starcatcher.ca

BBQ season is upon us yet again. We bought a grill from Melissa’s brother Mike as he was moving to Calgary and had no room for it. It was dirty as hell, but it was in good shape (and ours had seen better days). It was christened (yes, it was) on Sunday, but I’m definitely going to have to get used to it… Here’s the thing. I’m used to grills with charcoal (or ceramic) bricks in them. Our old BBQ had them. You heated it up, and thing stayed warm for a week. Most new grills don’t have bricks in them, and as such, they seem to lose their heat in a hurry (unless you rig some way to hang bricks on the deflectors inside the grill). As such, you need to leave the fire on high pretty much the entire time to keep things toasty in there, a design “feature” which suggests a conspiracy between grill manufacturers and propane companies to boost gas consumption. On the other hand, the design also suggests that flareups (and truly blackened steaks) might be a thing of the past, which may or may not be a good thing (I love me a good flareup, especially in the BBQ). Time will tell, but the much larger grilling surface will definitely lend itself well to parties.

We also got a new TV for the living room, a 32″ Samsung LCD from Costco. I had lots of extra cables lying around (HDMI, DVI, component, optical audio; how I got these I don’t know), so we got the TV pimped out with HD yesterday night, and the difference in picture quality is quite impressive. Eastlink has apparently come a long way with its HD offering, both in terms of the number of channels as well as the stability of its PVR boxes and its feeds, so I don’t mind dropping an extra $5 for that (I’m not bothering with the specialty HD channels for now). Some spare component cables allowed me to improve the picture quality of our DVD player as well, which serves me well on those nights where Emilia doesn’t go to sleep until 11:45PM. Like last night. Ugh.