I woke up the day after Christmas and decided that after ten years, I couldn’t stand my kitchen one more day. That it was time. Time to paint the kitchen. My kitchen is the last frontier in this house. For almost ten years I’ve spun my wheels and lived with the kitchen as it was when I moved in. Kitchens are problematic that way. You think, well, if I’m going to paint I have to move the appliances, and if I’m going to pull out the appliances, then I should do the floor. And if I’m going to do the…
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From the outside, the Wyoming Dinosaur Museum doesn’t look like much, in fact, it looks like a barn for long-haul trucks, but don’t let that fool you, inside are many many beautiful and amazing fossils. Many of the fossils are arranged in life-like poses like this nest of dinosaur babies. The collection is probably most notable for the huge Supersaurus that stretches the length of the big hall, but I didn’t think my iPhone camera would do it justice. If you click their link, you can see what it looks like. The collection also contains the only Archaeopteryx in North…
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While the hot springs were fabulous, as was the Dinosaur Museum (which will get a post of its own), finding real food, and a decent drink, posed a challenge and was the big downside to my Fabulous Birthday Adventure. The Safari Club at the Day’s Inn is pretty much the only place in town, and while the display of taxidermy is, depending on your view of such things, stupendous and/or horrifying, the food and drink possibilities are problematic. We started out at the Safari Club for a drink before trying to figure out where to go for dinner, and it…
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For my birthday last weekend, my sweetie whisked me off to Thermopolis, Wyoming for a little adventure. As you can see from the hillside sign, Thermopolis bills itself as the world’s largest hot mineral springs, and while it’s smaller in acreage than the Mammoth terraces in Yellowstone, apparently about a million-and-a-half gallons of hot water gush out of the springs every day. The springs themselves, as well as two hotels, two commercial pools with slides and saunas and other entertainments, and a State Bath House with both an outdoor and indoor pool, are all part of a really lovely state park.…
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My kitchen is the one part of my house that has still, after almost 10 years, not been renovated. It’s one of those tricky cases — if I pull the appliances out to paint, I might as well replace the floor. And if I’m replacing the floor then maybe I should have that problematic weird wall pulled out. But I don’t really have the funding to do all that, and well, the kitchen works surprisingly well in it’s unrenovated state, and so, nothing gets done. Sigh. It can be helpful to consult experts before diving into a big project like…
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From this morning’s paper, an AP article about Thanksgiving dinner that had both of us apoplectic with …. with … with outrage at the manner in which the corporate media normalizes Corporate Food. Here’s the lede: No need for a salt shaker on the Thanksgiving table: Unless you really cooked from scratch, there’s lots of sodium already hidden in the menu. … The traditional Thanksgiving fixings show how easy sodium can sneak into the foods you’d least expect. Sneak into your food?!? The salt doesn’t “sneak into” your food — the Big Ag corporations and the Big Food companies put it…
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Sigh. Every year. The endless parade of newspaper and magazine articles, the FoodTV episodes, the endless parade of drek from the media implying that cooking Thanksgiving dinner is on par with neurosurgery, wing walking, base jumping. It’s just a turkey. Thaw it and roast it — make a few side dishes, call the people you love and gather them around your table. That’s it. Doesn’t have to be good china, doesn’t have to be 14 dishes, doesn’t even have to be 14 people — just cook something and invite people to share it with you. Now granted, I learned to…
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For some reason, the annual consumerist frenzy of “Christmas” seems even more dissonant to me than usual. It’s clear there’s a class thing with the Christmas frenzy — there are people for whom the once-a-year pile of stuff under the tree is really really important, and there are people for whom it’s not. I have to admit, I grew up in a family who mostly believed in keeping it simple at Christmas. And although as a kid I was bummed by my parents’ knee-jerk rejection of anything like the “toy of the year” as consumerist claptrap (well, there was also…
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My first post-deadline, post-travel weekend and although I was woefully short on new fiction pages produced, I did get some long-neglected house-and-garden tasks done. First of all, I’m feeling sanguine about winter because, at long last, we got our whole pig! It took a long time this year because, well, the small packer/butcher operation we buy from sold more post-fair pig specials than they had pigs. So we had to wait for them to get more local pigs (they promised me it wasn’t a CAFO pig), and then for them to make the delicious hams and bacon. There’s nothing like…
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One reason I’ve hardly been blogging at all these past few months is that I’ve had a series of interesting, and fairly lucrative, freelance gigs on the side that have taken up what writing time I had. I like these. They’re interesting, and provide me a tiny bit of financial cushion, and keep me from being entirely dependent on my day job at the Big High Tech Company Who Keeps Laying People Off. The downside to this has been that I’ve been working too much. My weekends are pencilled out for the Freelance Gig, and there’s always that low-level deadline…