We are not alone

As a guidebook and review fanatic (must...prepare...obsessively...for travel...), I've read my fair share of Rick Steves. And Frodor's, and Lonely Planet, too. But I never really favored one over the other until now.

I really like this guy, his interview is thought-provoking and insightful - exactly what you would expect from one of the most widely traveled people on the planet. The interviewer describes Steves:

Steves wants Americans to get over themselves. He wants us to please shed our geographic ego. "Everybody should travel before they vote," he has written. We should be represented by politicians who want America to act as a good global neighbor.

Gotta love this. Let's hope that sticking a Canadian flag in your backpack becomes an old joke amongst Americans. Because, you know, who wants to be confused for those crazy maple loving hockey heads, eh?


And because I know you just can't live without it, one final poetry post.

Bat Snot

Just in case you didn't get enough yesterday, here's another batch from our favorite poet, the wondrous Glenn Beck.

I think I'd like "The Border" printed on a coffee mug. Ooh, and you know that "Imagine" would look great on an inspirational mouse pad, just in time for Easter.

Somebody said let's make Swedish meatballs at the furniture store

His name is Glenn Beck and yeah, he's scary.

What's scary is his poetic genius.

Please take a moment to absorb and reflect. Then realize your own artistic musings will never measure up so you ought to just model your every action, word, and breath after his own.

Also scary: that his name sounds somewhat similar to mine. Sometimes, late at night, I like to think Fox is one big social experiment... an April Fool's joke, if you will.

A nod to the ineffably fabulous Stephanie!

Whirlwind

I was told once, by a very wise man(child), that once I started working full time my weekends would become so jammed packed with stuff that I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I would seek "real life" and "stuff you didn't even know you wanted to do" like it was...well, my job.

And it's often true, as it was this weekend. The moment I left the office Friday I bounded, skipped, leaped with my coworkers into Audobon Circle for some tasty margaritas. Then I went to Sunset for birthday burgers with friends from Tufts.

Upon waking (and thanking my good sense to have that gigantic turkey burger to balance out the 'ritas) we went to Weston for an awesome maple sugar shack's pancake breakfast, complete with a live bluegrass band. Delicious and a lot of fun. After some traipsing about Boston buying clothes I don't need (but look really good in!) we returned home for a bit to prep some dishes to bring to Wise Old Manchild's Girlfriend's Potluck Game Night.

Boyfriend made oatmeal walnut chocolate chip cookies (he bakes! with a bit of reverse psychology maybe...) and I made avocado deviled eggs - both were a hit and I'll definitely make the eggs again come picnic season.

This week Boyfriend's sister and bro-in-law are coming into town - which will be great since we rarely see them and they're staying at Casa de Brighton for a few nights. I need to get Apples to Apples to play with them because I looooved it at the Game Night. It's so much fun. And the game website has ideas on how to make it even better... I'm slightly afraid I'm going to become a Game Night freak and host lots of nerdy board game events, but whatevs.

food fails again

Almost weekend!

Nothing could ruin my day, except this. About eating "Almost Meatless."
Really? This is all you can come up with, foodies of America? Puh-leeease. We are just about the only culture with three square meat-centric meals a day, and to talk about this new "trend" is to ignore the fact that America's carnivorous tendencies are the real trend. A century or so worth of unsustainability and heart disease.

In reality, centuries (millenia!) of people have subsisted on mostly-meatless diets. Another "duh" moment for all of you. I'm still waiting for Nobel prize on how eating less meat can save the world, you know, for that big paper I wrote in high school.

Yeah, I scooped the Times six years ago.

Food articles always cycle back to this, though, and constantly report this ancient and natural way of life as yet another socially-conscious trend, you know, back in here and here and here... Maybe it's eating all that meat that's effecting everybody's memories.

Bah! Ok, I'm done being shrilly liberal.


Happy weekend all!

an open book

I'm finally into my book, Christine Falls by John Banville, writing under the nom de plume Benjamin Black. Now this is noir...foggy city streets, manly men with drinking problems and sordid pasts, and the wily damsels that somehow surprise even though we knew they were hiding something all along. I admit it took some time to get into, and really it's not knocking my socks off. But I can't blame it, it's a tough act to follow after the stellar The Reader and it had formerly seemed like yet another disappointment. Instead, it's currently ranking at about a B.

Kara reminded me of my ongoing book organization - I don't bother with authors/genres to organize (and I tend to mentally categorize them by the order in which I read them anyway) - I go by color, so the spines in similar color families are grouped together. I spend more time looking at the bookcase than I do searching for particular books, and I know them well anyway, so I don't find it all inconvenient. Instead, I think it's purdy.

Now, the BIG issue at hand here is: which books to bring on vacation? I think Angels & Demons might be a good beach book, and timely considering the movie will be out soon... but I'm open to suggestions. Thoughts?

c'mon get happy

I needed to be cheered up this week.

Seeing The Watchmen on Saturday didn't help too much - it was violent violent violent and as much as I wanted to like it I found much of it to be really...stupid. We went to the Jordan's in Reading for the full IMAX treatment and the only redeeming part was the hilarity that is Jordan's Furniture. And when a 15 foot animatronic Wally the Green Monster outshines a movie, you know it's bad. The story deserved some solid action treatment to showcase the artfully twisted characters, and instead we got the usual superhero cliches and spandex clad babes. I wish I could give a better review but my eyes were closed half the time to ward off scenes of people blowing up (seriously, how many shots can you have of people looking shocked at after being DRENCHED in a passerby's blood?), and also I plugged my ears more than a few times to block out some God-awful soundtrack choices.

But, to accentuate the positive (much like Superchick's spandex number...) Spring Cleaning 09 officially took place this weekend. So I have prematurely switched out my winter clothes for the summer wardrobe, and will have to be artfully decked out in lots of layers until spring actually arrives.

Last night I made my favorite recipe - a tofu pesto sauce. It's from the Moosewood Cookbook, a veritable vegetarian bible, and even though I've only tried a handful of recipes from it they've all been amazing. This one is basically a traditional pesto with a block or so of blanched tofu added to make it creamy. I can eat it by the spoonful, and I do. It makes me want a big food processor though, which would handle it much better than our poor overworked blender.

It's very nice to be able to come home to a super clean (and organized!) house with a well stocked fridge. Now, we wait for patio season...