Monday, July 11, 2005

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.