I've been a bad LJ poster again -- often lurking and reading other posts, but infrequently commenting or posting myself. The last two items here should help and hurt my posting frequency, so we'll see how they balance each other out. Now, onward to the summary:

Home projects: We had some major enhancements done to the house over the summer. We had ( Read more... )

I finally got around to sorting through the pictures from my trip to London last month. As usual, I was taking tons of pictures for part of the trip, but then took none the rest of the time.

Thus, I have but two galleries to share:

• Kew Royal Botanical Gardens
• London Gay Pride

On Sunday, David and I made our way down to the North Carolina Zoo near Asheboro, NC. The original plan had been to go down on Saturday, but David was up late with his D&D group on Friday night and thus wasn't much up for an early Saturday departure ( Read more... )

Yay! ComicCon attendees got to see a trailer for the sequel to TRON! It's just too bad I wasn't there to see it myself. As with the writer from Gizmodo, TRON (along with Wargames) was one of the formative movies to my early life in the digital age. I expect I look forward to the new movie much as many of my somewhat younger associates looked ( Read more... )

After visiting Thailand and Cambodia earlier this year, it's rather distressing to read that there are troop buildups on the border between the two countries. Of all things, part of the border dispute is over a temple, Preah Vihear, which was just named a UNESCO world heritage site. I guess it's naive to want to just ask everyone to please play ( Read more... )

This seems to be the summer of having work done on the house. The projects (in various stages) include interior painting, new brick front porch and steps, landscaping with a back patio, and a major bathroom renovations, but the one to bring the biggest change to our life is adding central air conditioning to the house. For the first time in nearly ( Read more... )

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I've long been a fan of tortilla soup, but when eating out it can be tough to find it without bits of chicken meat or with chicken broth as a base. I put together this recipe for Cinco de Mayo, based upon recipies I found at Recipe Zaar and several other online sources. This rich, spicy vegatable soup is tasty and pleasantly filling too.

( Vegetarian Tortilla Soup )

Tonight I finally made use of the skills and experience I got from taking the Thai cooking class in Bangkok, and passed that along by way of running a mini cooking class for jontheprophet and . We only cooked three dishes, not all twelve from the class, but we did hit the big highlights: tom yum soup, pad thai, and penang curry (all vegetarian, of course). The ( Read more... )

We are waiting to get in to see Bill Clinton. I think they're going to way exceed their capacity of about 2500 people.