reesesWeb

WD-50 is not a great restaurant. Out of nine courses on the tasting menu in place when I ate there, I enjoyed probably three. The first shouted "Hey, I read about that Adria guy!" and consisted of carrot juice or soup stabilized by calcium chloride and sodium alginate over a similarly thickened disk of coconut milk. I don't remember the name, other than that it included "over easy" so you can easily visualize the presentation. It was quite good.

I also enjoyed the miso soup with soba noodles. It was a normal white miso, all of $.30 of paste and hot water at home, but the soba noodles were delivered in a squeeze bottle, still in semi-liquid form. I squeezed the pre-noodle goo into the hot miso soup and made my own noodles. I should like to declare that I was well along in the wine-pairing part of my meal, and the clumps were a result of my reduced coordination and the small size of the vessel.

I'll be heading to Manhattan (with a brief side trip to Philly Monday) and back to San Francisco Wednesday. I'm thinking of hitting WD-50 one night, and that leaves another night for some other food. If you're interested in either, or want to head for a drink, drop me a line.

This post was inspired by the most recent "this is how you should live your life" posts on 43folders. I blogbarfed a way-too-long comment that was in poor etiquette, and decided to edit it down into two related posts here. I'll add to it as I remember more things, and I'll add photos the next time I have to pack for travel.

Just like any moving part, the collection of things I carry from place to place is scrutinized repeatedly for ways to reduce weight. An obvious decision, I've separated my car keys from my house keys so I don't have to carry the big plastic lump with me since there's zero chance that I'll be using it.

I get the feeling that this is turning into my travel calendar at this point, and should just publish my iCal calendar I use for that purpose.

I'll be back in SFO from next Wednesday afternoon until Friday morning, which means I'll have a Wednesday evening and a Thursday evening free. Beers must be had, wine must be drunk, sake may be consumed. I can't be too hungover Thursday, but if my pores reek of tequila on the flight back Friday, the only person who will care will be the one in the seat next to me.

I saw this chap while waiting outside Disney's California Adventure¹ and flagged myself as a geek by recognising it as a Star Trek tattoo. Fortunately, I misidentified it as a "Romulan" logo instead of a "Klingon" logo, but that's really beside my point, which is this:

WHAT THE HELL KIND OF GOMER GETS A FICTIONAL LOGO FROM A TV SHOW TATTOOED ON HIS LEG?

I promised a recap of my trip to Dublin, and now that I have a little extra free time, I might as well make good.

I had mentioned before that we had trouble getting out of the US. We did manage to get to Dublin, obviously, but it took an extra day. Instead of arriving Saturday morning, we arrived Sunday morning. However, other than the one-day delay, our flights departed and arrived very close to schedule, much to our relief. I slept the entire flight, other than while eating and watching xXx 2, a movie I highly recommend if you are forcibly restrained in a chair at 35 000 feet over an ocean, even if it is a smaller, pansy ocean such as the Atlantic.

As you may guess, something unfortunate has come to pass.

I logged onto continental.com to check in for our flights from IAD->EWR and EWR->DUB, and saw a melange of conflicting flights. From the summary page, it looked as if one of us to fly to Newark Friday, the other to fly to Newark Saturday around noon, and both of us to fly to Dublin Saturday around 8pm. Calling Continental's helpful phone staff (I am perpetually amazed how great Continental, Northwest, and Alaska Airlines customer service reps are, by the way) cleared up the situation -- after Toronto, the FAA wasn't taking any chances with the weather, and cancelled our flight to Newark six hours early because of a thunderstorm. I don't know if the cancellation was intended to soak up slack in other flight schedules or because the storm cell was too large to be gone by then, but regardless, our options were to pack in about thirty minutes and hop the train to Newark and hope that the flight took off, or wait until Saturday.

I don't know what it is about Americans, but when we travel to foreign countries, we seem to think we're going on some major expedition into the wilds. To this day, I cannot feel prepared for a trip overseas without a visit to REI and/or a Patagonia store.

It's not as if I've spent much time scaling Kilimanjaro or making a solo trek across Antarctica. The roughest trip I've taken was when I was a kid and wandered around France, from Paris, to Normandy, down the Loire, to the Riviera and Monaco, and up to Brussels. Aside from trips to Mexico or Canada, which are little-known third-world border towns outside the USA, I can't recall having been to any place with a less developed technical infrastructure than Prague or Budapest, and both of those have better cell coverage than my hometown.

A somewhat successful trip back to the Bay Area over, I'm now at home preparing for Friday, when we'll fly to Ireland to spend a little more than a week in and around Dublin. It's a bit of a shame to give up our view (part of which is seen above) and the cute little notes from the Park Hyatt housekeeping staff, but I think it's for the best from a pecuniary perspective.