Michael left Thursday evening for the dance retreat where he’s supporting a Sun-Moon dancer at the Birdsong Peace Chamber through Monday. Amazingly, this will be only the second time we’ve been apart for more than a couple days since I moved in 5 1/2 years ago, the first time being when I skipped up to New England for a few days to visit my father when he was in rehab. We could use another good dose of missing each other ;)

I pretty much have plans every day that I’ve been able to work into my on-call schedule. Last night I went over to Nita’s house and enjoyed Hard Candy on her big new TV. Wow, what a movie. Don’t read anything about it, not even the back of the DVD, just watch it, I’m very glad I was completely clueless about it.

This morning I met up with Alex in West Chester at the WCOJ station. I was a bit nervous before the show, but once the show got going I was OK. It’s much easier to talk to an audience you can’t see, it felt more like we were having a discussion with just the hosts. The hour flew by. Our team member, Jim listened to the show and said we “sounded like radio professionals” – but I think he was just trying to be nice. I confirmed with the host that the podcast will be online within a few days, and I’ll be sure to post the link all over the internet when I have it, I’m excited to hear it. In all I’d say the broadcast went very well, our hosts were excited about playing around with Ubuntu more and invited us back!

The rest of the day today has been spent catching up with journals and email. This evening will be spent on projects!

Tomorrow afternoon Joe and are coming over over for some pizza and hacking. Should be fun :)

I’m also trying to train Simcoe not to destroy the toilet paper. We’ve removed the extra paper from the bathroom and will probably get some sort of closed container, but she still attacks the paper on the roll. I don’t want to have to keep the bathroom door closed for the rest of her life to get around this problem. Last night I used a trick I found online of putting some coins in a little container and setting it on top of the toilet paper, idea being that when she tackles the paper the coins will fall on her and scare her off. When I came home from Nita’s last night the coins were all over the bathroom floor. Today she hasn’t touched the paper. It’s too early to claim success, so we’ll see how to goes.

Friday was Michael’s birthday. I spent the evening home with the cats and a couple good books. He ended up heading out for the evening to build the fire and be the rock carrier for the monthly men’s sweat lodge down in Malvern as a way to spend his birthday in service. While he was there he was asked to be the support person for the upcoming The Sun-Moon Dance (info here), which he agreed to and will cause him to be gone from this upcoming Friday through Monday (which works out well, since I’ll be on call/working this weekend anyway).

Saturday was spent doing some major cleaning of the house while the weather was still tolerable. Saturday evening we headed down to the Bird Song Peace Chamber for a fire ceremony (more on this in an entry to come). After the ceremony Michael and I headed up to Ortino’s Northside to relax with a couple of beers. I grabbed a Saison DuPont – Belgian Farm Ale, recommended by the bartender we trust. It was quite a treat even though it had a strange skunky smell, surprisingly dry and crisp, now one of my favorite saisons. I also grabbed a Allagash Curieux – Burbon Oak Aged Ale, which our bartender described as obviously burbon-y, and sort of burns when it goes down. Wow! I had to try that. It didn’t disappoint, I won’t be finishing a whole 750ml bottle myself again anytime soon, but it was an interesting change for an ale to be so liquor-ish.

Sunday it was starting to get hot. I spent the morning outside with Caligula writing a letter on my laptop until it got too warm for me and I headed inside for the afternoon to read in the air conditioning. Michael can tolerate the heat much better than I and spent the afternoon outside exploring the area behind the garage where we have an accidental tree nursery. Some walnut saplings (4+ ft tall), a couple spruce and some others. He ended up planting the walnut where an old shrub I didn’t like used to be. For dinner that evening our friends David and Constance took us out to the Parc Bistro for dinner to celebrate Michael’s Birthday. The dinner there was good as usual, even if the Chimay cheese on the cheese plate we ordered was much more mild than ones we’ve had in the past.

Finally, I started going to the gym in the evenings. On my way up to Vidalia Marketplace near where I used to work the other day I realized how much I valued that time I used to spend commuting home, some days it was quite theraputic. I certainly don’t want a commute again! Between time and money lost of commuting I never want to go back to that. But I think I did need a way to ease from work to evening time better and the meditation/grounding methods just haven’t been cutting it. So Michael suggested I head to the gym in the evening so I have that time I need after work. My only concerns were how full the YMCA parking lot is in the evening as opposed to the morning and how tired I was the last time I attempted to do the gym thing in the evening. I went last Thursday evening and yesterday evening and learned that most of that is families spending time in the pools and child-centric events, rather than adults in the main workout room, there is plenty of space for me to get my workout done. I also found that taking the hour+ of commuting out of my day gave me some of my energy back, I didn’t feel nearly as tired as I had in the past when going in the evening. I think this will work out well, I’m home by 5:30PM for a shower and a reasonably timed dinner.

After some major problems with headaches this spring Michael went in for some blood work. It all came back fine except for one thing – his cholesterol. What?! We didn’t eat the greatest over this past winter (both of us put on a few pounds), but we still didn’t eat fast food aside from pizza and were in general more healthy than typical Americans are. And he doesn’t have a family history of high cholesterol. It’s all quite puzzling.

As puzzling as it is, we need to do something about it. We’ve cut red meat out of our diet and eliminated a lot of cheese. More fish has been added as well as a lot of healthy snacks. We’re now looking to expand our dinner menu but the cookbooks we have just aren’t cutting it, and neither is the google (so much pan fried, quick-and-easy, and full of cheese recipes out there!).

We’re primarily looking for healthy vegetarian dishes. So I’m asking for suggestions: cookbook suggestions, meals/recipes you love, websites you find particularly helpful, other comments? TIA!

On the 4th of July I didn’t really have plans until the evening before when mentioned that the Battleship Farragut was in the Philadelphia port for the 4th of July holiday and giving tours. Cool. I love boats and ships, when I was in high school I grabbed extra history credits (of which I had more than enough) to take a Maine Maritime History class that I found absolutely fascinating. Going to see a battleship on the 4th seemed appropriate.

I met up with mct around noon and we headed down to Penn’s Landing. By the time we arrived the line for the Farragut tours was stretched halfway down Penn’s Landing, no joke. We watched the line for about 10 minutes and it wasn’t moving, so we decided to explore the rest of Penn’s Landing and come back later to see how much the line had moved and if it was worth spending whatever amount of time in it.

At the end of the landing there was a submarine and a big 19th century ship, and a booth from the Independence Seaport Museum selling tickets to board the sub and ship, including tickets to the museum. You can go inside the submarine? Cool! So a couple tickets were purchased and we started out journey inside the submarine. Tickets in hand I took that opportunity to tell mct that I’d had several nightmares about dying in a WW2 era submarine and it’s going to be a bit scary to actually go inside one, but I figured I’d be good as long as it didn’t move (it wouldn’t, it was sitting on the bottom of the harbor and probably hasn’t moved for years). Thanks to mct for taking pictures :)

Upon decent into the sub I quickly learned that it was not scary in the slightest, the Becuna submarine was neat!

Me standing in front of some graph thing with paper in it (whoo technical!)

mct checking out one of the radios in the sub. If you notice above him is a red light – don’t let the flash fool you, this entire room was bathed in red like which gave it a sort of eerie feeling. Turns out they actually used the red lighting because it’s easier for your eyes to adjust from red light to dark than from white light to dark, so quite appropriate for use in this room with the periscope when one needed to look outside at night.

Torpedo room! The folks who worked the torpedoes actually slept right below and on top of unfired torpedoes since they were virtually harmless until fired.

Radio room. This is just one of the several rooms with tons of dials and switches. Neat stuff.

The USS Cruiser Olympia looked amazingly spacious after being inside the Becuna. The officers had whole dining rooms with wooden furniture and glassware that’s nicer than what you’d see in most homes! The regular enlisted men still got hammocks though. They had an operating room, dentist office, and all sorts of things on the ship. Unfortunately for us the upper deck was closed off due to the pilothouse reconstruction project.

After visiting the ships we took advantage of our museum tickets and went to explore that. They had a pretty interesting exhibit called Women & the Sea, and it’s companion exhibit Ladies who Launch. The rest of the museum was pretty neat too, if small.

By the time we left the museum it was around 4PM and tours of the Farragut had ceased. Perhaps for the best, I didn’t fancy spending a couple hours in line for some crowded tour. I enjoyed exploring the submarine a great deal more anyway. But mct did get close enough for photos of it.

From there we headed back to the suburbs as rain was threatening. We met up with Nita and had some pizza before I headed home. It ended up pouring for a good part of the evening. Some areas attempted fireworks, a friend of mine took a bunch of photos of the ones in Philly. Michael and I didn’t bother though, we just had a relaxing evening in.

Most of you have heard me complain about the bizarre liquor laws in PA. You can only buy hard liquor and wine in state stores that have restricted hours and only a handful of which are open on Sunday. Beer is only sold by the case at Beer Stores, except for at restaurants and bars that have a liquor license which allows them to sell up to 2 six-packs of beer. To skirt the law some small pizzerias and the like have attained restaurant liquor licenses and sold a minimal amount of food and a huge quantity of beer, these places that sell more beer than anything else are affectionately referred to as “Stop and Gos”

So when Bob emailed Michael this week about an article he saw about Vidalia Marketplace, saying it was some kind of beer store I quickly hit Google and found their website. Their website has a beer menu item:

The Rumors are true – as long as you are 21 years old, you can buy beer at Vidalia Market Place!

Gasp! Upon inspection of the website you discover that it’s just a grocery store, but includes an eat-in area, which is probably the key to this in-grocery-store beer shopping – they are a restaurant with a liquor license!

There will be a vast variety of beer available from all over the world! If you have any questions about our beers or you would like us to carry a particular beer, please ask a beer associate for assistance.

Sweet! It’s not rows and rows of Budweiser!

My favorite is this bit: State law requires that we ring your beer purchase at a designated cash register in the beer section. In addition, you may also purchase your food items in the beer section, even if you only shopped for food items at Vidalia. We will always have an open register in the beer section available for your shopping convenience.

Ahahaha the hoops they have to jump through to get away with this.

The same day Bob emailed us (July 3rd) I decided to take a trip down to Lansdale after work to check this place out. I figured that if they were too expensive (as often is the case when you buy beer from restaurants or bars) or had lousy selection I’d just hit the beer store in Skippack for our 4th of July case of beer.

But I wasn’t disappointed! Great selection! Reasonable prices! And I had to take pictures:

A whole aisle of imports, mostly Belgian! Sweet! They had a bunch of lambics I’ve never tried, some Duvels, a bunch of Chimays. Oh yum yum. The aisle facing this one was full of microbrews.

The beer cooler! Lots and lots of 6-packs, plus cases and singles. I managed to take both these pictures while there weren’t people standing in the way, which was a bit of a trick, the beer section was pretty full of people the whole time I was there. And people were talking to each other, saying how great it was that they could buy six packs, how amazed they were at all the beers they’d never heard of. It was amusing and a bit sad – where I grew up this was normal! In spite of having a few amazing breweries, PA is for the most part living in the beer dark ages!

So I grabbed 3 six-packs and went to stand in line to get my beer (remember – only one register can handle beer, and lots of people wanted beer!). So I get up to the cash register and was hit by the “2 six-pack maximum” thing. D’oh. No worries, all I had to do was take two of my six-packs out to my car and come back into the store and buy the third. Absurdity abounds, but that’s what I did. I happily drove home with six-packs of Rogue Dead Guy Ale, Victory Hopdevil and Victory Prima Pils.

Hopefully the popularity of this upscale grocery store will make more stores start doing the same, as a lot of modern grocery stores have eat in areas. Or (dare I hope) start to clue the lawmakers into changing our alcohol laws. This isn’t some dingy Stop and Go in the city, we’re wealthy, high tax paying folks in the suburbs picking up our hummus and beer at a nice store, and this is what we want.

Yay!! Happy Birthday myn, love you (: