The Best Thing Ever

Man, I think I'm totally going to have to go to Dublin one of these days for the Street Performance World Championship.

Here's 2008 champs The English Gents:


Check out Gamarjobat, too. They're something else.

Eventful and Enlightening

The excitement's been thick on the ground hereabouts lately. Yesterday we went to see the Dalai Lama speak (it was very cool, even though we had nosebleed seats) and went to a sake tasting party with Anita's Zen buddies. Lots of good food and tasty beverages. I feel well and thoroughly enlightened.

In non-Buddhist entertainments, Friday we went to see WALL-E, which was a cute little movie; not as good as Ratatouille or The Incredibles, but well worth seeing, and this afternoon we're going to hunker down and watch Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog. Get it while it's still free!

A good weekend.

Found it!

"The thing I like about the Nashville Jug Band is they put the jug first. So many of the musicians today — they play the jug fine all right — but then they put the jug down. You got to live the jug. Every morning, everybody in this band — Ed, Jill, Tommy, David, Roy-Boy, John; Brent, Mike, Sam, Dean, Tom, Too Slim, even old Jim Rooney — they look in the mirror and they say ‘What can I do for the jug today?’ That’s what you got to do. Live the jug.”
—Too Slim, February 19, 1987

The thing I like: when you do a Google search for "live the jug", yeah, sure, the liner notes (PDF download) to the Nashville Jug Band album come up as hit #9, but hit #10 is the good old Prudence Risley Traveling Moonshine Orchestra.

Photogenic Phood Number Phive

On the menu this evening:

• Chilled Zucchini Soup

• Creamy Corn with Sugar Snap Peas and Scallions

• Grilled Mojito Chicken Breasts

Accompanied by a delicious Reinares Vendimia 2006, and to be followed by key lime pie with whipped cream.

Mmmm. Every now and then you need to cut loose. Anita is an excellent griller. From now on, she's in charge of the fire, traditional gender roles be damned.

Biggest Darn Mouse You Ever Saw

Tired of gigantic rodents infesting your home, drinking your beer, and putting the moves on your girlfriend? Laser eyes are the perfect accessory for the cyborg death machine in your household!

Anita's first week at Epic went well. They have a treehouse, apparently. She also has her own office. It seems that the money is flowing a little more freely in the healthcare software industry than in small animal veterinary practice. So far, so good!

A Sad Loss

I came home today to find that the first little green tomato on my tomato plant had disappeared. Vanished! Some sort of critter, no doubt, but this doesn't bode well for the rest of the crop. It was nowhere near ripe.

There are other flowers higher up the plant, so maybe whatever it was won't be able to reach. Sigh.

As karmic balance, Jorge sent out the diversity paper to Molecular Microbiology today, so that's good. Hopefully it'll go through all right. That'll be two papers - only one or two more and then I get to graduate!

Evil City Stringband

Live from the Lost Dog Lounge:



Sometimes I miss living in Ithaca... Got to pick up that banjo again.

She Got The Job!

Hooray! Anita got a job!

One business day after stopping work at the Animal Health Center, Anita got a call from the HR department at Epic Systems, offering her a position in "Quality Assurance". Basically she'll be on a team testing out medical software, doing her best to break it so that it won't have any problems when they send it off to hospitals. It's a far cry from veterinary medicine, but it's a great company, and seems like it'll be a lot of fun. Life is weird, but good.

To celebrate, she made cookies!

Also, we bought a bottle of 18 year old Talisker scotch (her favorite). Mmmm.