Following my visit to the Sonic Drive-In in Vista, I stopped at the nearby Frazier Farms Market mainly to see they had any Ginger Ale Zevia, which they did have, but I was intrigued by what I saw next to the Zevia. With so few beverage manufacturers realizing that there is a market for sugar free drinks that don’t use artificial sweeteners, it’s always a nice surprise when a new comes to market that is able to be naturally sugar free, and today, I discovered a new product that I just had to bring home to try out.

That new product is Steaz Zero Calorie Sparking Green Tea. Essentially it’s a flavored tea product made with sparking water so it looks and tastes more like an exotic flavored soda instead of a tea product. The tea is sweetened with Erythritol and Stevia extract thereby making it a great option for people following Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program. The teas are also organically grown with special mention on the bottles about how its sustainably sourced for a natural and organically based beverage. There’s also several logos on the bottle to indicate it’s compliance with several programs such as certifications for being organic, vegan, fair trade, and a low carbon footprint during manufacturing. Essentially indicating the company is as environmentally focused as it is profit driven, definitely an admirable quality.

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To most of the rest of the country, Sonic Drive-In restaurants are a common, everyday sight and experience. Perhaps, one hardly worth taking note. However, they are relatively new here in San Diego, with their first store appearing in Santee about a year ago. I still have not visited that location, but on my way to my Post Office Box in Carlsbad I was driving through Vista and found they had put in a Sonic Drive-In near the recently redeveloped Main Street area. In fact, it’s really close to the old Peppertree Frosty shop that has an amazing variety of milkshakes and other ice cream treats.

I decided to give Sonic a try as I haven’t done a “drive-in” experience in years and thought it might be fun. I pulled into an open stall, decided on what to have then pressed the button to call the store to let them know I was ready to order. Once the order was placed, I loved the fact I could just pay with my Debit card (using it as a Mastercard) right at the menu board right next to the speaker and within a few minutes a young girl on roller skates was out to deliver my order and receipt. It was really cool. I know once the drive-thru was introduced, the drive-in’s were pretty much existing on borrowed time and nearly disappeared permanently, fortunately Sonic has been able to revive the format and make it accessible to folks who might never know the concept ever existed.

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Yesterday, I decided to stop for some food after work and while driving through Escondido, I decided to stop at the Farmer Boys Restaurant on Valley Parkway. Farmer Boys is a chain of restaurants throughout Southern California although they have next to no presence at all in San Diego County. They have 2 stores in Escondido, but are mostly located in Riverside and San Bernadino counties. (They even have 2 locations in Las Vegas.)

The restaurants are pretty cool as a kind of hybrid fast food/sit down restaurant. You place your order at the counter like a fast food place and if you’re dining in, they give you a number and serve your order to your table on real plates with real flatware, not the disposable paper products of traditional fast food places. The place has a more rural appeal in terms of appearance and fits in with a country style home feeling, and is really quite a pleasant environment to dine in. And the service is quite friendly too.

Farmer Boys has the tagline “World’s Greatest Hamburgers” and while many places make that claim or something very similar, usually it’s just over inflated hype. Would I consider the burgers at Farmer Boys to be the World’s Greatest, no, not by a long shot. But what I would say is that they’re definitely on par or slightly above the average sit down restaurant. And while the tagline really focuses on burgers, they really do offer quite a selection of different things, burgers are just a small portion of the menu. They do offer a rather large breakfast menu, so they have a greater bit of variety than you’d expect for a place claiming to be a “burger” joint.

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Now that 2009 has come to a close and 2010 has begun, I can safely say that it’s a year that has been very challenging and although I am not the least bit sad to see 2009 go, it certainly was not without some really incredible experiences for me that I would like to highlight before wipe the slate clean and start fresh with 2010.

This list was especially difficult to narrow down since 2009 was the year I kicked my blogging into high gear. I had started Ryan’s Incredible World in 2007 didn’t actually start blogging until 2008 and I would maybe make no more than five entries a month. So picking my highlights of 2008 was relatively easy since there wasn’t so many blog entries to go through to pick out the defining moments.

I had joined a couple of 30-Day blogging challenges which requires 30 blog entries in 30 days and it essentially got me into the habit of making almost daily blog entries. Now it’s pretty safe to say that each month sees about 25 new blog entries. The constant blogging has actually helped bring a bigger audience to my blog, so if your first time reading any of my writing has been in 2009, then no doubt something I wrote in 2009 caught your eye and is why you’re here reading this entry now. I am grateful for the many folks who’ve read my blog and left me comments, it’s been a pleasure to hear your feedback throughout the year. In any case, I looked through every post of 2009 to select what I feel were the 10 Most Incredible Things about 2009 that happened for me. You’ll note I combined a few complimentary things to narrow it down to 10.

I do hope you enjoy my reflection on 2009 and continue to join me on my quest to find the most incredible things of 2010. Without further ado, in no particular order.

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The kind folks at Cumberland Packaging, the makers of Sugar In The Raw, sent me some samples of the Stevia Extract In The Raw product. As someone who’s been on Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program since April, I’ve been actively replacing sugar with a lot of alternative products, such as Truvia, and PureVia.

One of the big challenges is trying to find good natural substitutes for sugar, unlike the popular “packet” type sugar alternatives you usually find offered everywhere such as saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose all of which are toxic man-made chemicals. Stevia is a great alternative but I’ve only tried it when it’s blended with a sugar alcohol such Erythritol, as is in the case of both Truvia and PureVia. Those brands say that they combine the sugar alcohol with the stevia to help remove the bitterness of plain stevia. So I was a bit hesitant to try plain stevia.

So when I saw the opportunity to have the makers of Stevia Extract In The Raw to send me some samples, I thought it was a great opportunity to do so. I was following them on Twitter and they were offering samples to their Twitter followers. They saw on my profile that I am a bit of a blackjack expert so they asked me a blackjack question before sending me the samples.

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When it was announced in 2008 that the Disney Resorts would be offering free admission to one park for people to celebrate their birthday in 2009, I knew I was going to make plans to enjoy Disneyland for my birthday. It’s not the first time I’ve spent my birthday at Disneyland. The last time was in 2004 back when I last had an annual pass to the parks. I was excited to come to Disneyland for my birthday as I haven’t been to the park since right around the time Space Mountain was re-opening following two years of being closed to completely replace the tracks.

I posted a note on my Twitter account to see if any of my friends would be free and available to join me at Disneyland, and I suppose the one thing as you get older is that the responsibilities of the real world doesn’t always allow your friends to come play with you in an amusement park on a “work” day during the week. So aside from several notes of regret of not being able to come from local friends and notes from international friends where the travel distances were prohibitive of being able to come, it was looking like I’d be doing the park on my own. No big deal as far as I’m concerned, I’ve never been the type of person to allow the fact others couldn’t come to stop me from enjoying the things I want to do. Besides, I’ve done the Disney parks several times on my own when I last had annual passes, sometimes I’d end up at the parks on a whim and would have no time to invite others anyway.

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As part of my birthday celebration, I planned to get a room up in Anaheim for the night of September 2nd, so that on my birthday I could get an early start at Disneyland. Since went ahead and booked a room through Priceline and got a great deal on a hotel, the decision to be made was should I just head up early in the afternoon, or go up in the evening. I thought I might consider going into Disney a day early but didn’t really want to spend that much money as a day at Disneyland isn’t cheap.

After passing by the discount wall at work, I saw they had coupons for Knott’s Berry Farm that would drop the admission price down to $29.99 from the regular $52.99 price, so it sounded like it might be worth doing since I haven’t been to Knott’s Berry Farm in at least a decade or so. It could be fun. Well the only thing that had me a little concerned was I wasn’t sure what time I would get to the park because I had a few errands to run after work before I could finally hit the road and get there. The concern was due to the fact the park was only staying open until 6pm. This just seemed crazy to me as it’s still technically summer, and labor day isn’t until this coming weekend, so the early closing time sounds a little premature.

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One of the things that I suppose is both good and bad about growing up in one place and moving to another is that you get to experience different things, but you also get nostalgic for the things that you can’t get in the new place that were readily available where you used to live. So as a Canadian living in San Diego, I tend to miss some of the things that were readily available in Canada that aren’t readily available here in San Diego. Fortunately, there are some great Canadians who are helping make sure former Canadians can get their fix for Canadian items, such as Rob and Elena Peters.

In what is becoming a more common way of meeting people, I met Elena Peters through Twitter. Somehow she found one of my twitter accounts and started following me. I occasionally peek at who is following me on my twitter accounts I was certainly curious about this “GoCanuck” that was following me, so I clicked over to read some of the tweets made on Twitter as well as follow the link to her site. It looks like Elena spends some time in San Diego every year and I had unfortunately just missed her most recent visit which included a Canada Day celebration that sounded like a fun event to be at. I certainly would have gone to celebrate Canada Day with other Canadians here in San Diego if I had known about the event beforehand.

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After having attended the last two San Diego Pride Parade’s in the last couple of years and having to work, I decided this year I was going to make sure I saved a few days of time off so that I could take part in the festivities this year. And with the Chantal Kreviazuk concert in Los Angeles last week, I decided to add a few more days to my time off request and as a result I was able to take part in quite a few activities.

On Tuesday night, after I had stopped by Jorge Cruise’s office to say hello and show off the results of my 47 pounds of weight loss using his incredibly awesome Belly Fat Cure program, I treated myself to a late lunch at Which Wich sandwich shop in Hillcrest and then because I was in the area, I saw The Center for San Diego’s LGBT community was hosting a Bear Pride Bingo event that a lot of my local friends were attending, so I quickly sent in an RSVP and headed on over to the event. For $15 for a packet of bingo sheets, $2 for a dabber, and $1 for an optional game, I was set. I didn’t win any of the games but came very close on a few occasions. I did happen to know a couple people who did win, namely Vito Grandolfo and Tim Palmer. I even went with Vito and his friend Earl Shearin over to Brians’ American Eatery for a post-Bingo bite to eat. (Many thanks to Earl who wouldn’t let me pay for my meal.)

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Twelve weeks ago, when I first met Jorge Cruise, I was 47 pounds heavier and 10 inches bigger around my belly. I had read in the Costco Connection magazine that Jorge was looking for 100 participants to take part in his Belly Fat Cure challenge. The purpose of the challenge was to find testimonial cases for the program when it officially launches either in December of this year or January of 2010. Jorge had previously done a couple of local based testimonial case groups through San Diego Magazine, and the Costco Connection was the third and final group to get the chance to preview the materials before it gets officially finalized for the launch.

I had submitted my name and a couple of shirtless photos that I wasn’t too proud of along with my application to the program and a hope for the best. I was pleasantly surprised to not only be selected to be part of this group which would meet online weekly for the duration of the challenge, but I was also selected to be part of a smaller group of San Diego based Costco members that got invited to Jorge’s office to personally get introduced to the program. Unfortunately, Jorge’s busy schedule prevented more than one additional in person group meeting with him, but it was still an honor to be selected.

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