liketoeat.

Today, we had another Atlanta drift event put on by the awesome people at Southeastdrift.com. I had a great time as usual, and ran a ton of really fun tandem runs with Andysapp and Erin. Andy brought out his video cameras which we placed on each of our cars for some exciting chase footage and then edited the clips into an awesome video which you can watch right here:

KILL OR BE KILL. from Andy Sapp on Vimeo.

Brady and Panda were also out snapping classy still photos. Here are a few preview shots, but check out the S3 Blog for even more coverage.

Unfortunately, I didn’t snap any pics of the food from the day, but we were definitely loaded up with tasty treats throughout the afternoon. Tran and Laura showed up around lunch time with a bag full of QT hot dogs, chips, and apple juice which was awesome of them. I enjoyed my share of the feast and later ended up giving one of the extras to a friendly homeless man (sorry, Tran). I probably wouldn’t’ have done it, but he kept rambling on with entertaining commentary such as how Byron had a soothing voice and how Laura was prettier than black girls, so I figured I’d reward him for his fun values.

Following the hot dogs, I bought up a couple of bomb pops from the ice cream truck that was driving by. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m pretty sure Laura and I both got more of our pops onto our arms and the ground than into our mouth, but oh well. After that, we were attacked by an intense rainstorm that left me feeling quite gross for a while, but I eventually remembered that I had packed an extra shirt and flip flops. I changed into those and was then notified that Andy’s mom had made cupcakes, which was possibly the ultimate prize of the day (Andy’s mom is notorious for making the best chocolate cupcakes in the nation, and today was no exception). I ate down a few of those and finally called it a day.

After the fun and exhausting day of drifting, I ran home to shower and change, and then met a bunch of the crew up at Discover Mills to grab dinner and catch a movie. We dined at a nice Mexicans establishment by the mall, it was quite tasty.

Here, you can see Laura, Tran, and Erin anxiously awaiting their meals:

And on the other side of the table, Jessica, Brady, and QC made exciting faces:

Byron showed up a little later but I had already started eating and didn’t get the camera out again. Sorry, Byron.

After dinner, we headed back to the mall to catch our late showing of the new Pixar film, Wall-E. I was a bit tired going in and kinda worried about staying awake (I tend to sleep through about 93% of the movies I watch as is), and my suspicions were quite correct. I think I passed out about 20 minutes into the movie and probably only woke up 2 or 3 times to see a few minutes of it, although the parts I saw were enjoyable. Byron and QC also napped, but Laura seemed to really love the movie. Erin, Tran, and Jessica seemed neutral, and Brady flat out hated it. I’d be willing to give it another shot when I’m a bit more awake however.

Today was a fairly slow day that mainly consisted of me waking up and doing a bit of work on my 240 to get it ready for the drift event going on next weekend. I started by re-installing most of my interior (the car had been stripped for the last week or so as I was pulling sound deadening out and painting the floor), and then running up to Erin’s house to get some help with a seat bracket for my new Sparco passenger side seat.

We got all of these things taken care of and then I met Laura over at the S3 office as I’ll be rabbit sitting Kashi for the next few days while her apartment gets bug-bombed. There’s been a terrible infiltration of knats (haha) lately and apparently our homemade traps haven’t worked, so we’re hoping professionals can do the job a bit better. We set Kashi up in her new temporary home in my office and then decided to grab a quick bite to eat for dinner.

I rarely visit Waffle House at regular hours so I’m not sure if this is what always goes on at 8 pm on a Sunday night, but it was just kinda bizarre. Our waitress was just generally strange and somewhat rude, and wouldn’t let me order an All-Star special without eggs (I don’t eat them) without a huge amount of fuss and her telling me it was against policy and stuff (you’d think leaving something off would just cost them less and they’d be cool with that, but apparently not). Aside from the food and service, we had an entire table full of redneck bro’s sit right behing us and they were extremely loud and obnoxious the entire time. We eventually got our food though, and luckily it ended up ok. Still a strange trip overall though.

Here’s Laura hiding from the bros by reading a book:

And then a shot of my fairly tasty biscuits and gravy:

This past weekend, Laura and I took a bit of a road trip up to the annual Secret City Festival in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This was a festival we had been researching for some time and were quite excited about. It is basically a big city festival for Oak Ridge, a small city in the middle of TN that was taken over by the government in the early 1940’s to use as a facility to produce one of the first atomic bombs. The residents didn’t know at all what was going on though, and were just given jobs in factories building stuff that they weren’t told about, so it was kinda weird. It wasn’t until the bomb dropped in Hiroshima in 1945 that the city was informed what they had been doing.

Anyhow, we knew that the festival included a Wolrd War 2 reenactment, a possible tour of the Y-12 National Security Complex (the place where the a-bomb was made), and a bunch of other stuff. We set off fairly early on Saturday morning to assure getting there in time to see everything we were interested in, however that failed pretty quickly. The Y-12 facility is still used today so it’s extremely high security, and they require that everyone entering has at least 2 forms of ID, and something that proves that you are a U.S. citizen (such as a passport). Around the time we hit Kennesaw (about 30 minutes away from our start in Dunwoody), we realized Laura had left hers at home so we turned around. This wouldn’t have been too bad except for the fact that the GA highway warning signs advised that all lanes were blocked on the way back, so I took the super extended back road path to get us back home. Upon leaving for the 2nd time, we saw that there was no stopped traffic whatsoever, and that the signs were lying. Thanks Atlanta.

After getting out of metro Atlanta, my trusty GPS decided it wanted to take us on another strange backroad adventure through Dalton, GA and into Cleveland, TN. It cut the mileage down a little bit, but our speeds were definitely slowed as it was mostly 2-lane country roads that led us by BBQ restaurants and billboards with photos of strange people. We continued the journey though, and eventually had to stop at CVS to get cash as there were no ATM’s in site, and we were worried that Oak Ridge might not have many credit card accepting vendors. The CVS trip was quite entertaining and included a strange couple of redneck women dressed in Elvis Prestley attire trying to buy pregnancy tests with Food Stamps. Good fun.

Eventually, we continued on our way and were dumped back on I-75 (which made the backroad detour even more useless), and ended up near Oak Ridge. It was a fairly long journey off the interstate but we finally arrived, parked in the JC Penny parking lot (which was the allocated parking lot for the festival), and set off to try and find the tour bus to take us to the Y-12 facility as it almost time for the last tour of the day at 3:00 pm. Once we realized that you actually had to drive to Y-12 to board the bus, we found our way there and ran inside to sign up for the last tour. They checked our passports, made us leave our cameras, phones, knives, gun (big surprise there), and pretty much everything else in the car. After a thorough metal detector inspection, we were finally allowed to board the bus and enter the facility (but not without a final test, a sniff from a drug/bomb sniffing German Shepard).

Inside, we drove through the entire facility and it was quite fascinating. We couldn’t really see anything other than a ton of old buildings, but just knowing the history of what we were around was extremely interesting. The security was probably the most intense part, and the razor wire around nearly every building in the 2.5 mile long facility made the average jail look like a kid’s playground. There were also a few buildings that featured turrets that were probably armed with all kinds of automatic machine guns and who knows what else. Laura and I contemplated running off from the tour at the one spot we were allowed to get off the bus, but realized that we’d probably get shot pretty quick (“Authorized use of lethal force” signs were everywhere), and we also decided we wouldn’t even really know what to do with a bunch of plutonium. It seemed fun though. The tour eventually ended after about an hour of driving and story-telling from the guide (and obnoxious laughing from the backwoods country folk sitting next to us on the bus), and we took a quick stroll through the visitor’s center.

Cameras weren’t allowed inside but Laura snapped a quick shot of the sign as we drove back towards the main part of town:

Google provided me with a decent aerial shot of the entire site as well to see the full size and location of the facility:

After leaving Y-12, we realized that we had probably already missed the WW2 reenactment, so decided to stop for lunch at Wendy’s as we were both starving. I didn’t get any photos, but I had a slightly strange tasting spicy chicken sandwich and Laura had a fairly sub-par salad. Not really the high point of the day, but it relates to food so I figured I’d throw it in there.

Even though we missed the reenactment, we were able to browse the war area and snap a few neat shots from the German and American bases that had been set up. The vehicles, weapons, outfits, and even German speaking we overhead were quite well done and looked very authentic.

After browsing the imitation Normandy coastline, we wandered through the rest of the festival. It wasn’t quite as exciting as the stuff we had seen earlier in the day and mainly featured rows of tents selling strange crafts or enrollments to karate studios. There was also a weird band playing that seemed to consist of a couple of teenage kids on guitar/electric drums, their mom and dad singing and playing guitar, and probably a random old man neighbor on the bass. It was odd but strangely entertaining for about a minute.

After this, we saw the last historical attraction, the Friendship Bell given to Japan from America after we blew up a majority of their country. So nice of us. Laura and I posed for a friendly photo by it.

After our final laughable moment of being offered Atomic Fireball candy by a man in a really bizarre Irish accent (we think), we finally called it a day and headed back towards Atlanta on a more civilized route that didn’t involve strange country back roads. Quite a fun trip overall though, and I put up a full gallery of the day’s photos here so be sure to check those out.

Today, we climbed Stone Mountain. We had been planning this for a few weeks as part of our conditioning for the 33 mile hike at the end of the summer, and finally made it happen. The day started with me heading to D-Wood to pick up picnic supplies with Laura which went well. Shortly after this, we received a call from Erin and Tran saying that the weather where they were was awful, and they were seeing tons of rain, flooding, and general chaos. It was still fine in D-Wood at the time, but we were worried that this would ruin our trip.

We went back to the apartment and went ahead and made sandwiches to snack on as it was already feeling like lunch time. I went with the tasty brown sugar ham and swiss on pita bread combo and it was a great choice. After this, the rain finally attacked us but luckily it didn’t last long. Erin and Tran were still getting tons up their way though, and had about decided to call the trip off. With nothing to do, we hung out for a while, watched some cheesy show about Sasquatch/The Jersey Devil/The Loch Ness Monster on the History channel, but finally heard back from Erin with news that they would head down after all.

Upon their arrival, we headed to Stone Mountain, got lost trying to find the hiking trail, finally got there, and started our climb. It was a 1.3 mile trail to the top which wasn’t too terrible, but had us worn out a bit upon our arrival. Laura also got attacked by slick rocks and sorta fell and hurt her knee, but she claimed to be ok. Tran worried about it a lot though, and threatened to make her turn around and go back.

Here’s Erin and Tran looking victorious after reaching the top:

Laura and Tran looking excited:

Random scenery from the top of the mountain:

Mandatory group shot:

And finally, Tran glaring towards Laura while discussing her knee:

After filling up on water and enjoying the scenery for a few minutes, we decided to head back down to assure a good seat for the laser show. We sprinted down (literally), got back to the car, and realized we all smelled homeless. I had thought to bring an extra shirt along but unfortunately my Camelback decided to leak on it deeming it totally useless for the remainder of the day, but luckily the park had a nice gift shop with a number of classy choices to hold me over. I settled on an awesome baby blue shirt with a bald eagle on it for $9, washed myself down with Laura’s orange scented hand sanitizer, and felt much better.

We finally made our way to the Laser Show area and claimed a spot. At this time, some creepy old man in front of us stood up and stared at us for a good 4 or so minutes, but finally went back to his spot. It was really odd though. We also snacked on some of Laura’s Kashi inspired trail mix to hold us over before dinner.

The laser show finally started up and it was quite enjoyable. The only downside was the fact that it was flooded with advertisements (there was a full 5+ minute Chick-Fil-A segment, along with numerous other ads at the beginning), and they didn’t play “Proud To Be An American”. This made Tran and Laura especially unhappy. On the upside, their firework exhibition was really well done. Here’s a crappy picture I took with my phone.

After the show, we hurried back to the car and finally made our way over to Felini’s for another night of pizza. It was delicious as usual.

For even more coverage of the day’s fun, check out the full gallery here.

Today was a very fun filled day made up of a number of entertaining activities. The day started by Erin meeting up with me at my house to grab lunch at Chick-Fil-A (courtesy of some free coupons we got yesterday which was nice) and then do a bit of work on my 240. Most of the day was spent chipping sound deadening out of the interior which pretty much sucks, but we made good progress.

After a few hours of that, Tran headed over and we decided to come inside. Impressed by the new LauraJMoss.com website which we launched yesterday, Tran decided she wanted a site of her own. We didn’t buy the domain yet, but JTranOnline.com will be up soon, and is currently being hosted on my server. It has a classy pic though, so check it out.

After that fun, we headed towards D-Wood to meet up with Laura, Shai, and Barry and head towards Little 5 Points for a party going down at Wish, a neat clothing store run by one of our friends. We managed to dodge Atlanta traffic pretty well and finally parked, and met up with a bunch of friends who ended up being down there. We also enjoyed some delicious free Nathan’s hotdogs courtesy of Wish.

After hanging around the party for a while, Erin, Tran, Laura, and myself decided to wander around L5P for a second and see some of the other sights. Laura also wanted to get a falafel wrap from this place she likes as she isn’t really a hot dog fan. Here’s her enjoying her meal:

After roaming around for a few minutes and realizing that everything closes super early, we headed back to the Wish block party for a while. Unfortunately it was like 115 degrees with 600% humidity, so we didn’t last long and decided to depart pretty quick.

Here’s a picture of Tyler’s car I took on the way out (Tyler is an old-school DriftMechaniks member, and his wife Lauren runs Wish). It had been in the shop for about a year but is finally done now and looks awesome.

Back in the car, the decision was made to head north and enjoy a night of mini-golf up in Duluth. We had been discussing this for a while and finally decided to make it happen. We settled on Pirates Cove, a big pirate ship themed place right by my house, and it was fun.

We had to wait around a few minutes for Andy, Lieze, and BM to make it so used to opportunity to pose for some crappy pics with my point-and-shoot. Pardon the quality.

Andy, Lieze, and BM finally arrived and our game was started. We all quickly realized (well, at least I did) that mini-golf was a bit harder than we remembered, and I was flat out awful. Tran lost her ball to the lake on the first hole, mine was gone on the second, and then numerous other issues occurred throughout the night. We managed to keep playing though, and did have a really good time (aside from half of the course being like 100 feet from I-85, which was really loud).

At one particular hole, I made an observation that there were goldfish in the pond which I thought was neat. Erin, deafened by the cars on the interstate, immediately turned around and yelled “dolphins?!?!”, which ended up being the running joke of the night. In honor of Erin, here’s a slightly fictional rendering of that spot with dolphins included.

We finished up the golf game and finally ended up outside the pirate ship where we posed for a group shot.

After realizing how hungry a good game of mini golf makes you, we headed down the road to conclude the evening at IHOP. Andy tried to eat the menu.

We finally had a chance to order our food and it proved to be entertaining. I decided to try out the video function on the new point-and-shoot to document this and the remainder of the meal, and here’s the result. Keep in mind I know absolutely nothing about shooting or editing video, so the results might not be very good.

Overall, quite a fun day. I put up a full gallery HERE so be sure to check it out to see even more from the day of excitement.

We tend to go to Felini’s a lot, but for some reason, I never find myself getting tired of it. Slices are quite large and only cost like $2, and it’s always tasty, so you can’t really go wrong.

Anyhow, Yousef, Laura, and myself made a late night trip down there tonight after a slightly failed attempt at our Jamaican Party. See, Laura just returned home from a week long business trip to the island and had a few neat recipes we were going to try out, but we were all just flat out too lazy and tired to cook anything and decided it can wait until another time. The pizza backup plan was fine with all of though.

Here’s Yousef expressing his love for pizza and white people:

Laura excited about her Veggie Pizza extravaganza:

And finally me being eclipsed by my slice:

Back at the apartment, we started messing with getting Laura a website so that she could host her pictures from the trip and eventually set up a portfolio site of some sort. Laurajmoss.com was settled on, and we got the site underway. I threw together a quick front page design later that night (inspired by Laura’s new life dream to be a hippie, drive around in a VW bus, and sell pancakes to other hippies for a dollar – long story, I’ll explain more later) and you can see it now on the site.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever know what the above words have to do with a classy Italian lunch, but for some reason Mambo Italiano (this nice place in the Forum shopping center in Norcross) seemed to have that all over their regular menu, drink menu, and dessert menu. Laura and I were quite puzzled by it (thought it might relate if there was a gym in the back, or perhaps a smoothie bar, but none of the above were seen in the establishment), but still enjoyed a delicious lunch at this new place.

We were torn between it, Jason’s Deli, and Atlanta Bread Company, but decided to change things up a bit for once and were quite pleased. They started us off with some super soft pita bread (I think) and an unknown dipping sauce, but I actually enjoyed it. Even Laura (who tends to not enjoy bread for sport) seemed to be a fan.

We both ordered our own pizzas thinking they’d be small individual sizes, but we were quite wrong. Here you can see Laura with her mammoth Veggie pizza.

I opted for the pepperoni, and it was quite nice.

The huge size ended up being ok as the leftovers will probably provide us both with another meal or two.

After the pizza party, we walked to Barnes and Noble and enjoyed a nice after lunch drink at the Starbucks inside. I think we had Iced Soy Chai Lattes, but I’m terrible at remembering the name of their fancy drinks so I may be totally wrong. Whatever the name, it was delicious. After acquiring our beverages, we sat on the floor reading books about camping in north Georgia but were kindly told to move over to actual seats. Apparently thinking you’re a child when you’re actually 25 doesn’t work well in bookstores. Oh well.

…at least according to the bread basket at O’Charley’s.

For the evening, Erin, Tran, and myself did agree, and enjoyed our share of tasty rolls during our Monday night outing.

I also had a delicious bacon cheeseburger and baked potato, here’s a shot of it.

In other totally unrelated news, figured I’d mention that Giraffe now has a new home. Wooley and I bought/built him an awesome mouse condo that features a loft-like balcony with ramp, 2 wheels, a nice tube, and a bunch of other stuff. He likes it a lot so far.

This afternoon, Shiz, Panda, and I were bored and hungry and decided we wanted to grill some hot dogs. We drove down the street to Kroger, made our way to the hot dog aisle, and were faced with an important decious: which variety to try?

Thankfully, Kroger narrowed down the brand choice for us by making Ball Park franks 2 for $5 (I think), but in my recent health kick (I’m hiking 33 miles at the end of the summer, more on that later), I thought that trying Turkey might be a wise idea. We settled on one pack of turkey and one of beef, and headed home to start the grilling.

Out of the package, you could immediately see a difference (beef on the left, turkey on the right).

The beef hot dogs looked and cooked much better, but I continued on with the turkey dogs and let them finish their grilling process.

Inside the house, we prepared them for consumption, and Shiz and Panda also posed for strange pictures.

Upon tasting the dogs, there was a noticeable difference. The turkey ones weren’t necessarily bad, but they didn’t taste like a hot dog (Shiz compared it to eating a weird turkey sandwich, and he was pretty much right). We ate them anyhow, and Panda modified his with spicy BBQ sauce to make it a little more exciting.

Skyy watched from aside and begged to try either of the choices, but I’m not a fan of giving her people food so had to decline. Panda did dance with her after dinner though, which was nice.

The conclusion? Forget about the slight un-healthiness for a second (they’re all hot dogs after all), and buy the beef ones. They taste a lot better.

Today, Panda, Wooley, QC, and myself went to Firehouse Subs for lunch. The subs were tasty as usual, but the main purpose of this post is to document Panda’s special edition lunchtime testing of random hot sauces that were available at the establishment.

Normally, Panda expresses zero care, fear, or emotion when eating hot food. I’ve had hot wings before that were downright unbearable to me, but Panda licked them up as if they were candy. The kid is crazy. Anyhow, he happily jumped at the idea to try a few of Firehouse’s sauces out, and until the end, it was fairly uneventful.

Firehouse has about 30 or so sauces on display that are free to try, and they are all rated from 1-10 for heat. Panda started out with a few 6’s and 7’s, and as expected, he didn’t seem the least bit phased. Bored by these results, Wooley returned to the counter at an attempt to find something a bit more entertaining. A few minutes later, he returned with 4 sacues ranging from a 9 to a 10+++. We figured this might get a little better.

“Pure Poison” was the first contender, and checked in at a 9 on the hot scale. Panda applied a bit to his sandwich and didn’t seem the least bit bothered. Quickly becoming bored of it, he switched up to the higher scored sauces, and went with “Endorphin Rush”, a 10+ on the scale.

A generous portion was applied and again, there we no noticeable results. At this point, I was fairly convinced that Panda’s taste buds were straight up broken, and that nothing would ever get a response out of him. Not giving up yet, we got him to go up to “357 Mad Dog”, a 10+++ on the Firehouse scale.

After adding a bit of the sauce, I decided to read the bottle’s extreme warning labels to get a bit of an idea as to what he was getting into. It was fairly intense, and went into detail about not touching your eyes, and how you should warn people if you gave it as a gift. It was also the first one that mentioned it’s Scoville rating, which was 357,000 (the Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness of a pepper, and apparently things like Tabasco only come in at around 30,000).

One bit into this stuff and we instantly see that Panda was somewhat uncomfortable.

Wooley smelled the bottle and said he nearly wanted to throw up, so I can only imagine what Panda was going through. It didn’t seem like too much fun though.

A number of minutes went by, and the pain was still quite apparent. No amount of sweet tea seemed to ease the pain, and at this point, Panda decided to call it a day. We did go ahead and inspect the last contender, the innocent looking “Melinda’s”.

Apparently this stuff packed a Scoville rating of 577,000, so we can only imagine how bad it would have been. Hopefully we can talk Panda into eventually going back to try it, so check back in the near future to see if it happens.