Suncoast Gun Show Craziness

Well, Barack Obama set out to fix the economy and he's definitely done a good job of stimulating a sector that he'd rather shut down than help out. So much so we had to deviate from our plans today because of it. See, the plan for today was to make it to the Suncoast Gun Show to take the Concealed Weapons Permit course. After talking to my friend that was already up there, he was in line for 45 minutes JUST TO GET IN. He missed the class, and we expected the same to happen to us. Instead we took what may have been our first afternoon without our daughter to enjoy lunch at Lee Roy Selmon's, and do a bit of shopping. Fortunately, we did make it to Knight Shooting Sports in Clearwater and signed up for their all day CWP class. It was a bit costlier than the course at the gun show, but for double the money you get 4 times the course. I'm hoping to do my part to stimulate the economy by buying a handgun (had my eye on a Glock 19 for a while now) in the near future. Class is at the end of the month, wish us luck!

State Moving to Deregulate Development

Originally posted by Mariella on Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog:

Florida State Legislators (just like some Hillsborough County Commissioners) are working to “streamline” — i.e. deregulate — the development industry. State lawmakers want to make it cheaper & easier for developers to build more subdivisions and strip malls, apparently ignorant of the widely reported fact that Florida has 300,000 vacant homes for sale — a housing glut that is slashing property values for all of us and contributing to the economic crisis. The Times reports:

Florida legislative leaders want to make it easier to get permits to destroy wetlands, tap the water supply and wipe out endangered species habitat, all in the interest of building houses, stores and offices. They say streamlining the permitting process will get the economy moving again.

Affecting several counties & cities, including all the urban & rural areas in Hillsborough County, Senate Bill 360, (euphemistically named the “Community Renewal Act”) would:

• eliminate state review of supersized “Developments of Regional Impact” (DRIs)
• eliminate state review of Comprehensive Plan Amendments
• reduce public hearings for development projects
• lower Level of Service (LOS) standards for roads
• eliminate “Transportation Concurrency” requirements

Transportation Concurrency requires developers to ensure that there is adequate capacity on the roads to accommodate the traffic generated by their developments. If the local roads are already full of traffic, then concurrency requires developers to provide the additional capacity needed for their projects by paying for measures like road-widening or turn lanes and traffic lights. Without concurrency, they wouldn’t pay, so WE would have to pay to bail ourselves out of the traffic-jam-hell their development creates, while they pocket all the profits without any responsibility.

Some argue that eliminating transportation concurrency would reduce sprawl by making it easier for developers to build in the urban area where concurrency requirements are most burdensome because the roads have already reached capacity. Of course, this would allow development to overwhelm those already-full roads with additional traffic, condemning the urban areas to traffic nightmares, which is not an acceptable trade-off even if it could prevent sprawl. However, it cannot prevent sprawl. With or without concurrency, developers will always prefer to build in the rural area because rural land is cheaper, and available in large “clean & green” parcels. The only way to prevent sprawl is for local leaders to stop approving it.

Another bill, Senate Bill 630, would put a moratorium on impact fees — the fees developers pay to partially defray the costs of infrastructure required to support their projects. Even with those fees in place, each new house costs us taxpayers $13,515 for roads, schools and other infrastructure. Without impact fees, our costs would roughly double, while developers would be able to make more money selling cheaper housing, further lowering our home values — enriching developers at our expense.

Meanwhile, developers’ lobbyist Frank Matthews is up to his old tricks, pushing also for the elimination of local environmental protections like our EPC provides. (Sticks readers may remember Matthews’ role in our local battle over wetland regulations.)

Let’s pay attention to which of our elected officials are pushing to shift more of the costs of development from developers to taxpayers, while paving the way for more sprawl that will only destroy more natural resources and worsen our housing glut.

Both bill 360 & 630 were introduced by Sen. Mike Bennett, of Bradenton. These bills are barreling through committees which include all four Hillsborough Senators: Ronda Storms & Arthenia Joyner have both voted “yes” to 360 in committees; Victor Crist, Charlie Justice, and Ronda Storms will soon review 630 in committees. All our lawmakers will eventually weigh in on all this so tell your representatives what you think now. The Lt. Gov. sidestepped Wayne Garcia’s questioning on this topic, so we had better help educate him and our Governor as well.

I’ve drafted a sample letter with contact information you can use to send your thoughts to Tallahassee. You can also ask your county commissioners to lobby the state against deregulation, and let them know we don’t want county growth controls & environmental protections weakened either. 1000 Friends of Florida has posted an informative alert calling on citizens to oppose SB 360.

Unless we can persuade our legislators to work for the public good, we might as well skip these middle-men and pay developers directly. Hey, maybe we could just pay developers NOT to ruin our communities, our economy and our environment.

Instead of passing all this legislation to toss out our development controls, which will end up costing us all a fortune anyway, it might actually be better for each taxpayer to just write a check directly to every Florida developer, bypassing the part where they destroy our natural resources and dump a bunch of cheap housing in our neighborhoods that (if it ever sells) would only clog our roads with too much traffic until we handed over the money to pay for more road lanes.

My Libertarian tendencies are all for privatization and deregulation of businesses and commerce and what have you, but not at the cost of the tax payers. On top of it all, I can't believe that the legislators feel that building more homes is a good thing when we currently have 300,000 vacant homes across the state. I've sent off my letters already, fight the power!

Recovering from drinking around the world at EPCOT on my birthday

Yesterday was my birthday, and I wanted to drink around the world in EPCOT. The challenge was 11 drinks starting at 11 am. Come to find out, there's an additional "outpost" bringing the number up to 12. That's for next year though, I only made it to 10, and I'm attempting to recap from memory, which is fairly fuzzy as of mid-afternoon yesterday:

1. Canada: Skipped, too early for Moosehead
2. United Kingdom: Boddington's on tap, 20oz (this was a mistake later on, as my stomach can only hold so much liquid)
3. France: Kronenbourg 1664 (12oz)
4. Morocco: Casa Beer (12oz) with lunch at Marrakech
5. Japan: Aged Sake, can't remember the name (2-3oz)
6. America: Seasonal Budweiser Brew, draft, not sure of the size
   
7. Italy: Lemon slushie thing
8. Germany: Red Wine (2-3oz) and a picture with the guy in lederhosen (mistake, should have had beer in Germany, but was seriously good wine)
9. Outpost Pavilion (Walt apparently didn't feel that Africa should be properly represented in the World Showcase) I was going to get a drink here, but it was taking too long, I was way too drunk to be waiting in line. On a side note, the entire Sherman tribe rocked out on the drums...
   
10. China: Very full at this point, went for a smaller portion in the Plum wine (2-3oz)
11. Norway: Beer of some sort, not sure what size
    
12. Mexico: Dos Equis, not sure what size.

Needless to say, my birthday rocked. We ended up on a drunken shopping spree in downtown Disney after I tried to sober up with some yummy McDonald's cheese burgers (always better when you're drunk). My wife was very accommodating to say the least. No one was hurt, except my wallet and I'm still surprised that I didn't need to purge at all. Granted I did end up needing to pee at just about every country past Japan.

In hindsight, this attempt at drinking around the world wasn't very planned. I mean, we knew where we were going, but it would have been better served by planning out what to drink along the way and not getting anything too large. There's already talks or trying it again on my wife's birthday (her this time, not me) and I'm already planning for February 23rd, 2010 when I will be drinking around the world, and then some (+1 for the Outpost Pavilion). I'll just have to keep training until then ;)

The Sprout Adventure - 5 days later

It's absolutely astonishing at how fast these little buggers grew. They grew so much that they were pushing the sprouter open after only a few days. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the seed measurements that the Sprout People recommended as the containers were overflowing so early. Perhaps I read the directions wrong, I re-read them a few times because I wasn't so sure about it, live and learn.

After soaking the seeds in water overnight on Monday, the seeds were placed in the sprouter Tuesday morning. Since then I have been punctually rinsing and draining the seeds 3 times a day (morning before work, evening when I get home from work, and night time before bed). It's definitely paid off as of Thursday I was already harvesting a small amount of alfalfa and clover sprouts (perhaps prematurely) and a small amount of the mixed batch of beans (even more-so prematurely). The biggest reason for early harvesting of the alfalfa and clover sprouts is that they were the main offender for pushing the lid off of the sprouter.

Thus far, we've been pretty inventive with integrating the sprouts into most of our meals (mostly as a salad topper), and there have been some epic failures as well (specifically the PB&Sprouts I made for lunch). Unfortunately, we haven't made Phở in a while, so the bean sprouts weren't utilized to their full potential. When I finally detox from all these sprouts and decide to grow some mung beans, I'm planning on making sure Phở is on the menu at least a couple of times.

I'm curious to see how well the sprouts hold in the fridge, I made sure they were dry before packing them (as per the directions). Not sure we'll be able to eat them all up before they go south, worst case scenario the compost bin should be happy with the bit of variety :)

Day 1:

Forgot to take a photo of the seeder

Day 2:


Day 3:


Day 4:


Day 5:

Recipe: Carpaccio with Sprout Salad

Thought I'd share a recipe from Alton Brown's Good Eats for Beef Capaccio. I've made it a few times now and it doesn't disappoint (even though the butcher's mangling of our tenderloin did). The original recipe can be found here.

One thing this recipe doesn't mention is quickly pan searing the roast before placing it in the freezer. Yeah I know, Carpaccio's supposed to be raw, but with the paranoia of today's consumer, it's better safe than sorry. Quickly pan searing all sides helps to kill off any bacteria that may be on the outside of the meat (surface area is typically where all the buggers are). I also find that after pounding it out, the meat has a more dynamic aesthetic with small ring of cooked meat around the edge (it's like the pink ring found on smoked meats). You can omit the searing if you'd like, if not, get out a heavy (preferably cast iron) pan, and heat up a bit of extra virgin olive oil (medium-high). Salt and pepper the meat on all sides (I'm pretty liberal with the salt on this particular dish). Quickly sear all sides (a minute or less on each side, even the ends). It shouldn't take much time to cool, and you proceed with the plastic wrap as per the original recipe.

Because we've had an over abundance of sprouts this week, I opted for a alfalfa salad instead of arugala, and because we had some left over aged provolone that was used instead of Parmesan. In addition to the sprouts, I added some carrots and green beans. I tried something different with the green beans, I used the vegetable peeler to create thin slices (ribbons?). It turned out surprisingly well.

My wife topped hers with a drizzle of olive oil, and I used a drizzle of Balsamic vinegar. We don't make 4 servings the way the recipe suggests, in fact, I just wing it when it comes to the amount of meat. It was about 3-4 inches of the tenderloin this last time. Keep in mind the sliced pre-pounded beef rounds were very small considering the crap cleaning job the "butcher" did. Still bitter, I suppose. From now on we're cleaning the meat at the house, at least if we mess it up we can learn from the experience.

The Great Urban Race and the Value of the Grocery Store

So we decided to hit up the Ybor Farmer's Market up the road from our house instead of driving all the way to St. Petersburg this weekend. Everything was great until we got closer to our destination. People dressed up like it was Halloween. Folks running around with no regard of the fact that folks were trying to commute while they blindly jaywalked. No parking near the market. So after walking 5 blocks from the parking garage I finally took notice to what was going on, the Great Urban Race. It's some sort of urban scavenger hunt it seems. No harm, I suppose, but it did add a level of craziness that I was hoping to avoid by staying local for our produce today.

Speaking of scavenger hunts, I came across something that could have been completely fantastic, but was completely quashed by my wife. So the produce vendor was selling cleaned pineapples, and over by the garbage can was a box full of pineapple tops. I already have one pineapple plant in a pot, and another that is soaking in water until it's root's form (which hasn't been going that well). I thought, "holy crap, that's a lot of free pineapple tops!" My wife's reaction was "I don't think it's right to dig through the trash take them". Well first and foremost, the tops were next to the garbage can in a box. Additionally, they were obviously garbage, and were obviously going to end up in a landfill with the cardboard boxes. Sadly, no free pineapple tops for me. If anyone else out there is looking to start a bunch of pineapple plants, I do recommend hitting up the Ybor Farmer's Market for the hook up.

After the farmer's market we ended up at El International Meat Market on MLK Blvd. Now I've been here a few times before to get beef tenderloins, and I've never been let down. Well until today, I suppose. The tenderloin we purchased was fairly small (15$ at 5.99$ per lb) which was fine, we're not the biggest folks. The sad part was how mangled it was, most of the meat ended up going towards sandwich meat since it was sliced open and not really capable of being used for fillets. I was able to salvage enough for a small carppachio dish and 3 steaks. Again, very disappointed. But hey, we can vote with our wallet and never set foot in that establishment again.

After that we ended up at Publix for what was going to be a short trip for a few staple items. Now here's a testament to the grocery store. Even though we've been shopping at the farmer's markets for produce and specialty markets for just about everything else, we were still able to spend 100$ at the Publix. Granted, part of that was dog food and charcoal, but those are still items that you can't find at the smaller markets. This experience has made me re-think my "no more chain stores" kick I've been on. Perhaps we can start making our own dog food?