August 17, 2009: Indian Food in Peekskill

I got up and hung out with Liesl and Dominica a little bit this morning since we are all on an earlier schedule that we would normally have on a normal work week.  So no need to start work right when I got up.  I then worked for a little while making sure that I was all caught up and that there was nothing needing my attention.  Then, around ten, we made a run to Home Depot to get the CAT5e cabling that we need in order to test my theory about our spool of CAT6 being bad.  Luckily CAT5e is practically free in comparison to the CAT6 we already purchased so at least we are not spending an arm and a leg for our next round of testing.

No one needed me at work so we stopped by at Pastel’s for a late breakfast or early lunch.  When we stopped we noticed that the new Indian restaurant that we have been impatiently awaiting the opening of in the Beach Shopping Center had silently opened this past Friday the 14th!  How exciting.  It was only eleven when we were there and they do not open for lunch until eleven thirty so we vowed to return for dinner this evening.  We are very, very excited.  We have not had access to an Indian restaurant since moving to Peekskill.  This is a really big deal.

There is a rumor floating around the Internet today that the final release of Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard operating system may be pushed forward to less than two weeks from now.  I have been waiting for forever for Apple to release Snow Leopard before buying my new Mac Mini.  This means that I might have it in no time. The reality is, though, that I will have no time at all to use it before my trip to Germany so even if it does release early I really should probably wait until after I return before ordering it.  I am really hopeful that a new version of the Mac Mini with a quad-core processor and at least 4GB of RAM will be available at the same time although I find that to be awfully unlikely.  Apple just never gives their Mac Mini product enough horsepower.  Now it is practically anemic in comparison to normal machines on the market for a bit less money.

Work slowed down considerably this afternoon and I actually had some time to relax.  I had time to make our first CAT5e cable and test it out.  Of course, on the first try, the cheaper cable worked perfectly!  This is great news while, at the same time, very annoying.  At least now we know that the cable itself is bad and it was not anything that we were doing.  So now we need more cabling from Home Depot.  Now we have to rip out all of the existing in-wall cabling and start our entire house wiring process over again.

At four thirty Dominica and Liesl ran out to do some shopping.  They hit the post office and then Home Depot to get another five hundred feet of cable in addition to the one hundred feet that we picked up early this morning.  It may not be enough for everything that we plan to do but at least it is a start on it without spending too much money.  We only have so much time to be making cable this week anyway.  She also hit Pier One Imports and a few others stores and got some important home decorating items like a new running for our side board table in the dining room and a serving tray that is going to go on it where we are going to keep the alcohol – very European style like you see in As Time Goes By. She also got several picture frames that we are going to be mounting this week around the house.  Now that we are printing photos at home we are getting ready to start using them for decoration.

After they got back I had to work for about half an hour more and then we were able to head out to dinner.  We drove down to the Beach Shopping Center and first hit the liquor store there as we now need an assortment of mixers to display on our side board so we picked up some vodka, Pimms and Irish whiskey.  Then we went to the brand new Ruchi (I hope that I got the name right) for dinner.

We were the only people eating at Ruchi’s until just before we left one additional couple came in to eat.  It is going to be a slow start getting an Indian restaurant going in Peekskill and most people associate Indian food with buffets so the lunch crowd there is probably a lot more popular – or will be once we get word out about the place.  The people there were super nice and the food was really good.  We were so excited to discover that they have south Indian cuisine like dosas.  We were totally not expecting them to have dosa.  There was so little chance of that and yet they have it.  This is going to massively improve our quality of life here in Peekskill.

The food was really good.  We split an appetizer and each got a dosa.  We also got some curry to split as well.  We skipped lunch having only had a late breakfast so we were both really ready for a large meal.  Everyone working there just loved Liesl and kept coming over to talk to and play with her.  She loved all of the attention even though she was getting tired and really just wanted to go home so that she could go to bed.

Liesl got to taste her very first curry tonight.  It was a buttery mild vegetable curry.  Not in the least bit spicy.  She just had a little bit but she liked it.  She also had a bit piece of garlic naan which she really enjoyed.  We had to keep taking it away from her because she was trying to eat the whole chunk at once.

There is a very real possibility that we will be going back to Ruchi tomorrow for the lunch buffet to check that out as well.  Dominica has only had Indian once in the last year or more.  We were eating it constantly when we lived in North Brunswick and got it occasionally in Newark but there it was a real struggle.  I was able to get it in the city from time to time.  Now that we have ready access to it again we are going to be on an Indian cuisine rampage for a while.

Once we got back to the house Liesl pretty much went straight to bed.  Then Dominica and I worked on hanging a picture in the dining room and getting other pictures ready to hang tomorrow.  Then the big job for the evening – assembling the baker’s rack in the utility room.  Unfortunately because of the tiny doorway we are stuck building the rack inside of the utility room instead of our in the den area.

After the rack was built Dominica felt really exhausted and fell right asleep on the recliner in the basement while I worked on cleaning up anything that could be gathered up and placed on the rack which included a lot of bins, paint cans, servers, etc.  Suddenly there is room for things in the basement again!  This place already looks much, much better and there is a lot left to be done.  Tomorrow is going to be cable making day.  We have a minimum of eight cables to make and to get run to really get things cleaned up.

I worked for another three hours after Dominica fell asleep.  I booked my hours for last week and realized that I worked approximately ninety-two hours for the office last week!  That is a bit ridiculous.

At the end of today the move conversion count is at three hundred and twenty seven movies!  That does not include television shows, music videos, miscellaneous stuff or whatever.  Just the filesystem count of files in the movies directory.  So some days it doesn’t move at all and some days it climbs quickly.  Overall, though, it gives a fair status of the overall progress.  When the count nears twelve hundred it means that the entire process is roughly “done”.  Although done will just mean “caught up”.  The process will never really be completed as new material will always be added.  It just won’t be coming from a massive backlog of material.

I found out tonight from dad that hurricane Bill is scheduled to be slamming into the Hudson Valley this weekend.  It is still five days away from making landfall in the northeast but the Hudson Valley is roughly in the center of the prediction zone so there is a really good chance that we will be hit.  We live on the top of a really tall hill and are a good twenty five miles from Long Island Sound and at least forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean proper so we are only likely to see amazingly heavy wind and rain at most but it should make for an interesting weekend with my grandparents and Aunt Gayle visiting us from Ohio.