slow food event at our house

i can't believe i've neglected to put this on my blog before today.

Slow Food Columbia Presents:

Local Beer Tasting - October 11, 2008 from 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Beer Tasting with small food pairings
Olympia / Columbia, SC
Saturday, October 11, 2008 - 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
$30 for non-Slow Food members; $25 for members

Slow Food Columbia is hosting a casual local beer tasting which will take place at the home of Waldie, an active member of our convivium. We hope you will join us as we welcome from Greenville, local beer expert Brian Cendrowski.

I think the best quotation from Brian's bio - and the most fitting for Slow Foodies - is the following: "For Brian, it isn't just about the beer, it's about the people and the relationships that beer brings together."

So please join us! We're selling tickets online only for this smaller, more laid-back event. Tickets must be purchased in advance, online and cannot be bought at the door.

BUY TICKETS TODAY:http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/44977


More information here.

great dinner

roasted sweet potatoes with butter

indian-spiced chickpea salad with yogurt and herbs

spiced mustard greens with cumin

pumpkin pie

cursed machinery

remember how i sung the praises of the bread machine that i just got? well, i bought the ingredients to make a second loaf of bread yesterday and wouldn't you know but the little paddle thing (a necessary part of the machine) was totally missing! i searched high and low and just cannot find it. and, since it's a discontinued model the piece was hard to come by and i ended up paying $23 for the replacement. that's my luck for ya!

doozer inspects the alien visiting the house

last weekend

i never really wrote in detail about what we did last weekend when my parents were in town. so here it is.

they arrived wednesday night and left on monday morning so we had a good long 4 day weekend to chill and do fun stuff.

i already mentioned that bo put in a dishwasher for us. here's a picture of it.

a God send!

thursday night we were tired from installing the dishwasher all day and the house was a wreck so we took take the parents out to one of our favorite restaurants in town. yummm! be bim bop!

friday, baldman had to work so he stayed in town, but mom, bo and i headed to the mountains to visit my uncle in boone. what a great town that is! we just hung around the town, walked in a few shops, went to dinner with my aunt and uncle and then the 5 of us took off to cross the border into tennessee to go to an antique auction. i love auctions. it's like a lost art. and i find it fascinating to see what people bid and do not bid on. i got a lot of interesting stuff there*.

here are a few picts of boone, (i'm sorry i didn't take more).





we got home way late friday so us old folks were about spent for the rest of the weekend. we walked around thrift stores and then headed home for a rest and a home cooked meal and time to spiff up for an nice evening out. a few weeks ago a very considerate friend of ours gave us season tickets to the south carolina philharmonic. because they were season tickets we also got 2 free additional tickets to any show of our choice. so, that being said, saturday was opening night and we all got to go! the show was fantastic and the new music director was really lively! it was great fun!

after mass on sunday we headed to the greek festival. man, that place was packed! they even expanded it this year, but it was still packed. and for the first time since we've been attending (5 years), they were sold out of most of the good food. the veggie plate was gone. the spanekopeta was gone. the baklava was gone. geeze, what did we go for!? but we scrounged a plate together anyway and enjoyed the good weather and people watching.




*"interesting" is sort of a polite way to say junk. but, to be honest, it really wasn't junk. my uncle had a great time bidding on things and then say, "i bought that for you!" so i got a great dresser which my mom bought me, a watermelon rug (the most interesting find), and a cool oil lamp which is missing the dome on top.

speaking of new machinery

my stepdad and mom brought down a new-to-me dishwasher this past weekend! how cool is that!? i spent thursday helping* bo hook it up and by thursday evening we were in business. what!? oh yea!


*i mean, basically i stood there watching and occassionally handing him tools. but honestly, i feel like i learned a lot.

bread machine follow-up

this weekend i made my first batch of bread in my new machine. it was awesome! so easy and it turned out great! i highly recommend getting one if you don't already have one!

company tomorrow

yippee! my parents come tomorrow! woohoo! oh, what fun we shall have.

my r2d2 breadmachine

we went to some friends' house last night and they gave us a bread machine. i'm so excited about it! she bought it used from craig's list but then ended up acquiring another one, so she never used this one anymore. i love fresh-baked bread, so i'm super excited to get started using this. so i downloaded the owner's manual tonight and looked over it. it seems fairly straight forward.

now to try some recipes.... if anyone has any they'd like to share here, post it in the comments. i'd love to try them!

she's too funny

when we were at the slowfood columbia event a few weeks ago, baldman and i met anne postic a blogger and occasional writer for the free times. i had read her blog a few times before meeting her and remembered that she was fairly witty. we had a pleasant and humorous 10 minute conversation with her at the dinner that night and that was that. but since then i've added her personal blog (as opposed to her more professional blog) to my daily blog feed. she never lets me down. every time i read her blog i laugh out loud. so i've added her link to the toolbar at the side of my page.

if you're inclined to check her out, go back to monday's post. it really had me laughing.

congrats!

baldman's mom got a job today! congrats! we're so proud of you!

silence

i felt like i should've posted something yesterday to mark the 7th anniversary. but i didn't know what to say. so i just said nothing.

miraculous mailman

this evening when i came home from work i walked to the side of the house and noticed that there was a box sitting on our screened-in porch.

i thought, "hmm, i must've left the door unlatched yesterday."

pull. pull.

the door didn't budge. it was still locked.

i walked around to the front of the house, went in the front door, and then through to the side porch. the box was a package which was delivered by the mailman and left sitting right in the middle of our porch.

the thing is, when baldman's bike was stolen we put a new hook and eye lock on the door and purposely put it in the way upper right-hand corner of the door, where it would be next-to-impossible to unlatch and sneak onto our porch.

but somehow the mailman managed to unlock the door, put the package on the porch and relock the door. baldman and i examined the door for a good five minutes and we cannot figure out how he could've done it.

unsettling. or amazing!

stellar weekend

yesterday i pulled myself out of bed a lot earlier than i wanted to. but, thanks in part to my fellow-garden-loving coworker, i had a fire in me to get the garden ready for fall. so i plowed everything down that was finished or that never even got started, turned the dirt, made it all pretty, and planted 2 sets of onions, 2 sets of carrots, spinach, italian greens, and lettuce. this is my first try at fall gardening so i hope these things work out. i'll let you know. but the garden looks all pretty again with freshly tilled earth and no weeds. and, man! did we have weeds. the vines that made homes beneath the garden were ridiculous! so if nothing else, i eradicated a whole bunch of yucky junk.

yesterday evening we had a bunch of tanzanian's over for dinner. we had excellent food and even better company. plus we got to eat outside in the back yard, which was totally enjoyable!

today was full of shop shop shopping. a few days ago i decided that it was high time for me to have a clothing update. i underwent a year review at work recently and the only negative comment was related to my not-always-so-professional clothes. most of my clothes come as hand-me-downs from my sister, which is great. but they should probably be used as supplemental items to one's clothing, not the main staple of one's wardrobe. most everything either doesn't fit right anymore, has pit stains, or is just not quite professional enough. so i headed out to the mall to try my hand at shopping, which i hate doing and am not good at it either (which is another reason why i have so few professional clothes). i had the fantastic idea to call a friend who lives close to the stores. i figured, if nothing else, she would want to grab a drink or something and provide a nice intermission to my shopping spree. to my surprise, and much to my greater benefit, she sort of took the shopping as a challenge for her to help serve as a buying consultant and help me pick out some must have staples. after making several successful (and thrifty) purchases she invited me back to her place where she unloaded a bunch more really fantastic stuff that she either didn't wear or wanted to get rid of. so i made away with a steal! and a whole new wardrobe, really! now the question is, what am i going to wear to work tomorrow!?

hurricane effects in haiti

i heard a little about this in the news today, but there really hasn't been a whole lot of coverage overall. hurricanes gustav and hanna really tore up haiti a few days ago and they're really suffering big time. i received this in my inbox on wednesday from partners in health's listserve.




Partners In Health
September 3, 2008

Dear friends,

Haiti needs your help.
This morning, after watching images of howling wind and torrential rain tearing through Haiti, I received a note from a colleague in Haiti explaining the devastation that Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna left in their wakes. Loune Viaud, our Director of Operations in Haiti, explained that the situation is dire and the suffering extreme. She estimates that close to 10,000 people have been driven from their homes by floodwaters in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley, where we have recently expanded our operations to six new facilities.

We’ve received reports of families, doctors, and patients are stranded on roof tops as water floods homes, hospitals, and health centers and reports of social workers wading through nearly four feet of water hoping to get patients and their families to safety. While the effects are hard to quantify so soon after the disaster, there is a clear and desperate need both for emergency relief and for long-term assistance to address the vicious cycle of poverty, environmental degradation and disease, which is guaranteed to intensify in the aftermath of this crisis.
In an effort to stem the suffering of our patients, their families, and the communities we serve, PIH has taken some immediate action:

* Patients at the hospital in Gonaïves, who were sent to the rooftop as the wards filled with water, are being evacuated to Hôpital Saint Nicolas in Saint Marc.
* Our social work staff is doing whatever it takes to find our patients and their families in the most devastated areas and to ensure that they have all of the support and assistance they need.
* Organizational partnerships and community-level collaborations are underway to ensure that those who have been displaced or lost all of their belongings have food, water, housing, and a place off of the wet ground to sleep.
* Our hospitals and health centers are preparing for thousands of additional patient visits in the coming weeks and are planning long-term reconstruction and support efforts.

We ask you, now, during this time of tremendous suffering, to take action with us. Please help us keep our promises to the communities we serve as we provide additional services and support in the wake of this unforeseen, and certainly unbudgeted, disaster.

Please consider an additional gift to Partners In Health’s work in Haiti today so that we may respond swiftly during this time of crisis and continue to support our patients and their families in the months to come. Donate online and visit our website for more information and updates in the coming days

As always, thank you for your support. We cannot do this work without generous partners like you.

Sincerely,

Ophelia Dahl
Executive Director