it rains it pours. All of a sudden my fonts started going all funky in Photoshop - appearing in the menu one second and then disappearing the next. I was barely able to get a logo together to promote the signing and then I spent a while trying to fix the problem. I thought maybe it was a corrupt font or something but I couldn’t fix it. By now it was 3pm and I had to head to the Apple store lest lose my chance to get my hard drive replaced.

During this time I also came to a decision. I decided that I had too much work to do to not have a portable for however long it was going to take to replace the drive. I had all the data I needed, I just needed somewhere to put it. I decided that I was going to pick up a new 17″ Powerbook to use while the other one was being repaired. I figured that if I needed to, I could return the new one when the old one was fixed and consider the 10% restocking fee a rental fee. So off I went.

I hit the Menlo Park Mall about 35 minutes later passing Sunshine Hamburgers and Frank’s Italian Hot Dogs along the way. The mall was jam packed and I was lucky to find a spot in the Nordstrom parking lot. I was still mulling the decision about whether to pick up another laptop or to wait it out.

I headed in and then took the escalator up and walked to the Apple Store. I hit the Genius Bar weebsite to make an appointment and foudn out that they were booked solid for the entire day. Crap - now what? I headed for the register and when it was my turn I asked the guy two questions: 1) If they had any 17″ Powerbooks in stock and 2) since I knew my HD was dead, did I really have to make an appointment with a ‘genius.’ He said the appointment was sort of neccessary because they had to do some diagnostics and get some specifics like whether or not I wanted my data rescued. He then told me I could leave the machine if I wanted and they would call for the other info. Then he headed back to see if there were any Powerbooks. After 5 minutes he came back with the box and said it was the last one left. I decided it was a good idea and grabbed it (along with some AppleCare). As I was paying for it he also mentioned that he had found a free genius who would take down a case for my current Powerbook. I guess the lesson is, if you want special service, buy something big first. My info was taken and the old Powerbook was handed over. The guy remarked on what good shape it was in. If he had only seen how many meals I had eaten in front of it.

I walked out with a very big black box in my hand and headed to American Eagle to see if they had a dark brown cord jacket in an X-SM. Luckily they did so I walked out with that as well. Then I headed back to the office to do some restoration.

Restoration went pretty smooth since I had my old Home folder backed up which meant that not only were my files intact but my address book and stickies files, photos and music too. Even most of the apps transferred over smoothly. Nice.

After all that was done it was about 8pm and I was starving. I thought about just grabbing a pizza but I thought it would be an even better idea to make a pizza. I hit Whole Foods and bought a boule of whole wheat pizza dough, some shredded mozzerella, 10 slices of Applegate Farms pepperoni, a sweet italian sausage and a garlic and herb sausage, some Mario batali tomato sauce and some mushrooms.

After returning home, giving Lillian a bath and putting her to sleep I made the pizza which turned out excellent. They aren’t as fancy as David’s pizzas yet but they soon will be at this rate.

I hit my 4th spin class in a row today. It’s a pretty great workout and I dig the big videoscreen they have available. Today we were back to biking through Kauai and Maui. The class today wasn’t as touch as the one last week as there were less “hills”. Nevertheless I broke a good sweat. This class is a great change of pace.

Before I headed home I hit the A&P and picked up ingredients for turkey chili. Since I’ve been so busy lately I decided to make something that would last a few days. Cubanelle pepper, green pepper, ground turkey breast, dark red kidney beans, organic chopped tomatoes, tomato sauce and an onion. pretty simple.

When I arrived home Lillian and Debbie were up and after showering I went to work right away. I worked up until 3pm and then we all went outside to enjoy the very nice weather. Debbie wanted to see if she could hit a baseball so I brought the bat and the ragball with us as well as the Nerf football. Our first destination was going to be the swings but a huge group of kids having some kind of party was horsing around and seeing if they could fit on the baby swings. We went to hit some balls instead. Or ball I should say - I only had one and it was kind of inconvenient because Debbie turned out to be a pretty good batter and everytime she hit it I had to go run and retrieve it.

After hitting about 10 balls or so we tossed the football around. Then the swings became free so we headed over. On of the kids had kind of flattened the baby swing but it was flattened in a way that made it better for Lillian. We swung for a bit and then headed back. Then I started making the chili. I usually dash a variety of whatever hot sauce I have on hand in there and I may have dumped a bit too much of Blair’s After Death Sauce in there and the chili turned out to be pretty hot. Oh well.

Later on we gave Lillian her bath and Debbie read to her and put her to bed. While this was happening a very odd sound came from the left side of my Powerbook. It initially sounded like a high pitched whine and I thought maybe a quicktime or flashclip had opened up in the background. The whine stopped and I continued working. 5 minutes later more whining. Then it started sounding like a lawnmower. Holy Crap I thought. Nothing had frozen or slowed down yet so I thought maybe the fan was freaking out. I started praying that it wasn’t the drive. The lawnmower continued however and then I got a beachball. I force rebooted. The lawnmower stopped when the power cut out but when it started up again so did the awful sound. then it hung at the grey screen and I knew I was screwed. I started panicking. I tried rebooting a few times with no luck so I stuck in the Tiger DVD and tried Disk Utility. No luck. I frantically packed up the laptop and ran to work. My options were to see if I could run Diskwarrior on it and see if that did anything even though it sounded like a massive hardware failure. No luck - it didn’t even see the drive. I then cloned the system from the G4/500 at work and used that as the staryup disk hoping that maybe the internal drive would mount. No luck there either. Crap. Defeated I headed home where Debbie had dinner waiting for me. I let the machine rest while I ate and afterwards I decided to give it another try.

This time when I started up it couldn’t find the startup disk - makes sense since I switched it to the firewire drive at work. I then restarted and held down Option and noticed that no startup disks showed up. Not good. Then I did what I should have tried much earlier, I reset the PRAM, left to go to the bathroom and when I return my login screen was waiting for me. Hallelujah. I let my desktop and drive mount and felt a very slight feeling of relief. Slight because the drive was still sounding like a lawnmower. I didn’t have much time - I threw my jacket back on and raced back to work to grab the firewire drive so I could back stuff up. I already had a 97% backup from Oct 12th so I wasn’t really that screwed but I still had uncopied work. I got that backup up and then decided to try and clone the Powerbook drive. While it was copying the Applications I headed to bed.