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Some years ago, Susan asked me to get her a crème brûlée kit for her birthday or Christmas. It had some custard mix, four little ramekins, and a butane-powered kitchen torch along with a can of butane to refill the torch. The torch was very impressive and some of you may have seen it when I took it to Anna Maria one year to light cigars. It had all the menacing danger of a blowtorch, but smaller and cuter.

I don’t know how I started looking for lighters at DealExtreme, the Chinese website where I get a lot of flashlight stuff, but I found out they have jet torches that are lighters. I don’t smoke, so I didn’t realize they also have those in stores here too. I found one that got positive reviews and was less than $3, including shipping. I figured I couldn’t afford not to buy it. They include just enough butane to make sure it works, so when I got it, I got maybe 2 seconds of flame.

Continue reading “Jet Torch Lighter”

This morning as we were getting back from our walk, Austin sniffed around in the thicket in my front yard that may have once been a pine island. There were these big fat blackberries and most of them were ripe. I’ve never seen such perfect wild blackberries. They were round spheres of fat individual drupelets (this is the correct term which I just learned from Wikipedia), like plump little soccer balls. I had about 10 or so and they tasted good (though I don’t like the seeds in blackberries). I did not eat the lower growing ones in Austin’s range.

A few months ago my HDTV receiver stopped working. I had been switching it off with my surge protector after finding out how much energy it used and maybe it didn’t like that. It would take it a long time to reboot, but at some point the green light started flashing rapidly and there was no picture no matter how long I waited. I tried turning it off and unplugging it to reset it, but got the same result. I spent some time today trying to figure out solutions and found some discussion areas that said the flashing green light means it is dead and there is no way to fix it. I took the cover off to see if there was anything I could see that stood out and could be fixed, but the only thing I saw I could fix was a small fuse and it was not blown.

Continue reading “New HDTV Receiver”

Today I am furloughed from work, so I thought it would be a good chance to watch the USA World Cup game against Algeria. I turned on the match just after the US had a goal called back because a player was offsides, although a replay showed he was just barely onsides. I watched the rest of the scoreless first half with the USA playing better than Algeria in general. At one point, in referencing the bad call, one of the announcers mentioned the 1982 game between Austria and Germany that prevented Algeria from advancing from the pool play portion to the bracket play. Eventually Dish Network’s signal was lost somehow and I missed the rest of the game, but the USA won 1-0 with a late goal and advances to the second round. England won by the same score with the same record, but USA won the pool because they tied one of their games 2-2 and England tied one of their games 0-0.

Anyway, I looked up the 1982 game on Wikipedia. The deal was that Algeria had already played their match so both teams knew that Germany (West Germany at the time) would advance if they could win the game, but Austria was already a lock so they had nothing to lose or gain. Germany scored early to go up by 1-0 and for the rest of the game, basically nothing happened. Although the teams deny they were colluding against Algeria, neither played with any sort of aggressiveness and one announcer refused to call the game anymore while another told viewers they should turn off their TVs.

After that game, they started scheduling the last of the pool games for the four teams in a group at the same time so they couldn’t safely collude.

This week Publix had half gallons of their premium ice creams 2 for $5. It’s about as good a price as they offer it and they still use real half gallons, unlike Breyers and others who shortchange you by keeping 25% of your ice cream.

A few months ago I got a really intense chocolate ice cream called Chocolate Trinity which is dark chocolate ice cream with a magic shell type of crunchy swirl and chocolate bits. This past week I bought one they call Cappuccino Fudge Blitz that is really good. It is a coffee flavored ice cream with white chocolate cream nuggets, mocha espresso brownies (like cookie dough), and chocolate marble. There are grainy things in there that turn out to be real coffee grounds. This is about my favorite ice cream there is right now. Well, until I have something else in my freezer.