Punderings

We were only a little late doing something for our anniversary, although I’m very late at blogging it.  But that’s OK; we actually did something nice this year.

At a friend’s blogged reccomendation, we tried the Craigie St. Bistrot for a nice dinner out – with the babysitter home with Roxanne!  At the risk of losing the price of a Happy Meal, I will tell the truth: it was wonderful.

The restaurant is almost tiny, hidden away in the basement of an apartment building.  As their website says, their kitchen is probably smaller than yours.  It’s intimate and very subtly but nicely decorated with touches of Frech whimsy and prints all around.  The waitstaff was amazing – not the formality, but certainly all the pleasantness and services you’d expect at any of the absolutely top places in town. I was wondering how the hierarchy of waitstaff went: what other restaurants do you have to work at first, and then where else, before you can work in a place like this.

Since it was our anniversary we got champagne cocktails from the chef to start with – a nice way to start, reminicent of Casablanca. Although the whole menu was tempting, we both went for the 3 course prix fixe, Amy for the veggie version.  Let’s see if I can remember all the wonderful things we had:

Amy had a warm green veggie soup (I forget what) – with an amazingly creamy green and fresh taste.  I had the tempura soft shell crab, perfectly done with some nice sauce and a bit of green stuff as a counter point (oh boy, I’m tired, can’t even remember what it was).

For dinner Amy had a sort of pasta primavera, so to speak: fresh veggies, with ricotta gnocci.  I had the softest, richest pork chop I’ve ever had.  I don’t know how they cooked it to such perfection: it’s not just getting it barely hot enough to cook it without drying; there was something much more – I didn’t know chops could be that – lucious.  I also went for the Vouvray for a glass of white with dinner – the waitress was just right in confirming the choice.  As IO and LR confirmed, while the wine list is only moderately sized (all French, by the way), it’s cheap for the caliber of food you get.

We got the desserts – which each came with a paired dessert wine.  They split the glasses, since we were splitting both desserts.  First a cheese plate – it was me, of course.  Goat, sheep, cow: each interesting and complex on many layers; plus good french bread, dates and sweet fruit, and a touch of bitter greens to cleanse in between.  Then a fruit crumble with a pistachio crumble topping.  Both wines were wonderful – very complex and appropriately sweet without being cloying, even a touch of dryness in one.  Heck, I’m a very dry fan, and I’d be happy drinking one of these with an appropriate dinner myself.
The funniest thing about the staff was the bathrooms.  It’s tiny: there is a front door, and the only other exit is a long twisting hallway that goes to both the kitchen and bathrooms.  Every time a patron goes to ‘go’, the staff quietly says “diner coming thru” and they all carefully get out of your way.

Menus change daily; they are printed shortly before the restaurant opens, after they’ve done their day’s shopping.  Deal that can’t be beat: Wed & Sun, at 9pm, they offer a Chef’s Whim tasting menu for only 39.95!  You’ll never know what it will be, but I can’t wait to try it.

Finally got down to my grandparent’s place on Long Island. It was far too short a trip, but jobs and time factors were a definite issue. My father and friend Karen were down for a long weekend – and of course it was raining all that week too. I always forget just how humid rainy weather can be at the shoreline.

Roxanne did amazingly well on almost all of the trip. It was a lot of traveling in just two days. Of course the new emergency toy I had saved up came in handy: a realistic looking toy cell phone. Kind of silly, but the cool part is you can record your own voice as one of the buttons. That was worth more than a half-hour of silence – er, of noise, but happy noise.

The ferry ride was fine, until they blew the horn to announce departure. I tried to explain it was just once, to say ‘get out of the way, here comes the ferryboat’! Of course the fact it was thick fog across the sound put the lie in that, as they started blowing it every 5 minutes. Even inside that was a bit much, so we sat for a while holding our hands over her ears (very cute in some ways) until she actually took a nap.

Having grown used to being able to stay at my grandparents place, I forgot how difficult finding lodging can be in some vacation spots! Half the hotels and B&Bs laughed at me – nicely – when I asked about a single-night weekend rental. Oh well. We slept on the single bed and the couch at home, which actually ended up fine since with Roxie we were up first anyways.

Dinner was nice – Soundview Inn, where we hadn’t been for quite a while. But my grandparents still knew one of the waitresses from long ago. Roxie did a good job again, although she was so attached to the idea of mom’s strawberry daiquiri that we had to get her a non-alcoholic one for herself.

A quick trip to Wickham’s for pies, some sitting around watching Roxanne play, and a big breakfast rounded out the weekend. Oh, and a stop at Zip’s diner in Killingly, CT on the way home too. For some reason, Roxanne would just not fall asleep in the car on the way back. A hurried lunch, then some fussing, and finally she was out for the expected nap. Phew!

(Grrr, WP isn’t properly pre-dating my posts even though I’ve asked it to. Oh well, no, wait, let me try it this way.)

It’s funny: only my second Father’s Day, and already we all forgot what date it was. I suppose I should have been tipped by William and company asking us all to come out to Sturbridge for the day. But I really thought of Father’s Day as the next weekend, not so early on the 18th.

Not quite what I would have thought of, but it turned out to be better weather than it might have: the forecast seemed miserably hot, but it was just plain very warm. Wm & Lydia and the kids, plus Mim & Dud drove up, and we drove down, and were all pleasantly surprised when we realized that they had a Father’s Day special: all fathers got in for half price!

As expected, we didn’t see as much history – Roxanne’s favorite by far were the animals. The bull (the ring in the nose was a giveaway, I suppose, along with the horns), pigs, sheep (hot!), goats, and especially the chickens. The bonus with the chickens is that they run around the open barn, right past you! Exciting, but also a little scary when they’re almost as tall as you are. We did well: we only overstayed her energy threshold by about a half-hour. Getting in the car wasn’t too fun, but she did take a good nap on the drive home.

Various random factors did end up having us go down to my grandparent’s place on the island the next weekend though, which is another of the things I wanted to do for Father’s Day. But that’s the subject of another post later.

Ahhh… the start of summer. No, not today: not only am I pre-dating this post (sorry aggregators) but I’m not even talking about the astronomical start of summer. No, I’m talking about that first week of summer weather. The second week of June, after some cool and rainy spells, that first week that was warm, sunny, and happy. That was the beginning of summer for me. When the days are warm, and you really enjoy it. Then the night air is soft and not cool, really, but just comfortable. The time when the New England weather finally allows you to wear whatever you’ve got on, without having to check the weather and change before going outside.

That’s the unofficial start of summer.

Ah, I had one setting off in my setup, so some of the spam was being moderated even though it should have been killed directly. We’ll see if that helps. If not I’ll add one another spam tester plugin – there are plenty out there. Oddly enough, this month has also show a big rise in spam to my yahoo account too, which is usually pretty good at catching nearly all of it. I wonder what algorithims changed?
At least most of the pharma spammers are gone, although now the car insurance types have come around, offering… well, whatever it is they’re offering. A chance to click on their website so the owners can have inflated statistics and sell more ads, I guess.

It’s sad. Not as sad as actual criminals, I suppose – spammers are a purely intellecual danger, and I’d far rather have 100 spammers than 1 mugger. But still sad. Must be the weather – raining yet again – getting me down.

Edit: Geez they’re dumb – and boring. It’d be nice – and would save everyone time – if the spam software writers would just respect some basic setting, maybe like a robots.txt-like setting for “No, really, I moderate comments, so don’t even bother since it’ll never get posted”. That would sure save me a few seconds now and then to spam-off all comments, and would save their botnets (or far away country sweatshop workers) time in simply skipping over any sites that had actual spam protections.

Of course shortly the real tech types would simply flip that bit on their blogs and websites without bothering to continue updating the actual anti-spam plugins. But there would be plenty of non-tech types who wouldn’t even know how to do that, leaving spammers plenty of places to, well, spam.

Edit: Darn.  Every now and then I wish I could moderate a spam thru.  One spammer actually says that “I found this site and became happy!”.  It’s nice to know that I made some spammer’s random number generator happy enough to spit out that phrase.