I love the Internet. My previous post about the Margaritaville Tailgating Grill that I had seen while shopping at one of the local San Diego area Costco Membership Warehouse stores was only supposed to be a one off post. I never in a million years thought I’d be writing a second blog entry about the grill and for that matter so soon. Click here to read that entry. But the nature of the Internet being what it is, my blog post was spotted by local tailgating enthusiast, Dave Lamm, of TailgatingIdeas.com and he decided to leave a comment here on my blog.

Dave wrote to say that not only does he have the Margaritaville Tailgating Grill, but he’s also taken it a step further and completely customized it with the team colors for the San Diego Chargers and of course, decked out the grill with the Charger’s logo as well. Dave has literally taken the grill from a novelty level of coolness to practically must-have level of coolness. Gone are the plain looking grey swing arm and the obnoxious lime green look of the original grill. In their place are the ultra-cool looking Chargers team Golden yellow swing arm, and Blue accent colors for the trim. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say the finished grill resembles a football helmet now that’s sporting team colors. It looks great. It definitely screams “Sports Fan” where the unaltered grill kind of screams “Yuppie.”

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Today I decided to introduce my co-worker and roommate to the Coca-Cola Freestyle Fountain machine (which I previously wrote about, click here to read that blog entry). Since there are three Jack In The Box locations in Escondido that have the machine and Escondido is on the way home, we stopped at one just to get drinks to try out the machine. Unfortunately, we ran into one of the downsides of the machine.

The main downside of the machine is that because the Jack In The Box locations get a lot more traffic of visitors than the one I encountered at the Noodles & Company restaurant in San Marcos, the fountain was “Sold Out” of a lot of flavors. Here it is a Sunday morning and all the Fanta Zero flavors are sold out, both regular and diet Barq’s Root Beer are sold out, as well as several other variations which limits the choices. The menu screen doesn’t hide the unavailable choices, but rather changes them to grayed out options that it won’t allow you to select. So you just get stuck knowing there are choices you can’t have at the moment. (Probably a secret plot to make you want those flavors even more.)

Additionally, the busier Jack In The Box locations also meant it was kind of a slow process to get the drink because there was a small line for the machine as each person spent a little bit longer than a traditional fountain to pick and chose what flavors under the various brand labels and in the case of the sold out status of a lot of the more exotic flavor choices many had to go into other menus to pick something else because they weren’t able to try what they wanted from each menu.

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When I met up for dinner with my good friend Caroline the other night, we met up at one of the San Diego area Costco Membership Warehouse locations to do a little shopping before dinner. One of the products we encountered in the Costco that just made us laugh was from Jimmy Buffet’s line of merchandise branded as the Margaritaville Tailgate Grill. Now it’s not unusual to see a small portable barbecue grill being sold for the purposes of tailgating, but what makes this one unique is that you can actually mount this one your vehicle if it has a standard trailer hitch connector.

Now you can actually always have your portable grill attached to your vehicle and take it wherever you go. It seems like an incredibly funny concept to me that anyone would want to mount a portable grill to their vehicle but if you do a lot of tailgating or camping out with your truck or SUV, then it may be the perfect item for you. I can see it being handy when you’re actually using it, but I would be concerned with nosy people seeing the grill on the back end of the vehicle while you’re shopping somewhere and just having to touch and look at it. I would not be a big fan of that if I were to have such a grill attached to my vehicle.

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In some ways it’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since the tragedy of the World Trade Center towers in New York City falling due to two terrorist highjacked passenger planes aiming for and crashing into each tower. In other ways its hard to believe it hasn’t been longer. In any case, this year it seems a little more poignant to remember the tragedy of September 11, 2001 or 9/11 as it seems to be commonly referred to.

I think the reason why I feel like I need to honor the memory of September 11, 2001 is that I had my first trip to New York in October 2001 to attend the Mamma Mia! premiere on Broadway, and this year, in a couple more weeks I will be returning to New York for the first time since 2001 to see Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA launch the English language concert version of their musical, Kristina. Kristina is the musical Björn and Benny wrote that tells the story of Swedish immigrants coming to the United States in the late 1800′s. The story is based on the book series known as “The Emigrants” by Vilhelm Moberg. The New York performances are being staged as a concert version of the show instead of a fully staged production at Carnegie Hall. This will be in many cases the public’s first chance to experience the show in English. A workshop version of it was worked on a couple years ago but never heard if it actually had any public performances.

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Recently I had the opportunity to try XyloSweet and found it to be a very good Xylitol brand of sugar substitute. I had seen Amazon.com offers the XyloSweet in a great price for a 5 pound bag, but I wasn’t willing to commit to that big a bag without trying it first.

I had purchased a two pound bag at one of the local natural foods stores and made a batch of my sugar free Nanaimo Bars with it and my almost sugar free Black Forest cake for my birthday. I found the Xylitol to be really good. So it made sense to get the 5 pound bag from Amazon as it’s $23.99 plus tax and shipping as it’s a third party sale from the Vitamin Shoppe and not directly carried by Amazon. So with the tax and 99 cents for shipping, it was less than $28 that I was able to get the Xylitol in the five pound bag. This sure beats paying $8-$10 a bag for one pound bags as I have done with other brands in the past. It also nice to have it delivered to as it was there in just a couple of days by UPS delivery.

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Yesterday I decided to redeem the wonderful free burger coupon I got from Red Robin restaurant on my birthday. It had been a while since I last visited Red Robin. Usually I go with my roommate but today I went by myself.

I waited to go until about 1 in the afternoon so that I’d miss out on the lunch crowds. No need to tolerate a busy restaurant when you don’t have to that’s for sure. When I got there, there were just a handful of tables filled with people which was perfect. I got seated in a booth well away from the others already there, which was great.

My server ended up being a woman named Amy. She was the friendliest server I’ve ever had at Red Robin, which is a great compliment because I’ve had a lot of really friendly servers over the years of visiting Red Robin. In fact, I only once had a bad server at Red Robin and I never saw that guy working there again, so I can’t complain about Red Robin.

Amy saw I had one of the email coupons with me and asked to have it when I ordered so that she could get it entered right away instead of at the end. I think she assumed initially it was one of the current email coupons for $5.99 burgers as was surprised it was the birthday coupon. She immediately asked if it was my birthday that day to which I said it wasn’t. I mentioned I had gone up to Disneyland on the day of my birthday. She said her son was currently up at Disneyland that day to celebrate his birthday. She also said that he was an annual pass holder, so he was using the option of getting an additional admission to the park for a friend of his that didn’t have the money for the admission to go with him.

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It’s funny when you start a job that you never really know how that job is going to impact your life. When I started at Document Sciences as a part-time Graphic Design Assistant way back in October of 2000, I could never have predicted the friendships that I’ve formed there, nor even how my life has change since I started there. Even though I haven’t worked for the company since the end of June 2003, I still periodically see several of the folks I used to work with there.

Last month for example I attended the CD Launch Party for Roxy Monoxide, a local San Diego band that was started by my former boss, Scott Samuels. I do miss working with Scott, he was definitely one of the better managers I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

Document Sciences introduced me to one of my best friends in the world, the incredibly fantastic Caroline Bender. She was a trainer for the company and has since moved on to become a Marriage & Family therapist. She is without a doubt the person from Document Sciences I keep in contact with most. And for both of us 2009 has been a great year of weight loss. She’s been following a program that’s been working well for her and I have been following one that’s been working well for me. So now we seem to be more keen on getting photographs with each other every time we meet up so we can track our weight loss progress. And through Caroline I’ve also become better friends with another Document Sciences co-worker George Graham, who I didn’t know I had a lot more in common with at the time I worked with him at Document Sciences. Caroline and I attended his wedding last year.

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Jorge Cruise has officially released an image of what the cover of The Belly Fat Cure book is going to look like. The book will be released right after Christmas with a scheduled release date on December 28, 2009, perfect for those getting ready to shed those post holiday pounds and New Year resolutions.

The book will feature a forward written by Dr. David Katz, who is a featured columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine. In addition to being a wonderful resource to explain the whole Belly Fat Cure process, the book also explains the scientific reasoning behind the Belly Fat Cure, and how to apply it to your life and start making smart “carb swaps” that will make it easy to transform the food choices that have made us fat in the past into food choices that will keep us trim. Yes, believe it or not, it is possible to have brownies, chocolate, pizza, and ice cream that will actually help you lose weight instead of packing on the pounds.

A good portion of the book helps by taking common meals from many restaurants and shows you how to turn that “Belly Bad” meal as Jorge calls it and transform it into a “Belly Good” meal without sacrificing flavor at all. Do you ever get food at Denny’s IHOP, Mimi’s Cafe, McDonalds, Burger King, Jamba Juice, Starbucks, Einstein Bros. Bagels, FatBurger, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Arby’s, Schlotzky’s Deli, Chicago UNO, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, Wolfgang Puck, Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Quizno’s, Subway, Panera Bread, Rubio’s, Red Robin, Chevy’s, Taco Bell, Ruby’s Diner, Chipotle, La Salsa, Hometown Buffet, Panda Express, Boston Market, Pat & Oscar’s, or In-N-Out Burger restaurants? If you do, then learn how bad some of the items you can get there really are for you, and don’t worry, the same page spread shows you how to make the same thing at home in a better way that’s not loaded with sugar or excessive carbohydrates.

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The future of Soda Fountain dispensing has arrived, at least in beta testing form. When I stopped at the San Marcos, California location of Noodles & Company to redeem the free bowl of pasta offer I received for my birthday from the chain, I discovered they have installed a new soda fountain machine which according the signs offers over 100 different flavor combinations. Amazingly the machine didn’t seem to be much any bigger space wise than a traditional fountain machine except for the fact it was freestanding instead of having to be mounted on a counter. The opening within which to place the cup seemed to be styled from the “Men In Black” school of retro looking futuristic designs.

Instead of offering individual taps for each of the 100+ flavors, there was just a single opening in the Coca-Cola Freestyle Fountain. You just insert the cup against the lever in the back to have ice drop through the machine into your cup, then just allow the cup to sit in the center while using the touchscreen to pick the brand of beverage to bring up a sub menu of available flavors from which you can choose to fill the cup with. Many of the flavor choices are ones that aren’t available in retail stores as bottled choices because there simply is no way any store would ever carry that many different flavors.

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As I made my way out of the Disneyland Park to meet up with both of my parents and my grandfather outside of the Rainforest Cafe in the Downtown Disney area, I realized I should have just gone over to Tomorrowland and gotten on the Monorail to ride over to the Downtown Disney area. What I ended up doing was heading back to the main entrance of the park, exiting through the entrance plaza, passing through the exit of the security check lines, and then having to basically walk the entire distance of the Downtown Disney area because I forgot the Rainforest Cafe was on the far side of the Downtown Disney area. And I also forgot it’s parked right next door to the Monorail station.

Normally I don’t mind the walk but after having done the previous day at Knott’s Berry Farm and all morning in the park in close to 100 degree heat, my legs were starting to get rashes from all the walking, so I was a bit sore by this point in the day. I was surprised I made it over to the Rainforest Cafe before my parents and grandfather. The Rainforest Cafe is near the parking lot and I was coming on foot from the middle of Disneyland and having to walk through the entire Downtown Disney area just to get there. I didn’t end up having to wait too long though, it was just a matter of trying to find a somewhat shady spot as the mid afternoon heat was really starting to take its toll.

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