3-7-10 Sunday (Quick Ass Checks)

Clea’s newest thing – while we shower, she likes to hang out on the edge of the tub between the curtain and the liner.  It’s funny because the liner is clear so we can see her and she can see us and the water.  I compared notes with Jim and he and I do the same thing to her.  We take the handheld shower part and spray at her.  She bites at liner at the water impact spot.  She can’t actually get a bite of the liner because it moves outward when she sticks her face to it.  It’s funny.  After the shower, her newest thing is to get into the tub while we’re drying off and then roll around in the water.  Jim says he’s turned the water on again and she gets a little wet and doesn’t care. 

  Meow!

We had to return the rental snow pants.  This time since we had more time, we explored the surrounding areas of Dilworth and South End.  We liked the areas.  Some of it was newer, revitalized buildings and lofts.  It seemed as though street side cafes, and coffee houses were common.  All of this was on the other end of Uptown.  I love Uptown. 

Above: I’ve photographed some Atherton (my last name) shopping plazas on a prior post.  Up a little further from that were these business lofts.

Jim had printed out a BOGO coupon for a restaurant.  It turned out they weren’t open for lunch so we went to a local chain called Showmar’s.  Jim had a Gyro.  It was “OK”.  I had some burger thingy on a pita.  It was “OK”.  Jim’s onion rings were lame – per his report.  Not real healthy food anyway.  OK, none of it was healthy.

 Above: Many locations in North Carolina.  The food wasn’t very impressive so now we know where to avoid. 

Here’s a fun photo:

Above: Ahhhh, so sophomoric.  We passed this, we both spotted it and without hesitation, Jim made a u-turn for some photos.  We laughed… a lot.  There’s so many captions that came to mind.  Go ahead, leave one in the comments.

We grocery shopped at Costco and then Walmart.

Dinner time crept up on us quickly.  Jim has been itching for me to make “Baked Onions with Gruyère”.  I must confess that we never heard of Gruyère.  After reading the recipe, of course we found out it is cheese.  This recipe came out of Reader’s Digest and you can view it here.  It’s on other recipe sites like here.  By the way, can anyone recommend a similar cheaper cheese?

I scanned it so we can talk about it.  I’ll do the talking though.  Shhhhhh.

5 onions is overkill for just Jim and I.  We bought 3 onions, I used 2.  We spotted a big ole brick of Gruyère cheese for $10.  Being we only needed a little amount, Jim cheaped out and wanted to use grated cheese like parmesan.  I misunderstood and used shredded sharp cheddar.  Oh well.  We didn’t use fresh sage either.  I know, you chefs are stunned, right?  Get over it.  I think if I can find a smaller amount of the cheese, we’ll try it again.  We also think it could have used a little more bake time since the onions were quite large.  We couldn’t though because the other stuff was ready.

While I was preparing our salads for the upcoming week, Jim worked on getting the hot tub running.  With not much time, he found the problem to be cross wiring.  He corrected his error and got the hot tub working.  With the limited time of sunlight, he and I worked fast at scrubbing the hot tub down, rinsing and eventually filling in hopes of having it hot by late evening.  Well, the water needs to get over 100°.  With water from the hose at 50-something degrees, it never happened.  By 10:00pm it was at 70-something.  Oh well.

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An insurance update: We got the Victoria policy in the mail.  This is the one that agent couldn’t tell us what the extra would be for having damage to the RV.  We didn’t go with them (stayed with Progressive) but it was interesting to find out it would have been $400 more a year for the damage!  Really.