Sezmu

Had dinner last night at a fairly new restaurant in town, Sezmu. Very nice place, fine dining. We shared a "beet study" - beet tartare, a goat-cheese beet sandwich, and roasted beets. I had an awesome salad with Port Salut cheese, pear, dates, and almonds. Mich had a spring roll with tuna that came presented like a sushi roll - really yummy. For the main course, Mich had monkfish with a wild mushroom packet wrapped in swiss chard, and I had snapper with "forbidden black rice" - apparently it was originally only served to royalty. Had a sweet tinge to it - pretty nice. For dessert we shared the fudge cake, which came kind of deconstructed - a little cylindrical cake, a small scoop in coconut ice cream, and a caramel brittle-y thing. Nice coffee, too. I was trying to be stealthy with the photo, and it came out dark - didn't use flash. You can see in the foreground the gigantic pour of cognac they gave Mich.

Ask The Pilot

Wow, I've got like three books that I'm within 15 pages of finishing. Expect some book posts upcoming.

This one is called Ask The Pilot by Patrick Smith. It's a collection (or distillation) of salon.com essays about flying, from the point of view of a pilot. Now, I tend to think of myself as a pretty level-headed flier. I don't freak out unnecessarily, and I figure that pilots and flight crews know what they're doing 95% of the time (can't say the same for security screeners.) This book is well written for me, as well as for someone who is freaked out about flying. Basically: Airlines in the US are extremely regulated; if you sense anything wrong on a flight, you are over-reacting. There are enough buffers built in to the system to take care of things. Pilots are blue-collar professionals, not pampered primadonnas. In fact, there is precious little romance left in the industry, more's the pity. Good non-fiction, very informative.

(Book 4)

Babies

Got our first look at my co-worker, Chris's new baby Hannah today. Precious little girl, very sweet but with a good set of lungs when she has something to say. Another co-worker, Mary, grabbed her and wouldn't let me get a picture of dad holding her.

Oh yeah - babies, plural. In other baby news, our branch manager, Tammy, is soon to be a grandmother - she was at the hospital most of today with her son and daughter-in-law. Still awaiting news on that...

Sushi attacker

Hmmm. Somehow I got a day behind on the picture-of-the-day thing. So, bonus picture day! Two photos of our littlest sushi eater! Sofia is turning into a total sushi addict. She loves miso soup, straight ginger, and just about all kinds of sushi that she's tried - California rolls and Crystal Shrimp to start with, but she also sneaks some yellowtail or a Rainbow roll now and again. And inari (sweet fried tofu pockets) were a hit with both her and Julien tonight.

Digital Camera Presentation

I did a "Beginning Digital Cameras" presentation at the library last night - it was about 30 minutes, plus 10 or so for questions. About 20 people showed up, and most of them brought their cameras (some still in the boxes.) Went through my powerpoint presentation, which covered basic photo taking, file formats, storage, editing, etc. It was basically the same program I had done 3 years ago, slightly updated to reflect higher pixel counts, new websites like flickr, but really, not much has changed. I wish I could do a more in-depth program - how to edit and manipulate your photos, for example. That would be hard, though - there are so many different programs, I don't know how I would pick one to focus on.

Snow line

snow
Originally uploaded by turi_b.

The front of our house. You can tell what part of our yard gets winter sun from the snow line - our driveway gets pretty much zero sun. That's week and a half old snow there.

Incidentally, this is the first blog entry posted from our new laptop, sitting at our kitchen table, using our wireless connection. Also first image edited using the GIMP, which I have a lot to learn about...

Cars!

And this one came out a little blurry, but it was the best I could do. We set up soem Hot Wheels track last night, and Sofia was totally entranced. She ran cars up and down it for probably 45 minutes last night. Mumbled to herself the whole time: "Cars! Fast!" I think she's been driving with Mich too much...