The thing annoying me most today: The manager of the apartment complex I live in will bring the trash dumpsters to the curb, but then leave them there. For weeks. Not that it's hard to walk out to the curb with my trash, but normally one of the dumpsters is right at the bottom of the stairs in front of my apartment, which makes it so much easier to ( Read more... )

Someone explain this to me: In the middle of the week, in the middle of the day, two different malls in two different cities were packed. Yesterday, I was at Stonestown in San Francisco just before lunch, and the parking lot was full and people were all over the mall itself. Today, I was at Valley Fair in Santa Clara in the early afternoon, and it ( Read more... )

Some of my friends asked me, upon my return, what my top three things about India were. After having been to a part of the world I'd never been to for five whole weeks, that's kind of a tall order. I came up with this list, though ( Read more... )

Being that my last post was in late October, this is probably the longest stretch of time I've gone without posting. Remember when I used to post daily? Back in 2004? But now that I've gotten into the habit of keeping my food blog up-to-date, I suppose I can try to do that here, too ( Read more... )

My nephew Conner was baptized last weekend, and the favor given out at the reception was custom-made M&M's with his name or the date or his little face printed on them. I'm eating some now - and I have to say that it's really weird eating chocolates with a smiling baby's face on them.

I watch a lot of What Not to Wear. Enough that, during a marathon last year, I went into my closet and pulled out a ton of my clothes that I realized I either shouldn't be wearing or just never bothered wearing. And I've taken a lot of their tips to heart: I generally don't wear message T-shirts anymore or wear clothing that looks like stuff I wore ( Read more... )

Several of my colleagues stopped to ask me how I'm doing today, which was very sweet. I also hadn't realized that people remembered that D was leaving town - and going to be in India till next July. At the moment, I feel like it hasn't really hit me yet that he's gone, at least while I'm at work and keeping busy. I know the evenings and weekends ( Read more... )

I went to Coldstone's today and tried their (apparently new) marshmallow ice cream. It was kind of awesome. It had the same texture as a marshmallow, except that it was ice cream - you could push your spoon into it, and the ice cream resisted in a way that regular ice cream doesn't. I had them mix in some brownies, and it was highly enjoyable ( Read more... )

Just a quick note to mention that Target sells pillows that are not only cheap but comfortable to boot. Really comfortable. Surprisingly comfortable. And for only about ten dollars a pop. I normally sleep with two pillows because I like having a lot of height under my head, but the "extra firm" option, which is supposedly meant to side-sleepers ( Read more... )

This year was the first time I've ever really paid attention to the Olympics. It started with staying up too late one night to watch who won men's race walking (and who knew that a 24 km race walk would take nearly two hours?). Then I watched a little baseball... then I saw Michael Phelps win his eighth gold... and Shawn Johnson win her first. By ( Read more... )