Another year, another milestone, another period of hapless casting about for something interesting to blog about. When faced with this problem, many of us turn to our stats pages for a little navel-gazing. And what better time than on New Year's Day? Just who are the robots, spiders, and visitors who drop by? Naturally, any good stats page includes information about connections from other sites. This is usually where the spam hits the fan – a lot of the links turn out to be for C-list sleb porn and for hosting services and info-harvesters. Now and then, though, there's an…
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If No Icelanders Admit To Feeling Blue, Are They? The premiere of TAR showed people tearing past gorgeous Icelandic scenery and pestering gorgeous Icelandic locals for directions to Seljalandfoss (waterfall) and Vatnajokull (glacier). In their interactions with some locals in a town, Don noted that everyone seemed to be “ripped” at 7 o’clock in the morning. An old Internet acquaintance who lived in Iceland had mentioned that there are a lot of problems with alcoholism, so I wasn’t as surprised as Don was. As a Nordic country with long, dark winters, you would think that there would also be a…
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Just in case I have to retreat from the Reality-Based Community into absurdity, the new Stitch’s Great Escape attraction opens Nov. 16 in Disney World. A cow-orker is taking vacation time then specifically for this very event. When we went to Dizzy Whirled and did the Alien Encounter (which has been re-worked with a Stitch theme) it was a pretty good freak-out, and we bought funny pictures in the gift shop. Could be much, much more fun to have Stitch running around in the dark breathing down our necks…
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Oy. We have made it home. I feel good and we had a great weekend, but it’s good to be back in our own house, and shortly, we’ll be back in our own bed. I didn’t sleep well at all for the whole trip. There was a bit more to the story last night after I went to bed – after a couple of hours, I started to feel very yukky. And then, after a few minutes of intense regret for eating so damn much bagna calda (basically, whole roast cloves of garlic, by the forkfuls), I eventually felt better.…
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Who’da thunk garlic ice cream with caramel mole sauce would be so damn good? I mean, I knew the bagna calda (roast garlic in a skillet) would be good; eventually we stopped bothering with dinner rolls and just ate the whole roast cloves by the forkful. I figured the crab cooked in special garlic sauce would be good (Dungeness, too) and when it came on a giant griddle set on a rack over two big empty “boneyard” bowls (for the discarded shells). But there were a couple of surprises – there was a pasta dish that was kind of an…
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We’re on the road to SF today – in case I didn’t make it clear earlier, we’re on a quick weekend trip to Napa Valley and San Francisco. Yesterday we went on a wine quest -we were supposed to go to 5 wineries and at the end we’d get a free T-shirt. Well, we succeeded, and had a great time visiting with vintners and owners and drinking great wine and petting great dogs. Tonight we finally eat at the Stinking Rose, so Steve will stop nagging us about it. I understand that we will be emanating essence of garlic for…
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On our upcoming trip to The City, it would nice to see these Mona Caron Murals.
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Okay, so today we’re headed to The Morton Arboretum – it’s a hot, muggy day so we’re taking lots of water along, and also our workout stuff with the goal of hitting the health club and cooling off in the swimming pool. We’re meeting Steve and making our stealthy approach in one vehicle, so as not to alarm the trees. The original plan was to go to the Ren Faire, but David nixed that on account of aforesaid mugginess and all the people and turkeylegs abounding. And we’re on our way out the door. More later.
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My very dear friend Ellen lives in Germany – her husband David Beard is the Academic Director for the Oxford Experience, a study program that takes place in Oxford each summer. This would be SO cool – meals are taken in the Great Hall at Christ Church, which was the setting for the dining hall scenes in the Harry Potter movies. They have a really interesting program of subjects, and I wish that I could do this. Maybe some year. Ellen has been telling me about these for years, and each year I grow increasingly more and more envious. I’d…
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A long-planned hike to Starved Rock today nearly came to naught because I, unlike Ronnie, am not the Great Communicator. However, we made it to the park and hiked, which consisted mostly of walking up and down stairs and along boardwalks. There are normal trails also, but the area is underlain by a layer of soft sandstone that erodes VERY easily, so the high-traffic areas are boarded. We met up with Steve and drove down to Starved Rock to join Jill and her friend Gina. I screwed up by not checking directly with Steve to be clear on a change…