Tag naples tomato

Saturday morning Ali and I headed outside to do the yard work.  We both commented on just how intense the sun felt, instead of it being late September it felt like a mid-July day.  If I was a candle I would have melted in short order.  After weeding Ali took to the tractor and I grabbed my trusty weed whacker a little later.  For some reason I got the idea in my head to weed whack the inside of the entire fence line as well as the last ditch in the back which in spots had grass that was two feet high and as dense as some right wing zealots.  It took me a long time to do it all.  I went through 2+ tanks of gas and had to refill the spool line,  in total I think I was out there for almost two hours just whacking away.

I had mentioned something to Ali that we should try to do something with the TONS of lemons we have on our myer lemon tree.  The lemons we get are a bit odd.  They only seem to turn yellow once the outer skin splits, otherwise they stay green.  We harvested at least 50 of them.  While we were at it we also picked our key limes, figuring maybe Ali could make a key lime pie.

During the afternoon we worked on juicing the lemons and limes.  It was not exactly fun.  Some of the lemons were so big they had to be quartered instead of halved before being put into the hand powered juice press thing.  It was a mess as lemon juice was spraying everywhere.  Ali and I took turns squeezing the lemons.  I didn’t do as much as I hoped because the motion was not exactly aching forearm friendly.  Like I said, many of the lemons were quite large and despite their green skin were filled with a lot of lemon juice.  In no time we had enough juice to make a pitcher of lemonade with tons to spare.  We had only gone through half of the lemon harvest. The lemonade actually tasted like lemonade, pretty damn cool.

Later in the weekend Ali used the key lime juice to make a damn nice key lime pie.  Ali and I both get a real kick out of eating stuff that is made from ingredients we grew ourselves.  It’s just a satisfying feeling.

Saturday evening we picked up my mom to go to dinner. We took the new party van just for fun.  Ali had bought a gift cert to a place called Naples Tomato off of restaurant.com.  Neither Ali or I had ever been there.  Mom was there once before and she warned of the high prices.  We figured it would be nice to try someplace different. 

The restaurant is right in the middle of strip mall that had lots of empty stores, certainly not an upscale location.  You walk in the place and are greeted by a huge corridor of nothing but wine bottles on the wall.  Evidently this place is big for wine snobs.  We were greeted by what I assume was the owner, they asked if we had reservations which we did not.  Typically during off season, even on a Saturday night you don’t need reservations.  The guy tells us that right now there was roughly a 45 minute wait.  This seemed odd to me considering the front area of the restaurant, including the bar was very sparsely populated.  The owner said that if we didn’t mind sitting at the high top tables up front we could sit right down.  He indicated those were first come first serve tables.  We told him that would be fine.  The owner would have been more accurate to call them “first come. no serve” tables.

It quickly became apparent that these tables were the bastard step child of the main dining room.  Serving customers at these tables, at least in our case was obviously a low priority.  We sat at the table for at least 10 minutes until our waiter came over to ask us if we wanted any drinks.  This slow response was a common theme during the entire meal.  Our waiter checked in on us very little. 

Every aspect of the experience was slow. Our meals took forever to come out and when they did finally come out they brought the wrong food.  The food was not brought out by our waiter, it was brought out by some hispanic guy that understood little to no english.  He figured out the food was wrong via our pointing and shaking of the head.

Finally we all had our food in front of us.  They gave mom the wrong topping for her prime rib but she said it was fine.  Ali liked her food, mom was ok with hers, mine was not great. I didn’t come close to finishing my food which was some sort of chicken meal. 

Even the bathrooms in the place were annoying.  The place seated a lot of people yet the bathrooms were the gas station variety, a single toilet and urinal in an open room.  The urinal was mounted so low and was pitched at such an angle that I wound up with urine splattered shins, sigh…

So thankfully the meal was over and we got the check.  Despite having $25 knocked off the meal the tab was roughly $75.  The reason it was this much was because they automatically added an 18% gratuity to piss me off more.  You know I normally have no problem tipping 15-20% for decent service but when a place removes my ability to tip based on the service we receive there is zero chance I will be returning.  It is a ridiculous business decision in my opinion.

Ali and mom had their leftovers boxed up, I told the waiter to not bother boxing mine.  Mom got one more slap in the face when she went to heat up her warm ups last night and found that for some reason they decided to dispose of her peas for her.  So long Naples Tomato, you won’t be seeing me again.

So Sunday we had another race to time.  When I crawled out of bed at 4am and heard the symphony of frogs screaming in the background I knew we had to get some considerable rain during the night.  I was surprised when the gauge showed almost an inch had fallen.  I hadn’t even considered bad weather for the race.  As we drove to the race site it was in a steady rain which continued up until shortly before the 7 am race start.

Luckily wet roads do not cause the same technical issues with the Ipico system as it did with the DAG set up which required us to duct tape lines to the asphalt.  The weather proof timing mats that Ipico uses work equally well in dry or wet conditions.  The course stayed dry for the majority of the race but somewhere around 9:30 it started raining steady.  Luckily I was under a canopy but even so some water was blowing in.  There also was puddle of water that was creeping towards the various electronic devices I had on the ground. I quickly scooped the stuff up and stacked it on the table.  getting electrocuted would just ruin the entire weekend.

So even with the wet conditions the timing system performed perfectly.  Any problems I had were self created as I am still working out the procedure for certain timing operations.  The last runner came across the line over 3 hours after the race started.  I had turned off the timing equipment by that point but wrote down the guys bib number and time and included him in the final results.  Hey if you are gonna cover 12 miles it would be nice to get credit.

The Eagles game was pretty much a cake walk.  We saw a lot of Michael Vick, unfortunately he did very little when he was on the field besides hand off, throw a couple incompletions and ran for a short gain.  The Eagles are really going to the wildcat formation A LOT so far and I have to say I am not impressed.  I haven’t seen it gain more than 10 yards yet, more typically it results in a short gain.  Perhaps they are still fine tuning the formation but for me it hasn’t done anything to make the Eagles offense more dangerous.  Kevin Kolb had a solid, mistake free game.  It had to make most fans feel slightly better about the various times that Donovan is out, which has happened every year for the past half decade.

Even though the Eagles enjoyed a fine outing my fantasy team did not.  In fact I found myself focusing on the poor performance of my fantasy team instead of basking in the glory of the Eagles win.  I had a bad break when Frank Gore went out early in the Niners game.  I also invested HEAVILY in the Saints this week, starting 3 players since they were playing the Bills whom had the worst pass defense rating in the league.  Well the three players netted me less than 15 points.  Oh well you can’t win them all I suppose.  My next week is going to be tough.  I have a TON of players on bye week.  I am going to be scrambling to fill the lineup without having to put key players on waivers.

Spook ate next to nothing all weekend until last night where she ate some pureed tuna and egg.  Ali and I have been giving the cat various meds twice a day and hating every minute of it.  The most disgusting part is after putting the goop in her ear that is supposed to help clean out whatever gunk is in there. We both get coated with residue as the cat shakes her head violently after we put her down.  Last night I had the bright idea of putting some pureed tuna in a large syringe and trying to inject it into her mouth.  There was an air pocket in the tube and the plunger was stuck.  I pushed harder and Spook got a tuna projectile fired into her mouth.  Of course Ali wound up wearing most of that as well.  

Who knows what sort of cat adventures Spook has in mind for us this week.  All I know is I just want her to eat.  Having an animal starve on my watch would not sit well with me.