Car search Christmas holiday

A situation arose rather suddenly over this Christmas holiday where someone in our family needed a car on rather short notice. So Natasha and I scrambled a bit and then started searching for a vehicle. We ended up deciding the best thing was for us to buy a smaller car that gets better gas mileage than my large 4WD pickup. I would then give the family member my pickup to use while I drive the new car to work. While gas prices are low now, there's certainly no guarantee that they'll stay that way, esp. with Obama as President. I drive about 52-53 miles per day for my current commute. It works out to about 20,000 miles a year.

Anyway, rather than looking at new cars, we searched in 2-3 year old used cars with low mileage. This really is the better way to go financially because the much lower relative cost of the low-mileage used car versus the new car.


We decided on a 2006 Nissan Altima from Carmax with about 24,000 miles. It was only about $17,300, including a transfer fee from the Carmax location in Georgia where it was located. We drove a similar Altima at another Carmax location and really liked it -- nice and zippy. This one has a v6 3.5L engine with over 250 hp and light-colored leather seats. Should be here next week!

Now THIS is good tequila!

One of the most famous scenes from the 1986 movie Crocodile Dundee is where Mick Dundee (played by Paul Hogan) is confronted in New York by a 3 would-be robbers. One robber with a switchblade demands Mick's wallet, but Mick pulls out his huge bowie-style knife and says, "That's not a knife ... THIS is a knife!" and the robbers flee in terror.

I had my own experience with tequila lately. My previous post talked about how good the Cuervo Platino was. Well, that's a switchblade compared to the Dundee knife of a tequila I just tasted recently, a wonderful Christmas gift from my mom. It's the Don Julio 1942 Anejo tequila, a special reserve aged tequila. While the regular Don Julio anejo is itself a wonderful tequila, this 1942 kicks it up a notch even further in terms of smoothness, complexity, length of finish, and, of course, cost! It comes in a gorgeous bottle that evokes an agave leaf. See below or link here for more info.


After our rather busy Christmas day activities at home, and after going over to Stephen and Tami's house for Christmas dinner, we got back home and put the kids to bed. We were fairly tired after a long day and sat down to watch TV and have a snifter of our new (old) tequila. We were watching Discovery Channel's Mythbusters (link here), and were somewhat dismayed to see that one of the topics for that show was testing the myth that "you can't polish a turd." They were actually attempting to polish real animal dung. This is not the topic to be watching when you're trying to savor your anejo Christmas present!

By the way, they determined that, in fact, a shine CAN actually be put on a ball of feces. Who knew?

Cuervo Actually Makes Great Tequila

Jose Cuervo as a general brand is not really known to be a connoisseur's tequila. It's more known as a medium used to get college coeds drunk in Cancun so they'll take off their clothes and be featured in the next "Girls Gone Wild" video.

But Michael at my local Twin Liquors had a special running on this Cuervo Platino Reserva de la Familia. It's normally $53 but they had a special of buy two bottles for $70. This might be the best silver tequila I've ever had, and it makes one heck of a margarita / mex-martini (when blended with Cointreau and fresh lime juice, of course). It's certainly as good and perhaps better than Patron, Tezon, and Gran Centenario Plata (my other silver top tequilas). It also comes in a cool blue box.

How to Bond with Your Daughter

I took Lauren out to run a few errands a couple of weeks ago. It's sometimes nice to get Daniel and Lauren apart from each other so they're not fighting. They often seem easier to take care of with just one parent on one kid than when we're all together.


Of course, taking them to a fun playground and giving them Amy's Ice Cream doesn't hurt, either.

Daniel visits The Domain

I took Daniel with me one afternoon on a recent day off from work to look at nice watches at Ben Bridge Jewelers in The Domain shopping center in North Austin. Daniel agreed with me that the Omega Speedmaster moon watch was the way to go.

If one were to do a GQ style labeling of his fashion, it would be as follows:
-- Texas Longhorns cotton t-shirt, Target, $5.
-- Mister "The King" toy car, Target, $10.
-- Omega Speedmaster Chronograph, $4000.

Map of my "pretend" run

Here's a link to the run Daniel thought was a "pretend" workout.

Just pretending

I wanted to get some exercise Saturday afternoon, so I went for a run around my neighborhood ... maybe 4.5-5 miles or so. My son Daniel (age 5) was taking a nap when I left. After my run and shower, I went to the living room and was resting in a rocking chair. Daniel had gotten up from his nap and wanted to talk to me, and he wondered why I was so tired. I told him it was because I had just worked out.

He asked, "Did you go to the gym to exercise?" I said, "No, I just went for a run around our neighborhood." He replied, "So you were just pretending to exercise?"

Shaq, The King of the Brickmasons

In backetball, if you put up a really ugly shot that doesn't come close to going in, clangs off of the rim, wedges itself between backboard and back part of rim, etc., it is often said that you have thrown up "a brick". If that's the case, then Shaquille O'Neal, center for the Phoenix Suns, is coming up on a big milestone in bricklaying history -- his 5000th MISSED free throw. Shaq shoots about 52% free throws for his career, well below a typical NBA player who makes 70-90% of his free throws. See article on ESPN here, by John Hollinger.

To put this in perspective, Shaq has MISSED more free throws than many hall of fame NBA players have free throw total ATTEMPTS in their careers. Hollinger lists many of these players.

Photo credit: Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty Images

Only Wilt Chamberlain has more FT misses than Shaq. Apparently Wilt, who once famously claimed that he slept with 20,000 women in his life, was missing approximately one FT for every 3.4 women slept with!

Best guitar ballad ever, Musical Wednesday

Since I'm taking a vacation day Friday, I'll do "musical Friday" a little early this week. Here's Lyle Lovett on Austin City Limits, singing one of my favorite, most beautiful songs of all time. A cheatin' song about Mexican food!

Family planning

Hilarious commerial from Youtube sent to me by my friend Vic.

Toyota Supports Bailing Out Weaker Competitors

This is a really interesting point of view from Toyota. See CNN article here. Toyota would prefer that the US government actually help bail out GM / Chrysler to keep them in business.

At first, this doesn't seem to make sense. Why would Toyota want to save a competitor? Well, if you read down in the article, you see why:

The final concern for the overseas automakers is a longer-term problem. The failure of a U.S. automaker could open the door for a Chinese or Indian automaker to buy up the assets of the failed company and create a new low-cost competitor in the U.S.

"You could open the door for foreign companies to buy distressed assets at rock-bottom prices," he said. He pointed to India's Tata (TTM) and China's Geely as two automakers in the developing world that are already on record as being interested in expanding into western markets like the United States.

So Toyota wants to keep GM / Chrysler in business because they think that they are EASIER TO COMPETE AGAINST than those who would replace them if they failed. Just think about that for a minute...

Dilbert on the financial crisis

Awesome comic strip from Dilbert on the financial crisis lately. I was alerted to it by Adam Bold's weekly mutual fund investing radio show, link here.

Dallas beats New York despite its O-line

When watching the 4th quarter of last night's NFC East Cowboys-Giants game, it had a very similar feeling to Dallas' loss at Pittsburgh last week. Link here for recap (I like the line Romo had in his press conference about meeting secretly with TE Jason Witten to draw up the key 3rd-and-9 first down conversion that sealed the win). It seemed that Dallas would make a key blunder / mistake to give the game to the Giants. Dallas' offensive line looked pretty bad against NY's d-line, and Dallas was even getting lots of false start penalties at a HOME game. One of the penalties backed Dallas up and indirectly led to a safety that made the game closer than it should have been, as poorly as NY's offense was playing.

Of course, NY's O-line wasn't faring any better against the Dallas D, so maybe that just speaks to the quality of each team's D-line. But still, the Dallas false start penalties at a home game seems to show a bit of lack of discipline.

Right now it seems to me that Dallas has a somewhat decent shot to make the playoffs, but I can't see them winning more than one game in the playoffs (or beating a hot team like Carolina) unless that offensive line improves.

Reality check on watch interest, GQ pimping

So I got very interested in learning about watches recently, and have posted about several really cool, beautiful mechanical watches in previous few posts. But the reality is that even some of the less-expensive Swiss mechanical watches (such as the Omega Speedmaster), at $3500-$4000, are way out of my budget any time soon. And my personal favorite, the Speedmaster Broad Arrow GMT (link here), would be downright nutty to buy at > $6000.

A much more realistic choice would be something like this Seiko quartz watch below in stainless steel with a perpetual calendar (date shows correct # of days each month including Februarys, leap years, etc. without manual correction) for about $250. Even $250 is more than I would spend right now.


In one of the original articles / primers I read about buying nice watches (link here for the online GQ magazine article), they recommend against buying battery powered quartz watches because they're not a collectible item, etc. However, most sane adults realize that you must weigh this article's opinion against realities of a single-income middle-class family. After all, GQ's raison d'etre is to show men wearing really good looking--and very expensive--clothes and to try to get people to buy them. GQ is an influential advertising vehicle for the luxury goods business. You'll often see a man--thinner and much better-looking than me, of course--wearing a great suit, with labels showing you what he's wearing. For example ... Suit, Tom Ford, $4500. Shirt, Polo by Ralph Lauren, $290. Alligator shoes, Gucci, $900. Just because that magazine says you MUST buy something that expensive to look nice doesn't make it so!

While browsing other Seiko watches I ran across some other really nice-looking models (link here and image below, or here) that were more expensive (maybe $750-$850), but my personal feeling is that if I'm going to spend more than $200-300 I'd rather just wait and get something like the Omega Speedmaster I'd really want, instead of getting something "intermediate" that's still quite expensive yet not really what I want.

World's Finest Watch Company NOT Swiss?

Very cool article here in Forbes on a German watch company called A. Lange & Sohne (link to their web site here). Swiss manufacturers are typically thought of as being the best watchmakers, with Patek Philippe being considered probably the best (link here for Patek Philippe's site).

The article suggests that maybe the Germans are outdoing the Swiss at their own game. Whenever I can afford to buy my first nice watch (certainly not today), it'll probably be one of the less-expensive stainless steel / black models of Omega or maybe an IWC Schaffhausen. But if I can ever earn quite a bit more, I'd love to one day get something like the Langematik Perpetual below. I do not know how much they cost, but I'm sure that it is very high, likely something over $60,000.


Even MORE astronomical (probably something like $500,000+!) is this company's most complicated piece, the Tourbograph Pour Le Merite, below, and link here for more info.


From the company's web site: When fully wound, the mainsprings of mechanical watches deliver more torque than when they are nearly unwound, and this can cause rate inaccuracies. The fusée-and-chain transmission is perhaps most elegant way to eliminate this phenomenon. But it is so difficult to craft that only Lange's master watchmakers have had the courage to integrate it in the confines of a wristwatch (it has previously only been used in larger pocket watches). Image below of the fusée-and-chain transmission. Man, no wonder a mechanical engineer like me is interested in this stuff!

More on Mechanical Watches, Omega

Good-quality Swiss or German made mechanical watches are not really about telling the most accurate time possible. In fact, most digital watches or battery-operated quartz watches are long-term more accurate than even the finest mechanical watches. The reason people like and spend lots of money to collect the much more expensive mechanically-driven watches is because of the jewelry / craftsmanship aspects of it. You certainly don't need to spend thousands to get something to tell time, but about $2500-$3500 is about the minimum to get something mechanical / collectable like the Omega Speedmaster Professional above, about $4000 (image on right is rear view of watch).

As you add more functions (called "complications" in mechanical watch lingo), this tends to increase the price because you have more moving parts / gears to add the additional functions. For example, this Omega Speedmaster Broad Arrow GMT below adds a second time zone and date and costs about $6600.


Adding more complications like a "rattrapante", or split-seconds, chronograph function, increases craftsmanship required and cost. Again, it's not about just having a watch that can do stopwatch split times -- heck, a digital Timex can do that for < $50. It's about having these functions executed with mechanical means that makes it desireable to watch collectors. The Omega Speedmaster Broad Arrow Rattrapante below costs closer to $10,000.

Career advice involving sheep scrotum

Oh my God, my side hurts from laughing at this excellent column from Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's TV show, Dirty Jobs. Also check out Mike's blog here ... I really like his letter to a potential Eagle Scout a couple of posts back.

Mike offers a contrarian take and suggests that the typical advice about "following your passions" is nonsense. Money paragraph:

Enough already. Wall Street needs some new role models--and I nominate the men and women of Dirty Jobs, beginning with Albert, who I'm quite certain is still grinning behind his bloody mustache. Why? Because Albert knows that in a bear market, you can't grab the bull by the horns--you can only grab the sheep by the scrotum, and do the work at hand. That's right, boys. It's time to bend over, bite down, snap your head back and spit.

Man, I never thought I would type the words "sheep scrotum" as a blog tag (unless possibly doing a post about Texas A&M...).

Texas basketball team for real (for now)

I don't typically follow the college basketball regular season that much. I tend to get interested around the end of the season as the NCAA tournament nears. Right now there's still college and NFL football going on that is more interesting to me.

But #6-ranked Texas looks like the real deal this year, with recent wins over UCLA in Austin and #12 Villanova last night in New York (link here for recap). But it's still early. If we can beat Kansas or Oklahoma, then maybe we'll have a pretty special season going.

Snow day

I was hot yesterday morning -- it was only about 70F for a low temp yesterday. But one serious cold front moved in last night, and we actually had some snow / sleet accumulation this morning. None at our house really, but quite a bit on the side of roads and on other cars driving in to work. I guess Obama really has eliminated global warming!


Photo from Austin American Statesman home page, reader photo submission

The World's Most Horrible Golf Swing

I love golf, although I do not get to play nearly as often as I like. I often practice my swing and try to make it look like the pros I see on TV. Swings of players like Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Trevor Immelman, and others are great to emulate.

Then there's this swing, the actual golf swing of former pro basketball / NBA player Charles Barkley. Watch if you dare.

Rear View


Down-the-Line View


World's Best golfer, Tiger Woods, imitating Barkley's swing

Why are you smiling? I am not left-handed either!

Cool golf story from Freakonomics (which is a cool book, link here) author Steven Levitt blog post on the New York Times web site, link here. An economist friend of Levitt's writes about a cool experience playing at the Old Course in St. Andrews.

What was even funnier to me than the story was the comments below the post, where readers began making jokes about the Spaniard from the 1987 classic comedy movie The Princess Bride, link here.

Links to Swiss watch manufacturers

Link here to the home page of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, or Fédération de l'industrie horlogère suisse FH (sounds cooler in French). Also link here for their list of links to manufacturer web sites for over 200 member companies.

F.P. Journe Centigraphe Souveraine

Bun Ga Xao Xa Ot

That was what I had for dinner tonight. In English, it's chicken stir fried with lemon grass, hot pepper, onion, and garlic in a Vietnamese Vermicelli noodle bowl from Pho Thaison, the new Vietnamese noodle restaurant that opened up here in our Kyle / HEB shopping center. Link here. This was also the very first Vietnamese dish I ever had with my friends Robert and Steve, when they took me for noodles 13 years ago when I was in grad school at UT Austin (mechanical engineering).

Kelso column on BCS

Austin American Statesman humor columnist John Kelso did a really nice job slamming the BCS for picking Noklahoma over Texas ... see here.

I like the comment about figure skating and the Polish judge...

Lauren's birthday, Sauza Tradicional

My daughter Lauren had her 4th birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I forgot to do a post about it. Like my mom's tequila-bottle birthday cake at Thanksgiving (see previous post here), we also got my daughter's cake from Erin McCormick. She did a really good job on a "Mater" cake, the redneck tow truck from the Disney movie Cars. We had a few friends / relatives over to our house for her party, and I made martini-style margaritas with jalapeno-stuffed olives. These turned out to be quite a hit and I may make these again for future gatherings. See photos below, more photos on Flickr here.

Margarita martinis I made were as follows:
2 oz Sauza Tradicional Reposado tequila (one of the least expensive 100% agave tequilas, about same price as Hornitos, less oak flavor than Hornitos)
1 oz Cointreau
Fresh juice of 1/2-1 lime
1-2 tsp simple syrup to taste
1-2 tsp juice from jalapeno-stuffed olive jar to taste

Combine ingredients in shaker with ice. Shake, strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with jalapeno-stuffed olive.

Mater Cake

Lauren and Daniel

75th Anniversary of Prohibition repeal this Friday

I read a very interesting article today in Forbes.com, link here, regarding 10 prohibition-era classic mixed drinks to make at home. The author, Eric Arnold, writes:

Some Americans will lift a glass of egg nog or mulled wine this weekend. Others are planning on breaking out the hard stuff. Jim Meehan is one of them. Usually found behind the bar at speakeasy PDT (Please Don't Tell), Meehan, 32, is one of New York's best-known mixologists. But this Friday is special for him and every other bartender--4:31 pm on that day marks Prohibition's repeal, 75 years ago.

Kind of a funny coincidence -- My wife is planning a holiday party this Friday night at our home for the families of our kids' daytime play group, and she wanted me to make some mixed drinks. Well, we will certainly raise a glass to that special occasion!

In the article, there's also a link to click through a slide show of the various classic mixed drink recipes. I'd have to buy some new stuff to make most of them ... I do not have absinthe, grenadine, or Angostura bitters in my pantry. Maybe I'll make some Sidecars, one of the recipes in the slide show:

The Sidecar
In The Night Club Era by Stanley Walker (1933), he writes that Sidecars weren't made by Prohibition-era bartenders since they were too much trouble to make. The drink enjoyed much of its popularity right before Prohibition, however, and remains a favorite of cocktail geeks today. The main spirit, Cognac, can be substituted depending on personal preference (Armagnac is the same as Cognac, just from a different region of France). Some recipes call for bourbon, others for brandy.

Recipe:
2 parts Cognac or Armagnac
1 part Cointreau
1 part lemon juice
Stir all the ingredients together in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass rimmed with sugar, and garnish with a piece of lemon rind.
Recipe from The Savoy Cocktail Book, 1930.

Texas scre-OU-d by BCS

Texas lost out in the tie breaker for the Big 12 South title to Oklahoma, a team Texas beat 45-35 earlier in the season. So Oklahoma will play Les Mizzourables (a team Texas destroyed) for the Big 12 title and, barring a miraculous upset, will likely play in the national championship game against the winner of the Alabama/Florida SEC championship game.

Boy, how heartbreakingly close was Texas to playing in another national championship game? All we would have had to do is have Blake Gideon catch the ball in the Texas Tech game, or tackle Michael Crabtree on the next play...



Texas will likely play USC in the Fiesta bowl. Doesn't seem like a BCS bowl should be a let-down, but it feels like it now.

Moon, Jupiter, and Venus conjunction

I saw this story a couple of nights ago on Yahoo, and have gone outside the last two nights to enjoy this rare conjuction of three of the brightest objects in the nighttime sky very near each other. See below for one photo (from AP), or link here for another shot from Flickr. The Flickr photo (taken by someone in Colorado) is actually much closer to the geometry / arrangement that I saw from my backyard than the photo pasted in below.

Thanksgiving + Mom's birthday, Donna Julio Anejo

My mom, Donna, turned 60 last week, and we celebrated her birthday during Thanksgiving at my wife's aunt/uncle's (Tami/Stephen) home. Thanks VERY much to Stephen and Tami for hosting a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at their home!

Stephen smoked a turkey and a pork butt in his Big Green Egg smoker (link here and photo below). It was fantastic, and their delicious results have caused my wife to begin telling me that we need to get a smoker and preferably begin doing about 1 pork butt per week from now on until the end of time!


Instead of pumpkin or pecan pie, we had a special birthday cake made by a lady in our subdivision who has started making custom cakes. Her name's Erin McCormick (Cakes by Erin, ph 512-504-3868, email here), and she doesn't have a web site yet but I will post it if she creates one. My wife had the cool idea to make a cake like a tequila bottle, and we then thought up the idea of making a "Donna Julio Anejo" cake, based on Don Julio tequila -- this is the same tequila my friend Kevin Aymat downed in one shot, story here.

See below for the results! Note cake was actually chocolate and not tequila-flavored...link here for photo close-up of actual tequila bottle. BTW, this is a fantastic sipping tequila.