I’m sitting here at lunch eating some leftovers from dinner last night. Michael made pasta and falafel balls.

Falafel … is a fried ball or patty made from spiced fava beans and/or chickpeas. It is a highly popular form of fast food in the Arab East, but is also made as a snack food for the youth. Falafel is very common in Greater Syria and it is the most popular daily food in Syria. The word “falafel” comes from [an] Arabic word … meaning pepper.

I’d never had falafel before, but he figured we should try it as a substitute for meatballs (which I don’t particularly like). He made a good choice, falafel balls with pasta and tomato sauce are yummie!

I went wedding dress shopping in Iselin New Jersey with Nita. It was fantastic of her to drive us up there.

But talk about an overwhelming experience!

First of all, Iselin is like a Chinatown, except Indian. There is Indian fast food, shops all over the place selling indian videos and such, all sorts of indian clothing shops, indian jewelry – and almost every person we saw on the street was of indian descent. In fact, I think the only european americans we saw all day were the cops and a few at the indian buffet we had for lunch.

Many of the dress shops we entered sold more material than actual dresses, I suppose most basic indian dresses aren’t terribly complicated to make if you know what you’re doing. Of course I’m not going to do such a thing, so we had to just hit the shops that worked in pre-made.

The first shop we went into that we could serious consider things in was a disappointment. There was a whole separate room for wedding dresses, and although the prices were generally reasonable, the feel was high pressure and a bit snobby. The woman helping me actually laughed at me when I told her my price range and the colors I liked. It would seem that she was one of those types that hated that I was some white American girl trying to steal her culture. I decided right then that I wouldn’t be shaken by people holding such distain. She really tried to push me into getting one dress, which I liked, but I couldn’t fit the top on – she said it could be custom fitted, but I don’t want to commit to a custom fit before I know how it looks on me! This is why I’m shopping in real stores! I managed to leave that store eventually, the woman wasn’t too happy though. Sheesh.

We then visited a few other stores. I hate shopping for clothes, and this experience was even worse. The pressure is really on when you’re deciding what dress to wear at your wedding. You’ll have those wedding pictures forever! So many people will see them for years! AAAHH! A couple shops we went to were way out of our price range, nice wedding “boutiques” that informed me that I’d have to spend $2K on any dress that had lasting quality to it. Lasting quality? Do I want it to be durable too? Gosh, I’m only planning on wearing this ONCE! I want it to look nice, but I don’t need something that is hand-woven and hand stitched that took 300 man-hours to create.

About an hour into our search I was feeling very discouraged, and it was hot out. I was getting to the point where traditional wedding dresses were looking great and I almost wanted to tell Nita that we were just going back to KoP to hit a David’s Bridal. Nita admitted that she was concerned that we’d either leave with nothing or I’d be so frustrated that I’d wind up buying something that was “good enough”

Finally we arrived at Deen Fashion, 1405 Oak Tree Rd. It was a decent looking place, just selling dresses and the decor was not intimidatingly rich. I went to the counter and told the woman what I was looking for and my price range. She didn’t laugh or snicker, she just went with us through the shop and showed me dresses in my price range.

That’s when I found it. The perfect pink and off-white dress.

I tried it on, and it fit, only needing some minor adjustments. The woman at the shop said she’d give me a slight discount so the dress would be more within my price range (nice!) and that since the alterations were so simple and I lived so far away that they could be done that afternoon and I could take the dress home. EXCELLENT!

It was about 2:30 in the afternoon by this time. I was so excited to have found something. We hit an indian buffet for lunch, which I enjoyed but I’m not so sure about what Nita thought (which made me feel a bit bad, I offered to buy her a hamburger once we left town). After lunch we went looking for something for Nita to wear at the wedding but didn’t end up finding anything, she’s going to do some browsing online and let me know when she’s found something.

We left Iselin around 5. PHEW!

While coming home from the PLUG meeting on Google Internals the other night told me this story.

For those of you too lazy to click (I know I probably would be) the story is about the evolution of a popular Alternative Rock radio station in the Philadelphia area, Y-Rock 100. It was an FM radio station for 12 years, when that died (and left the Philadelphia area without an Alternative Rock station!) some of the DJs recreated it as an internet radio station, and just recently this very popular internet radio station was picked up by the folks over at XPN as Y-Rock On XPN. It’s pretty much commercial-free, the exception being a few seconds when you first connect to the stream. At the end of this month they’ll even have some FM radio time on XPN a few evenings per week. Cool.

Now I don’t listen to music radio much, I never listened to Y-Rock FM when it was around. Most of the stuff on the FM radio is littered with shamelessly promoted garbage and I hate commercials, gossip, and stupid DJs who don’t know when to shut up, I will change the station before listening to any of this. I listen to NPR via WHYY most of the time. When I want music I’ll usually fire up the interesting mix offered by plain old XPN or just pop in a CD of my own. At work I listen to Podcasts and WHYY and XPN streams.

But there are times when I just want to turn off my brain and chill out to some good Alternative Rock. I’m very happy to have this great option via internet radio now. (And thanks to for telling me about it!)

While at PLUG the other night I was asked what sort of techie stuff I’ve been up to lately. I had to confess that I had been doing “Nothing!” I’ve been working with Ubuntu-Women stuff, but that’s more sociological than technical (even if I am learning all the ins and outs of wikis). There are certainly a few causes 1) too hot to be near my computer (there is AC up there, but it can only do so much when it’s 100F out) 2) working a lot of overtime at my real non-IT job 3) other stuff like writing and reading taking up a lot of time and I enjoy them more when it’s hot. Still, it was a bit depressing. I think I’m going to resume my work with Perl-TK in the near future.

Speaking of which, has anyone read Perl Best Practices? Or are there any links/books you can recommend that discuss good Perl (or general) programming practices? I really need to work on writing code that has some sort of quality, in the past “working” has been good enough for me, and that’s the reason I’m a lousy programmer ;D

The heat wave we were having that got us close to 100F for almost a week has drifted off. It’ll only get up in the high 80s today, and the next few days look like they’ll be nice and sunny. Going to the gym in this heat has been tough, it’s air-conditioned of course, but when you’re sweating even before you walk into the gym and the humidity creeps in doing 30 minutes on the elliptical at a reasonable pace and resistance gets really tough – today was the first day I actually made it to 30 minutes.

Finally, I’m delighted to say that I’m going up to Iselin, NJ with Nita tomorrow! We’ll be shopping for my wedding dress, hopefully will find something wonderful and within my budget that I can take home right away – I don’t want to drive all the way back there to get something that’ll need to be fitted/customized. I’m so excited! I’ll have to bring my camera.

I love lambics, especially in the summertime. So when Michael came home one evening last week and informed me that they Ortinos Northside had in stock some of the Floris lambics made by Delirium (who makes one of my favorite beers, Delirium Tremens) I was excited. Delirium makes lambics?! AHHH!! YAY!

From Delirium.be:

In 1993, the production of fruit-beers of the “Floris” range was started. It contains, for example, beers made from cherries, raspberries or apples.

They’ve been making them for quite some time and I never knew!

list of Delirium beers, scroll down for all the lambics. They have LOTS!

So on Saturday night we met up with Bob and hit Northside. The ones they had in stock were the raspberry and apple. The raspberry was a bit less sweet than the Lindemans lambic, but certainly on the sweet side as far as raspberry lambics go. I generally prefer my raspberry lambic to have some bite, but I enjoyed this one. The apple was good and sweet for the first half of the bottle, but the second half made me rethink my evaluation, it was too sweet, I had trouble finishing it.

I hope they get more in. I’d love to try the cherry sometime.

I was in bed this morning staring at the curtains we bought a few months back and wondered how much a decent sewing machine would cost.

When we bought the curtains a few months back I was surprised at the cost. They’re nice curtains, and we bought them with a gift certificate a relative gave us after our engagement, but I figured I could probably make myself some for cheaper if I had a sewing machine and a clue about sewing.

When I was growing up my mother sort of tried to teach us to sew. I was terrible at it, Heather did pretty well. Eventually I gave up and my mother graduated Heather to the sewing machine. I’ve watched both her and my mother use it, even tried it once or twice, so I knew the general idea, but as far as actually using a sewing machine I was pretty much a newbie.

So today I hit google for some recommendations for a reasonably priced sewing machine for a newbie. I had a difficult time finding very many reviews of sewing machines. Sewing machines are expensive items that you only buy once or twice a lifetime, but I’ve found plenty of reviews for other appliances I’ve bought over the years. I guess sewing machine people just don’t like writing reviews at sites that were highly google-accessible.

Anyway, I did find a few reviews and decided that I could probably be safe going with a Brother or Singer machine over $150. Pretty much everything less expensive had lousy or mixed reviews and I figured I shouldn’t take a chance.

So I headed to Target.

And came home with a Singer 7444 120 Stitch Function Sewing Machine.

I had it unpacked from it’s box around 5:30PM.

It’s shiny.

I had it threaded by 5:50PM.

Spent the next hour or so playing with bits of fabric.

I can make it sew straight!

I can make it sew zig-zags!

At 8:30 I successfully sewed a button back on a pair of khaki pants.

Now this all might not seem much to grand master sewers out there, but I was never any good at this sewing thing. The fact that I could sew buttons on with this machine 3 hours after pulling it out of the box is mind-boggling. I’ll certainly need tons of practice to get any good with this (even to get to curtain making), but it’s fun and shockingly relaxing.

And now I am going downstairs. It’s past my bedtime and I’m all wound up from playing with my new toy. I downloaded the first couple episodes of Eureka this evening, it’s a new show on SciFi that a co-worker recommended. I watched the first 10 minutes or so of the pilot a few minutes ago and it actually doesn’t suck too bad so far. It’d be nice if this was some good scifi, I haven’t been impressed with anything the SciFi has released as far as TV goes recently (no, not even BSG).

was right, Clerks II is funny.

As we all know, Michael and I don’t go to the movie theater much because we don’t like them. But last night I was feeling burnt out from another 9+ hour day at work and I wanted to watch something funny. There was nothing saved on the MythTV box that was sparking my interest, so somehow in the evening I happened to mention that I’d heard Clerks II was funny.

“Let’s go see it,” says Michael.
“Now?”
“Sure.”

So we drove down to Oaks and caught a 7:45 showing. It actually wasn’t a horrible experience – didn’t get run over by and children wearing roller skate shoes, didn’t get harassed by women selling credit cards, didn’t have anyone near us talking through the whole movie. And the movie did its job in cheering me up. We managed to get home by around 10 so we could get to sleep at a reasonable time, like the old people that we are.

I’m having a long week (lots of those lately…), I’m so glad it’s Thursday.

Happy Birthday !

is my sister, she just got a LiveJournal about a week ago after the nagging of family members. It’s amusing to me that having an online journal has become popular enough that family members encourage each other to have them. I still think about how funny it is for me to go to family reunions and learn that several people in my family read my journal – and I didn’t even know they knew about it!

Now for some photos from last week I never got to post. Between crawling around our basement crawlspace on the hottest day of the year, Michael took some pictures while the Verizon guys were here installing the FiOS.

One of the two Verizon trucks in our driveway

They didn’t have a ladder truck, so used a rope contraption to string the FiOS line from the street to our house.

Junction box! This is where the magic happens. It’s mounted in our basement and has hookups for internet, television (coming soon) and some sort of digital telephone service they’ll be offering.

Battery backup and primary internet FiOS box (I’m pretty sure…).

And the FiOS connection has been going strong all weekend, I’m delighted. I spent some time downloading some MST3K episodes this weekend, and was happy to learn that there are a few on YouTube.com, just search for Mystery Science Theater 3000. They come in 10 parts, so you can watch them one at a time. I used the Video Downloader extension to Firefox to actually download the youtube videos (probably broke TOS for YouTube). It downloads them as .flv files, which mplayer played with no problem, but it didn’t work when I catted all 10 of the files together, d’oh. The quality isn’t the best either, but it’s tolerable, especially since you can’t get these episodes on DVD yet, so it’s still old tape trading.

The weekend was nice. Saturday we spent with Michael’s family, a nice outdoor event that I managed to enjoy, even if everyone in the family wants us to have babies ASAP (“Ooooh you’re getting married? When are the kids coming along?” *smile, nod, chuckle, screaming inside*)

First off, we got the FiOS installed yesterday. Michael worked from home all day so he was able to meet the Verizon techs and stick around for the 3-4 hours the install took. The install was pretty labor intensive, they had to run a cable from the FiOS box on the utility pole to our house, into the basement, mount the equipment in the basement (3 boxes, we’ll have to take pictures, Michael can identify them all), get an Ethernet wire run from the basement to our computer room on the second floor (Michael crawled around in the basement to fully acomplish this). Michael said he was bombarding the techs with questions and they were able to answer them all, either they knew the answer or knew how to obtain it – quite a difference from the Comcast techs Michael had to deal with this month.

The speed? We confirmed that it is 15/2mbps. It is fast. Big sites (Livejournal, Yahoo!…) pop up immediately – no noticeable image loading lag. We’re now pretty much at the mercy of the upload speed of the servers serving us, which is a pretty cool feeling. And since we’re still hosting our websites from home they’re much faster now too – yay! I’ve been pining for faster speeds for my websites for a while and was seriously considering paying for hosting again, now there is no need. Unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy the new found speed for very long last night, we had a nasty thunderstorm and after the power flickered a few times I decided it was best to turn off my computer and chill out in my bedroom with a book instead.

Monday was a busy day. I took it off from work to run a bunch of errands. In the morning I was on a Secret Mission, which will not be discussed until a later date!

I came home around 11AM to meet Michael and headed to Norristown to get our MD marriage license application notarized. This was a surprisingly pleasant experience aside from the typical downtown Norristown traffic. The security guard at the courthouse door was nice, the women we asked for directions from in the courthouse were delightful, the woman who notarized our application was efficient and friendly, even the toll-taker at the parking garage was in a pleasant mood. It feels so good to have such an experience on a hot day, especially when I expected the process to be much more difficult and time-consuming.

From the courthouse we headed to Montgomeryville, grabbed some lunch, and then Michael dropped me off at the Montgomery Mall so I could go to LensCrafters, he headed into the office for a bit. I’ve needed new glasses for a couple months now, and finally got tired of squinting. I got an eye exam and got a new pair of glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses. The new glasses are very similar to my old ones, a bit smaller. The sunglasses are a great thing, no more sun glare headaches while driving! The world is much nicer when the sun isn’t burning out my eyes.

My glasses were finished around 5, Michael picked me up and we went home to feed Caligula and then went out again – this time to Sly Fox for the MontcoLUG meeting. Michael was able to get a projector from work to use for the meeting (yay!) and 9 people showed up, which is not bad for one of our meetings. The presentation on SVN went well and it was a great meeting. It was really nice to see , he lives in the area but it had been at least 3 years since we’ve actually met up. The meeting wrapped up around 9:45 (Sly Fox closes at 10 on Mondays).

Monday and Tuesday were plagued with highs in the upper 90s, the humidity was terrible. The thunderstorm last night seemed to take all the super hot weather with it when it left. They are saying the high today will “only be 86” phew. There is some stuff I need to do around the house that really didn’t feel like doing in the super hot weather, we haven’t even eaten at home in a few days.

The Skippack Strut on Sunday was fun.

It began at Road House Grille at 1:30 in the afternoon. The temperature was hovering around 90, but there wasn’t too much humidity so it was decent in the shade and generally tolerable in the sun.

First course:

Road House Grille

Assorted hors d’oeuvres paired with McWilliams Riesling

The food served included little potato pancakes, meatballs in a pastry, little cheese and spinach quiche, and hummus on pita – all were good. The Riesling was a nice summer wine that I enjoyed. We sat out on the porch of Road House for this, but we were mostly able to get into the shade.

Second course:

Black Dog Cafe

Honey Walnut Shrimp-Toasted Honeyed Walnuts tossed with Shrimp and Cantaloupe paired with Red Bicyclette Rose

This dish was a bit much. It was battered and fried shrimp put into half a cantaloupe (insides scooped out and some little balls put back in) with the honeyed walnuts and coconut milk. The sweetness of it all caused me not to be able to finish mine. The Black Dog Cafe is an Asian fusion restaurant, not really my thing anyway, I don’t think I’ll be going back. The wine was not bad though, it was pretty mellow compared to many others I’ve had at wine tastings, but it was a red that was surprisingly decent to drink on a hot day. Again we were outside for this course, this time unable to avoid the sun! I was pretty hot when we left.

Third course:

Parc Bistro

Spicy Grilled Smoked Quail on Summer Melon Salad, with Heirloom Tomatoes, Red Onion, Ricotta Salada Cheese, Lime Essence, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and Fig Balsalmic Vinegar paired with Writers Block Grenache

This was the first time I ever had quail, it was a lot like chicken, perhaps a bit more tender. It was nicely prepared and the portions were small. The wine was not my favorite, it had that wood barrel conditioned flavor but not enough other flavor to balance it properly – and it was a pretty heavy red for a summer afternoon. They brought us inside an air conditioned room for this course, which I think was a mistake since it was *so loud* with everyone talking in the small room and the air conditioning made us feel so much worse when we had to go outside again.

This was a nice restaurant though, we’ll be going back.

Fourth course:

Brasserie 73

Baked Salmon Roulade stuffed with Tarragon and Roasted Pepper Compound Butter, served over Lobster Mashed Potatoes with Arugula Salad and Saffron Hollandaise pared with Red Rock Merlot some Zinfandel

The salmon was GREAT, pretty obvious that the same chef works here as at our beloved Road House Grille (the restaurants are separate establishments but owned by the same guy and sort of connected). we’ll certainly be visiting this restaurant again. Apparently they were going to pair it with a Merlot (I like Merlot, but with fish on a hot day?), but ended up bringing out a boring Zinfandel instead (I’m not much of a Zin fan), I wonder if the heat had something to do with the change in choice. The fantasticness of the salmon made up for the less than perfect wine pairing. We sat outside for this too, Michael had a bit of sun for about half the meal, but I was able to hide in the shade.

Fifth course:

Basta Pasta

Sweet Zabaglione with Wild Berries and Vanilla Essence, topped with Biscotti and Fresh Whipped Cream paired with II Moscato

The dessert was fantastic. Light, fruity, refreshing. The wine was less so, I know dessert wines are supposed to be sweet, but this one went overboard, it was like I was drinking juice. The restaurant itself was less formal than a sit down Italian restaurant where you are served but more formal than a generic pizzeria, not really our kind of place.

The company we had throughout the day was amusing. They were a family consisting of a mother (who was absolutely mad) and her three daughters (mid to late 30s, two of them were parents) and a couple of their husbands. They were the “loud group” of the whole production, gaining snears from the snobby people on the tour and laughter from the organizers who could tell they were having a blast. As Michael and I are very quiet it may seem odd that we’d wind up staying with these people, but they really were fun. We even got our first wedding gift, while leaving they handed us a napkin that turned out to contain salt and pepper shakers that they had lifted from one of the restaurants – AHAHAHA! Terrible.

The Strut ended around 5:30. Somehow, after finishing 5 glasses of wine, I felt fine. I think it had something to do with the heat, I drank at least one glass of water at each place we stopped at.

I’m glad we had the experience, but I don’t think we’ll be doing this again next year. July is too hot a month to have such an event, and although some of the food really hit the spot, I really wasn’t impressed with the wine selection. There are always plenty of wine and beer events throughout the summer, so on to checking out more!

I hate summer. I seem to forget every year how miserable and exhausted prolonged humid, hot weather makes me (although, I’m pretty sure people close to me don’t forget how cranky I get!). This is even true when I can hop from air conditioned place to air conditioned place, being stuck inside sucks. I hate avoiding the outdoors and I miss hugging trees when the air feels like hot soup. We are going to have to move north or to the mountains someday. I’m such a Mainer.

This weekend the forecast is showing highs in the upper 90s that will last at least through Monday – UGH!

Heat aside, we do have some plans for this weekend.

Saturday: Hide from heat in air conditioned rooms. We’ll probably go to the gym too. I was planning on going to the gym this morning but wasn’t feeling so great when I woke up :\

Sunday: Skippack Strut – “Progressive dinner involving some of the great restaurants in Skippack Village” – I am kicking myself now for not grabbing a copy of the menu when we got our tickets, it’s not online anywhere! It’s 5 or 6 courses at 5 or 6 different restaurants in the Skippack Village, food and a glass of wine at each place. Hopefully I’ll be too full of fantastic wine and food to mind the 97 degree weather we have to endure while walking to each restaurant.

Monday: I took this day off from work, I have a lot of errands to run, including getting to the courthouse in Norristown to get our marriage license application notarized (the courthouse is only open during normal business hours, of course). In the evening we’re having the MontcoLUG meeting at Sly Fox Brewery (So local people come along! There will be BEER!).