Matt’s News / Blog

Apparently this is the new rule at my apartment complex.  Today, I read the friendly monthly newsletter that my apartment complex puts out and on the back were there was a nice friendly reminder that charcoal and gas grills are not allowed.  What?! Last year gas grilles were allowed.  This made me very upset.  There aren’t many things worse then taking away a guy’s grill at the beginning of summer.

Well, there really isn’t much I can do accept get an electric grill.  This one looks good. I’m not sure what to do with my gas grill now.  It’s very nice and portable, camping grill. I suppose the prudent thing would be to sell it, since I rarely camp.  Any one want to buy it?  It’s just like this one: Coleman Table Top Grill but a year old and used.

Urg.

The good news for the day is I got a $50 rebate check from Vonage, for the phone adapter.

I started a garden today. It’s very small — it contains just 5 plants. One may assume that I have a natural talent for plants, being the son of a farmer, but not so. Alisse can attest to the plants I’ve killed :). Hopefully, I will have better luck with outdoor plants.

My garden has: thyme, basil, cilantro, peppermint and Gulliver’s White Bacopa.
I also got a table and chairs for my porch. It now feels much more usable.

I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription. In the past few weeks, I found I had no desire to play. I got really bored with the game.

If I ever decide to start playing again, I can reactive my subscription and my characters will still be there.

My main criticism of the game is that it requires a lot of time (several hours a week) to really be any good. Since I didn’t play that much, I lagged behind my friends that played and it took a long time to advance in the game.

This evening, I had a craving for Scones.  I really enjoyed having scones readily available over in Ireland.  With not much else to do and an urge to do something that didn’t deal with the computer I decided to make some.  I had to make a quick trip to the store to get a few things.  They turned out to be pretty easy to make.  Here is the recipe I followed:  http://www.thatsmyhome.com/hannahs/scones/cranberry-lemon-scones.htm.  They came out pretty well.  The bottoms are slightly too dark.

The scones also go well with my Irish Breakfast Tea from Ireland.

The really big highlight of my trip to Ireland was asking Alisse to marry me.  She said ‘yes’ !   Saturday after we came back from Powerscourt we went for a walk along the beach in Greystones.  I asked her there on the beach.

We are both really happy and excited, but it’s still hard being 3000+ miles apart.  The good news is that Alisse gets home in about a month.

Yesterday, we changed our status on Facebook, a big step in a relationship .  We’ve both have received a ton on comments.  I’d like to tell everyone “Thanks!”

We haven’t set a date yet, and really won’t do any planning until Alisse gets back from Europe.  We are thinking that the wedding will be sometime in the Fall of 2008.

You’ve probably noticed that my website has been unavailable at times.  I’m having strange problem with Apache crashing.  I can’t figure out whats wrong.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep it up while I try to debug the server.

I’m back from Ireland. I’ve been back since Thursday. I was suppose to get back Wednesday evening but there were a few snags.

I got to the airport in Dublin and found out the plan was delayed. A truck had hit the plan and damaged one of the doors. I must have been one of those food trucks. So, they had to fix the door and test the plan to make sure the door still worked (by pressurizing the plane).

All in all, the plan was delayed 5 hours. So I spend 7+ hours in the Dublin airport. Urgh.

Needless to say, I missed my connecting flight from Boston to Detroit. When I got to Boston, the airline had already got a room for me in the airport hotel (a Hilton) and booked me on the first flight to Detroit in the morning (6:00am).

Other then my delay getting home I had a really good time in Ireland. Here are some highlights:

• Visiting Powerscourt Estate, which appeared in The Count of Monte Cristo.
• Seeing the Book of Kells and the Long Room at Trinity College.
• Enjoying a Guinness while overlooking Dublin at the Guinesse Storehouse.
• Touring Dublin with Alisse.
• Celie dancing (Irish) dancing.

There are a few things that I wanted to do but didn’t have enough time to do and will have to wait for the another trip to Ireland:

• Glendalouch
• Newgrange