Earlier this week, I got up earlier than normal for my morning run. In appreciation for my good behavior, the fine mosquito denizens of the park decided to give me the gift of three bites on my legs. Although I understand the conditions were rather nice for mosquitos as well as humans at that hour, I'm still a bit shocked at receiving my first bites of the summer. If you'll please excuse me, I need to get back to scratching...*scratch* *scratch* *scratch *scratch*

I stumbled upon this handy little guide to alternative sayings for "asshat". You too can dish it out with style and grace by using "fecal fez" or a similar term in place of the now commonplace, yet still classic "asshat".

While doing some admin-ish type stuff, I noticed that 2003/07/13 was this blog's birthday.

Happy belated birthday Mein Blog!

My apartment seems to vacillate between somewhat organized and extremely organized. Mostly, it's a paper mess - receipts, junk mail, unimportant correspondence and other things scattered across multiple rooms. I have a high tolerance for clutter, but it gets to me after a while...the desire for clean, bare surfaces becomes overwhelming, and I give in to cleaning urges. After leisurely shredding, tossing and organizing random things here and there, the place has returned to its former semi-dishevelled state.

In other news, I finished off Shrub : The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. It's a nice, leisurely read that really gives insight into what makes Dubbya tick. And what the new introduction says is very true, "...everything we wrote about has been validated by policy changes made by now-President George W. Bush." Highly recommended.

About a month and a half ago, I started playing around with the Rockbox 2.0 firmware my Archos Jukebox Studio 20 and discovered the quaint little feature called "Build Playlist". After it built a playlist, I sicced shuffle on that badboy and let the player rip.

As of today, I'm at roughly song 1300 out of 3100 on the mega-playlist. I've gotten the opportunity to listen to a lot of seeming long forgotten hidden gems hiding in the deep recesses of the player. In addition, the odd juxtaposition of tracks I wouldn't normally stick next to each other has been ia refreshing and interesting change. I do wish that I had some better shuffle options (ex. no two tracks by the same artist with in a n songs), but overall it does the job rather well.

(On a downer note, the player seems to have gotten prone to seizures and the like. I'm not sure if it's a battery problem, a firmware problem or both, but it's highly annoying.)

Anyway, it looks like another two months before I get to load new music and begin the process all over again...whee.

Small quickie note: my car, the merry Mazda, broke 100K miles two weekends ago. I was travelling up to Champaign when I noticed that the 6th digit rolled over at mile marker 29 going north on I-55.

Long live the Protege!

Last weekend, a group of the co-workers and I made our way to Chicago to visit StrongBadAddict.

The car portions of the trip were uneventful, but amusing nonetheless: our Favorite Garbage Disposal fought for control of a certain Charlie's Angel's drink. Probably the most amusing gambits Favorite Garbage Disposal tried was using his hand as a cup holder under a blanket and screaming about pink elephants outside. The funniest thing about the whole situation was that Charlie's Angel was initially creeped out because she thought Favorite Garbage Disposal was trying to put the moves on her.

The culinary portions of the trip were quite excellent: dinner Friday at El Nuevo Mexicano, lunch Saturday at Sayat-Nova (an Armenian restaurant) and dinner Saturday at Nancy's Original Stuffed Pizza (the original that spawned many other locations including the one on Lake St. in Aurora).

(On a side note, Salamander Lady was able to join us for dinner Friday and got to meet the from work posse. She and I pretended to have a professional arrangement where we acted as each other's "friend" so we didn't look like total losers when we brought other friends into distant towns. Also, people tried to get us drunk so we'd spill the dirt on each other, but that plan failed thanks to the overwhelming power of our poor memories. Victory! =)

The entertainment portion of our trip included shopping on the Magnificent Mile. Thankfully, last weekend Chicago had the best weather I've experienced in a long time: low to mid 80's, clear, sunny and little to no humidity. This made going about on foot and on the El that much easier. We also watched The Matrix Reloaded at the IMax - good but a bit overwhelming IMax'd - and barhopping on Division Street.

The one and only down note of the weekend was that I drank a *wee* bit too much Saturday so a good deal of Sunday was spent teetering between "Am I hungry? Or do I want to hurl?"

By the time to depart rolled around, we were all tired out, but reluctant to go. StrongBadAddict and his wife were great hosts (Thanks for having us!) and a good time was had by all.

While in Chambana over the weekend, I discovered Gastronomica, "The Journal of Food and Culture". Gastronomica is a quarterly publication covering (brace yourself) food culture. The articles are varied and interesting: the etymology of various words related to farting, postulating that Washington Irving wrote about food, food related poetry and reviving ancient Roman anchovy recipes are just a sample of the types of pieces in the latest issue. The writing at times may tend towards the scholarly (even including citations and footnotes!), but is rather accessible. In addition, it never hurts that the magazine is assembled quite beautifully: nice, thick matte pages with interesting and fitting photos/illustrations.

If you're looking for a different kind of food magazine, this might fit the bill quite nicely.

Evidently, my dear Lish has beaten me to the punch in announcing that it looks like Seattle is a go for me.

Details will be forthcoming when I have them and feel comfortable about their public dissemination. However, I think it'll happen within the next few months, regardless of the details.

Needless to say, I'm rather psyched about the whole affair.