6/26/10

People are always doing things and then telling you, "Don't try this at home."  I say that's a bunch of bullshit.  If you never tried anything at home, then you would miss out on a lot of the best things in life.  That's my policy.  So, on the internet I've seen various incarnations of a particular food item that the stoners seem to enjoy.  At first I chuckled.  Then I wondered.  Tonight, after some hands-on secret agent training, I had worked up a bit of an appetite.  So... here goes nothing...

Step 1: Ingredients - (2) 12" or 14" Frozen pizzas, (5) Pounds of ground beef, (1) Package of shredded cheese, (1) Package of sliced cheese, (2) Eggs [half-dozen package pictured], (1) Package of bacon.  Your total bill will be somewhere in the $30-40 range, but the finished product will easily feed an entire family.





Step 2: Turn your oven on and set it at 350°.  Now form the ground beef into a giant hamburger patty and place it on a cookie sheet.  Mix in the two eggs, which will act as a bonding agent and add some stability to the giant hamburger.  Set this giant hamburger in your refrigerator for the moment.




Step 3: Using eight slices of bacon, form a woven pattern and place it on a second cookie sheet.  If this woven pattern is too difficult for you, I recommend enrolling at an SEC university or perhaps Ohio State, then choosing basket weaving as your academic major.  Set this bacon weave in your refrigerator as well.




Step 4: Fry the remaining strips of bacon until they are good and crisp.  Chop them into small pieces (bacon bits, in essence) and set them aside.  Now your oven should be heated, so take your giant hamburger from the refrigerator and place it in the oven.  Set a timer for twenty minutes, pour yourself a beer, and relax for a while.




Step 5: Remove the giant hamburger from the oven and drain the grease from the cookie sheet on which it rests.  Now retrieve your second cookie sheet, with the bacon weave, from your refrigerator.  Place the cookie sheet with the bacon on top of the one with the giant hamburger.




Step 6: Flip the entire arrangement, such that the bacon weave is now on the bottom and the giant hamburger is on the top.  (Be careful not to burn yourself.)  Remove the cookie sheet that now rests atop the giant hamburger.  Spread your bacon bits and shredded cheese on top of the giant hamburger.  For tonight's demonstration, the shredded cheese is a blend of cheddar and Monterey Jack.  Place this combination in the oven and set a timer for fifteen minutes.  Wash and dry the first cookie sheet (that no longer holds the giant hamburger).  Then kick back and relax.




Step 7: Add your sliced cheese.  You'll want to use a creamy variety that melts smoothly for this layer.  Mozzarella and Muenster will work nicely.  Swiss or Provolone may be suitable as well.  Our demonstration project uses semi-soft Havarti.  Place the arrangement back in the oven and set a timer for ten minutes, then relax a little more.




Step 8: Remove your giant bacon cheeseburger and set it on your stove top.  The meat will continue to cook for a period of time after it comes out of the oven and the cheese will begin to solidify slightly.




Step 9: Adjust your oven to the proper cooking temperature for your frozen pizzas and then place them on the center rack.  Set a timer for two minutes less than the time suggested by the pizza manufacturer.  In tonight's case, the recommendation was 400° for 19-21 minutes.  So we set the oven at 400° and the timer at 17 minutes.




Step 10: Check on the pizzas when the timer goes off.  They may need to cook for another minute or two.  They are done when the cheese has begun to brown and the bottom of the crust has begun to darken.  Place the first pizza onto your clean cookie sheet.  Using two spatulas, carefully add the giant bacon cheeseburger on top of the first pizza.  Then place the second pizza face-down on top.




Step 11:  After allowing your masterpiece to cool for a few minutes, cut a slice and dig in.  Bon appétit.




I'll now make a few observations. 

• The process was fairly lengthy, but most of the time was spent sitting and relaxing as each cooking stage proceeded. 
• The one slice from that last picture left me feeling quite full, so I'm not kidding when I say that this thing will feed an entire family.  My colleague for this evening didn't even finish her smaller slice.
• The little draft beer home kit thing from Miller Lite isn't bad, but it's a little tricky to manage the CO² on the nozzle for any kind of consistent pour.  It either dribbles out with no fizz or it fires out with too much gas, depending on how far you turn the cartridge.
• The variety of pizza that I used tonight (DiGiorno Cheese Crust) didn't add quite enough flavor to handle five pounds of beef, a pound of bacon, and two pounds of cheese.  The finished product was pretty good, but it wasn't excellent.  Excellence is our goal at the Fenian Godfather Culinary Institute, so some some tweaks will be required if we are to try this thing again in the future.  Some options would be to (a) use a different variety of pizza, (b) add some chopped green peppers or onions to the hamburger, and/or (c) spread a thin layer of additional pizza sauce between the two cheeses.
• You can never have too much bacon as far as I'm concerned, so adding another pound probably wouldn't be a bad idea.  The only question would be how it would affect the cooking time, but I think that the woven layer would cook similarly even if it were more tightly spaced.  The bacon bits are cooked separately anyway, so that step wouldn't be affected.
• Tonight's secret agent training will have to go back to the movie-watching variety.  I'm feeling rather sluggish and not cut out for any more activity at this point in time.

I guess I didn't really do a whole lot today, but the couple of things that I did manage to accomplish were pretty groovy.  Still plenty of time to deal with the more mundane stuff before I have to go back to work.

6/25/10

So I drove home last night.  Not much to report there, other than that I-75 is still a disaster.  The choppy stretch of road seems to be migrating southward though, so maybe they'll work their way down to the Ohio line within the next twenty years.  Then it will be time to start back in Detroit and tear the whole damned thing apart again.

At 6am today, having been awake for a day and a half and having consumed a sufficient amount of delicious refreshment, I reached an important conclusion.  If I truly want to be happy in life, I'm going to need to know more about being a secret agent.  Who better to use as a source than James Bond then, right?  Even if I don't find myself taking up the struggle against the enemies of civilization, my eventual mastery of the suave demeanor and cheesy lingo are bound to come in handy with the ladies and so forth.  So that's my new goal - 24 movies before my vacation is over.

Tonight I learned that, in the event that I find myself alone with someone like Ursula Andress, I should not drink the coffee.  It would be a shame to fall asleep on such an occasion, after all.  (You know, at least not until ten minutes had passed.)  Since I don't like coffee anyway, I can't help but feel like my training is a little bit ahead of schedule.

Next up: From Russia With Love

It would probably be a good idea to go to sleep at some point tonight, seeing how I didn't get out of bed until 2pm today.  This doesn't lead to a very productive day on the homefront.  So I think we're gonna limit my first training session to these two movies.  Plenty of down time ahead.  Gotta pace myself.

6/24/10

I'm sure Larry the Cable Guy could treat us to an amusing simile that would put everything in perspective here, but I'll just say that it really sucks to be four hours from home when your government says that you'll be tired after three hours.  It sucks the mighty balls indeed.

My overnight deal worked out okay for the most part.  I got rolling right at midnight, made a fuel stop once I got onto I-71, and then cruised into my consignee's lot at 6:40am.  The forklift guy had me unloaded in short order, after which I rolled down the street to an abandoned factory.  (Insert another observation about the Midwest in a bygone era, vacant buildings, etc. here.)  As morning turned to afternoon and I sat at #1 on the board, it became apparent that there wasn't a lot of freight hanging around for me to deliver.  Eventually I got hungry.  You ever get hungry?  I do.  Every day.  So I was sitting there in a parking lot along some little side road, wondering how to rectify the situation.  It's nice to live in the internet age sometimes.  Since I have a nice powerful computer and a speedy mobile broadband connection, the next step was obvious - look out my window, of course...

Any place that has been dishing out burgers since before my parents were born must be decent, I thought.  'This exit' was referring to the business loop through Chillicothe, which I was able to reach from the side road where I had parked.  So after a few minutes I was tucked into their truck parking area and placing my order.  Back in the 50's it was probably pretty exciting for people to sit in a booth and place their orders via telephone.  To me, today, it was just cheesy.  Oh well though.  When in Rome and whatnot...

The food wasn't bad.  Not really all that good either, but not bad.  After I had my fill, I drove back down the street to my abandoned factory and resumed the wait.  My 14 hour clock ran out at 2pm, but I went ahead and stayed on the board since I would be completing a ten-hour break at 5pm anyway.  If they left me sitting around all day and then needed me to roll somewhere before 5pm, then I'd just have to say they were out of luck.

In the end, it was I who was out of luck.  I got my next assignment a few minutes ago - deadhead home.  It's no secret that I've been anxious to get home for a while now, so that part is fine.  Still 226 miles away though.  The stretch from Columbus to Findlay will take me along some back roads and through some towns, so the overall pace of the trip will end up somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-55mph.  Not possible in three hours, so I'll have to sit here until 9pm, at which point my remaining three hours will carry me to midnight and I'll pick up more hours.  Then I'll get home in the middle of the night.  To some bureaucrat in D.C. this makes sense. 

And one more thing not to like about my new fleet - no pay.  That's SOP for this company whenever they send us home within the allotted time frame, but I've always gotten paid for driving home.  I park my truck at a fairly busy terminal, so my occasional deadheads home have been a simple matter of repositioning the company's equipment, as far as I'm concerned.  I go to Taylor with a loaded trailer 90% of the time (like last time and the time before), but even my deadheads have been paid in the past (like the prior time).  Not any more.  One more thing that we'll be doing 'by the book' from now on apparently.  Not coincidentally, also one more thing that bugs me.  Add it to the list, and that list is already a good bit longer than it used to be, if we're keeping score.  I can tell you that much.

Since I've caught a series of bad breaks, do you suppose Congressman Kanjorski might have some relief to offer me?  After all, I'm not a "minority" or "defective," last time I checked.  (I think I know what he was trying to do here.  Trying to call people like me racists since we're not real fond of government spending, but for someone who was a kid of Polish descent in the 40's, when the term "defective" had its own special meaning, he should know better.  This is pretty sloppy work.)



I do have one thing going for me.  My unfortunate lodger somehow came up with enough money to buy a case of beer.  I'm told that this case of beer now sits in my fridge and he's going to visit his parents for the weekend.  Looks like I won't have to race the clock and try to beat last call this time around.  Small victories, my friends.  Small victories.

6/23/10

I have to conclude that the sole purpose of government at any level is to make my life miserable.  Today was already off to a bad start, given the situation with the 70 hour rule.  As I rolled along I-40 though, at the very least it looked like I would clear Nashville today.  This would leave me within a reasonable range of tomorrow morning's delivery.  Since I can't drive again until midnight, it would help to be as close as possible.

Cue road construction... now.  A half hour parked in the left lane of the interstate is enough to convince a fella that the Tennessee authorities are conspiring with the feds and simply trying to ruin his day.  There were people in bright vests walking around but I'm pretty sure they were just milking the clock.  I sure as hell didn't see any constructing going on.  By the time I got free of the traffic jam, I had to park for the night at the little Petro off Exit 188.

Now I have 400 miles to go from here to my delivery point.  I'm due by 7am.  That would require a 57 mile per hour pace, but I'm going to need to make a fuel stop along the way.  So we're up to 59.25mph.  My truck can go 65mph and I'll get the benefit of hitting Nashville, Louisville, and Cincinnati during the off hours, so the schedule should work.  You motorists and construction workers out there had better not get in my way though.  That's all I'm gonna say.

6/22/10

In the 'credit where credit is due' department, we'll have to score one for my new fleet manager today. After slugging my way through the morning traffic, I got over to my consignee in Carrollton, Texas. Finally, finally, finally, I managed to send in my request for home time.  Give me nineteen days off.  Screw it.  I need a break.

After I got settled into the loading dock and kicked back for a while, I got a message from my fleet manager asking me how many vacation days I was taking.  It's funny - I get two weeks of paid vacation each year but it has never occurred to me to use the days off.  I always call the payroll people and make sure I get my money, of course, but my days at home have always counted as home time.  I accrue a lot of extra home time by staying out for weeks and months at a stretch, so I simply never thought to use my time off as vacation time.  With the assistance of today's handy little exchange of messages, I'm now scheduled for fourteen days of vacation and five days of home time.  Keeping some extra days banked up might come in handy some time down the road.  Like any good hypocrite, I don't mind having them looking over my shoulder when it works out to my benefit.  Good lookin' out, my brother.

My payload consisted of big rolls of foam, stacked floor to ceiling with no pallets.  As such, the unloading process took quite a while.  I was done eventually though, at which point I drove around to the far side of the building and parked to await my next assignment.  I had gone to the wrong side when I arrived this morning and I noticed that the adjacent warehouse was unoccupied.  Hanging out there sounded better than driving down to the terminal in Lancaster, partly because I hate driving in Texas and partly because my 70 hours were still in short supply.

My next assignment came through before I even had a chance to check my board status.  It was picking up in Lewisville, only a few miles away, at 2pm.  Since I basically hate driving in Texas regardless of the time of day, the thought of getting loaded just in time for the afternoon rush wasn't very appealing.  I decided to head over a few hours early and see what might happen.  The fella driving the forklift seemed pretty exasperated by my arrival but I did end up getting out of there well ahead of schedule.  Another 3,000 pound payload too.  Given that it is truck parts, I was expecting a heavy one.  It turned out to be seat cushions or something.  That'll help to offset some of the extra fuel I've been burning in the constant 100° heat lately.

In the 'criticism where criticism is due' department, we'll have to score on for the feds.  My trip is taking me to Chillicothe, Ohio.  I could have knocked out just under half the trip today and finished it off tomorrow, ahead of a Thursday morning delivery.  But the government somehow knows better.  Between this afternoon and tomorrow, I had a little over ten hours available to me.  So apparently it will be better for me to get off the road tomorrow afternoon, take a (probably sleepless) ten-hour break, and then run overnight to reach my consignee in time.  Assholes.

I can drive six and a half hours tomorrow, meaning that the last leg of the trip will be a fairly long one, meaning that I'll have to get cracking again right at midnight tomorrow night, meaning that I'll have to be done by 2pm tomorrow afternoon, meaning that I'll have to start fairly early in the morning.  Oh, if only my asinine federal government could regulate more of my life.  Just think - without them I might get a normal night's rest tonight and tomorrow night.  That would be terribly unsafe.

6/21/10

I don't really have much to say today, given that it was a pretty boring drive from Pecos to Weatherford, so I'll just say that you suck if that picture doesn't make you grin. Nothing further. Good day.

6/20/10

There are days, rare as they may seem, when my job involves little more than holding the steering wheel and setting the cruise control.  Today was almost one of those days.  Goddamned El Paso and its 'No Trucks In Left Lane' while our international guests tie up the two right lanes at 45mph.  Aside from those twenty miles of frustration though, it was a pretty simple kinda day.

Since the actual driving didn't bring us a lot of content, we're forced to look elsewhere.  If we look at the start of the day, things appear pretty good.  I stayed in bed nice and late for no reason other than that I could.  I headed inside and got some lunch, at which point I was reminded that A&W makes a fantastic bacon double cheeseburger.  Then it was time to drive.

If we look at the middle of the day, things appear pretty good.  My Tigers bounced back to make it eight out of nine on their home stand against the National League.  I got waved through another CBP checkpoint, this time in Texas.  My load is light enough that I was able to kick back and let the cruise control drag me along (aside from that stretch through El Paso).  Traffic and weather were rather favorable (aside from that stretch through El Paso).  No asinine messages came across the satellite.  My father was a little drunk by the time I called to wish him a happy Father's Day.  That's not a huge deal, but we don't generally have a lot to talk about.  When he's sober the conversations tend to be a little awkward, as neither of us really knows what to say.  Whenever he has a few pops in him, we can just exchange wisecracks for a few minutes and I'm off the hook.

If we look at the end of the day, things appear pretty good.  I cruised into the Flying J in Pecos and grabbed a pull-through parking space, then found that Sprint has upgraded its Mobile Broadband coverage in this area.  It used to be so slow that I would fork over the $5 to use Flying J's wifi for a night.  Now it's pretty quick.  This is handy when you want to read about the news of the day and such, even if such news leaves you scratching your head.

Tomorrow should be another day when I don't have to get up early.  I'm probably going to end up stopping in Weatherford.  That's only around 360 miles from here, so I can get a late start and still find a parking space without too much trouble.

Did a damned Euro really win the U.S. Open?  I know it's Northern Ireland and all, so maybe Gramps would have been proud, but come on.  That just ain't right.