Paradise ponders: shrimp burgers, electrical details, and the endless Mexican Train game... Well, we had our shrimp burgers yesterday afternoon and they were delicious. They were followed up by some most excellent chocolate mousse, homemade from scratch by the dynamic duo of Debbie and Michelle. The chocolate in it was Callebaut, the best we know of for cooking. There are several more servings of that mousse sitting in our refrigerator...
Yesterday morning I made scrapple and eggs, as planned. The scrapple was good, but quite different than what I grew up with. The biggest difference in the ingredients is that instead of just corn meal as the cereal component, this stuff has wheat flour and oats in addition. Also, it's much less spicy than other scrapple I've had, and more “porky”. None of those differences were bad, and I quite enjoyed it – and yet, it's not the same as the scrapple I'm familiar with, so I couldn't help being a little disappointed. Nevertheless, the scrapple we bought won't last long, I'm sure. :)
Jimmy and I finished up all the electrical work on the deck last night. It's beautiful! There are now nine 100 watt equivalent (but actually 17 watt LED) bulbs on the deck ceiling, giving us bright, shadowless light across the entire deck. There are also four duplex GFI outlets, two on the wall of the house and two on the ceiling, away from the house. Now all we need is the grill and nice enough weather! Well, that's not quite true... I still have to put up the rails. I have 8 pieces of 8' long 2x6s of clear redwood heartwood. These will be cut up into four rails, each of which will be made of two sections dowel-pegged together. I've got to do that cutting and doweling, then some routing (to round off corners, sanding, finishing (with three or four coats of clear acrylic polyurethane), and then mount them into the stanchions. I also need to caulk and paint a bunch of stuff on the house wall, and on the outsides of the deck ceiling. The weather next week promises to be great for all this work...
Yesterday we played an epic Mexican train game. On all our previous games we've played partial games, generally using half the starting numbers (0..12), in order to keep the game to just a couple hours. Yesterday we did the entire thing, a total of 13 rounds, each one lasting around a half hour. It was a lot of fun, and there was much merriment and laughter (helped by generous quantities of alcohol :), but it sure lasted a long time!
This morning we head to SLC to pick up our new dogger (Ipo) at the SLC airport, then lunch at the Red Iguana, drop off Jimmy and Michelle at the airport, pick up bird seed at Wild Birds Unlimited, visit the southern SLC Trader Joe's, and then finally head home. After ten days with Jimmy and Michelle, our house is going to seem quiet and empty – though the presence of Ipo should cause a bit of a ruckus! :)
