I recently ate at at Cantina 1511 and was astonished at how yummy their margaritas were. They were honestly the best I've ever tasted.

First, there was not a ton of ice. They sell frozen margaritas, but the ones I had came straight out of a pitcher and were served on the rocks.

Second, it was obvious that it was made with fresh juices. Almost all the margaritas you'll ever have -- unless you're at one of my parties -- are made with mixes. The freshness of the stuff just made my day.

So, I set about figuring out how to duplicate this margarita. I wasn't quite able to duplicate the recipe, but what I ended up with was fan-fucking-tastic.

As the owner of Cantina 1511 will tell you, variations in the sweetness of the fruit play a huge part here, so your mileage may vary if you try this recipe.

Also, you can use any kind of tequila you want, but the Cabo Wabo Reposado I used just took the flavors to a completely new level.

Finally, an important note: though you have likely been led to believe that ripe limes are green and overripe limes are yellow. This is NOT TRUE. Ripe limes are yellow. Overripe limes are brown. Always get the ripest limes you can find.

Bryan's Fresh Juice Margaritas

Yield: About 8 margaritas, depending on the size of your glasses.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups freshly squeezed lime juice
1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1 1/2 cups simple syrup
Cabo Wabo Reposado Tequila

Preparation

Strain the juices through a strainer into a pitcher. We don't want pulp in our margaritas. Gently stir in the simple syrup.

Optional: rim the margarita glass with kosher salt by rubbing a lime around the rim and dipping the rim in salt.

Pour the tequila into the bottom of the margarita glass. Margarita glasses have a small well at the bottom that blossoms up into a large mouth. I fill the bottom well in my glasses. Really, it depends on how much tequila you like and how fast you want to get smashed.

Add a handful of ice to the glass and pour juice mixture over the top until the glass is full.

Serve the result to a delighted audience.

I just made this recipe up tonight. It makes up for the fact that my mahi-mahi was not fresh and was actually pretty gross. This slaw rocked my world when I bit into it:

Bryan's Pepper and Mango Slaw

Ingredients

1 mango, julienned
1 red bell pepper, julienned
1 yellow or orange bell pepper, julienned
1 granny smith apple, julienned
1/2 red onion, julienned
1 jalapeño pepper, minced
Red wine or apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

Put everything in a bowl and toss to combine everything evenly. Add salt and pepper, using a little more pepper than salt. You just need enough salt to give it a little oomph. Add a couple tablespoons of vinegar and toss again. Taste the slaw and add seasoning and vinegar until it's to your liking.

My wife, bless her, usually handles all of the late-night baby issues. She is well within her rights to wake my lazy ass up and make me do it, but she either loves me or knows that it would be easier to just deal with it than to way me up. I'm not sure which.

As a result, I'm a little untrained on how to deal with 2:00am baby issues, which is how the following conversation came to take place:

Baby: Waaaaaaaaahhhhh!

Cecilia: Okay, Bryan, I'm completely exhausted so you are going to go give the baby her pacifier. You will not make eye contact. You will not speak. You will not make any noise at all. You will not engage the baby in anyway. You will simply grab the pacifier, insert it into her mouth, make sure she has a firm grasp on the stuffed elephant, tuck her in, and return to bed. Do you understand?

Me: Sir, yes sir!

As I've mentioned before, I have a lot of CAO cigars in my humidor.

I generally like CAO's product line. They are not the best cigars in my humidor, but they are pretty darn close. And some of their cigars, I really love (current CAO fave: the Criollo).

Every now and again, even knowing how good their cigars are, I get a nice surprise.

Last night, I opened up the "Miscellaneous CAO" drawer in my humidor and my eyes were drawn to the humble CAO Maduro. It ain't pretty, the wrapper is nothing fancy, it's just a plain-old maduro cigar.

I suddenly recalled that I'd smoked one of these before, as part of a sampler pack, and that I'd really enjoyed it. Really really enjoyed it.

"Why haven't I had one of these in a while?" I wondered. The one in the drawer had been there at least six months. It seemed strange that something I liked so much would be left to linger for so long, so I decided to end the wait cycle and took the CAO Maduro out for a spin.

To make a long story short, everything I remembered about the CAO Maduro was accurate.

With the first puffs, I began to experience that classic maduro flavor. You know the one I mean: that taste of slightly bitter berries that fills up your sinuses and gives you a full-head cigar sensation.

Next, came my favorite thing about CAO cigars: they consistently delivery big mouthfuls of smoke. When I'm smoking a cigar, the last thing in the world I want is wimpy smoke output. I want the smoke to enter my mouth and coat everything, so I can really taste it, send some out my nose to smell it, and still have plenty left over to do a group of smoke rings (if I'm so inclined). This "big smoke" characteristic is typical of the CAO brands, which is one reason I keep coming back to them.

The flavor kept on building as I smoked. And it kept getting better and better, adding richness and complexity with each puff. Usually, I read while I smoke, but the flavor of this cigar was good enough that I found it hard to concentrate on my book.

If there is one complaint to make about this particular cigar, it's that about 2/3 of the way through, it started drawing poorly and wouldn't stay lit. But that self-corrected after about 10 minutes.

Overall, it was a thoroughly enjoyable smoke, and I found myself wondering "Why don't I have more of these?"

That's a good question. One that I'll have to answer next time I'm at the tobacco store.

Waiter Rant has been out of commission for several days now.

For anyone wondering what happened, the good folks at SoundQue -- who host his site -- have confirmed that the WordPress software Waiter uses was hacked.

I suspected a hacker when, on the first day I began to get suspicious, I looked at the HTML source and saw that there was a hidden <iframe> tag that was downloading content from http://www.allddos.biz. None of that sounded good to me.

In any event, I'm assured that Waiter will be back on the air in a couple of days.

Where I work, everyone's e-mail address is first initial, last initial, at vgei.com. So if you are Pomerania Elbergort, your e-mail address is pevgeicom.

My e-mail, naturally, is bsvgeicom.

Do you have any idea how maddening it is to give that address out to somebody over the phone? This is what I usually wind up saying:

"Yes, that's 'B'-as-in-'boy', 'S'-like-'Sam', no, not 'F', 'S'! 'S'-like-'Sam'! at 'V'-like-'Victor', 'G'-like-'Gary', 'E'-like-'Edward', I dot com."

It makes me want to shoot myself in the head every time I have to say it.

Pat Sajak, of Wheel of Fortune fame, has one of the best kept secrets on the Internet.

On his website, Pat has a little area called Sajak Says. It is updated infrequently, but when it is updated, it invariably contains something worth reading.

In a recent bit on global warming he had this to say:

However, there’s another level on which I have trouble with those who are the true believers [in global warming]. Why aren't they doing more to stop it? I don’t mean offering ideas for regulations to tell the rest of us what to do; I mean what are they doing personally. If I'm driving an SUV or living in a big house, they can accuse me of callous disregard for the problem, but at least the callousness is based on my non-belief. What about them? Why are they still driving that big car or living in that big house? In fact, why are they driving at all? Why haven't they moved into a minimalist home within walking distance of their office? Talk about callous!

Imagine being absolutely certain we are the verge of a man-made catastrophe and not doing everything within your power to help reverse it. Anyone who truly believes it and still uses anything more than the lowest-wattage single bulb or drives one mile more than absolutely necessary is nothing short of a monster! A skeptic's actions can be blamed on ignorance; a believer's can only be chalked up to a shocking disregard for his children’s futures.

Talk about hitting the nail on the head!

This morning, for the first time, I felt my Daddy-Sense(tm) tingling.

My wife put our daughter down around 4:50am after 2 hours of struggling to get her to go back to sleep.

Around 5:00am, she started making fussy "eh eh eh" noises like she sometimes does after we put her down. We usually just wait these out, because she stops and goes back to sleep.

This time when she stopped, instead of the "ah, now I can go back to sleep" relief I normally feel, I felt a very strange sensation that something was very very wrong.

I got out of bed on auto pilot and went into the nursery. Our daughter was in the crib, struggling to breath. She had spit-up and had aspirated it. She was choking and rocking back and forth.

I picked her up quickly and started patting her back. She was breathing, but I could tell it was very labored. We spend so much time wishing she'd stop crying that it felt weird when I found myself wishing, desperately, that she would start crying.

It took us almost 20 minutes to get her to cry. Those 20 minutes were marked by labored, panicked breathing. Needless to say, we were scared to death.

When she finally started crying, we were desperately relieved.

She's OK, of course, but now she's absolutely terrified to be put on her back. I wonder how long it will take before she feels comfortable in that position again?

Now that I have a new baby, I'm learning all kinds of things.

I'm also understanding things that I've never understood before. Stuff about how parenthood changes you.

One thing I now understand that I never understood before is Selective Parent Deafness.

Selective Parent Deafness, or SPD, is the ability of a parent to stop hearing the screams and wails of their own child. The wails and screams of other children can still be heard, but their own children are effectively mute.

Before becoming a parent, I was dumbfounded at parents who would let their children have meltdowns in public and subject the rest of us to the concomitant high-decibel caterwauling.

Now I get it. Now I understand that the parents know their child is screaming, but they don't perceive the screaming to be all that bad. They perceive it to be at a much lower level than it actually is.

Armed with this realization, I have decided to do my part to keep public places free of screaming children. I have decided that I will react to any extended crying in public (i.e., more than 30 seconds) as if a klaxon horn was going off right in my ear.

This decision came before I realized that my wife has a much worse case of SPD than I do. Last week, we went to our chiropractor's office and brought the baby with us. All of the doctor's patients are over 18 and, as such, his office is definitely one of those places where screaming children do not belong. Typically, my daughter began having a meltdown as soon as the car was parked. I wasn't about to bring her inside, so I told my wife "Go in, do what you gotta do, then come out, and I'll go in. That way she only cries outside."

I was very proud of my resolve...up until the moment my wife looked at me like this was the dumbest idea she had ever heard of.

"Why do you want to stay outside?" she asked.

"Because the baby is crying like it's been stabbed in the leg by a jagged piece of glass. Nobody wants to hear this." I replied.

"It's not that bad." she said, trying to take the baby.

"NO! Go inside. I'll be here waiting when you get out."

"I don't understand what's wrong. Why do you want to stay out here?"

"JUST GO!"

After shooting me one last glance to let me know she's nominating me for the Moron of the Year Award, she went inside. She was gone for 10 minutes or so. The baby did not shut up the entire time. And she wanted me to subject all of the doctor's patients to that! I realized then that my wife has become one of the insensitive bastards that I used to bitch about.

Then, when my wife got out and it was my turn to go inside, she took the screaming baby from me and followed me in. At that point, I gave up. There was no sense arguing. She was determined that the entire waiting room was going to hear the fortissimo movement from the Baby Concerto.

I'm going to keep fighting this as much as I can but, like any good husband, I can already smell the losing battle. I may be doomed to insensitive bastardhood.