Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Two Interesting Restaurants

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Suggestions for dining in the Mesa/Tempe, AZ area.

I flew into Williams Gateway Airport in Mesa the other evening to drop off my helicopter for maintenance. My husband, Mike, who works in Tempe, came to pick me up.

It was 5:30 PM and we were both famished. Not in a hurry to drive home in traffic, we decided to have dinner. As we drove past the strip mall on Power Road at Ray Road near the airport, I spotted a restaurant called Dual. We stopped there for dinner.

The menu was interesting, the prices above average but not outrageous. The decor was modern, almost industrial. Our waitress was friendly but goofy (why is it that I always end up with the airhead servers?) and provided good service. Mike and I sipped mint julips and shared a baked brie appetizer. Mike had short ribs (which the waitress told us Dual was known for) with gnocchi and I had the roast duck breast over risotto. We finished off the meal by sharing a flan.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Yesterday took me back to Williams Gateway for a last-minute charter before maintenance began. I met Mike for lunch in Tempe. He took me to one of his favorite lunch places on University Avenue in Tempe: Cornish Pasty Company.

A pasty, as I learned just the other day during our Bradshaw’s Grave excursion, is a collection of ingredients wrapped up in a pastry shell and baked. They were popular with miners who prepared them in advance and took them down into the mines with them for their meal breaks.

Cornish Pasty Company has a long, narrow space in a strip mall with some tables and bar seats. We sat at the bar and watched two workers prepare batches of pasties. Mike had the Portobello Chicken (Chicken Breast, Balsamic Marinated Portobello Mushroom, Fresh Mozzarella, Roasted Red Pepper, Fresh Basil, served with a side of chilled Marinara) and I had the Porky (Pork, Sage, Onion, Apple, Potato, served with a side of Red Wine Gravy). Both were served hot and were excellent.

It also reminded me a lot of the restaurants I used to grab lunch at when I worked in Manhattan: small places that didn’t put on airs, had great food at a fair price, and were filled at lunchtime with local workers.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Chinese Food?

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I am amazed by what some people will eat.

The other day, when my husband asked what I wanted for dinner, I told him “Chinese food.” Unfortunately, without a real Chinese restaurant in the area, Chinese food is not something we can easily get. We had grilled steaks instead.

Yesterday, my husband came home from the supermarket with a surprise. “Chinese food,” he told me, removing a can from the grocery bag.

imageI stared. It was La Choy Chicken Chow Mein.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this stuff. It comes in a pair of cans — a tall one and a short one — attached together to make a really tall can package. The small top can contains the chicken and sauce. The big bottom can contains the vegetables, packed in water. You make dinner by heating up the contents of the small can, then dumping in the drained contents of the big can and heating it back up. Dinner in about 8 minutes.

When I was a kid, we used to eat this stuff. We used to eat SpaghettiOs and Hamburger Helper, too — but that doesn’t mean I eat it as an adult. I had no desire to eat La Choy Chicken Chow Mein. But Mike was kind of excited about it. “I want to see if it’s the same as I remember it.”

I prepared dinner while he fed the horses. I opened the small can and caught a whiff of something that smelled remarkably like cat food. There was a brownish gravy in there with small tidbits of a meat-like substance. Mike had instructed me to add a can of regular chicken (which we buy to make chicken salad), so I drained some of that and added it. Now it had chicken and tidbits in it. I tried not to breathe through my nose as I put it in the microwave to heat up.

While I waited, I opened and drained the big can. It contained mostly bean sprouts, but some small pieces of baby corn, water chestnuts, and microscopic pieces of red bell pepper. At the proper time, I mixed it all together and popped it back in the microwave. The odor was beginning to permeate the kitchen. Oh, and the finished product looked nothing like the photo on the packaging.

I mixed us some vodka and plum wine on ice and took a good long drink, preparing myself for the worst.

We had dinner a little while later. The best part about it was the plain white rice I’d made to go with it. I had two small scoops of goo over the rice. It was horrible. What was worse was putting the leftovers in the fridge. Now I have to look at it and remember it every time I open the refrigerator door.

I think I’ve discovered a new diet: the prepared food diet. That’s when you heat up prepared food that’s so bad you can’t eat it.

Does anyone other than me remember the little jingle for the La Choy commercials on TV? “La Choy makes Chinese food…swing, American!”

And can someone explain to me how a food product that tastes this bad can survive all these years?

National Do Not Call Registry

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Get your phone numbers off their lists!

Are you sick and tired of telemarketers ruining your dinner hour? Do unwanted phone calls from strangers bother you while you’re watching Boston Legal? Are your cell phone minutes being used up by auto glass repair company representatives and insurance salesmen?

If so, you really need to get your phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. It’s quick and easy to do and, after 31 days, if you still get unwanted marketing calls, you can register a complaint that’ll get the marketer in hot water with the FCC.

Start by going to https://www.donotcall.gov/. Click the Register Now button and use the form that appears to enter up to three telephone numbers and your e-mail address:

Do Not Call Registry

Click Submit. Then check your e-mail In box. You should get one e-mail message per phone number you entered. Click the link in the e-mail message to complete the registration.

It takes 31 days for your number(s) to be fully registered. After that, you should not receive any marketing calls, although you may still receive calls for charity fund raising, political campaigns, and surveys.

If you do get a marketing call after the 31-day period has elapsed, go back to the Do Not Call Registry home page and follow the links to file a complaint. You’ll need to provide the marketer’s company or phone number, so be sure to get that information when the call comes.

Your phone number will stay in the Registry for five years.

What are you waiting for? Do it now!

Treadmill vs. Walk in the Park

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Pros and cons.

I joined a health club recently. Wickenburg has an excellent “exercise center” that’s part of the Physical Therapy department at the local hospital. It has weight training equipment, elliptical exercise machines (is that the right name for those things?), stationary bikes, and treadmills. Just about all of it is computerized, so you can set goals and quantify many activities. The place is clean, there’s good music playing at a volume that’s not too loud to override it with iPod earbuds, and there are even televisions with captioning so you can read what’s being said onscreen.

Best of all, the members are an incredible mix of people, from the 20-year-old, skinny as a rail (as I was at that age) to the 40-something-year-old-who has had about five hundred too many cream puffs in her lifetime to the 90-year-old who comes in on a walker. I fit in nicely with this group, since I’m middle aged, overweight but not dangerously obese, and just enough out of shape to have to really work at my exercise regime, which is still in its infancy.

The treadmill is part of that regime — the warmup part. I start with a 20-minute session on the treadmill, using one of its built-in programs and setting the speed to about 3 mph. The programs change the machine’s incline, so I could be walking on flat ground for part of the time and climbing a hill moments later. Not a big hill, mind you. But one that’s enough to get your heart beating, which the machine monitors for you. In fact, if I enter my age and weight into the machine, when it gives me my heart rate, it’ll also tell me whether my work out is for weight loss or cardiovascular. I try to keep it in the cardiovascular range. I want to break a sweat, but not get soaked.

When I first thought about treadmills, I thought they were pretty dumb. After all, why use a machine to go for a walk. Why not just go for a walk? But I realized, after using a treadmill for about a week, that it does have some benefits over just walking. I thought I’d summarize them for people who have never tried one and, like me, wonder why they should.

TreadmillWalk in the Park
You can set a speed and stick with it.You don’t really know how fast you’re walking or whether you’ve changed speed.
You can monitor exact distance, speed, incline, time walked, and calories burned.You can’t easily monitor exact distance, speed, incline, time walked, and calories burned
You can do other things while you walk: watch TV, listen to music or podcasts, read a book or newspaper (a bit tricky), or talk to a companion.There are a limited number of things you can do while you walk: listen to music or podcasts or talk to a companion.
You’re breathing “conditioned” air, which may or may not be of a good quality.You’re breathing “fresh” air, which may or may not be of a good quality.
While you’re walking, there’s nothing to look at but the room you’re in, the view out the window (if you face one), and the people around you.While you’re walking, you can see a wide variety of things as you walk past them.
You can do it in any weather, at any time of the day or night (dependent on access to machine).You can do it in any weather, at any time of the day or night (but you probably will avoid hot, cold, rainy, and dark).
There’s nothing to interrupt you while you’re walking.You can be interrupted by friends and acquaintances you pass along the way, traffic, or obstacles along the trail.

 

This is all I can think of right now. The conclusion I’ve reached from all this is that a treadmill offers an efficient way to walk for exercise. Efficient is good if you’re pressed for time and want to make the most of every minute. That’s me. Right now I’m walking at 3 mph (average) for 20 minutes as a warm up for other exercise, including weight training. During that time, I can burn about 75 calories (no Hostess Cupcakes in my immediate future) and get my heart rate up to 130+ beats per minute. But if I didn’t want to do weight training and wanted to base my workout around a good, long walk, I could easily choose a more difficult program at a faster speed and for a longer time, I can just push a couple of buttons, pick a good playlist on my iPod, and have at it. Nothing will interrupt me and I’ll get the workout I want.

If you live in Wickenburg and have been considering the hospital’s exercise facilities, I highly recommend it. It’s moderately priced — I paid $300 for 6 months, but that includes the “setup fee” to introduce me to the weight machines (and them to me via programming). A longer membership is cheaper per month; a shorter one costs more. But the way I see it, what’s more important: money or my health? I know I won’t walk or exercise regularly on my own. And I know I don’t walk as fast when I’m out with my walking buddies as I do on that machine. So I’m getting a lot of exercise each 90-minute session at the “health club.”

I must be. I slept 10-1/2 hours straight through last night.

And a side note here: I also started the Atkins/South Beach diet. I know they’re not the same, but they’re close enough for my purposes. I’ve lost 8 pounds in a week. Still very overweight, but starting to get back to the point where I can wear most of my jeans again.

And the way I see it, every pound I lose is one extra pound of passengers I can take flying. With some of my passengers so big they fully extend the seatbelt before fastening it around their midsections, somebody has to lose weight.

Hermosa Ranch Insanity (revisited)

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Clearing up a lot of misinformation.

It appears that Wickenburg’s Department of Misinformation has been working overtime on this one. Let me set the record straight:

The FAA did not approve Hermosa Ranch. Whoever told you that is either lying or using information obtained from the Department of Misinformation. In fact, I have in my possession, a letter to Miles Johnson, Town Planner and Airport Manager, from the FAA that states, in part:

Assurance 21, Compatible Land Use, stipulates that the Town will take all reasonable measures to restrict land uses adjacent to the airport to activities that are compatible with normal airport operations. Residential property in the vicinity of the airport is not a compatible land use. Airport noise will inevitably cause homeowners to complain about the airport and demand restrictions on airport operations. The FAA does not support this type of development next to the airport. In view of Assurance 21, why would the Town approve residential home [sic] so close to the airport?

Does that sound like the FAA approves of Hermosa Ranch? Right now, the Town of Wickenburg is on the verge of losing its FAA airport funding because it continues to approve residential zoning near the airport. That’s something the Department of Misinformation does not understand or want the people of Wickenburg to know.

Every single one of my petition’s signers knew exactly what he or she was signing. In explaining it, I used the same photo and illustration that appears on this site. I answered questions with facts, I presented FAA-prepared documents regarding recommended safe clearances. It took me a long time to get those signatures; people don’t just sign any old thing these days. Most people signed based on the noise concern alone. Everyone with a brain understands that people are not going to like living under the path of landing and departing airplanes. Photos and to-scale drawing of the situation do not lie. Where was this information when the project was presented to P & Z and the Town Council?

And again, why wasn’t the Airport Advisory Commission consulted about this?

And finally, it disgusts me that a printed list of people who signed my petition to stop Hermosa Ranch is being circulated and the signers harassed by the Chamber of Commerce and other people. Petitioning is a first amendment right and a government body — or representatives of that body — are violating that right when they harass people who are exercising it.

What’s going on in Wickenburg? And when is it going to stop?