What to drink

when the power is out in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica: fresh orange juice, squeezed with a battery powered juicer!

Just under the wire!

Checked in and dropped bag with literally 2 min to spare. Ran from MARTA to Delta sky priority check-in.

Am looking good. On Airtrain to E gates now.

Holy SHIT, I hate this nervewracking last minute bullshit.

But, it all worked out.

Next stop: Costa Rica!

observations on aging

Getting old and being physically active both suck sometimes.

Tore up my heel, and ripped part of a big toenail off, on eve of flying to Costa Rica (on train to airport now, meeting A2 in CR!) Still going, but will have to cancel a jungle hike that I was VERY excited about.

Also have 2 week old poison ivy that is infected, and that J is worried might go septic.

Boo. If I weren't on my way to a great vacation, you should feel bad for me.

Bike porn, food porn, booze porn

Yep: this post has it all!

My lovely bike. I recently took off the milk crate, and it was kind of amazing how much lighter and more nimble Sitba feels without it.


I used to, uhhhh, hate bloody marys. My sample size? One. Unfortunately, it was after running a hot, fast 10K in Denver some years ago, and they were giving away free bloody marys with some top shelf vodka. I took one sip, and nearly had to spit it out. Then last year, I bumped into my friend J4 at Atlanta Streets Alive, and we popped into the Corner Tavern, where J4 introduced me to how delicious bloody marys can be, if made well. The not so secret ingredient? A little bit of high quality stout! The above bloody mary was at J4's house, before the Inman Park Festival.

This was the bloody mary fixins bar.

Speaking of the Inman Park Festival, yeah, well, it sort of sucks. I'll leave you to judge the above image (hints: yes, that is a Volvo crossover, I think an XC60, and yes, they were an official vendor for the event.)

When was the last time you cooked 10 quarts of coconut vegetable curry on camp stoves? For me it was last weekend. (And this won out of four dinners over two nights in our friendly but fierce little competition.)

This is what happens when you organize a cycling event for 400 people, are are somewhat obsessive about diverting recyclable and compostable material from the waste stream. Yes, that is my kitchen floor.

Busy busy busy. Today Atlanta, tomorrow Costa Rica, next week West Virginia. Whee!

Bikes bikes bikes!

So, yeah: I've been SO DAMN BUSY these last few weeks I've barely remembered to eat, much less blog. Here is a cool video about one of the big things that has been taking up a ton of my days: BIKES! WHEE!



I totally love the intro line: "Bicycles are beautiful, like the stars are beautiful."

More soon, really, seriously. Soon means after Saturday May 7 when a major event I'm helping organize is done.

File under: police beatdown

From what I could tell, the initial interaction involved an intoxicated homeless man declining to stop and talk to the popo.

Good job, Atlanta Police Department cop: you managed to throw a guy down to the sidewalk who could barely stand up in the first place. Good job, backup APD, you all definitely needed seven cops to stand around while one cop grabbed one guy, and threw him in the back of a patrol unit, and then open up the door to give him some shit. And a shout out to the astonishingly worthless rentacops from Central Atlanta Progress who crowded around as beatdown voyeurs: nice showing, but you still look silly in your pith helmets.





Perhaps the most troubling part of it was that the cop you see doing the beatdown was laughing and joking and smiling hugely with his cohort.

Confidential to APD: I don't feel safer knowing that you enjoy throwing people down on the sidewalk and smiling and laughing after you arrest them.

A little more food, a little more travel!

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have a (not totally unsubstantiated) concern that J doesn't eat well when I'm out of town, so I'm in the habit of making sure we cook a lot right before I leave, and leave a shit-ton of leftovers for J to eat.

I'm in the airport about to fly out to WV for five days, and here is our fridge as of this morning:


This morning as I was getting ready to leave, J said something like, "Now, honey, I just want you to note what the fridge looks like. So when it's empty when you get back, it's because I've been eating well, okaaaaaay?"

I love her.

A little food, a little travel

This:
was a fairly tasty, and fairly fun, and fairly expensive, "Steak and Cheese" vegan sub at Cafe Green in DC. The slaw was good, the pickle good, the sandwich... slightly underwhelming, especially for $9. But I couldn't resist trying a sandwich with a vegan meat substitute I'd never heard of before: “boolgogi”.

This is what happens when you are sitting in the airport lounge, and you need to simultaneously charge your laptop, i*od, and (semi-smart) phone with only one charger. Here's to standardized USB!

And since I'm throwing around random photos, here's a totally, completely gratuitous shot of onions.

Unbelievably busy lately, with half a dozen different major projects on the burners. So I should really quit blogging, shouldn't I? Yeah.

ONIONS! and a busted car

Just for you, A: I couldn't resist some delicious images of ONIONS! (I know, some of you don't know A, and can't understand why the hell I blather about onions so much in this blog. Just, uhhhhh: trust me. Okay?)

Frying onions in a pan.

Making a quesadilla with daiya, onions, and sauteed cremini mushrooms on a chipotle-lime tortilla.

Two quesadillas, about to be wolfed down. Delicious, they were, yes!

Okay, and to balance out the onions, here is why you don't want to take shelter in your car in a windstorm:

Walking out of airports, food porn, bicycles

Seriously: after a long draught in blogging, what more do you want than these three things? Tell me, dammit, and I'll probably make it happen, despite being ridiculously busy and juggling about ten pots on the burner.

Back in March, I once again enjoyed walking out of the Eugene airport, and back in at the end of my trip.

Here's a view looking north, as you're about to actually get into the airport proper. As you can see, there is plenty of shoulder to walk on. (Go back to that linked post for explicit instructions on walking out of Eugene, and for more discussion of walking out of airports generally.)

And a little food porn: I've gotten really in to sandwiches lately. This is tofurky, fresh tomatoes, dijon, and ONIONS!

And here's the obligatory bike porn:
This is my mountain bike after 28 miles of some of the most challenging cycling I've ever done, up in the wilds of Chamblee and Dunwoody, GA (ugly big box suburbs northeast of Atlanta that have some incredible off-road riding in the woods.) At various points my front wheel was over halfway submerged in muddy water (and remember that this bike is a 29er.) I got some moderately bad poison ivy:

Doesn't look that bad, I know: but this is almost two weeks old.

SURVEY! FACIAL HAIR!

Here's the thing: I think I look dorky with facial hair, but J likes it. My facial hair doesn't grow in uniformly, and the beard is now a mixture of brown, red, and silver. (Don't ask me why: my regular hair is all brown, all the time, with individual gray hairs just coming in.)

No, unlike A, who can go from clean-shaven to backwoods lumberjack complete with Elvis muttonchops in about three days, it takes me about three weeks of not shaving to get to this scraggly-ass goatee:


This is odd since all of my brothers are hairy beasts. Hmmmm. Mom, anything you want to tell me confidential-like? If so, please post in the comments section.

Enough family secrets, and back to the topic at hand: I did a series of shots while shaving the other day, and I want YOU, Dear Reader, to chime in on which you think looks best.


This is just shaving off the mustache which, while it might work when I'm rocking my singlespeed through local hipster strongholds L5P or EAV, is also the part that, as you can see above, looks the most 9th-graderish.


This is sort of a half-assed combination of chin puff plus soul patch.

Just soul patch (which I actually once wore back when I used to appear in court several times a week. But I also had hair down to my shoulder blades then, so it was, ahem, a different time.)

And what is probably my favorite, but also the most work: clean shaven.

Okay, readers: lemme know what you think! If there is a clear consensus, I'll even grow it out that way. Maybe.

What I Learned from this experiment: when you are taking flash pictures of yourself in the mirror, you have to squeeze your eyes VERY tightly closed. Shaving with little blinkie white spots floating in your vision ain't much fun.

UPDATE! A sent in this contribution to this post:

it's true... as an a bona fide, backwoods born Alaskan I can channel the spirit of the Devil's Club and mythic powers of the elusive Nagoonberry to produce this any time I take a particularly gruntworthy shit in the forest!

and attached this image of, ohhh, overnight growth:


Hey, is that a chipmunk I see hiding in there? ALVIN, ARE YOU OKAY?!?

Cliché, I know:

but I love it anyway:

"live with intention. walk to the edge. listen hard. laugh. practice wellness. play with abandon. continue to learn. appreciate your friends. choose with no regret. do what you love. live as if this is all there is."
-Mary Anne Radmacher

So true, since this is, indeed, all there is. Every day.

More blogging to come. Gotta get some graphic design done first.

Second root canal

in as many weeks. Dental insurance benefit for 2011 already maxed out. Coming out of pocket. Boo.

Moral of the story: don't use Squirt as combination toothpaste and mouthwash when you're 15.

Food porn: special West Virginia edition!

I'm uploading the below images at a way smaller size than usual to conserve limited bandwidth (satellite internetz here in rural WV.)

If anyone wants full-sized images, like A wants the onion images to blow up to 18x24 and hang on his walls, just let me know and I'll email them to you when back in the ATL.

Staying with a bunch of wonderful people, and did some cooking, and some prep. Here are a bunch of delicious dumpstered onions.

How about another gratuitous shot of ONIONS?

Turnip greens, kale (I think that was kale anyway), and mushrooms.

And these were soup ingredients: dumpstered corn, mushrooms, fresh jalapenos, and bell peppers.

We didn't just cook: we also drove a bunch around rural WV. This trailer sign kind of says it all. yeah, the Big Coal River runs right behind it, but it's not called the "Big Coal River Detachment", is it?

And surprisingly good vegan Mexican food was had in Logan, WV.

Back in the ATL sometime tomorrow. Busy busy!

food, food food! (and squirrels)

I'm going through a bunch of images from the last couple weeks, and the cries of the people will be heeded. I will not fight to the death, but I will also not step down from the exalted dangr-us thoughts throne in November. No, my friends, this will remain a benevolent dictatorship, and I will lavish you, my loyal subjects with food porn to keep you happy!

This is the incredibly greasy, yet still delicious, "Twice Cooked Soy Slices" from Lotus Garden in Eugene, Oregon. At the bottom center, you can see the standing pool of oil that covered the bottom of the plate. With a name like that, though, I suppose you know what you're in for:

*Twice Cooked Soy Slices………………………………...................9.50
( Veggie pork, cabbage, mushrooms, carrots, broccoli, bamboo shoots)

Back at home now, that's a Whole Lotta Tofu!

And who doesn't love some ONIONS!?!? These got caramelized, and were just damned delicious.

Some artichokes hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, about to get flash fried.

And the completed cast, clockwise from top: fried tofu, caramelized ONIONS, organic whole wheat penne pasta, and the flash-fried sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts.

Not super creative, and something that I have long used as a fallback dish when we don't have much in the fridge, and I don't feel like going to the store (before my 7pm meeting) and it worked out juuuuuust fine.

It. Was. Tasty.

Dinner also included squirrel stew. No, silly: we didn't try to create some sort of weird vegan squirrel stew. We ate dinner while watching Winter's Bone, the excellent if gut-wrenching Oscar nominated drama about the brutalities of life in the meth-cookin' Ozarks. Excellent, well done, kinda downbeat. Normally J and I have a pretty strict policy of not watching depressing movies: we have enough difficult stuff in our day to day work lives that we don't really need to add to it. But we're on a netfl!x route of watching as many of the 0scar best picture nominees as we can, so, squirrel stew it was!

Must be spring!

Yeah, it's Atlanta: less than a month after the gnashing of teeth and rending of winter garments when the temperatures dropped into the single digits and we got two inches of snow in one day (OH, THE HORROR!) we're starting thunderstorm season here in the A-T-L:

"
TODAY
CHANCE OF SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS IN THE MORNING

THEN SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS IN THE AFTERNOON. WINDY. SOME THUNDERSTORMS MAY BE SEVERE WITH DAMAGING WINDS IN THE AFTERNOON. HIGHS IN THE MID 70S. SOUTHWEST WINDS 15 TO 25 MPH. CHANCE OF RAIN NEAR 100 PERCENT.
"

Sounds like a good day to blog, yeah?

(Oh, and BTW, the benevolent dictatorship here at DANGR World HQ has heard the cries of the people, and we will allow Free and Fair Elections(tm) in November. No, to hell with that, we'll fight to the death. But we'll throw a bone, since the cries of the assembled masses have been heard, even all the way up here in the corner office: triple sec!)

Food porn, SF style!

'Cause the peeps in the SF like their food porn!

pizza fixins

and more pizza fixins.

and, uhhhh, more pizza fixins.

I'm not honestly sure why our "make your own pizza" night fixins table took three photographs to capture. It absolutely may or may not have had something to do with the various bottles you see sneaking in there (that small clear one, by the way, is Egyptian auzo (more commonly spelled ouzo, but the transliteration from Arabic to English can be imprecise.) Regardless of how you spell it, it's delicious.

ONIONS!

To round out today's posting binge, how about, uhhh, I dunno... some ONIONS!?!?

Onion ring prep -- DAMN, those ONIONS smell good!

Making the already delicious onions EVEN BETTER!

Much hot oil and many minor scalds later, we had a big pile of delicious ONION RINGS! (and since wo/man cannot live on onions alone, even though I'm willing to try, some tofu snuck its way in.)

(round out: Get it? Ha! Ha!)

Sangria porn?

A few of you know this, but for those who don't: I make a pretty mean sangria.

Raw materials = not cheap. The fruit alone cost around $20.

After much slicing and peeling.

And with the liquid love added.

The only thing you're not seeing is my super secret ninja ingredient. Whoever guesses it correctly gets me to make them a bigass pitcher of delicious sangria the next time I see you, so light that Comments section up, people!