Tech fail

One night's tapas output--see below for a list of the week's experiments

I spent last week in Madrid for work, at my organization’s annual meeting. Since I work alone, I really look forward to this event as a rare opportunity to be physically in the same place as my coworkers, and to cram into five days the year’s worth of gossip, inside jokes, and goofing off that you just can’t replicate by yourself in a home office. Since part of my job is to be the organization’s social media point person (or empress, as I prefer to call myself), I also had plans to tweet, blog, and FB the heck out of the event to my fellow attendees and to anyone who hadn’t managed to come but wanted to follow along interactively.

Wayback Wednesday: Steak Salad

Two years ago, I was just back to Canberra from my organization's annual meeting in Singapore, enjoying burgeoning spring weather, and devouring this salad. This week, I'm preparing to head from KC to this year's annual meeting in Madrid, enjoying perfect fall weather...and wondering if I have any steak in the fridge?

Applefest weekend

Autumn is festival season here in the lower Midwest; everyone comes out of summer hibernation, turns off the central air conditioning, and enjoys spending some time outside. Winter and summer are harsh and extreme, and spring is fickle and unreliable (you never know when a thunderstorm might brew up and send forth a twister), but autumn is placid, sunny, and beautiful. You could probably hit a different festival every weekend in September and October without going too far from home; our town’s big one is the annual Apple Festival, which was last weekend.

I really don’t like the summer hibernation, and autumn is my favorite season anyway, so I get a little hoopy when it starts to cool off. I certainly have this year, probably because this summer was even more intolerable than last summer. Or maybe it just seemed that way because this year I had patio furniture which I couldn’t use without getting a) melted or b) devoured by mosquitoes.
In any case, when last weekend rolled around I suddenly realized that I had invited a rather large number of people to a) park on our street, b) wander downtown with us to Applefest, or c) eat a meal at our house in conjunction with said wandering. In many cases, all of the above. And as the weekend shaped up to be bright, sunny, and mild, it became apparent that all of them were going to take me up on it.

Grownup candy

As the stores fill up with Halloween stuff (really? already?), I am reminded once again of how I never eat candy bars anymore. And I wonder: when did they start tasting so awful? Were they always that bad, and I just had a less discriminating palate when I was younger? Or have they actually gotten worse?

Of course, I can’t answer those questions until someone drops by with a Tardis and I can zip back to 1976 to check. And I think it’s a bit soon to be starting down the Curmudgeon Way (“You kids today!”, etc.). Whatever the reason, the fact remains that most of the time I feel that candy bars aren’t worth the cash or the calories.