Chris Moss Online

Today, lunch was shared with my boss and a colleage at Texas de Brazil. You have a salad bar and then the gauchos bring you meat. Lots of it. All kinds: several kinds of beef and steak, chicken, pork, lamb and sausage. Yum! The gauchos are strolling waiters who wander around carrying skewers of meat. You have a coaster on your table that is red on one side (stop) and green on the other (go). If you have green facing up, each gaucho will stop by your table to offer whatever meat he is carrying. Let’s say it’s lamb. Well, I don’t care for lamb, so I say “no thanks.” Then another one comes by, and he might have sausage. Well, I’ve already got some sausage on my plate, so I say “no thanks.” Then another comes by with steak, so I say “yes, please.” He slices a piece of meat off the skewer and you grab it with little tongs each person has as part of their place setting.

The food is quite good. Gabe had a 15% off coupon, so that made it relatively affordable ($15) for lunch. Otherwise, it’s a bit steeper. I think dinner is close to $50/person. And the service was actually excellent – it’s been quite a while since I’ve experienced service that good.

Today was a day with some very pleasant company. I had lunch with my dear friend and former Chubb colleage, Gary. We meet for lunch every so often and it’s always a marathon – about 2 hours. And it’s not enough time for us to talk about all the things we want to say. We (and our partners) are having dinner next Wednesday, so I’m already looking forward to that. As a bonus, he went with me about 5 blocks from the restaurant to get a quick geocache! It was a beautiful day – sunny and cloudless and 80

Tonight Bobby and Ian came over for dinner and a nice chat. I had to run by the store so I was a little late but fortunately James had already started dinner, so that went quickly. I made chocolate-chip cookies to make up for it. They turned out a bit thinner and crispier than usual but still yummy. Bobby and I were discussing how nice it is that despite having just spent 3 days with each other in fairly close quarters, we are still wanting to do dinners and now we are already thinking about another trip in the fall. We really do get on well and are more like family than anything else. Thanks for coming over, my brothahs!

Current mood: happy
Current music: Membership – The Tragically Hip

The Eaglebend Lane crew has just returned from a weekend of “camping.” Understand that what this means is that we rented a cabin in the woods. In this cabin are beds, sheets, a shower, a fireplace, a refrigerator, a microwave, a stove and oven, a sink, etc.

We also dragged along 3 iPods and a set of speakers for them, a Sirius satellite radio and jam box, 2 GPS units, at least one Palm Pilot. I didn’t see a laptop computer, but there might have been one. We all had cell phones but no service. I like it that way Music is important, phones are not.

But, it’s a tremendous amount of fun. We went to Beaver’s Bend State Park in SE Oklahoma. We reserved our cabin about 5 months ago so there has been a bit of build-up. It did not disappoint. We all had Good Friday off, so we left after work on Thursday and got there about midnight. We got up at a reasonable hour on Friday, had a fantastic breakfast (I love the smells of coffee and bacon out in the woods) and set off to hike. We probably walked about 5 miles in total and spent most of the day outside. The dogs had a great time roaming around and playing with Bobby & Ian’s dogs. More details of our trip are at James’ blog.

This was the first time Colby and Bosley got to meet and play with Skylar. Bosley doesn’t really like not being the baby and center of attention, but Colby seemed to have a really great time with his cousins. They even ran around and played inside the cabin. Bosley tried to ignore them all and snipped a bit. He has to learn to share.

The hike was really great – I grew up spending a lot of time in the woods and I miss that. The park is very hilly and is set in a nice, dense forest with a river and several creeks flowing through it. We hopped across the creek several times and saw lots of little waterfalls and such. At Bobby and Ian’s suggestion, we packed lunch and took it with us and ate out on the trails. That was quite a nice moment. The dogs were crashing through the creek while we ate – and sometimes they got a little too deep. Our dogs don’t like to go in deeper than to wade. Bosley nearly killed himself trying to leap all the way from bank to bank but instead did a pratfall right into the side of the bank on the other side. But he just kept on going! If it hurt, he didn’t let on.

I enjoy grilling and cooking with open flame. When we got back to the cabin, Ian and I took off to grab 2 quick geocaches and then returned to start dinner by gathering firewood. Ian made drinks and James and Danny returned from a quick run to the local Wal-Mart while I started our fire in the fire ring outside. The fire ring had not been well maintained and was on a slope. The rocks were scattered too far and there was too much dirt/ash so I tried to dig it out a bit so air could get under. Eventually we had a nice fire that lasted until our late bed time. When we camp, we cook baked potatoes in the fire. I mean, in the fire. You double wrap those bad boys in foil and put them in the coals for about an hour and a half. A better baked potato, I promise you have not had.

While the potatoes were getting going, I started a fire in the grill to cook the shish-ka-bobs that the others were preparing in the kitchen while listening to an iPod. I stayed outside and listened to Sirius while tending the fires and sipping a beverage. That meal was damn good and it was a great way to cap off our day. Then we made s’mores – yum!

Saturday it rained. No problems, we were prepared. We listened to music and the rain, chatted with each other and played games, including Simpson’s Clue and Guillotine. We never got to Munchkin – which means we were enjoying ourselves sufficiently. We did take a few strolls in the rain with our rain gear and look around and keep the dogs semi-content. I think they were hoping for a repeat of Friday.

It stopped raining long enough to grill cheeseburgers for dinner. Too wet for a campfire, but James came to the rescue and made s’mores in the oven. Yay! This morning was another delicious breakfast and then we loaded up and came home.

Bobby and Ian are special people and special friends, so each trip with them is special. One of the very special parts of this trip was that our friend Danny, who has just completed a marathon of treatment for Leukemia, was also able to join us.

Current mood: tired but satisfied
Current music: Hotel Illness – The Black Crowes

It’s my birthday – not for play-play but for real-real!

I wasn’t going to be so self-serving as to post a comment about that, but James let the cat out of the bag on his blog, so now it’s official – for the first time in a year, I’m older today than I was yesterday. Wait a minute…

Anyone else get sick of those Nigerian scam emails? You know, the ones from the Minister of Petroleum in Nigeria who happens to have $24 million in a foreign account that he urgently needs your confident help in to get it back to Nigeria? Thank god he stumbled onto your trustworthy free E-mail account!

Anyway, there is a site called 419eater.com that takes the perpetrators of this fraud to task. 419 refers to the Nigerian law meant to combat this scam industry. Some guy got bored and decided to monkey with the person on the sending end of those emails. The site does a good job of explaining why and how they do what they do. The funniest part is called “The Trophy Room.” They have gotten these scammers to take photos of themselves and send by e-mail. The guys scamming (“baiting”) the scammers always ask for them to hold a sign or object to “prove” that the photo is of that person. The Trophy Room is a collection of alleged scammers holding signs that say pretty ridiculous things on them (since the scammers don’t really speak English or grasp our culture, it works brilliantly).

Have a look at the Trophy Room and look at some of the people who may have sent you these e-mails.

James gave me a GPS unit for my birthday. It’s just like the one I was borrowing (for 3 mos) from Brian. But it’s mine, and I can customize it how I like. So now it has flames on the side! (j/k)

It has all the hardware and cables to connect it to the PC, which I didn’t have before. James also gave me some really cool mapping software to put on it, because the basic GPS comes with only the major highways & geographic features. But I want Eaglebend Lane on there, so, y’know. I had difficulty installing the map software, so that will have to wait – prolly need to clear my registry, because it bombed on the install and now won’t reinstall properly. Yes, I’ve already tried uninstalling it.

One of the neatest things is that you can download the location of the geocaches (waypoints) directly into the GPS unit. Before, I had to “type” in the coordinates, which was a tedious process of scrolling through the digits. I just loaded 160 of the closest caches on there, which should keep me going for a while. Of course, this will let me cache faster! Yay!

Thanks, babe Love ya lots! But not just cuz you buy me stuff.