Caramelized

The plan was to drop off the car at noon, take the bus to the mall, enjoy the eye candy and have lunch, then take the bus back at 2, go home for a bit, and then meet Janice for coffee in MV at 6.

But when I checked in at Toyota, it took 20 minutes because I had to wait for a senior rep, because I was wanting the car reprogrammed to not beep while in reverse, and their inept system, which already had all my info twice - once in the sales system and once in the appointment system, had to have it all entered again by hand into the work order system. Jesus on a pogo stick.

And the Sr. rep drops this on me: the beep thing had to be done at "the main shop" which apparently is not where we are, and required him to place an order. So maybe the car would be done at 4, but maybe not.

So I went to the mall. Cheesecake Factory would be my first choice for lunch, except it has a long wait, and not a lot on the menu that I like to eat.  So I walked all the way to the other side of the mall to the food court, but it has changed so much. Gone are Ivar's, Mongolian BBQ, McDonald's (I never eat there anyway), Sbarro, Cinnabun. In their place are a faux Thai place, the lobster shack (which was all out of lobster), a Vegan place, a salad place, a burger place with maybe three kinds of burgers, way overpriced Panda Express, and something called "Chicken Wow!"  

Sat and watched people for a while because I was tired and sweating, probably from all the walking with my knapsack, my laptop inside it. Downstairs and way far to the Starbucks, but there was no seating anywhere near, and the only other places down there were California Pizza Kitchen and a sushi place. Gone is Mayflower, that huge Chinese place. Or am I thinking of The Great Mall?

People watching caused much suffering. It was about 90° outside, and so many women were dressed as if it was not air conditioned inside. There is still that trend among the college women and maybe high schoolers (hard to tell them apart these days) to wear short shorts made of gossamer material. Lots of skin tight stretch pants, too.

Back to the food court, finally got some beef teriyaki at a small Japanese place. It was mostly rice, but the veggies only had a tiny bit of the alleged vegetables.

Went over to the Haagen-Dasz stand, but decided against it, at $6 a scoop. Walked some more, watched some more, went outside and sat on the bench in front of Cheesecake,  almost went in for dessert, but again, the price and the wait. So I walked across the blvd to Satan's Row, all the way to the end, admiring the view. Got an iced chai at Peet's and cooled off, and now it was after 4, no news from Toyota, so I walked to the bus terminal behind the mall and caught the next one back. As I was pulling the bell for my stop, the phone rang, but I didn't get it answered in time, and as it turned out voicemail never got to me until many hours later. One more reason to leave AT&T.

The car was done, the 6-month checkup was free,  but they had the gall to charge me $75 for the programming. I'll be writing Toyota corp a nastygram about that.

No time to go home, went straight to MV, Janice was a little late but that was okay. Lots to look at.

Took my laptop out, finally. All the time in the mall I hauled it around, but there was too much to see for me to open it up.

Had a nice chat, then home.

Looked at my caramel walnut recipe, and decided that since 1/4 cup of sugar went to 1 Tbsp of butter, 2 cups of sugar would go to a stick (8 Tbsp) of butter.  Also decided to use my small omelet pan. Melted the butter, added the sugar a little at a time, it finally almost filled the pan. But it wasn't melting. And I figured it could use some more flavor so I dumped in about 1/8 cup of vanilla extract, which made it all bubble up. Still needed help melting, so 1/2 cup of water. That did the trick, but I knew 1 lb of walnuts would not fit, so I poured the mix into a larger pot, and added the walnuts. It took a while for everything to get to the right consistency, and I finally used a slotted spoon to drain the walnuts a serving spoonful at a time, and place on a sheet of parchment. I'd used waxed paper before, but the parchment worked a lot better.

Dinner was a small salmon and rice meal, and dessert was maybe 1/8 cup of the candied walnuts. A little grainy, but delicious. Three servings before I decided this was not good for a diabetic.

Went online to see if there was a way to cancel my Verizon order, but it refused my SS# last 4 digits. Which explains why the credit check did not go through. The idiots who designed the online for only show *** for the SS#, so I didn't see it was typoed. They should have called or emailed.

Took my evening meds and shot up the usual overnight insulin, and started writing on LJ. And had to stop for 15 minutes because somehow my Hgl had dropped to 70, and it took a Klondike bar and another helping of walnuts to get it back up.

Plans for tomorrow:
Maybe see a movie
Verizon, cancel my order
Enjoy my porch & my aircon

Communications Day

A quick note that while FB is overloaded with photos and anecdotes about fathers, I ignore the event.  All these greeting card days are Hallmark inventions, starting with Mother's Day. I can think of no good reason to set aside one day out of the year to celebrate someone we celebrate every day. My dad disliked father's day, and didn't care if it was ignored.

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Did some minor stuff this morning, including accidentally shutting Spook in the bedroom closet. It's her fault. She opened the door herself and declared a glorious revolution against my best shirts. I thought she had exited well before I shut the doors.

Around 11 am I headed the Prius over to Verizon, and basically browbeat one of the reps until he agreed to make some calls that only a rep can make. He found the order easily, and two phone calls later found out that it was being held up because of some perceived fraud. After he faxed a copy of my driver's license and something else which proved I lived where I said I lived, it was all cleared up.

Next stop was Target across the street, to replace the bath mats which did not fully survive the last washing. And a back scratcher, aka bath scrub brush.

And I was wanting to go to the Starbucks there and set up the new phone on their wifi, but couldn't remember the password to my account. There was at least $40 on there, no way was I going to use cash. I pulled up my password list from the old phone, but I didn't have Starbucks on there.

Home, logged into Starbucks and discovered that my browser cookies had somehow got munged, and I ended up resetting my password.

I have pretty fast wifi at home, so I let Google's auto restore do its work, I just needed to log in to some apps like FB, evernote, twitter and amazon.

In other device news, my Nexus 7 tablet is no longer holding a charge, and it is resisting charging at all. So at the last minute I went to Fry's and bought the ASUS equivalent. It took three USB cables before I found one which would go into the slot, and it was the one the unit came with, surprise surprise. And that had been charged and is pretty much done downloading apps. Same apps as the phone. It even copied the screen image from the droid, which was a selfie I took with the new phone.

The tablet is mostly used as a Kindle, and to watch youtube videos and a little bit for shopping. It's wifi only, no data plan.

Somewhere in the afternoon I made another batch of caramel walnuts from the goop left over in the pan from last night. It still came out crystalized. So after my pot pie dinner I put it back in the pan and let it melt. And burn a little. but now it's not crystals, more like chewey caramel.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Home, grab the laptop
Photographers meetup on the other side of Sunnyvale.