Bodegas Piqueras Castillo de Almansa

Bodegas Piqueras Castillo de Almansa is very much a carnivore's wine. It is rich and spicy and complex and oaky, and would go well with a big slab of dead something cooked over a fire. But since I'm a vegetarian, I'll have to get some really hardcore cheese or something. It is also the single most beautiful shade of red I've ever seen. I want to get married in a dress the colour of the single stray drop clinging to the side of the bottle.

Ickiness

WARNING! (UWAGA!) Buckwheat honey sounds like a good idea, but it's
disgusting! It smells like a horse, and tastes like the smell of a horse.
I had one mouthful in a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and I had to spit
it out and throw out the sandwich and the rest of the honey because it was
so disgusting

Blog layout angst

Any design geeks out there? As I mentioned before, I have started adding titles to my blog posts. However, my layout predates titles, and I'm rather attached to my layout and not to fond of any of the layouts currently available. So I need appropriate fonts for post titles and dates. I want the titles to be no bigger than my current date headers, and the dates should either be above the post titles (but in a smaller font) or perhaps in the bottom where it says the post time. Preferences? Any suggestions for good font sizes and attributes for doing this?

There's this thing on TV: "OMG, there might be foreign submarines sailing
around in the northwest passage! OMG! Canada could lose the northwest
passage!"

Turns out "Lose the northwest passage" means "If foreign vessels sail
unhindered through the northwest passage for 50 continuous years, then it
may be considered through legal precedent as international waters."

I think the introduction was just a tad sensationalist?

Things they should invent: personal medical priority record

There's an episode of MASH where Charles works really hard to save this
guy's legs, and is thereby unable to completely restore the nerves in his
hands. Then when the guy wakes up, they find out he's a concert pianist.

I think I'd rather have my hands saved than my legs if it came down to that
since my livelihood, major recreation, and a big chunk of my social life all
depend on my ability to type. However, a doctor would have no way of
knowing this. Therefore, they should come up with a way of having the
patient's priorities listed in their OHIP record. So if I were injured and
unconscious and admitted to the hospital, all they'd have to do is swipe my
health card or look my name up in the computer, and they could find out that
I'd rather have my hands saved than my legs, my right eye is more important
than my left eye, I'm allergic to erythromycin, I really would not mind at
all if I were left infertile, I'd prefer vegetarian drugs if at all possible
but it isn't a matter of religious conviction, I don't want to be given any
religious last rites at all, and I want to be an organ and tissue donor
despite any protest from my next-of-kin.

Tsunami charity challenge

It's a bit late and this isn't the most appropriate medium ever, but I'm going to issue my challenge nonetheless:

If you receive gifts for xmas, I challenge you to donate to the relief charity of your choice the sum total of a) all the cash gifts you've received, b) the value of all the gift certificates you've received, and c) the cash value of any gifts that you've returned for a refund.

It's an easy way to make a generous donation, and you'll be no worse off than you were before xmas.

And remember, if you donate to a Canadian charity before Jan. 11, the federal government will match your donation!

Be it resolved...

I don't usually make resolutions. However, I don't usually wake up every morning to a death toll being announced, so things are not typical around here. Ergo, the few resolutions I have made:

1. Add titles to my blog posts
2. Read more non-fiction
3. Make a point of doing standard smilie socializing with co-workers, especially those of my demographic
4. Whenever I notice a behaviour I don't like in others, figure out a way to avoid reproducing it myself
5. Eventually come up with a strategy to keep my physical, mental and emotional state from interfering with my work. In other words, figure out how to work well when I'm having a bad day. (This is the hard one).

Today I had to talk to my co-worker "Bob", so I walked over to Bob's
cubicle, knocked, and poked my head in. However, another co-worker (whose
cubicle this isn't) was sitting there at Bob's desk. In a fit of
brilliance, I said, "You're not Bob!"

It later occurred to me that we can draw upon this experience to introduce a
little surrealism into our workday. All we have to do is find someone who
is sitting at their own desk like usual, walk into their cube, and say
"You're not Bob!"

Overheard:

"It's called Europe for a reason!"
- an early-adolescent boy on the subway, speaking in a "Well, duh!" tone of
voice. I didn't catch the context of the statement.

Henry of Pelham Reserve Riesling is bright, fruity and dry. Despite the
tangy dryness, it's highly drinkable and very refreshing, while remaining
strong enough to pair with more aggressive foods. I like it!

So they found NO dead animals in the tsunami. I have therefore invented a
tsunami early warning system. All they need to do is microchip a
representative sample of animals and track those microchips on a GPS. When
ALL the animals start running uphill, sound the tsunami warning!

Last night I dreamed that I had a summer job working at a grocery store that
kept being attacked by terrorists. Whenever the store was attacked by
terrorists, I had to sneak out the loading dock and run to the grocery store
next door, which contained a police station. After this happened a few
times, it occurred to me that maybe it isn't worth being attacked by
terrorists every day for the mere pittance one makes working at a grocery
store. After all, I still had a full-time job earning a professional salary
(i.e. my real-life job), and I really didn't need the extra money. But
whenever I brought up the possibility of quitting my grocery-store job,
people would accuse me of being a spoiled lazy ungrateful brat for thinking
that I'm somehow entitled to be excused from the requirement to have a
summer job.

As I was flipping channels, I stumbled upon a clip of Martha Stewart cooking
with Cookie Monster. Now THAT I'd watch!

The one thing I still want to know that the newspapers haven't told me: how
far inland did the tsunami waters reach?

For the past few years I've been uncomfortable about receiving cash gifts
from people who are retired when I have a perfectly good job. So this year
I donated the total amounts of all my cash gifts and gift certificates to
tsunami relief. I still feel guilty though. I'm not sure if it's about
accepting the gifts instead of giving them back, or about giving the gifts
to charity instead of using them to indulge myself like my relatives
intended, or if it's about making a donation that doesn't hurt at all. I'll
have to think about this a bit more.

I stumbled upon a new self-revision technique today: after you have a full target-language draft, revise one page to completion, then do something else. Then revise the next page to completion, then do something else.

"Do something else" consists of a 5-10 minute distraction, like getting coffee, going to the bathroom, talking to someone, reading an article on the internet or taking care of a piece of administrative minutia (comme suite a la discussion concernant alumni/alumnae, I'm assuming that's the singular of minutiae?).

It's slow, it's not efficient, and if my boss knew I was working this way he'd give me a "reminder" about our quantitative objectives. But using this technique (and working with hard copy, not on-screen) I managed to get c.10,000 words of English draft copy all finalized except for proofreading (which needs to be done by someone else anyway) on a day when I hadn't done yoga, hadn't had breakfast, and was in a generally grumpy and non-revision mood.

I also have another enlightenment this morning, but I'm not sure at the moment whether it's a good idea to blog about it.

The reality of the whole tsunami disaster thing hasn't sunk in for me yet. I haven't even started absorbing it emotionally. So I see it on the front page and my first subconscious thought is "Why is this on the front page?" I read every article about it straight through because intellectually I know it's important, but I'm reading with an "I should be reading this" attitude rather than a "This is of interest" attitude. I know it will sink in eventually (it took about a week for Sept. 11 to sink in, it took a couple of weeks for Darfur to sink in), perhaps it's taking so long because the scale is so large, but until it does sink in I just look like a horrid terrible callous cold person :/.

The yoga lady on TV says to passively watch your thoughts float by without getting involved. That sounds like a cool skill. But HOW do you do it?