I just noticed that when you click on the ‘your store’ tab on Amazon it takes you to a recommendations page that has a tag cloud of different product categories. My biggest tag was ‘Alternative Dance’. I’m so excited, I’m so ashamed!
I’ve been cooking better meals this week, due primarily to the fact that I actually went grocery shopping during the weekend. Traveling, getting settled and eating out too much gave me too many chances to not cook for myself. In an effort to rid myself of this habit of laziness, I’m trying to cook atleast 4-5 dinners per week. I mean “cook” as in prepare food from fresh ingredients. I’ve got a pretty good track record of oven and microwave prepared Trader Joe’s meals, but that’s not what I’m shooting for.
To help spur on my cooking bug, I’d like anyone with favorite dinner recipes to send or post them. Half the time spent cooking is finding what you want to make, and its generally most of the inspiration. Looking in cookbooks is fun, but personal recommendations should turn up alot of gems.
In a related eating out note, I added a link box to the sidebar of all my yelp.com reviews which happen to be all restaurants. Go figure. I plan on adding more restaurant and non-restaurant reviews since I’ve found the site to be indispensible in a new city. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to eat at many dinner restaurants in town. [Personal Ad: Looking for attractive, fun woman to take out on dinner dates for sole purpose of reviewing dinners. Honest.]
Final Thought: Last Friday a pigeon sh*t on my head. I mentioned this to Amy and she said it means I’m going to have good luck. Good…. I thought it meant God hates me.
Last weekend I flew out to Indianopolis for work. I went out a few days early and met up with my Coworker Eric who had finished up his work and was going to head back Sunday. Events included racing SCAA Spec cars, paintball, a great dinner and hitting some bars/clubs downtown Indy.
All in all, it was pretty fun, if not a little expensive. Indianapolis is good for one day of adventure, then its charm (if you want to call it that) seems to wear off, especially during the time you’re hung over. Favorite moments include taking an accidental extra lap and driving straight off the course, the staffer at paintball telling me to shoot the opposing team of 13 year-olds “all [I] want” since the owner’s son was on it, and asking the girls in the VIP if they were going to stay up there all night or come down and dance with me (of course they wanted to stay in the VIP).
After the weekend was over, Eric headed back to Seattle and I headed up to West Lafayette for the fall career fair at Purdue. It’s my first time doing anything like this, and was definitely a great experience and chance to really learn how to talk a lot. And I mean a lot. Software developers aren’t known for their social skills for good reason. We don’t get much practice in smoozing, but over the course of 2 days I easily talked to over 200 students about my work, and what each one was doing, along with talk to some faculty.
On monday I was put on a corporate panel to talk about the company a couple minutes before it started. Ingen, the recruiter, waved me up to the front of the lecture hall to tell me that they had unknowingly put us on the panel. I said a couple things about the company and answered a couple questions about what types of problems we work on (ie. distributed systems) and the work environment we have (lots of email lists, and a young culture of activity). Overall, I think I did a good job given my small prep time.
After the career fair was over, I headed back to Indy for the night and got out of there early next morning. As fun and intense as the few days were it was really nice to be back in Seattle. I’m not made out to be a traveling professional. Hopefully the next time I travel it will be for a holiday.
I bought the Archers of Loaf album ‘All The Nations Airports’ on ITunes a couple weeks ago. I just listened to it on my stereo, and the quality is for crap. It’s one step forward for digital downloads, one step backward for audio quality. Matt covers the trend of complimentary digital downloads with vinyl purchases. Perhaps the idea should be extended to any media purchases. There is a company that would be really well positioned to offer this service, but they’ve been getting to much press from me lately.
Got some Japanese at a relatively nice place out in Bellevue with Ariana, Andrew and the rest of da crew on Friday night. The soba was mediocre. It’s a wild ride when we all get together in public. Like the kind of wild ride where we’re obnoxiously loud, probably busy teasing Sterling about her eating habits or some other habits picked up during her home schooled childhood. It’s the only way to dine.
After sushi destruction, I thought my night was over. Fat chance. I called Al to see what he was up to and he informed me that “shenadigans” had already begun in Belltown. How am I supposed to turn that down? I met up with Al (or more accurately in Michigan accent, Ale), and peeps and we shenadiganned our night at all the best douchy clubs on douche row. At our last bar stop of the evening, we ran into Eric , my current office-mate, and his whole posse. What’re the chances?! Al was my last office-mate, and it felt alittle like running into your girlfriend, when your out cheating on her with your ex, oh man, for real, it did. Ok, I have to come clean, it only made the party that much more rawkawwwws - bring the NOIZE!!! Eric’s peeps had a rooftop party going on after the bars closed that ended the night.
Fast forward though my Saturday at Bumbershoot. Notable notes? Pretty good performances, mix in some sweet mediocrity. Most notable moments: girls in rollerskates hitting each other, girls hitting each other in rollerskates and Al’s rooftop overlooking the bay. Keep fast forwarding through Sunday for Nora’s b-day at Garage Bowl, where records were broken, primarily the record for earliest afternoon drunk on 5 whiskey sours currently held by Katie. Sunday night was like a Neil Young young track about being lonely in a big city in your twenties. You can imagine.
Today, The Labor Day, I managed to head out before noon down to Capitol Hill. My errands run was thwarted when the bicycle shop was closed, and also by the fact that I can’t figure out the difference between E. Pine and Pine St. It’s actually pretty annoying. You’d think that the continuation of the road would be W. Pine, but no, its not. So my attempt to get lunch at the Baguette Box on Pine St. was unsuccessful. I ended up eating Burritos and calling Dad to see what was going down in W. Mich. I informed him of my plan to get on a boat that day to see the water and views. So began my journey down to the docks…
The Washington State Ferry system is impressive once you get on one of the ferries - They’re gigantic allowing for cars and trucks to load on and move really fast for their size. I took the earliest ferry to leave the docks to Bainbridge Island. To see the city from the boats is pretty inspiring, as in any city that affords you a view from the water. Anyone who says the space needle should be torn down in crazy, it adds way too much character to skyline to be removed.
Unfortunately, beyond the great views and fun ride, the trip didn’t elicit much excitement. Bainbridge is more like Borebridge. It’s understandable since I felt like I had been transported from a bustling metropolis to downtown Saugatuck, Michigan. It was a very quaint town. My time there lasted a short hour and a half then it was back on the next ferry and over to the tough streets of Pioneer Square where I considered scoring some H just to get the images of handcrafted jewelry and earthen pottery out of my mind.