Snow Emergency

I am still receiving the snow emergency alerts from George Dreckmann, the recycling coordinator of Madison.  This year they don't seem to be personally written by George Dreckmann, which is disappointing. However, what is not disappointing is that Madison is finally cracking down on Snow Emergency jerks! I have been wanting this for so long. I always get up after a snow emergency, dig out my car in the freezing cold (after it has been plowed in, usually), and sometimes even park it in a pay lot, just so that I can abide by the snow emergency rules.  Then other people, take the $20 ticket, take a week to dig their car out, and as a result, leave huge piles of snow that never get plowed and make the street unparkable for the rest of the winter. This year, things are changing.  They are giving $60 tickets and towing people! I wish I could be there to see it.

Robert C. Byrd

I was just updating my CV. It's getting a little long for some purposes so I set to thinking about what things to take off.  One option was this scholarship I had throughout college called the Robert C. Byrd Scholarship. I never applied for it, NY State just gave it to me.  Maybe it's super crappy and they give it to everyone? So I looked up some information.

 Many of you already know that Robert C. Byrd is a Senator from West Virginia. Here's his picture:

He's the longest serving senator in US history and the oldest current member of congress. He's been in the Senate longer than Obama has been alive. 

In 1942 he joined the Ku Klux Klan, and was elected Exalted Cyclops (which is ridiculous. Cyclops? Wizards? Is the KKK even trying to be taken seriously?) He swears that he quit a year later and was never interested in the Klan again (but there is some evidence that it took a couple years to wean himself off). He was elected to the House in 1952 and has not left Congress since.  As a dixiecrat, he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (he says he regrets that), and voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By 1968, he started changing his mind and voted for the Civil Rights Act and decided to finally stop being a segregationist and racist. Then he did a bunch of other stuff, was called "The King of Pork", and launched this scholarship program.  It is actually the only merit-based scholarship funded through the US Department of Education. They give out about 27,000 a year. Now I feel honored to have this award.  I also take to heart Senator Byrd's 1997 advice to young people interested in politics (as should you all): "Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena." 

New Camera

After many good years with my not top of the line digital camera, I decided to get a new not top of the line digital camera. The lens on the old one kept getting stuck, resulting in severely out of focus pictures.

So here is the new camera.  It is much smaller, and it is "wasabi green" (it was, like, $30 cheaper than black). 
Admittedly, it is ugly.  But at least it won't easily get confused with anyone else's camera (except maybe Shrek fans, or something). But all in all, I am happy to have it.  

Can you tell the difference between my new 10 megapixel camera and my old 2 megapixel camera? Both files are the same size. 

Flushy

Many of you may have heard that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is in trouble.  I was born and raised in beautiful Illinois, but I don't know much about the guy.  I had nothing to do with this scandal and haven't lived in the state for about 8 years now.  I do know he wasn't liked much by his downstate constituents.  He refused to live in the governor's mansion in Springfield, which really caused a stink.  Also, I know he didn't think much of Pike County (read God's country).   

Emily and I were at a tavern in gorgeous Pike County once and overheard some old timers talking about the governor.  Apparently, he had recently purchased the grand champion steer at the state fair and didn't know what to do with it.  When asked about it he said that he might release it in Pike County let everyone there hunt it down or something like that.  

I was curious about my memory of this story so I found the actual quote, via the capitol fax blog.

After reading the quote, I don't know if what he said was actually derogatory towards Pike County seeing that it is a popular hunting destination.  But he certainly did not mention Pike County with the reverence it deserves.  For example, Pike County is typically predicated with the adjective "beautiful".  

Anyway, the quote does make him sound like a total crazy person or at least a drunk person.  I wonder what he finally did with the steer.  

Toby Keith

A week ago or so, Casey and I were watching A Colbert Christmas and Toby Keith was one of the guest stars. He sang this song about A War on Christmas, and it's actually a pretty catchy song, and a fairly funny video. But I know almost nothing about Toby Keith, except that he got in a big fight with one of the Dixie Chicks and he loves Ford trucks. So was this song a joke, or not? Toby Keith doesn't look like he's joking. But he really portrayed almost no emotion whatsoever,so it was really hard to make any assumptions about his intentions. So this instigated a period of intense interest in Toby Keith.He's from Oklahoma, and very proud of it. He really does seem to be a genuine good ol' boy. He worked at an oil rig and played football in Oklahoma for a long time before his music career took off.  He is intensely patriotic and very into supporting the troops (which I guess was the cause of the fight with the Dixie chicks) but is actually a democrat. The weirdest thing about Toby Keith is his unnatural Ford truck fascination.  It is integrated into everything he does. 

So, as it follows, Casey and I watched the movie he wrote and starred in, "Beer for My Horses".  We actually enjoyed it, even though there are several parts that really don't make sense. He basically just tried to jam in as many parts for old country singers as possible, which led to scenes of him talking a plumber for no reason, or running into a circus troupe, etc.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

A Colbert Christmas: Toby Keith Sings

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

So, conclusion is, I can really see why Toby Keith is popular. He just seems like a really genuinely nice guy, and he does seem to have a pretty good sense of humor.  He is very unpretentious, without making a big show of being unpretentious. He doesn't seem to really take himself seriously and doesn't seem to really think that his work is necessarily all that important, which I like in an entertainer. So, I learned a lot this week about someone new, although I did not buy any Toby Keith albums, in case you were wondering.

No more video chat

During the past year or so while Casey and I were living apart, we would spend at least 30 minutes a day talking to each other on iChat. Right before I finally moved out Casey took a few pictures for us to remember the experience, since, hopefully, it won't happen again.  I just figured I would pass the good times on to all of you. A little slice-of-life, if you will. Videochatting actually really helps a lot to make a long distance relationship a little easier.

Pescadero, Part II

After eating a seafood lunch and browsing one of the two stores in Pescadero, we decided to stop by a local dairy that produces goat cheese.  I love goats. I think they are very cute and their cheese is delicious.  Here is a picture of me in front of the goats (and two llamas, I guess).  They all seemed to really want to stand on a pile of dirt on the left hand side of the yard. It was getting pretty crowded over there.

We took a different route home and stopped at the beach. 

 The tide was out and we had a good time looking at all the plants and animals in the tide pools. Here is Casey looking quite dapper at the beach.

Good times!

trip to Pescadero

After I got back into town, Casey took a day off of work and we took a trip down to Pescadero. It is a very small town on the other side of the Santa Crus mountains from where we live.  On the way through the mountains, we stopped for a short hike at Memorial Park.  It was a lovely day and the park was practically deserted, except for park rangers. Here's me next to a large tree. Very California.  We are slowly accumulating a fairly large collection of pictures of us near large trees.

Here is a totally gross picture of a banana slug.  There were a lot of them on the trails, and since it is fall, they look just like some of the yellow leaves that are falling.

Here is me thinking about slugs and barfing in my mouth. 

I really don't like slugs.  I guess I never have. I can remember going into the garden at night and coming back in with a slug on me and freaking out. They used to all crawl on top of each other to die in a huge pile when we set out cups of beer.  But my true hatred came when I went to college in Oregon and there was a bad slug problem the first fall.  They were all at least 6 inches long and I stepped on one on the way to the dining hall.  It totally popped and I got slug juice on my shoe and it took weeks for it all to come off. These slugs were totally pavement colored, and shiny with slime. Ugh. I guess it really scarred me.  

Casey and I were wondering, are slugs good eatin', like snails?

Also at the park was a much touted "swimming hole".  Here is Casey next to it.  Looks pretty weak to me. 

I'm back

I returned to California last week and Casey was at the San Jose airport to meet me and my 80 lbs of luggage.  He brought me to a romantic little spot in Santa Clara called 99 Chicken. It is a Korean restaurant that specializes in, well, chicken. The restaurant was patronized mostly by Koreans and the waiter (Casey says he is the owner, but I'm not sure how he knows) spoke English quite quickly and confidently, although I couldn't really understand him.  We told him that we wanted some beer and he told us that we wanted this: 

1.5 L of OB (Oriental Brewery)! Here is Casey enjoying his first delicious glass. We also ordered the assortment platter of fried chicken, which included regular fried chicken, fried chicken with sauce (kind of a sweet and sour), spicy sauce fried chicken, and fried chicken with honey on it. This really was some of the best fried chicken I've ever had. All the varieties were delicious (well, "sauce" was kind of boring). Here's another picture Casey took of me with a huge plate of fried chicken in front of me to add to the collection:

From these pictures you can also see the interesting choice of wall decorations.  They seem to be movie posters from Korea and pictures of people eating fried chicken. 

We had a very good time and the food was delicious!

Hiatus

Since Casey and I planned for this blog to be about our life together after I moved to California, and since I have had to move back to Madison for a few months, we have decided to put the blog on hold until I get back.  It is a shame, and I am not very happy about my current situation, but hopefully it won't last too long and I can get back to California soon.

From these pictures of my current living situation, you might understand some of my malaise.

But, hopefully, when I get back to California, there will Precious Moments galore!

Slow Food Festival

On labor day weekend, we headed out to the Fort Mason Pavilions in San Francisco for the Slow Food Nation Food Festival.  Slow Food is an organization that works tirelessly to preserve access of fancy foods to rich people.  We had a great time there and got to try some tasty foods and beverages.  The best part was hobnobbing with San Francisco's elite.  We even saw the mayor and his wife cutting in line for chocolate.  

Here's the cheese plate.

Emily eating pizza in front of a snail bread sculpture.

Chihuly Time!

Last weekend, Chris and Olivia were kind enough to bring us as their guests to the de Young museum to see the Chihuly exhibit. It was pretty awesome.  Here are some highlights of the exhibit. Here are some big circular things called Persians:

Next is me and a random little girl in front of some basket like things that are different colors inside than outside.  I think these were my favorite. 
Chihuly also made a series he calls "chandeliers".  Apparently the inspiration was his love of chandeliers.  huh. Here's one we decided looks like bug butts.
Next is this huge platform with hundreds of different pieces.  It was extremely impressive, although you get a bit of sensory overload. 
Here's a close up of one of the pieces.
At the end was a screening of "Chihuly in the hot shop", which was extremely interesting.  I think it has been broadcast on PBS if anyone caught it.  In it, Chihuly brings back many of the people he has worked with in order to recreate some of his most famous pieces.  It turns out that Chihuly has not actually blown any glass at all for over 20 years.  He is really just an ideas man, and spent most of the time standing around in his oversized hawaiian shirt and crocs (i don't actually know if he was wearing crocs, but he really looked like the kind of guy who would wear crocs). He also drew some circles with about 20 pencils at once while his "gaffers" were rushing around directing like 30 underlings and blowing tremendous glass structures. Occasionally they would let him help and he would kind of poke the glass with a stick.  He just looked really out of place in his own workshop, which led us to the conclusion that art of this scale probably runs a lot like a big lab. Chihuly probably never really even goes into the workshop much, but the sheer force of his name means that he gets the best glassblowers in the world.  He kind of gives them some guidance and money, they do a bunch of work, and he puts his name on it.

Another entertaining aspect of this movie was that the subtitles were on and were transcribing both the dialog and the lyrics of the background songs.  Reading the subtitles would go something like this:

"I met Dale back in 1974 while he was working on his basket series. Me and my boyfriend like to go to the park."

It was weird.  

After the museum we had an awesome dinner at B Star in the Richmond, which was awesome.  Thanks Chris and Olivia!

Harvest Season

Its been a rough week or so, what with Phelps quest and the Bigfoot travesty. So understandably, blogging has been at a low. I sent the camera to Philadelphia with Casey so that he could take pictures during his ACS trip. All of the zero pictures Casey took should be posted soon. While Casey was gone, I spent some time in San Francisco with some college friends. We had a good time up there and hopefully I will get some pictures from them up on the blog.  

In the meantime, we set out to the Stanford gardens to check on our big fall harvest. As many are aware, Casey has gardened every year of his life. This first summer in California was no different and it even seemed like a great opportunity to try some new crops.  After all, California is nicknamed, "America's salad bowl".  Similarly to UW, Stanford has community gardens with plots one can rent and garden. It isn't as nice as Eagle Heights and the plots are smaller and more expensive, but it is right near work, and one could potentially garden all year long.  Casey just loves it.  Here he is next to his plot, surveying his bumper dirt harvest.

Looks great! Here's where the gophers dug under the tomato cages and the somehow got full grown plants out. Maybe back through the hole they came in through, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon?
This is the culmination of a long, noble battle Casey fought, and eventually lost (much to the amusement of his boss, who compared him to Bill Murray in "Caddyshack"). At one point Casey even tried feeding them Juicy Fruit because of advice he read on the internet. The people that run the gardens don't seem to be too concerned about their extreme vermin problem.  I have never seen anything like this.  We would have animals eat our produce in Wisconsin, but they never took the whole plant right out of the ground.  Through an elaborate system of chicken wire, Casey did manage to protect one basil plant that we harvested on Saturday and ate on a pizza. yum. 
I guess gardening is over for now. The whole thing is very disheartening.  

obligatory cat pictures

As indicated in the previous post, Elsie really didn't seem to care at all when we got home.  After Casey went to work the next day,however, she had to be touching me at all times and spent most of the day sleeping on my legs.

While I promise that I am going to resist the temptation to just fill this blog with posts of Elsie pictures, I will have to post some, since that seems to be the only thing on my camera.  Part of the problem is that I have a life long goal of getting Elsie on Cuteoverload.com.  I really think that Elsie has what it takes and is way cuter than a lot of the cats on that site.  Still, most pictures of her seem to look more fat than cute. The camera really does seem to add 10 pounds.
Okay, one last one for Casey. I assume he took this, since he thinks it is cute when she sleeps on her head.  Also, Elsie is the only other one that lives with us, and she doesn't know how to use the self timer.

We have actually been in California for about 3 weeks and really have no pictures to post about.  Casey is heading to Philly tomorrow to go to the ACS and see Russ and Rachel, and my friends Katie and Gordon are coming to town on Sunday.  So hopefully, these events will make our life appear more exciting.  I guess I should have posted about Phelps Quest, since that seems to be the only thing that anyone on television can talk about.  I really feel like Michael Phelps is ruining the Olympics and that it totally isn't fair to call him the greatest athlete of all time.  There is no other olympic sport in which a person is even eligible for like 50 gold medals. Why are there so many swimming events?  Its ridiculous.  I saw on the Today show, that he can basically live off of the money he is making from this olympics for the rest of his life.  How is this possible? Who cares? Still, I have basically been enjoying watching the olympics, even though I now feel sorry for all the American gold medal winners who aren't Michael Phelps.

Home!

After leaving Wyoming, we still had two days left in the car.  It was sort of a blur.  I remember that it sucked and it was hot and I was grumpy.  I also got a horrible heat rash across my back.  We pretty much drove straight for the last two days, stopping only for gas and food.  Here we are at a KFC, where I enjoyed a KFC snack pack.

Casey really thought this picture was going to be hilarious.  I'm not sure if it is or not.  I guess it is sort of funny that I might have a huge plate of fried chicken for a snack.  Anyway, the worst part of the drive was entering California over the Sierra Nevadas.  The Corolla was really struggling with the trailer and downgrades were even more terrifying (until I turned off the overdrive and went down in third gear. duh.) I was really afraid that Casey and I would get stuck at Donner Pass and be forced to survive the winter on Wendy's.  That would truly be a nightmare. 
After the Sierra Nevadas, the rest of the trip was smooth sailing.  Before we knew it we were home and enjoying a delicious bottle of California wine! Here we captured the warm reception we received from Elsie, who was eager to get right back to ignoring us.

Wyoming

Wyoming really was pretty awesome.  Here Casey took an informative picture about Wyoming Winds at a rest area, after a discussion with Marta about a windy rest area.  We think this is what she was talking about even though it was, disappointingly, not windy at all that day.

We took a 30 min. detour off I-80 to a town called Saratoga, WY. Casey has been wanting to go to a hot springs since I have met him, and we have always been foiled. Actually, the truth of the matter is that he is always foiled because I veto the plan. We almost stopped in Colorado once, but it was snowing out and I didn't want to drive another 6 hours all wet. When we were in Mexica, we got on an unmarked dirt road to "Agua Caliente" but I vetoed that, too, because I didn't want to die in Mexico. So Casey found Saratoga on a hot springs website and made reservations for us at the hot springs resort in town. The resort was super cute, with about 30 rustic rooms surrounding the hot springs. They had a series of tubs of different heats, and I assume they all drained into this large swimming pool, which was a really comfortable temperature, like a warm bath. Here's Casey enjoying a Busch light:
Then they had some uncovered and some tent-covered smaller hot tubs. Some of these were almost unbearably hot, especially during the day. At evening after dinner, they all filled up fast, especially the covered ones. Most of the people at the resort seemed to be middle aged couples, we think from Colorado. Here's me enjoying the healthful benefits of one of the covered mineral hot springs:

The town also seemed pretty awesome and it seemed like it would really be a nice place to visit longer. There was a big river through town and they offered float trips, fishing, and all sorts of other outdoor adventures. There was also a public hot springs. When we got there, most people were actually in the public swimming pool, which was not free, even though there was a river next to the pool, and draining into the river, was the hot springs. So, if you are a traveling vagrant and don't have enough money for a chlorine pool, they also offered this option:
(The sign says "hobo pool", but the camera strap is in the way.  argh)

As you can see, many wandering homeless people took a break from hopping freight trains to partake in the slightly murky water. It actually did seem like a really nice hot springs.

I would definitely recommend Saratoga to anyone traveling the mighty I-80.

I would also recommend listening to John Hodgeman's book, "The areas of my expertise" on audiobook.  Underbakke turned me on to the audiobook version, and it made the whole trip (and visiting the hobo pool, in particular) much more entertaining.

Nebraska

After making it through the glorious land of Underbakkes, we arrived in the great state of Russes and Rachels. The first (and only) item on the agenda was getting a Runza! Has anyone else (besides Russ and Rachel, of course) been to Nebraska?  There are seriously like 200 Runza restaurants.  They even had Runzas in towns of 300 people. So for dinner, we HAD to stop.

The Runza appears to be similar to many regional food items, in that there is smooshy dough with meat and spices and cabbage inside. They seem to have russian-german roots. 
I guess Russ talked a bit about Runzas and even tried to make some? Anyway, during the Runza experience, Russ seemed to always be on Casey's mind. 
Here we tried to share with you the inside of a Runza, not knowing that the inside of a Runza, much like vampires, cannot be photographed.

Getting Gas

I assume that the trailer also compromised the gas milage, and it did seem like we stopped a lot more often for gas. Luckily, Casey was there to capture these precious moments on film.

I thought we were going to have to spend a lot of money on gas.  I guess we did, but it was less than $400 for 2200 miles.  So, that's better than 22 mpg.  That's not bad.