Redbox

This past weekend, I finally tired out one of the Redbox movie rental kiosks that have been popping up around town. There is one in the Neighborhood Market, and at McDonald's off the end of Kiehl, across from McCain Mall, and on JFK and N. Hills. You'll know it when you see it. It's literally a big red box.

The way it works is that you swipe your credit card and it dispenses movies. You pay $1 a night and you just have to return it before 9pm the day after you get it. If you don't return it in time, they just charge you another dollar for each extra day.

The movie I was looking for had just been released the previous Tuesday, but the Redbox had a copy, so I swiped my credit card and entered my email address and zip code (to verify my billing address). The movie came sliding out and I was on my way. The whole thing took a couple of minutes and the dvd came in a hard plastic case.

I wish I'd checked to see whether entering an email address was optional, but at the time, I just wanted to see what kind of confirmation email they'd send. I ended up getting three emails from them: one verifying my rental, one verifying its return, and one showing the charge. Three emails over one rental seems a little much, but I can see why each one is useful.

I currently subscribe to Blockbuster through the mail and return them in the store, but I actually liked Redbox enough that I might suspend my blockbuster subscription for a month or two and try Redbox instead. My blockbuster plan is $16 (plus tax) a month, which would buy me 16 Redbox rentals if I manage to return them all on time. If you use Netflix or Blockbuster Online and always send the movies back through the mail, Redbox probably seems like a huge inconvenience to you. On the other hand, if you're like me and you usually swing by a Blockbuster to return movies in the store, Redbox only adds the inconvenience of having to pick up the movie ahead of time.

I checked out the Redbox website and I really like that you can see what movies are available at a location prior to leaving the house. You can even reserve a movie and have it on hold for you when you get there. The one thing I can't believe is missing is a quicker way to locate movies. You basically have to look through screens showing 10 dvd covers at a time. They're sorted by title, release date, or availability, but you can't just view a list of all available titles at once or even search for a movie title and see what locations nearby currently have it. I can definitely think of some basic features that would make the website more useful, but the very fact that you can check a Redbox inventory and put movies on hold before driving down there makes the website worth using.

The one disclaimer I will add is that Redbox's inventory of movies is (from what I've seen) exclusively new releases. If you're into foreign movies, or seasons of tv shows, or old classics, don't count on Redbox to have anything you're looking for.

Schlotzsky's got a makeover

I went to Schlotzsky's for lunch this past weekend. It's been around for as long as I can remember, so I'm not going to even bother telling you where it is. If you don't already know, I'll let finding out be part of the adventure. It'll build character and be worth it. You'll thank me.

I don't go there very often, but their fresh-made bread is worth the trip. I don't know baking, but the bread is the perfect density and is full of air pockets. There is probably a name for this type of bread, but I just call it "delicious". I always think of them as being on the expensive side for a sandwich, but I don't think it's any more than Jason's Deli or McAllister's. Plus, you can check out their website to get some coupons (.$50 - $.75 off a sandwich, depending on size).

Schlotzsky's also has the best chips around. They have their own chips, in all sorts of tasty flavors, so don't go in hoping for Dorito's or Lay's. I always get the Cracked Pepper ones, which are probably my favorite kind of chips ever. You can also get Schlotzsky's chips at some grocery stores around town (Walmart Supercenter on McCain carries them last time I checked) so pick some up even if you don't make it by for a sandwich.

But like I said, this place is been around forever, so I hate to act like you don't know anything about it. If you haven't been, go. Nuff said. The reason I'm posting is because if you haven't been in awhile, they've redone their dining area. It used to be a big open area and you could see everything from everywhere. Now they've added a brick divider so that you can't see the front counter from the seating area. It looks a lot nicer than it did before, so check it out. It'll be a good excuse to go. It also looked like they were working on adding a back patio area, but it was still under construction as of about a week ago.

Crazy Hibachi Review

Last Friday night, I decided to go out for dinner and a movie with a couple of people. To be honest, we usually drive out to Rave to see movies, but we wanted to save some time, so we went to Lakewood 8 instead. We bought the tickets first, then drove around looking for a restaurant with a short wait time. We ended up at Crazy Hibachi in Lakewood Village, where they were able to seat us immediately. I went to Crazy Hibachi not long after it opened a couple of years ago, but for no particular reason, haven't been back since. This time, we ate at the Mongolian Grill.

If you're not familiar with Crazy Hibachi, it's got three different areas. There is a sushi bar (which I've never been to), there is an area where groups of about 6-8 people sit around a chef while he fixes your meal and does tricks along the way, then there is the Mongolian grill. At the Mongolian grill, there is a buffet with various kinds of meats, vegetables, and sauces. You pick whatever you want, throw it all in a bowl together, then give it to a chef next to the buffet. He throws your food on a giant grill and cooks it while you wait. It just takes a minute and your food come out hot and fresh.

Selection: The buffet had a very nice selection of meats to choose from. The choices included: beef tenderloin, pork tenderloin, chicken, shrimp, sausage, calamari, mini scallops, and crab (imitation). The other half of the buffet included lo mein noodles, and vegetables of all kinds. I'm not big on vegetables, so I don't remember everything they had. I know there were two kinds of bell peppers, carrots, broccoli, onions, and probably about 15 others I didn't eat and therefor don't remember. To all this, you can add at least 8 different sauces, peanuts, salt, sugar, garlic or an egg. In addition, the chef will add your sauce of choice right before taking your food off the grill for that extra bit of flavor.

Atmosphere: Nice decorations and ambiance. My only complaint was that as the tables filled up and the chef was grilling up a storm, the constant clanging of his tools on the grill was a little annoying and made conversation harder to maintain. We were only a couple of tables from the grill, but the area for the Mongolian grill is such a size that you couldn't get too away if you tried.

Price: It was $14.99 per person to eat at the Mongolian grill. The food is only as good as you make it, but it's all-you-can-eat, so if you don't like what you make, you can try again. It was much better than anything I've had at other all-you-can-eat buffets, and I did get to control how much of my favorite things I got. The drawback was that apart from a cup of rice (steamed or fried) and a small salad, there wasn't anything to go with it. Maybe I'm missing the point of a Mongolian grill, but for $14.99, an egg roll would have been nice. Cokes or iced tea were $1.50.

Overall: The food was good, and while I would certainly go back for a special occasion, but I won't be adding Crazy Hibachi to my regular rotation of restaurants. If you're the kind of person who never needs a to-go box, Crazy Hibachi is for you. As for me, at most restaurants where I would pay $15, I end up taking home enough to make lunch the next day. At Crazy Hibachi, the food was good, but I didn't eat enough to make it worth what I paid considering my lunch the next day was back to tuna fish.

Miscellaneous: Since I was headed straight to the theater after dinner, I utilized the bathroom at Crazy Hibachi instead of taking a gamble with the theater's facilities. In hindsight, I should have waited. The bathroom smelled like smoke, I had to hold the handle down in order for the toilet to flush, and the stalls were about on par with what I would expect from a public high school. Nothing was dirty or broken, but it was certainly not what I expected based on how well decorated and maintained the restaurant as a whole was.

Update: Central Arkansas Hobby Shops

This weekend, I continued my search for local hobby shops. I couldn't find any in NLR or Sherwood, so I drove to Hobby Shack in Jacksonville. I found there hours online, so I didn't call to verify that they were open. As luck would have it, I picked the one weekend of the year where there was a regional scale model convention going on, so the Hobby Shack was closed in order to have a table there. I wish I'd had time to stop by Pulaski Tech and take a look around, but I had lunch plans in Cabot, so I couldn't make it there and back in time. Instead, I waited until after lunch and drove to HobbyTown USA in Little Rock.

From looking for them on the web, I found out that HobbyTown USA is a national chain of Hobby Shops. The local store is in a shopping center at the intersection of Bowman and Markham. They had a larger selection of model car kits than I found at Hobby Lobby, and tons of other scale model related items that I didn't even know existed. They also had a ton more options when it came to paint options. While I was there, I picked up a couple of the colors I'd been unable to find at Hobby Lobby (semi-gloss black, for example) and got to choose from spray paint colors in several different finishes. I went with a metallic finish for the spray, which proved more difficult when it came to getting and even tone, but after a little sanding and re-spraying, it came out alright.

The prices at HobbyTown USA were slightly higher than Hobby Lobby, but the selection in paint alone make it worth the trip. As for kits, there were several that caught my eye, but in the absence of a front-runner, I picked the only one I saw that was on clearance. It was a 2002 Camaro for $7, which was more than half off. I do love a good deal.

On Sunday, I decided to go out looking for some sort of organization box to hold my growing supply of paints and glues. I couldn't find exactly what I wanted at Target, so I drove across the interstate to Michael's. I don't go in Michael's very often, so I did a bit of wandering, and low and behold, they had half an aisle devoted to model car kits! They had about as many paints and supplies at Hobby Lobby, but they had a bigger selection of car kits than Hobby Lobby or even HobbyTown USA. In addition, they had 5 kits on extreme clearance. Even though the Camaro was sitting half finished at home, I bought three of the clearanced kits at a grand total of $20 before taxes. You can't beat that, considering most kits are around $15-$17 regular price. I don't know if Micheal's always has a couple of models on clearance, but I do know they almost always run an ad in the Sunday Paper that has a coupon for 40% off one regularly priced item. This ads up to a pretty steady flow of discounted kits.

While I'll probably still end up at a true hobby shop for paints and tools, I'll be surprised if I can find kits for a better price than what I've seen at Michael's. Hopefully there's a regular rotation in what cars are available, but in any case, it would take me a while to run out of options. I'll try to go by the Hobby Shack in Jacksonville some other weekend, and report back on what I've found. From looking around on google and viewing shop reviews, they're supposed to be one of the best around for hobbies from scale models to trains, so I'm looking forward to that visit.