It’s been a pleasant weekend. The weather is hovering in high 70s, low 80s with very little humidity. I ended up filling my mp3 player with podcasts yesterday and spending 3 hours tending to my gardens. Afterwards I cut up a bunch of fruit we had around the house and was feeling so domestic that I baked a loaf of banana bread (used this recipe, it’s quite good). I then spent the rest of the afternoon with my nose in a book. Lovely.

In the early evening I headed down to Lansdale to hit Vidalia Marketplace for a few beers. I ended up with sticker shock, they’d increased the prices on all their beer 10% or more since I’d last visited! Apparently they realized what a gold mine they were sitting on. Please PA government dudes, take a hint and take us out of the alcohol dark ages! I picked up a couple lambics for myself and some pilsners for Michael.

Speaking of beer, after a couple exhausting weeks of work and hot weather, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner down at Ortinos Northside. They recently redid their beer menu and added several beer coolers so now they actually have most of the beers on their list. Shocking. I ended up taking up the suggestion by to check out Brewery Ommegang‘s Three Philosophers Quadrupel:

The essence of wonder is a unique and masterful blend of strong malty ale and authentic Belgian Kriek. Our philosophers deduce that this powerful marriage of cherries, roasted malts, and dark chocolate will only achieve more wisdom and coherence as it broods in the dark recesses of your cellar.

According to the label on 2004 bottle of it that I enjoyed, they actually use Lindenman’s Kriek. Oh nice, but this was no girly beer. This was a malty Belgian with a kick-you-in-your-throat strength of aged fruitiness that bordered on a liquor flavoring. I loved it, but just like with the Allagash I had a couple weeks ago I think I’ll plan to share the next bottle I get. It was pretty awesome with the mussels and pasta I enjoyed as an entree.

Anyway, for dinner on Saturday Michael grilled a couple salmon burgers, which were surprisingly fantastic. Michael picked them up fresh at Landis (yes, like the cycling guy, Landis is a big name in PA) and when he inquired about ingredients to make sure they weren’t made of crazy preservatives the seafood fellow assured him that it was all natural ingredients. Cool. After dinner we watched Daredevil+Rifftrax (Rifftrack?), good stuff.

Other misc stuff:

The cup of coins on the roll of toilet paper thing has been successful to ward off Simcoe’s destructive advances so far. She only knocked it over once, and that was over a week ago. I think she’s even afraid to go into the bathroom, which is fine with me, as long as I don’t need to keep the door closed forever I’m happy. I’m still not claiming victory though, and I suspect this is one of those training exercises that will go on for a while, coins > scared > remove coins > attack after forgetting about the coins > coins > scared…

A fellow I know from PLUG recently brought up the suggestion on list that Philadelphia host the 2008 KDE aKademy. I’m not a KDE user, but seeing such a conference come to the States would be cool, even better if it came to Philadelphia! There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but the guy who is heading up the effort has a lot of time to spend on it, so I’m pretty confident that a team of us could pull it off. I’m holding off on my involvement for a while though, I really don’t have the time to put much work into such a thing. Perhaps after we’re confirmed as the location I can make the time.

Much IRC dramaz over at #deep13. Rob posted yet again about how dead the channel is, and then made the executive decision to shut down the channel. I objected, because quite honestly I was pretty pissed that after all the work I’ve poured into the website and the channel over the years some Grand Deep13 Ruler would have the power to end it all at his say-so. Maybe I am just hanging on to something that’s dead and should just give up, but it’s so sad to see a channel that’s been around for a decade be forcefully shut down even when it still has regulars, ya know? Probably I shouldn’t care at all, #13thHour is my real home, we talk about MST and Rifftrax more there than in #deep13 anyway. Yeah, I convinced myself, I don’t care about #deep13 anymore, I’ll be handing in my keys to the website today.

And fun news, Michael and I went to see the new Disney and Pixar film Ratatouille on Thursday night. I had my reservations, I never even ended up seeing Cars because so many friends said it was lame, and I feared the golden age of Pixar had come to an end. I’m happy to say that Ratatouille changed my mind! This movie was a delight! Clever, funny, original. You should go see it.

Sunday I did end up having a couple friends over. It was fun, they brought their Wii and after some failed attempts by myself to play Tennis we switched to Mario Party 8, which was so dripping in cute that I fell in love. Alas, I will not be searching all the local stores to try to get my hands on one (apparently they’re still a bit tough to get), I really don’t have time for console gaming these days. I’m happy with my little pink DS.

I picked up our tickets for the Philadelphia Folk Festival in August. This is perhaps the only thing that ever happens in our lovely town of Schwenksville and we’ve never been to it. Every year there was always something, we were otherwise engaged, I couldn’t get the time off, we couldn’t afford it. But not so this year! We made plans way ahead of time and even bought the tickets before the 10% discount for early purchase ran out.

And speaking of fests, we’ll be attending the Brew at the Zoo 2007 on July 28th. A couple beer-loving friends of ours told us about this last year and I was pretty upset about missing it. I am not missing it this year! The microbrew lineup is really impressive. And you can’t beat the venue! Apparently the Elmwood Park Zoo is a pretty small Zoo (unlike the nearby Philadelphia Zoo), but they have cute, fuzzy things like sugar gliders and a jaguar so I’m happy.

And now it’s time to complain about the weather. The highs have been consistently in the 80s this week (up to 89 today), which would be tolerable except for the humidity. The humidity absolutely kills me, yesterday evening I was even feeling a little sick and skipped going to the gym. I shouldn’t even have to have my A/C on right now but it’s just so intolerable without it. And rain does nothing to clear out the humidity (like it did in Maine), I think it just makes it worse. Yuck. I hate the summers here.

Thanks again to everyone who commented on my entry asking for veggie recipes, we got some good ideas. Too bad most of the recommended books are out of print! But I guess that’s how it goes with cookbooks. It looks like I can snag most of them from Amazon resellers, and those I can’t are added to my used bookstore list.

I’ve been able to get more reading in lately, not nearly as much as I have in the past as I’ve been reading the same two books for 3 months now. I finally started Cryptonomicon, which was recommended to me about fifty thousand times but I never got around to. I’m about halfway through now and it’s been quite enjoyable. I’m also reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which is easily now in my top 5 as far as historical books go. It’s absolutely fascinating, and I find myself talking about it more often than I typically talk about books. Once I finish it I’ll be picking up the PBS Documentary version that I caught a clip of a couple years ago which led me to the book.

Aside from one little outing, my plans for the weekend are pretty much: Find air-conditioned place. Read. Yeah, I could use a relaxing weekend, I’ve been busy lately.

Oh the horror. I just checked my neglected Satellite News box in my @gmail.com address and was shocked to find the following email:

From: Chris Cornell
To: mst3kinfo@topica.com
Subject: MST3K Info: Blobfest

And a reminder…
If you happen to be in the Phoenixville, Pa., area and are a fan of the
movie The Blob, you may be interested to know that Mary Jo Pehl will
be attending this years’ Blobfest. The event will take place on today
and tomorrow at the historic Colonial Theatre.
To learn more about it, visit:
http://www.thecolonialtheatre.com/html/BlobFest.html

And if you see a guy wandering around wearing a blue cap that says
“Sampo” on it, say hi!

Sampo

It ended last night.

Oh no, no no no! Phoenixville is like 20 minutes from my house!!! I’ve never gotten to meet Mary Jo Pehl!! AAAHH :(!!! I think I’m going to cry. I’m on call this weekend but I could have popped out for an hour for something so important! Oh sadness, such sadness.

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!