Popped into the newly remodeled and opened Foodland Farms at Aina Haina. It’s kind of a mini “Whole Paycheck” market. They borrowed a lot of aspects with the areas of higher end products, deli, and prepared foods, but not quite as extensive. The beer selection is also pretty good with some items I haven’t seen elsewhere, but again is nowhere as extensive as Whole Foods. What I did spy was this Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale. With a name like that I simply could not resist. Pours with a pretty strong head, simply popping the cap produced bubbles in the bottle neck. Color is a medium dark somewhat cloudy amber. Immediate floral aroma without even taking a sip. It is strongly hoppy, the bitter hits you from the begining, it’s no aftertaste here! I guess Bigfoot like drinking flowers? 
It demands to be drunk while eating something hearty and strongly flavored, I had it with a herbed roasted chicken and it worked well. I don’t know if I could handle drinking this by itself. Thankfully it doesn’t have the syrupy sweet that immediately turns me off, although I have to wonder how they achieved the butt kicking 9.6%ABV, and the label does say barleywine style. I only now coming off the buzz from that one bottle. I have a hard time rating this. I enjoyed it with my meal, perhaps the ABV helped, but I had a hard time finishing it after my food was done. I guess go with middle of the road 2 out of 4 bigmonkeys?
Archive for the 'Review' Category
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In anticipation of the upcoming Whistler snowboarding trip, I wanted to update my first aid kit. I have heard of these coagulating products from reports coming back form the sandbox. For heavy trauma, even arterial bleeding, this stuff forces the leaking blood to coagulate and form a mass. The blood flow in adjacent tissue is unaffected, so there are none of the necrotizing effects associated with tourniquets. For amputations, a tourniquet would be required, but for nearly anything less, packing on coagulating agent seems to be the best course of action to stop the bleeding while the victim is being transported to a medical facility. Bigger hole = more packs of coagulant. Continue reading ‘Quikclot Sport’
I dropped by Target in Kapolei for some small items from the pharmacy. They had neither the simple breath strips nor the esoteric traumatic bleeding clotting agent that I was looking for. While looking at their selection of bandaging tape, I took a look at their in-house brand. Unlike the in-house Long’s/CVS stuff, the Target stuff was made in The PRC. No, there really is no way I’m going to buy medical-related supplies, of all things, from China. Sorry!
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Alright guys, you need to give the people in the packing department more material and stop skimping. This is the second package of high dollar fairly sensitive electronic and optical equipment I ordered from them that arrived with inadequate packing. Is the risk and return rate worth the savings in material? Sheesh! When I picked up the box and did the tilt test, I already could tell they had done it again, hearing the item inside sliding around freely. They were lucky with this one, Panasonic’s OEM packaging for this lens was fairly minimal. I am going to yet again write a negative feedback on packing to Amazon, this time probably more scathing than my previous one. Lemme dig up my pic for that one….
Ah, here we go, the camera had some fairly robust OEM packaging, but still…. It bugs me. Both pieces of equipment appear to have survived intact and fine, but really, a big name mail order business like this really should take more care in their packing. Even a monkey could have packed these better!
I was cleaning out my wallet today at lunchtime, and found the receipt from the time I went to Good to Grill after the Honolulu Marathon. $8 USD for the Surfer Special (2 pancakes, 2 eggs, bacon or SPAM) and $2.50 USD for a cup of coffee. The food was fine, and they actually had real butter instead of margerine for the pancakes, but all the service items were third-party prepacks from like Y. Hata or somewhere like that. The service was excellent. One of our group even knew the owner, and we got to meet him when he came by before just we left, but we had attentive service before any of the staff knew this. I would have to drop by for lunch or dinner to really pass judgement, but from this breakfast experience, I’d say that I was underwhelmed, in particular value wise. The Euro Illy coffee was just coffee – there are so many good locally-produced coffees that the rationale of bringing in a supposed premium European brand feels like pompous name-dropping.
Ambivalent – give them a try and see what you think
Two-and-a-half out of four breakfast scarfing monkeys.
The New Year in Hawaii means interesting seasonal entertainment from Japan on KIKU-TV. The general worldwide economic downturn has been reflected in this annual spectacle in more austere sets and decreased use of expensive shots like the helicopter fly-in on ELT on a rooftop stage at the opening many years back. The talent level has remained fairly consistent through the years, so the enjoyment level has remained pretty much the same. Here are some reflections on this year: Continue reading ‘2010 60th Annual NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen’
So I got this annoying cough. I thought I was getting hit with allergies starting a number of days ago. Itchy eyes, sinus pressure. Now this cough and somewhat general melaise. Might be a cold. Just popped a giant guaifenesin expectorant tablet. Damn that thing was a horse pill, wasn’t quite expecting that! Almost gagged it up! Hoping that will loosen things up and make the coughs a bit more productive. This particular one is max strength, hugest dose I’ve seen, 1200mg.
To calm the cough, here’s an interesting one, dark chocolate. Seems the cacao has stuff that in some research has shown to be more effective than codeine in suppressing coughs. Of course I don’t know if it’s been studied wide enough to be reliable, but what the heck, it’s was an excuse to go buy bars of Godiva dark chocolate that was on sale at Longs. And who needs an excuse to have some good dark chocolate anyway! So some hot steaming and spicy pho for dinner certainly loosened up some of that mucous, followed by lots of water, and a 43g bar of dark chocolate, and you know what, hardly a cough. Is it placebo? I dunno, but I’m not complaining. If I plan to continue trying this, it might be better to look for higher cacao concentration bars with less sugar and fats though. In any case, it sure puts me in a better mood, chocolate is good for you!
Oh, and don’t bother with milk or white cholocate. Milk chocolate is barely chocolate, and white chocolate is an insult.
Went by 7-11 in search of some refreshing fruit drink. I saw this and remembered a couple weeks back all the talk of citrus and this fruit mentioned. I had to buy it. I can report it is quite yummy and refreshing. Fragrant. Not quite like yuzu, it’s a different hybrid, supposedly mandarin and kumquat, but still a very nice aroma. Wonder where fresh fruit can be found, I’m sure whereever you go for your Philippino shopping.
3.5 out of 4 vitamin C’d monkeys, I’m sure a fresh squeezed version would be great, but this still brings back “Sweet Memories Of Cebu”!
Fabio put an order together for all of us from RescueDirect for trauma shears. It was pretty difficult finding decent quality shears locally, perhaps from not looking in the right place, or not having access to the wholesale medical supply companies’ inventories. Most of the stuff I found wasn’t even PRC quality – heck, the ones McBike had were made in Pakistan or Afghanistan or something! I saw that Todd the tennis racquet stringer had a pair of nice shears that said “Acme†and “Titanium†on them. He had gotten them next door at Long’s on closeout after CVS took them over, but that was months before, so there were none left to be had. A quick search online identified the product, and a cursory investigation of the various online retailers’ shipping policy regarding The 50th State selected a dealer. The word went out, and soon we were rolling in trauma shears (it was more like a couple of months, but Fabio was busy). Continue reading ‘Acme Titanium Bonded Trauma Shears’
Picked up a little canister stove at the Snow Peak store in Shiroishi while in Sapporo. Most Snow Peak stuff is available on the USDM, but after the first year, Snow Peak USA removed this particular item from their product listing, though you may still find remaining stock here and there. I’m not really sure what’s up with that. All the specifications and information is readily available online, so I’ll just go over some of the things I noticed. It is really small, but it isn’t particularly light. I only say this because I picked up the aluminum-bodied Ultralight version. Granted the ultralight doesn’t have an igniter which means you have to add weight elsewhere by carrying a lighter or matches. Continue reading ‘Snow Peak Gigapower Micro Max Stove Titanium’