Had a service call to W&M Burgers and their lot was full with delivery trucks so I ended up parking on the side street that goes by St. Louis Drive In. Walking back and in the small collection of shops on the corner across from St. Louis this shop Shaloha caught my eye. Signage indicated Middle eastern cuisine, I was intrigued. The two other customer eating were of that region so I took it as a good sign. I had lunch waiting back at the office but conveniently I needed to suppliment it. Decided to get a side order of falafel, not having had any before. While I waited, dude assembling the food gave me a sample of their pita with a generous dab of hummus. Good stuff, the pita is fresh made on premise, a great balance of chewyness and fluffyness. It’s their signature item. The falafel was pretty good, these deep fried chickpea balls were actually pretty light on flavor, needed the dipping sauce provided. Nice texture of crunch on outside, and a hearty, almost meatball like texture inside. This place will definitely need furthur exploration and try of their main entrees!
Author Archive for taro
Page 41 of 88
This past rallycross the FX had been having power and driveability issues. Luckily this time I saw the CEL come on so I pulled the codes later. Turns out the error is from the AFM. Unfortunately perusing Root’s boneyard revealed 3 AFM’s in a addition to the one in the street FX and one in the rally FX were all bad. The street FX was in the best shape, it should be since it was a reman bought recently from NAPA, so I swiped that one into the rally. The street then got the next best one I could find.
So this past Saturday I decided to go check out ABC in Pearl City. Haven’t been there in a while so might as well see what they got. Mostly overcast, but still hot. Not a single Corolla AFM to be found. In fact AFM’s seem to be one of the first things to go, there was hardly a car with one left! Continue reading ‘Junkyarding’
Crawled under the rally FX tonight & dropped the engine crossmember. Sure enough, the 3M Window Weld mount has failed again. Didn’t last long, this stuff just can’t handle this kind of stress. Doesn’t help that pumping it out of a caulking gun allows for a lot of air pockets. Come this weekend I’ll give up on this and am going to cut and weld in some plate to make a solid mount. NVH? It’s all there!
Don’t let the black bottle fool you, pours a medium light yellow, medium head. Fairly strong hop bitter and touch of skunkyness. The bitter and strong carbonation gives a feel of dryness, but there is actually a moderately heavy mouthfeel. I can’t say I really like this beer. I’ll drink it, but it wouldn’t be a choice I would make to buy it again.
2 out of 4 sapphiry monkeys.
OK, I guess I’ve been abusing my GoPro beyond it’s capabilities. This was mounted under the front bumper, and today’s course had a couple sections that became rutted so was contacting dirt. Prob should have taken a cue when one of the click in mounts snapped, but instead I switched to shorter mount and kept going. On one of my final runs I got back to see that the mount was intact, but the case was empty! It looks like the latch popped open. Eventually we were able to find the camera and the wifi back. It’s pretty banged up but it appears to still turn on. Connector is crammed full of dirt and the lens is scratched. The real suck thing is that I didn’t notice until I got home, the flash card is gone! No footage!
Having used both the Sony and GoPro over our Hokkaido trip, I now have some more thoughts on these two cameras and how they stack up against each other. GoPro feature set wise wins. Their WiFi remote is very useful, much more than linking up a smartphone. How often in -10C with winds blasting enough to almost knock you over and snow swirling in your face are you going to dig out your smartphone, take off your gloves in order to use the phone, wait for the app to sync, then browse through it to change settings or start the camera. The GoPro allows full access to all functions while in the waterproof case, although in use the only setting I changed in the field was the inverted setting. The Sony once it was in case only has the start/stop button, which ended up being fine. And it’s a nice big button that makes it glove friendly.
But the Sony has only one tiny impossible to see record indicator LED on the back, I could never see it in the field. The start tone is too soft, again impossible to hear through layers of neckwarmer, helmet ear muff, blasting snow and wind.
Part of the current Spring Thaw variety pack. I’ve already reviewed the Alpine Spring, which is one of my current faves. This one is a porter and pours moderate heavy head, an extremely dark brown, almost black. There’s a definite dark roast, and yet it does not taste burnt. The bitter is also moderated by its fairly strong maple sweetness. You also definitely get the nuttyness from the pecan, but can’t readily identify it. I’m generally not a fan of beers with heavy sweetness, but it works pretty good here, and surprisingly the mouth feel is not very heavy or syrupy. However this isn’t a chugging beer.
I give it a 3 out of 4 porterly monkeys.
Now boarding. Spent about 45 min at the Sapporo Chitose airport onsen, awesome! Every airport needs one!
yup, never fails, the snow is coming down as we sit on the bus bound for airport. We decided it was too much to try and squeeze in a last day of riding and getting on the airplane all stinky.
16:00 and on bus heading back to Sapporo. While snow conditions were good, riding comfort pretty harsh with the whipping winds. We called it an early day, we got some good runs in. Bus is slowly making its way back, now this is an honest blizzard. There’s stilla bout seven car lengths visibility so it’s not too worrying. Am now seriously considering riding Sunday and got straight to airport. Stinky riders!