Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

Most weeks, I take maybe a dozen or so images and choose the one I like best to post as my weekly photo. Today’s post will be quite a bit longer, as Michelle & I just got back from a short vacation to Chicago and I’ve got rather more pictures to share than usual.

We drove out Thursday morning, hitting Chicago around 3. We were hoping to get there before the traffic went completely nuts for rush hour, while still not having to wait around too long before we could check into our hotel. We managed the second part without any problem, but the first was a bit more …. problematic. I’m not sure if it was actual rush hour traffic or not. But when we got within a couple of miles of the hotel the traffic turned into a snarled mess of bumper-to-bumper nonsense of the sort we don’t generally have to deal with at home.

A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.
Robert Orben

Our Hotel (in Minature)
Scale model of our hotel at MSI

We made it safely through that mess to the hotel, handed the car over the the valet service, checked in, went to our room and collapsed for a bit. Oddly I find driving to Chicago to be a much bigger nightmare vastly more stressful and tiring than driving to Minneapolis. *shrug* Eventually we got back up and headed out to dinner. We decided for our first night to just hit the hotel’s restaurant.

I know it wasn’t particularly adventurous of us, but it had gotten some decent reviews and the menu promised both Italian food & pizza. We ended up having an excellent dinner[ref]Spinach supreme pizza with fresh mushrooms as well as a new (to me) and most excellent hard cider (Wyder’s Dry Apple)[/ref] and were served by an outstanding waiter.

Museum of Science and IndustryThe next morning we headed out to the Museum of Science and Industry. We got there early, bought our tickets and then waited a in line for a few minutes. Shortly afterwards, they opened up and we headed up into the museum. We went straight over to the area holding the MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition. This was actually one bonus to not getting around to visiting MSI the last time we vacationed in Chicago. The MythBusters exhibit is a temporary exhibit that only arrived at MSI earlier this year and leaves for its next stop in a couple of weeks. So if we’d come when I’d first wanted to, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to see this exhibit. (more…)

Just a quick note that photos are coming, but have been delayed due to exhaustion.

Update (2012-08-13 9:45pm): Photos have been processed and uploaded to Flickr. Still working on writing up my thoughts about our trip. Not sure if I’ll finish that up tonight or if you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Books & Headspaces

Sometimes it really surprises me how much my enjoyment of a book is linked to my current headspace. For example, I read The Magicians a year or so ago and I recall really liking it. But this time around, I hated it. Well in truth the book was ok; what really I hated the main character. This read around he just totally rubbed me the wrong way.[ref]Whiny, rich kid who’s incredibly smart, gifted with magic and always unhappy because it’s just not good enough.[/ref] Then there was Blood and Honey. I don’t know for sure that it’s something that would normally be to my taste; but when I read it, I was in something of an angry mood[ref]A stressed Coffee Bear is an angry Coffee Bear.[/ref] Or we could look at the Dresden Files which over all has been a great source of entertainment of late; unfortunately too a great source, as it’s been keeping me waaaaay too late into the morning as I read each volume.[ref]My sleeping schedule currently hates Mr. Butcher.[/ref]

Other Notes

  • I hadn’t realized how much a pair of worn out shoes were affecting my general feeling of well being. At least, I hadn’t until I finally bought some new ones. Good lord, I totally should have bought new shoes sooner.
  • Speaking of things I should have done sooner, I went in to the doctor’s office today and got some antibiotics for the sinus infection that’s been wiping the floor with my system.
  • I’ve been working on the new theme for this site, and I’ve got a rough prototype worked out for the home page. But I just don’t like it much. It’s not god awful, but it’s also not good enough. So I’ll probably be ditching the current redesign I was thinking about and try another approach.

This evening was the annual Burns Supper hosted by H.A.G.G.I.S. We try to attend every year as it’s a fun evening of food, friends and dancing. And like every year, I went elsewhere for my meal, but came back for dessert and dancing. I have tried haggis once and that was an experience that needs no repetition[ref]You can basically think of haggis as soupy, liver-flavored oatmeal. I don’t like my oatmeal soupy and just the smell of liver causes me to lose my appetite.[/ref]. I should mention that the desserts are not part of the catered meal, rather they are all brought by attendees of the supper as a contest to see who can make the best dessert, most traditional and who has the best presentation.

As my wife and I enjoy desserts and there were a couple of trifle recipes we wanted to try out; we decided to both enter this year. Her trifle was based on a black forest cake while mine was a mixture of blackberries, angel food cake and cheesecake pudding. By the I got back to the supper from having real food. the dessert table had been decimated. There was a tiny bit of my wife’s dessert left and only a spoonful of the gooey bits of mine. I ate that little bit of dessert and then had to excuse myself momentarily[ref]I think my fettuccine Alfredo didn’t entirely agree with my guts even if it did agree with my tastebuds.[/ref]. I was just heading back to the hall; when a friend came and got me, telling me that my dessert had won an award.

I have to say, there’s nothing quite like walking into a room full of people all clapping for you. It’s a lovely ego boost and that was my pleasant surprise.

One of my goals for this year[ref]I don’t really do new year resolutions, but I do occasionally set personal goals for the new year around January 1st.[/ref] is to write more here; so while I don’t have a single idea that feels worthy of a full post, here’s a dump of various things floating around/through my skull today.

  • Is today stupid driving day or something? I’ll grant I left for work a few minutes later than usual, but it seems odd that so many people would continually be pulling out into moving traffic (from driveways and side streets) and then going so slowly[ref]Example in a 40mph zone, a car pulled out of a driveway less than half a block ahead of me, pulled across the lane I was driving in into the other lane and then just as I caught up to them they pulled right back in front of me.[/ref]. Fortunately the roads were relatively clean this morning, so I was able to stop before plowing into any of those idiots, but still….
  • Back in the day when Javascript was new to the web, many sites used it to frequently touch my browser in the bad way. So I quickly grew to hate it and pretty much ignored/disabled it for years. In more recent times, Javascript usage has grown up/cleaned up its act. To the point where I’m actually interested in learning to use it. So I’ve been searching around for some decent tutorials but haven’t had a lot of luck. Most tutorials either assume you already know quite a bit about Javascript or are so extremely dated that they’re useless. I did run across 2 sites with tutorials that don’t seem to be too awful: Codecademy[ref]Codecademy gives a decent general knowledge of Javascrip. Though the site is far from perfect, with bugs in the lessons that prevent you from completing them or with questions that unclear in what they are looking for and hints that can be utterly useless[/ref] and jQuery for Absolute Beginners[ref]While technically these tutorials cover jQuery (a Javascript library) rather than “pure” Javascript and while covering an older version of jQuery (1.2.6), it still has been very interesting to go over so far.[/ref]
  • I’ve been thinking about about redesigning this site, but I’m trouble deciding what to do. I’ve got some ideas floating around in my skull, but I might hold off until I can look into working up a logo.