That was the trip up to Maine where on your birthday you celebrated hard with that bottle of Devil's Spring and still deny talking to your parents on the phone, even though you did. It was just me, you, Zup, and Timmo.
The one your thinking of was the Sugar Bush 1 trip where Tommy lost both of his door handles because as you remember, all the cars were encased with a layer of ice and they didn't try to thaw them out before trying to yank the door open...
Damn, all of those trips are blending together. Except for the Diamond Tour that was done in '94. But that one has a journal that is still fun to read through to this day...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
I always love reading that journal. It's at least a few times a year I bust it out and give it a read. I tried finding a picture of the Elvis pig in Burlington. I even reached out to the Burlington community and quite a few people remember Pepper's, but no one had any pictures of it unfortunately. With the exception of Diamond Tour '94, the Jay Peak group trips were by far my most favorite...
I 100% agree with you on the Jay Peak trips. Especially that one where we first saw Pepper's (among so many other fun snippets that happened that week)...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
It's funny about all those little places we stayed and ate at because I tried looking up most of them and they just don't exist anymore. It's almost like the whole thing was a dream that never happened (except we have pictures to prove it)...
How many restaurants no longer exist that should still be in business. There was a little German restaurant here that was pretty amazing, and were affordably priced ('cause for some reason all German restaurants are always expensive) but they are gone, the owners retired, the kids took it over and decided they didn't want to work. The same goes for so many other places as well...
At least those dreams are documented in photos and in one case, a daily diary...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
What's worse is when the restaurant still exists, but the food and service are not even close to the quality they used to be. When we'd go up north we'd make reservations at the Rainbow Grille in New Hampshire. Our first time there it was a nice rustic and quiet place with a very pleasing decor and quiet jazz playing in the background. The food was phenomenal. We always left absolutely stuffed. As the years went on, the decor was stripped to be a little less cozy. I don't recall hearing the music. More loud families instead of mostly couples enjoying the night. The lighting became a little more harsh and slowly the food started to suck. The last time we said that was it, we're not coming back. The food didn't taste like it was freshly made anymore, more like it was prepped a day or two beforehand and just re-heated. We're so bummed because we had two restaurants that we liked to splurge at and both of them went down the crapper...
Oh yeah, I 100% get the downhill slide that a lot of restaurants have done over the recent years. But then there are some restaurants that do maintain their quality, like the Waldhorn Restaurant that's here. They serve really good German food and I have never had a bad meal there. While there are families that eat there frequently, kids are always well behaved so there isn't any annoyance either...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
Your hoity toity eatery comment sparked a memory when Frank and I were in NYC and we were recommended to go this high-end fancy restaurant. The starter salad tasted like how my lawn clippings smell. And the main entree was on a plate the size of a Mack truck hubcap (yeah, I know, they don't have hubcaps but humor me) with close to nothing being served. I literally took my fork and stabbed each piece on the plate, swiped the "fun-sized" steak on the drizzled sauce and ate it all in one bite. Over $100 for our dinners (mid 90's pricing) and we didn't order any drinks. When we walked out, I crossed the street to McDonald's and got the rest of my dinner...
I would bet that that was probably one of the last times that you ate at that Scottish restaurant, huh...
Did I ever give you a copy of the Dark Side of the Rainbow? I took the Wizard of Oz and created a DVD with three audio tracks, the main track was the Dark Side of the Moon played twice and the second play starts right after the first. The second track was the Dark Side of the Moon but with the second play delayed slightly and synchronizes better with some scenes. The third track is the main movie track so you can watch the movie normally...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
I will admit to the occasional fry order when I need some salty starchy snack. Not often, but it is an on occasion thing...
But funny that I just looked at my Plex and the Wizard of Oz movie is the original without the extra audio tracks. And I know I gave my last copy to a friend, we were watching it and I just left it with them at their house. All of the times that I've seen it, it was just watching the DVD. So I'll go find that project archive and burn a few more copies, and also render it for streaming...
Most of our corporate restrictions are tied to ZScaler. At least GitHub is available, but there are customer sites that are blocked when I need to fiddle with the settings or send a report to IT support and tell them to allow it...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
Man, we love us some seasoned curly fries at home.
We have ZScaler as well and let me tell you how much I hate that awful piece of shit software. It's been the bane of so many of the troubles I've dealt with. More than once this year, I've had my time entry of 8 hours : "System unavailable". And our "help" desk in anything but...
I had to laugh today. I was on a call with CVS, we're upgrading their servers and everything was ready (they have had all week since Monday to get their prerequisites ready) and they go to try and remote in. Nope, they haven't been on those servers in a while and ZScaler was blocking them. Needless to say, we never did the upgrade...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
It's always a crap-shoot if things are going to work properly from one day to the next. So many times I end the day, throw the machine into hibernation, return the next morning and Visual Studio is crawling, Teams refuses to update my status correctly, and for some stupid reason IIS isn't recognizing my local certificate anymore. I restart all the usual service suspects and it just gets worse. Half the internet stops working. My Task Manager shows 96% utilization even though all the processes added together don't add up to even 10%. And then I just glance over at my Teams inspirational message above my name and smile. It reads: "I just don't care enough". Then I slowly move the mouse over to click the "Restart" button and go stare out the window because I know I've got at least 20 minutes of peace before that stupid machine is ready for me to log in...
