The Flying Biscuit Cafe has tofu scramble
… and they are insanely busy! Loving it!
Dan Rei and I in “The Empire Strikes Back Uncut”!
The team included Wren and Bailey too – nice work everybody, we’re famous!!
Chicago and VU Homecoming
Spent Wednesday through Sunday with Erik Keith Matt Ken Mark Tim Tara Kristen Kari Kristine Kathleen Bob Jon and lots more…
Wednesday
Direct flight on Southwest, oh yeah – brought snacks and “The Good Lord Bird” – smooth sailing. Beautiful and brisk at Midway. Walked around with Revco blasting in headphones. Trying to find the pizza place where Keith was hanging, while simultaneously navigating Erik there. Keith got mad that I didn’t get there sooner. Erik wouldn’t install an app that would have shown him my location, so drove around without finding me for an hour. Finally we all got to the pizza place. They whined, I got mad, slapped Erik and Keith, Keith got pissy. Off to a capital start!! :P
Matt showed up and reminded us how to chill. He’s doing great, teaching art to 35 high school kids at once (wha??) on the south side of Chicago. We went to the art studio where he works on lithographs done on these blocks of limestone that he gets (from Russia I think?). Beautiful stuff! Wish I’d bought one… Well, I misbehaved there and that was the end of my Wednesday night. My Pulp Fiction moment without the adrenaline or fun. Live and learn!
Thursday Keith and I got up to run (I was 100% recovered) and headed out of our swanky Hotel Lincoln digs straight into… camels? Yep we were running through the totally free totally amazing Lincoln Zoo! It was early so we didn’t see the lions, tigers and giraffes until later, but we did catch the seals before we were through the park…
…onto beautiful views of the city from the beautiful wetland preserves around Lakeshore Drive. Absolutely stunning, full of all kinds of native plants fish and birds, with the Chicago skyline as a backdrop…
9.0 Jabberwocky
How can there be a Terry Gilliam-directed movie starring Michael Palin that I have never even heard of??! Good Lord! Stephen tuned me in and we thoroughly enjoyed this massive indulgent romp through a middle age equally beleaguered by a huge monster and the beginnings of a free market economy. Classic!
9.5 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Imagine some of the most respected, regal and talented British actors of our generation relocating to India to make an epic movie about discovering the beauty of life – you don’t have to, just watch this amazing film.
9.0 A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The audio book is like listening to Douglas Adams sarcastically spinning yarns that turn out to be true.
“You have been extremely – make that miraculously – fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides, has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result, eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly, in you.” Continue reading “9.0 A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson”
9.5 Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy
Those rock solid hugely fun Marvel superhero blockbusters keep coming. I loved that CA had a serious and important motivational element. Guardians of the Galaxy was epic too – huge fan of Chris Pratt – Marvel just keeps delivering! These are just AWESOME fun!
I like that the blockbuster action movies have moved away from the stupid so-fast-you-can’t-tell-what-happened style of action – there are some seriously – SERIOUSLY – beautiful superhuman stunts for which I don’t want to miss a single movement. Strange to work so hard to write properly (no dangling prepositions) about superhero movies with short curt dialog. But even that is being so well done these days. Hollywood is getting their action movies right. :-)
Peasant Meals
I have become addicted to what I am calling peasant meals: fresh local veggies, some savory spices, all sauted and served on a bed of rice or pasta. Today’s menu: local farm fresh okra and onions breaded with herbs and pan fried to perfection, on basmati rice:
Some other recent dishes are on this recipes page…
Bad beer night
Gary and I headed out for a minor adventure last night, into the mysteries of Raleigh Beer Week. How big would it be?
We got started around 7pm and had a couple concrete events off raleighbeerweek.com – here we go! First to Tyler’s tap room where there were 12 brewery reps on hand. We were hoping for the cavernous place to be filled with sample beers, but all we found was a recommendation from a rep from Victory brewery in PA. I almost always stick to local dark beers but because the rep was cute I ended up with an Ale that was so spicy we didn’t finish it – I NEVER don’t finish a beer! :-) Tasted clovey and cinnamon-ny. Meh.
We gave up on the crowded place after watching two or three poor barkeeps pulling as fast as they could. There were two highlights: watching the girl pull a brew into a hot glass and watching it crack and explode in her hand (she was ok and seemed somewhat entertained by it as well, ha); and another barkeep explaining the mechanical tap that pulled the precarbonated beer from the keg like they did in the 1500s.
Next it was off to Foundation for a new local brewer’s keg getting tapped before it was officially available. Now, I love Foundation, Jane and Larry and I watched their barkeep work drinks for a mesmerizing hour and I developed a serious mancrush on the guy (that’s four, Green Gartside, David Beckham, Sam Rockwell, should I be worried about switching teams?)…
So… the board in front of a long line of bearded hipsters read “Belgian Dark Stout”… omg I’m pumped… we chatted with the brewer, a nice fellow with a generous smile and a massive beard, he explained that the brew process was extended to let bacteria consume the extra sugar that was “unused” by the yeast. And we recognized that it was described as a “Belgian Dark SOUR”, not stout. Sour. Remember that.
My man was reduced to pouring a thousand glasses for the thirsty crowd, wasted talent. The place was packed. So we headed to the entrance where there was a small space left. By the time we got there, we started to realize that something was up. By the time we focused and figured out what it was, Gary was puckering and shaking his head wildly. Bless his honest soul. The rest of the bar, myself included, continued to make polite smalltalk and work very hard to avoid puckering as to reveal the big fat sour elephant in the room. The way-worse-than-lemon-juice-concentrate-level-of-sour elephant. Eventually he convinced me to abandon my post and stop the posing, and we headed out feeling like someone had twisted the life out of us.
As a final effort, we headed to the roof of Raleigh Times to cleanse the palette of the evening’s misadventures with a single good old fashioned Canadian ginger ale. It never tasted so good. :-)
All in all, I have to say I have never had so much fun drinking such disappointing beer.
UPDATE: Raleigh Beer Week has been deadly. Monday with Gary, Tuesday with Bill and Stephen, Wednesday drinking a big Tripel bottle with Jon, and off to Tir Na Nog on Thursday with Stephen and Bill, with Stephen and me staying to finish off the strange perversions of the TNN staff – they took two Lone Rider minikegs and polluted Sweet Josie with cocoa nibs and coconut, and destroyed some Peacekeeper with some horrific rum thing or another. Ha. MORE BAD BEER ohs nos… and here comes the weekend…
Oh and I actually started beer week early… as in 9am Saturday early… after the Raleigh 8000 run with Gary…
UPDATE UPDATE: I took Friday off! Whew I needed that! :-)