On our last trip to Trader Joe’s we picked up a sample of what we thought was plain popcorn. Thirty seconds later we’re grabbing bags of the stuff and threatening the kid behind the counter if he’s holding out on us. Trader Joe’s Kettle Corn is a delicious snack that can be enjoyed by those that like sweet or salty snacks. To me the real magic about the Kettle Corn is the mix between sweet popcorn kernels and salty ones. instead of trying to make all of the kernels sweet and salty like other kettle corns, each Trader Joe’s kernel is either salty or sweet, leading to a different taste sensation with every bite. Get to your nearest Trader Joe’s and try it out today!
I spent yesterday evening playing with the Wordle website, which lets you input text or link to your del.icio.us tags and turn them into very cool word cloud graphics. The frequency of words or tags determines the size in the cloud, and the website lets you pick how the words are oriented, the font and the colors. I ended up putting in the lyrics to The Victors , the University of Michigan’s fight song. The result is now my new desktop on my laptop and is posted below. (click to see the whole image)
I love to grill from Spring to Fall. In preparation for the upcoming July 4th weekend, Kristen and I made ribs today.
They were delicious! Click More to see how we made them.
Last May we visited the Huntington Botanical Gardens while in town to see Amie and David. What’s great about the gardens is that they have different types of flora and fauna setup up throughout the grounds in settings close to where they would be in nature. They also have some great theme gardens, the Japanese garden was amazing and made you feel like you were in Japan itself. I took this picture on the way out of the gardens. I like the contrast of the color of the blossoms to the clear blue sky. I also like the background of the building and the people being slightly out of focus, it looks cool.
I’ll post more pictures from the road in the future, please comment on what you think about the pictures.
Since Battlestar is on break until god knows when, I’ve decided to revisit some of my favorite books and movies over the Summer. Its great because I get to enjoy some of my favorite things, but also because sometimes I find or realize something that I didn’t during a previous viewing/reading. Yesterday, I finished reading Naked by David Sedaris and tonight I am going to start Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. I’m a huge Clancy fan and Red Storm does a great job of playing “What if?” with a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact battle. I also had the computer game when I was in 6th grade and at the time thought that games could not get any cooler.
As for movies, tonight I saw Blade Runner for the 15th time. This time it was the 2007 Final Cut Edition,which as far as I can tell added a few more scenes than before, and I still don’t understand how people can say that Deckard is a replicant. Ridley Scott does a good job painting a sort of negative utopian future in a way that sci-fi fans will eat up and leave everyone else scratching their heads.
At my brother’s urging, earlier this year, I got the audiobook of the short story that the movie is adapted from, “Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Phillip K. Dick. The story is a little more darker and dreary than the movie, but is a great science fiction story and in some areas surpasses the movie.
