Journaling on estrip is easy and free. sign up here

Dragonlady7's Journal

dragonlady7
My Podcast Link

05/15/2006 15:47 #21997

less grumpy
Ahh. Brief nap, chill-out session, rereading a story I like, and I feel better. It's raining now, which makes me happy-- it's a soft rain, and I just planted a bunch of plants-- all my peppers are out now, and the few zinneas I got to sprout, and if it weren't raining I'd worry about them wilting. Especially a couple of the peppers-- I should have separated them. I put four seeds in each big container, and they've been in there twelve weeks now. Several of them, only one or two of the seeds sprouted, and those were fine, but in a couple of them, all four came up, and I should have separated the survivors. Today they were an indistinguishable tangle of roots, and a couple of the plants may not survive having been separated. The tomatoes fared better, but then, it took them a shorter time to get this tall. (I started the peppers a couple of weeks before the tomatoes.)

I have writing to do but I am very tired, for some reason, and feel quite daunted by the prospect of the task.

But. New journal music, slightly mournful but upbeat: Billy Bragg, "A New England".
I don't want to change the world
I'm not looking for a new England
I'm just looking for another girl

goes the chorus, and I kind of empathise. There are so many things I object to so strongly in what is going on in the world today, things that are being done in our names without the slightest respect for our wishes. But I can't make my brain operate on that scale. I can barely cope with the individual-scaled issues that confront me; how can I even begin to grapple with the humankind-scaled issues?

Not to be overly serious. My favorite line of the song is this one:
I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them, but they were only sattelites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
I wish, I wish, I wish you cared.


If you want a copy yourself, (e:zobar) taught me to use Gather this morning.
I love Billy Bragg's aesthetic. This is one of his solo songs, just him and an electric guitar. I was going to upload one of the ones he did with Wilco, but this one was easier to get. (The other one was in AAC format.) And this one's more apt to my mood.

Ah, yes. The number.
Gather #: 0720492001147722419
jenks - 05/15/06 20:02
Wow... that totally brings back memories, but I have no idea of what. Weird. I can sing along, know most of the words, but have no idea why. Was it in a movie? The title/artist didn't ring a bell, but the lyrics did and when I played it it came right back. I love stuff like that. :) thanks.
leetee - 05/15/06 19:55
New England is a great song. i can't hear user songs here (i dunno why... or at least i can't remember, uncut knows, prolly something to do with us using linux), so i snagged it from your gather. thanks! :O)
dragonlady7 - 05/15/06 16:09
Oh good! I'm glad I could help. :)

I think I got it off Audiogalaxy, to be honest-- but those were the days of everybody-on-high-speed, pre-RIAA-suing-us. Oh how I miss Audiogalaxy.
paul - 05/15/06 16:03
I love that song. I never had the ending as it was one of the songs I downloaded during the less dependable days of dialup file sharing.

05/15/2006 11:43 #21996

Growl
I have been waiting for two weeks now to get my next restaurant review set up. At this point, I have to do it today. It's due tomorrow.

Apparently the person at the restaurant who would approve such a thing is on an indefinite vacation. These people are so disinterested in whether they get a review that they've just kept putting us off until: you guessed it. I can't write a review this week.

Which means that a) the paper has a blank space, b) I'm off my schedule and now no longer will be published in the same issues as Z's biweekly column, and c) I'm sitting around on my ass having blocked out the time to go to the damn place today and now have a space of my own to fill.

Am I really feeling like writing them a good review?

"N, while a great place to eat, are inconsiderate and disinterested fucks who don't care about publicity and can't take care of a simple business matter in a reasonable fashion."

Rrgh. I know I'll get over it, and write a positive review, because I have no choice really, but come the fuck on. Free publicity isn't even worth being courteous and professional about?

It makes me wish I had even the slightest say in where I get to review.

05/14/2006 11:15 #21995

photos
I'm blogging the trip to the Finger Lakes on Livejournal but only briefly (mostly, as is my specialty, I'm rambling about other things)-- (e:zobar) wrote about it thoroughly enough here. (e:zobar,50)
But I'm posting the photos here, because I am determined to learn how to do so. Here we go!

Crap, 100k limit? That's tiny! Well, I'll try again.
Captions below images.

image
Bully Hill vineyards, with Z in foreground, a bit windswept.
image
A decorative railing at Bully Hill, made of railroad ties and other metal.
image
The entrance to Watkins Glen's hike of the waterfalls.
image
Inside the Glen, a view of the walkway along the waterfalls.
image
Along the glen, a staircase on the trail, leading back down to the glen.
image
At the suspension bridge over the glen, Z helpfully alters the sign.
image
I took this picture for my baby sister, who is fascinated by mosses. (She is studying natural resources but really wants to specialize in plants, specifically mosses. I am not making this up.)
image
A red eft. My friend Abbie and I used to hunt these all summer, and she kept some in a terrarium. They are cute and very dumb.
image
A view along the glen.
image
The trail crosses under the cascade here. It freaked me right out.
image
Scenery, from the moving car: I think this is Keuka Lake. It's goddamned gorgeous.

dragonlady7 - 05/15/06 11:47
metalpeter-- thanks. :) I had fun taking them.

theecarey-- yes, it's gorgeous down there. I hope to get back down there more frequently-- it's closer than i realized, and this summer both my little sisters will be down there.

paul-- the limit makes perfect sense for the format. I'm used to places where it shows little thumbnails in the body of the blog and then you click for a larger view, so 400px wide is smaller than I'm used to making my main pictures. Of course it's a perfectly sensible solution for a blogging site like this. I have yet to find a good place to host my photos; this isn't a photohosting solution, of course.
I wouldn't want to embed images any larger into the body of a post-- I'm just used to a different format, where it wouldn't be set up like that, and so the images could be larger.
theecarey - 05/14/06 21:21
Camping, hiking, fresh air (and a few wild creatures)--I love that area, especially in the fall.
paul - 05/14/06 12:38
The limit should be 150k. I could change the limit now that I can afford more space but I imposed it because there is no reason for a 400px wide image to be above 100k even at very high jpeg quality levels.

Beyond storage space costs, Keeping it low makes viewing journals more manageable for people with slower connections.
metalpeter - 05/14/06 11:28
Verry nice pictures.

05/10/2006 11:53 #21994

busy
I just spent like $140 on food, but that's good, as I hadn't been grocery shopping in ages and now I'm caught up. Wegman's, Spar's, and Jim's mean that now I have Everything.

So by the way, I'm this food columnist, right? Right. Ostensibly. I gotta harass the editor to, you know, set up my next review so I have something to write about, and I've been trying to set this up for almost two weeks now, so, I'm getting a little tired of that, but someday it will fall into place. Right? Pff. Anyhow.

I want to do more than restaurant reviews. I want to write about all the great food Buffalo has. I was discussing this with the Spar's girl (whose name I am sorry to say I don't know)-- I said, there should be a Sausage Festival or something, and y'all should go head to head to demonstrate whose are best. She agreed, and rattled off without pausing about six places that always said they had the best Italian sausages.

She then admitted that she sometimes does covert ops-- they'll send her down the street to Wegman's to look at what prices they have on various items, and she always has to put her ponytail over the Spar's logo on her shirt, and make sure she doesn't look suspicious, because apparently Wegman's is on the lookout for that sort of thing. So she can't write anything down. She also admitted that the "guys" had gone to check out Budwey's-- "They have a pretty good selection," she said, and then went on to caution me about the chicken sausages there. "Chicken sausages have to be precooked," she said, "or they go off right away." Budwey's has raw chicken sausages, which can be dangerous. Spar's offers two chicken sausages (hot and mild), pre-cooked, and they'll be bringing out a third (spinach and cheese) in response to demand. "These, you don't have to eat or freeze right away," she said. I asked why chicken was suddenly so popular, and she had an answer I hadn't expected: "Moslems," she said. "One of our employees is one, a Bosnian refugee." Apparently the Black Rock neighborhood they service is home to a large number of displaced persons from the former Yugoslavia, many of whom are Moslem. "They come here for our beef, and turkey," and she pointed out their cold cuts selection. The store's logo is a cheerful pig, and many of their sausages are the traditional pork, but they also carry a wide range of European grocery items, and she said that the Yugoslavians like those as well, "to make them feel like home."

I bought my usuals-- their spicy pepperettes [dried sausages, good for snacking], their landjager / jagerwurst "hunter sausages" [smoked, non-refrigerated, excellent for taking on trips], a dozen slices of their incredibly-good bacon, three of their German bratwurst with beer, and three of their chorizos. I admitted that I'd had a Budwey's chorizo last night. "It was okay," I said, "but yours are better. In fact, the best in Buffalo!"
She grinned, and pointed at the plaque. "I can't wait to show this to all our regulars," she said. Thursday and Friday are Spar's busiest days-- in the winter, those are the days to buy food there. I hadn't expected to get more than the dried sausages today, but she said during the "grillin' season" they tend to stock the store more often, because business volume goes up.

Spar's European Sausages, voted the Best in Buffalo, is located on Amherst St. right near the intersection with Grant " >(MAP TO: ). It's right down the street from the Amherst St. Wegman's, and we've been going there for longer than we've lived in Buffalo. They also offer, on a limited basis, some really good German potato salad, and other rotating specialties. Nothing beats their sausages on the grill. And if you can't get there often, stock up-- their sausages freeze well, and you can just pull them out and throw them on the grill while it warms up to defrost them. The ultimate convenience dinner-- i don't get why people buy fast food.



In other news entirely, it looks like (e:zobar) and I will be at the Century again tonight to watch the Sabres game, because we don't have a TV and want to see the game. So if anybody is interested... the Century's right down on Pearl St., just off Chippewa. " >(MAP TO: )
mrdt - 05/10/06 18:44
I got an idea...how bout we plan a huge food lovers party, I'll cater it and you can write about what a good job I do. Then I won't have to be a food reheater for the rest of the summer!!!
metalpeter - 05/10/06 18:39
Never been to spar's But when I walked past it a few months ago, I think someone I used to work with was working in there. If I ever buy sausage i should check them out.

05/09/2006 14:05 #21993

Best of Buffalo
Two things in this post.

1) A question. Z and I have not had a day off together in many moons. We have not left Buffalo in as many moons. So this week, to celebrate (not happily) the end of my part-time schedule, I got (e:zobar) to take Friday off, so we can go somewhere Thurs. night and stay over and do something cool all day and then get me home in time for work Saturday morning (at 11 am).

So where should we go? Toronto? Stratford Festival? The Finger Lakes? Southern Ontario? Ohio? Pennsylvania? I'm looking for suggestions. It can't be anything that would require a lot of planning and reservations, because we're going there THIS Friday.


2) The Best of Buffalo party. How cool was that? It was free food, brought to you by the best restaurants in Buffalo.
It was free music, brought to you by the best jazz band and the best choir in Buffalo.
It was free etertainment, brought to you by one of the best djs in Buffalo (actually I'm not sure who he was; someone one of the video guys knew). I felt very chic because I owned at least two of the CDs he had in heavy rotation (Portishead's Dummy, which my new journal music is from, and Sublime's self-titled album), and he was scratching like a mofo-- he had a really neat rig but I won't go into the details here.
And they had the game on in the background, of course! Z and the video guys were in the back room, and they had the projector set up with a switcher-thing so that they could easily transfer among three different feeds at varying levels of transparency. The slide show displaying the results of the voting (in case you missed the announcements) had squares chroma-keyed into the background so that they could put live video feeds into those corners-- for a while they had the game going on in those corners, with the slides made slightly transparent over the top so that you could follow the action all the way across the screen.
But throughout the game they had the thing set up so that when it went to commercials, they'd put the slideshow or a live video feed on instead of the commercials.

Babik was playing during much of the game, and they get super-extra-awesome bonus points for being such good sports about it. They didn't care that everyone was watching the game-- they were watching it too! And after one of the goals they stopped, and the violinist played the "charge!" thing. How awesome is that?

The fact that the Sabres won only made it that much more awesome.
dragonlady7 - 05/09/06 18:03
Crap, lost my comment.

BBQ was BW BBQ, Blasdell: :::link:::

Ravioli were Lebro's, also suburban, in Getzville I think: :::link:::

Tsunami is an awesome joint, right on Kenmore Ave not far from my house. Chef A. is a good guy-- the ad sales people love him-- and he's been really annoyed lately by all these other advertisers saying things, in the wake of Kuni's closing, like, "now we have sushi so you can still get sushi in Buffalo"-- and he's all, "But I've ALWAYS had sushi and I'm actually a SUSHI CHEF!"
So I guess it's nice that Tsunami won for best seafood, but really their sushi is superlative. But I haven't had O's (who won the category), so I don't know how they stack up.
paul - 05/09/06 15:11
It was pretty amazing. I was a huge fan of the ribs but I can't rememebr what restaurant made them. Do you know? They were right under the video screen.
scott - 05/09/06 15:06
If you haven't been there, Cleveland makes a good day trip from Buffalo.

The Rock and Roll hall of fame is a lot of fun, there' some nightlife, and it's pretty inexpensive.

I think the Indians are playing Friday night, too. (I'm not a baseball fan, but it's an open-air major league park, which is always a fun atmosphere)
jenks - 05/09/06 14:46
mmm. love portishead.