End of Summer Travels

We spent a few days in Chicago for a family reunion. While there, we saw a pretty funny lighter (for BBQ's and what not) shaped as a chicken. After Chicago, we headed out to NY for a wedding. We stayed in NYC; while walking around midtown, we made a pit stop at Trump Tower and discovered that The Don has his own brand of bottled water! This was new to me, but then a couple weeks ago I heard Conan O'Brian make a reference to Trump Ice. The "OOF" is from a painting we saw in the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art); I just thought it was funny. While walking down 5th avenue (I think), we ran into a street fair. This one sausage stand seemed a little odd; apparently the King of Pigs is quite happy about the long chain of sausage made from his fallen compatriots. It's probably worse than several years ago when Mr. Potato-Head was selling french fries for Burger King.



Back in Atlanta, we finally found the Delallo garlic antipasto that we (me in particular) got hooked on while we were living in Austin, TX. Upon first sight, we bought about 2 lbs. of this fantastic stuff (which was all they had), and had consumed 1 lb. of it within a few days. After not having gone in the back of the house for a few days, a big, colorful spider had set up shop along our flower/vegetable/spice garden. The body of the spider was a good 2" long, maybe even slightly longer. When you include the legs, the overall diameter was quite considerable. I blasted it out of there with the garden hose and then took down its web. It was still a pretty impressive spider.



We were in Boston this past weekend (Labor Day) for another wedding. The funniest thing was that the DJ at the reception looked like Max Weinberg! The wedding was held at a classic auto museum. In the basement, they had an interesting collection of those old fashioned bicycles with the large front wheel. There was an old block print that had the great caption of "Beer is back!" that I found entertaining (it was in refernce to the end of prohibition).

Long overdue update, but probably a stupid time to be doing this.

Ok, I haven't updated in a while, and I really shouldn't be doing it right this moment since I'm supposed to be working on proposals and papers that are due in a week.



These first two are from the normal silly category. The first one is a sign that happens to say "No-op" (which is only funny if you're a computer person, and even then the humor is questionable - the sign had said "now open"), and the second one ... well, I'm not sure I want to know what parts are or are not missing.



Sue's mom came down to visit at the end of May. We dropped by the Coca-Cola museum. None of these pictures are terribly "strange", but I thought they were neat. The first is one of the original bottle designs, the second is the original six-pack (case is made of cardboard), then we have some foreign coke cans, and finally a photo from the international coke flavors section.



At the start of June, I headed off to Madison, WI for a conference. While in the airport in ATL, I saw this store called "New Sex Change". Well, that's what I thought I read, but it was actually "News Exchange". In Madison, they had a nice farmer's market at the capital, and I got myself a 1 lb. bag of cheddar cheese curds (squeaky!) and jerky of four different animals (beef, ostrich, venison, bison).



I also made stops at two local breweries for tours. The first picture is just of giant stacks of kegs. The second is of the tops of cans before they make it on to cans. One of the breweries makes extra money by bottling beer for other companies that don't have their own (or sufficient) bottling machinery. This last picture is an example of their outsourced bottling: Rock Head Extreme Malt Liquor, which apparently has a sufficiently high alcohol content that they can't even sell it in the US (they ship it from Canada to Wisconsin for bottling, and then they ship it back north).



Who wants produce from "Bland Farms?"



Not a funny picture, but an impressive reminder of what nature is capable of. This is our next door neighbor's house after the remnants of Hurricane Dennis passed through Atlanta. Luckily no one was home and no one got hurt.

Start of Summer

The end of the spring semester has finally come, and now I can catch up on all sorts of things. This waste of time being one of them...

Random pictures:



The first is a big pepper mill in the shape of the Stanley Cup, except that the pepper mill will probably see more action this year than the actual Cup. The second just has a funny name. I don't need to comment on that. The third picture is a pair of chopsticks with "training wheels". We saw these in a sushi restaurant in South Lake Tahoe.



Mmmm... 100% Human Sale. And self-serve dog wash? Isn't that called hosing the mutt down in the driveway? Why do you have to pay for it then?

Long Overdue...

Haven't updated in quite a while. Been too busy with this being a professor thing. Anyway, here are the latest random pictures.



The first picture is from us moving out of our apartment. This is inside the U-Haul that we inefficiently packed. Luckily, it was a lot faster to unpack the truck. The second picture is from the first weekend after we moved in. We had a nice ice storm in Atlanta which covered everything in a very pretty layer of ice. Unfortunately, it also brought down quite a few branches taking out a good number of power lines (we were not affected by power issues). This picture is a big branch that fell about one or two feet away from my car (which didn't get hit).



Sue's mom moved to Nashville in January just a little bit before we moved into our new house. We drove up one weekend to visit in February. The first picture is from a store window that sold cowboy boots... except I don't know what self-respecting cowboy would wear smiley-face boots. The second is from a lunch counter that apparently sells "Oriental Lunch", which I thought was funny because it just seems so dated. The last picture looks like we're in Greece. I don't know why, but they have a replica of the Parthenon in Nashville.



Finally, I was just in Austin this past week for a conference and to visit Intel folks. My ex-boss is a cheese fanatic, and these are just some pictures from his cheese-refrigerator. He gets all of his cheese shipped from a store in Pittsburg and he tends to order several wheels at a time. Somehow, he got stuck with about a dozen sticks of pepperoni with this last order, too (that's about half of them in the freezer). It's just an impressive amount of cheese.

Holiday Pictures... after spending Christmas in Las Vegas with Sue's dad, we drove down to Orlando where my parents and brothers were staying for the last week of December.

We avoided Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, etc. knowing that they'd be incredibly crowded and busy during winter break. We did go to "GatorLand" (or was it GatorWorld? I don't remember).



Lots of gators: piles of adults, little baby ones, breeding areas, etc. And apparently they like hot dogs (you can buy a bag of hot dogs to feed to the gators).

Otherwise, we just hung out by the pool, played some mahjong, and were generally lazy (as you're supposed to be on vacation). We made a couple of trips to Publix for groceries where I found some funny stuff:



(1) In the ice cream section, we found specialty ice cream treat/novelties for dogs. That just seems really wrong to me. A dog's lucky if it gets an ice cube once in a while. (2) Bubba burgers are just a funny name. (3) I had no idea hostess was in the holiday baked goods business. Pretty scary. (4) Publix has a knock-off brand of Robitussin, simply called "Tussin". I thought that was pretty funny, too. Someone in the Publix marketing team deserves points in the "Same Name but You Can't Sue Us" department.



While walking around one of the Outlet Malls, we ran into this advertisement. I didn't know that Cheese Curds was a hot product in the fast food business. "Curiously Delicious" is a bit alarming. It reminds me a bit of poutine, but without the fries, and without the gravy.