Andy and Darcy’s Blog

So we were sitting watching Good Eats and we heard what sounded like fireworks. We looked out the window and it appeared that someone was indeed lighting off fireworks. I went back to watching Good Eats and I looked up again after about a minute and the fireworks were still going. Then it got bigger, thats when I figured it wasn’t fireworks.

We decided it was a good time to call 911. The dispatcher said they knew about it already and were sending out trucks.

I then picked up my camera and snapped off a few pictures from the living room. (Sorry about the poor quality it was through the bay window).

Gallery link

Preliminary reports seem to state that it was the garage that went up. After about 5 mins we heard what sounded like more fireworks, could be gas or something that went off. The flames got pretty high, up around 20 feet or so, and our neighbors across the street evacuated their house, embers were floating onto the roof. Scary stuff.

Now we just need to hope and pray that everyone is ok.

I have never lived anywhere else that I have seen this weather phenomenon. And I’m talking about sun dogs. On Monday we saw them driving to work, and we also saw them driving home from work. In both cases, there was one on each side of the sun but its hard to capture that on a camera like I have.

Here they are in the morning…its kind of hard to get a picture without power lines on the way to work.

And here they are on the way home. We hardly ever see any daylight in the winter, since its all during our working hours.

Maybe this could be considered another of the silver linings to living somewhere where its cold way too much of the time.

Last Wednesday, February 20th, there was a total eclipse of the Moon, that was visible from most of North America. Just for some history, a total lunar eclipse was last seen on March 3, 2007, and will next be seen in December 2010. So I figured it would be a good idea to brave the frigid temperatures (I’m talking ambient of -3 degrees, here) and take some pictures.

The operation was basically this: leave the tripod set up on the deck and jump out real quick with my camera, take some shots and duck back inside. I repeated this about 6 or 7 times, until it was at full eclipse and then I retired for the night. It wasn’t as “cool” as the total solar eclipse we watched when I was in middle school, but still pretty neat. Here are some photos from the event:

In the long awaited sequel to my inaugural Rochester Epicure post, I am writing today about zpizza. It is a chain that recently opened a store in the Shops at University Square (formerly Galleria Mall) in Rochester. It’s situated on the 2nd floor of University Square, on the end opposite Games by James, with lots of seating. The concept of the restaurant is an upscale pizza parlor with unique pizza selections and fresh, good ingredients.

One of the menu items that flew off the menu at me immediately was the Pear and Gorgonzola Salad, with its pear, Gorgonzola cheese, candied walnuts and balsamic dressing, almost the perfect salad. I didn’t actually try it this time, but it is on my list when I go there next. Once I do, I’ll have to compare it to my reference salad, the Pear and Ama Blue salad at Prescott’s.

We decided to go with 3 slices of pizza, each of us getting a slice of the Mediterranean and sharing once slice of American. The Mediterranean was brilliant, pesto as a base, with eggplant, kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and roasted red peppers, all topped with a good helping of feta. If I had one drawback with this pizza, it is that the eggplant is cut rather large and tends to come off all in one piece. The American was pretty good, basically a supreme pizza with some good tasting sauce. It is reminiscent of Papa John’s, but a bit less sweet and more fresh tasting. The thing that set this pizza apart though was the crust. Not too thick, not too thin, with a good flavor. It had a wonderful chewiness that I have come to love in a pizza crust.

All in all we will definitely be back, maybe not all the time, but frequently. One of the nice things about zpizza is the amount of seating, there is ample seating inside and even more seating outside in the mall area. Which makes it a perfect place for going and getting some lunch with our larger-than-usual groups, that we sometimes have.

Ratings (out of 5)
Atmosphere: 4.0
Service: 4.0 (the cashier was personable)
Food: 4.5
Fun: 3.5 (it’s a pizza spot, thats about it)

Overall: 4.0

Here are pictures of Andy making marshmallows. It’s crazy, but you can actually make these things at home!! And you can flavor them with all sorts of good things like vanilla beans. Or you could even make your own Peeps!

It’s like making a meringue, except you would substitute gelatin for eggs. We learned all this from watching Alton Brown on Good Eats. Next time for us: amaretto marshmallows.

Well, apples that were stored in the refrigerator for 4 months are better that way. This past weekend I dried apples.

Somehow, one of our bags of fall apples is always left behind. Those apples are not made into apple pie, apple cobbler, or any apple whatever. Last year the bag sat in our fridge until we had to make room for the new season of apples. These apples weren’t honeycrisp or anything that would go bad quickly. These apples were good for long term storage…but still…it is definitely better to make apple chips out of them.

We were at the cathedral in Winona several weekends ago so here are my pictures. The cathedral is quite old, but it was recently renovated. It is beautiful!!

The superbowl was celebrated by us and our friends with a feast of German food. Andy made sauerbraten with a raisin wine gravy, a meal with a long and intensive assembly process. This roast marinated in red wine for 3 days! After a while, it became quite wine colored. The rest of the food at this event was spectacular as well. Jon made spaetzle on site, and it went with the gravy very well. Brian also made a very tasty German potato salad. Besides the wonderful German food, we had vanilla cookies with lemon icing by Pam and Jim and an excellent chex mix by Kristi and Mike. We had other food besides that, and I liked it all.

I wasn’t really that into the game all that much. I have really lost my passion for football now that fantasy football is over. We had the football connoisseurs watching on Andy’s TV in the basement, and the rest of us normal people watched upstairs and hovered near the kitchen. I have to admit that I really didn’t see any spectacular commercials this year, but that could be attributed to the fact that I was organizing my pictures the entire time.

As you can see from the pictures, most of the upstairs people were multitasking, but a good time was had by all.

At our tour of Mayo, the scientific glass blower showed us a Prince Rupert’s Teardrop. A Prince Rupert’s Teardrop is made by dropping molten glass into cold water. It comes out in shape of a teardrop. The outside of the teardrop is incredibly hard, so it cannot be shattered, even with a hammer. However, if you break off the thinner part of the teardrop, the strongest part of the teardrop is broken and the entire teardrop crumbles like sand. It was a really cool demonstration.

So if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that I went on a tour of Mayo with SWE. And I couldn’t fit all of my blog into one post, so here is the rest of it!

It was Saturday so there was no one at the clinic (I assume the Methodist Hospital and St. Mary’s were quite busy). We went into admissions and saw the process by which patients are admitted and go through the system. It was designed for efficiency. On the floor I saw, there is a central station where people who know things work that connects to three hallways of exam rooms and one waiting room. I think there is something similar on every floor. They have a system of lights for every room that indicates its status…patient waiting, doctor is in the room, etc. The doctors use pagers to communicate when they’re needed somewhere.

We then toured the engineering department which provides custom devices for the doctors, replications of scanned organs, and improvements to the processes at Mayo. They have a lot of CNC machines and use cad tools for much of their work. They fabricate a lot of metal devices, and we saw a flow jet machine as well. We saw a jaw socket that was in the process of fabrication. They also showed us a device for inserting the sensor for deep brain stimulation on a pig.

The clinic has its own scientific glass blower, and we saw a demonstration of his work. He demonstrated blowing bulbs into cylindrical glass tubes, bending the glass into corners, and attaching glass tubes to larger glass vessels. He makes all kinds of things…the most notable of which were heart / vascular system replicas so that people could practice angioplasty surgeries.