Dinner party an unparallelled (sp?) success.

ByGwyn Fisher

I ended up making shepherd’s pie based on an old family recipe I found on the world wide wibbly web, with a few adaptations. During my research I found out that I was actually cooking cottage pie, since shepherd’s pie is made with minced lamb not beef. You live and learn. Anyroad, it was well nice and I got to use the Salsa tipo inglesa I blogged about a few weeks ago. And it goes pretty well with tequila, who’d’ve thunk it?

It wasn’t all put together as last minute(ly) as I’d feared because Sita’s first Tequila class only lasted 2 hours, not 4. It was just introductions from the 15 or so people there and reading a few powerpoint slides. So we had time to nip over to Waldo’s Mart (the 99 cent store across the road, well, 13 pesos including VAT) and stock up on extra forks and stuff. It looks like all the people Sita was hoping to interview for her project are coming to talk in her class. Saturday classes run from 10 to 2, there’s no way I could have hacked that yesterday. Sita is made of stronger stuff, it appears.

Next Saturday it’s a field trip to the town of Tequila where there’s a festival of some description going on, I might have to come along for that one. On Friday night we’re going to a Thanksgiving dinner with some teachers from the American school, which’ll be a laugh. Tuesday evening another mate of mine’s coming over for tea and bickies. So the social scene is picking up nicely. The employment scene is also starting up gradually. Jose’s got a few leads, and there’s another gringo graphic designer in the area whom I might be meeting next Friday. Voluntary work appears to be easy enough, though. Sita’s off to staff a creche for the women’s rights organisation today in the town centre. And I’m expecting translation work from the Gwod Metropolitan Park people any minute.

Dcp_4151bAgaveWeb.com is crawling along, I’m a bit stuck for what to do with the site and need more inspiration. I was playing with rounded corners, first using CSS, then giving in and going back to the dark age of tables. I’ll work something out… Jed themed maybe? A lengthy flash animation of a black tail in bracken, then Jed jumps out, frisbee in mouth into a puddle. The muddy water splashes the camera and a menu pops up with options…. No that has nothing to do with Agaves. I’m open to suggestions…

We planned to see Harry Potter yesterday but Sita was too knackered after a late night and academic stuff, so we watched War of the Worlds on DVD instead. Maybe today… keep your eyes on the “Media Box” on the right for my two cents. Harry III was my first review for this website… June ‘04 seems like a while ago. Well, it was…

and finally, here’s a video currently doing the rounds on the interweb of GTA playing grandma. More non-sequitur-riddled-posts coming soon…

Similar Posts

Shipwrecked

It had just started to pour down so we though we’d head for the bookshops in Chapultepec and then a restaurant, so we jumped in a taxi and checked out the bookshops for some scholarly tomes and investigated the space where Sita’s doing her talk next week. All v. nice though they didn’t have the books we were after. Anyroad, then it really started to piss it down, vertical sea type stuff with hail and all, and within a matter of minutes cars were practically floating past. A bus crossed the central reservation and everyone went searching for higher ground. After an hour or so it stopped but the streets were still rivers and it became an urban jungle type scenario having to edge around walls and find lower waters and all that. Quite fun, but I soaked the only shoes I own (except me flip flops). Anyroad we went to Funicular to eat and then Sita stayed home and watched crap on the telly and me and Jose went round Fernando’s for snacks and ales and met some more really sound friends of theirs. Fernando shot some nice footage of the floods and if he sends it to me as promised I’ll post it… On the way home I had my first tacos de carnaza in Av. Americas, and they were surprisingly good, even though you can eat anything at 3 in the morning and it’ll taste good. “Al buen hambre, no hay pan duro” can be your Spanish phrase of the week… “when you’re really hungry, there’s no such thing as stale bread” is a rough translation.

And for your word: naufrago – Shipwrecked person.

Jose’s been trying to persuade me to put this one in too, but I’m buggered if I can translate it decently: El que es perico donde quiera es verde y el que es pendejo donde quiera pierde. Literally: “He who is a parrot, wherever he goes, is green, he who is an idiot, wherever he goes will lose”…. more loosely, “A parrot will always be green and a loser will never win” and looser still “You are who you are no matter where you go”. It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue for me mind…

Plans for today, you ask? Translate a load of Sita’s talk, and then Superman and bowling/pool. Stu and Anne rang me this morning at 9:30 when I was fast asleep, but it was 3:30am their time in NZ so I couldn’t complain. Nice to reverse the situation a bit there. That’s yer lot for now. Sorry bout the lack of posting lately, I’m all involved in the LAUlens site, trying to get it to do discounts on bulk orders and suchlike, and am back updating one of my first sites from 2 yrs ago, GO joven. Have a grand weekend, cheers : )

I do the heavy lifting, and Sita does the thinking

I can’t believe how good the house looks after less than a week. We’ve got cable plumbed in, the phone should be connected any minute now, and I’m expecting a package from SBC Global filled with DSL goodies to get back on the interweb… Still to do this weekend: Build the bunny-containment-facility in the garage, hang up me clothes, decorate my little corner of the office, investigate 5.1 surround sound possibilities for the living room, fix the truck’s indicator light, clean/sterilise 629 Koshland way and move the plants, mow the lawn, plant some “erbs”, reestablish contact with family and friends… I’ll be busy alright. The joyous news is that next week I’m on holiday and will relish the chance to relax and get things done at a slower pace. I’m planning on sorting out my electric guitars and amp and introducing the neighbours and anyone else within earshot to solo renditions of Levellers songs. Should even fit in a trip to Downey to feast on turkey, ham, pecan pie and mashed preta (which is Irish for spuds, though the spelling may be off a tad…) . Sita, meanwhile, has 800 pages of papers to mark (grade in American) from the Hip Hop Culture (nothing to do with rabbits) class she TAs for. Eeh well, more “news” soon once the information superhighway gets funnelled into the house.

Dog is my co-pilot.

dogismycopilot (16k image)

Cheers for the e-mails, Mark & Annelise. Off to play scrabble now will write soon…

Rim to Rim to Rim attempt

Rim to Rim to Rim attempt

This attempt at running from the top of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim to the South and back had been on the cards for the best part of a year and all my runs over the last year or three have kind of been leading up to this. Having to say goodbye to the best dog in the world, Atticus the day before almost made me cancel but you don’t get opportunities like this very often… Derek, Jon and I headed down from SLC around 3pm on Friday afternoon and set up our tents in the forest about 7 hours later just outside the National Park. Temperatures fell that night to 13F ( -10°C ) and none of us slept particularly well, we were up by 5am and drove to the Kaibob trailhead and changed into shorts and shirts and headlamps and started the descent in the cold and dark as the sun slowly rose. Starting a trailrun downhill is very different to the usual hard uphill and though I should probably have saved my energy, we got to the bottom in under 3 hours and it might be the best trail I’ve ever run, the going was soft and mostly wide enough to pass people okay, the views were magnificent and ever changing with the light and elevation, and the temperature was perfect and shaded all the way down. Any new trail is fun but I’d never been into the actual Grand Canyon before and the scale of everything is just ridiculous for a country lad like me. As good as it gets really.

After crossing the Colorado river and waiting for the mule train to go past delivering luggage and supplies to the folks staying at Phantom Ranch, Derek and I began the ascent, by this point it was getting hot. After getting about halfway up to the rim I wasn’t doing great and the temperature (it hit around 85F (30C)) and incline was only going to get worse. There was also the small matter of getting back the 18 odd miles to the North Rim, so I decided to give up on the R2R2R goal and just make sure I got back okay. Derek, who is made of sturdier stuff and has done this madness before, carried on and made it to the top (South Kaibob trailhead) while I waited down at Phantom Ranch and then we did the long ascent back to the car together. By the end of it I was pretty beaten up and limped over the finish line about half an hour after the sun had fully set and we made it to the Saloon in North Rim in time for Bright Angel IPAs before heading back to the tents. Maybe this time next year I can try again now I know better what is involved. A warmer sleeping bag is first on the list and more training on ascents in full sun/ heat. The full R2R2R that Derek did is 20,000 feet of ascent, 46 miles and I managed about 14,500 over 37 miles or so. It’s by far the furthest I’ve done in a day Map of the GPS recording (10 KM further that the 50K a fortnight ago) but I’m still a disappointed I didn’t do the full thing. Maybe next year. I should have a better phone by then too… these photos could have come out better, with such different light levels and the massive scale of everything it was hard to take decent shots but these give an idea. Photos of me courtesy of Derek. Decided not to include the one of me looking very pale post puke on the way up…

Unforgettable.

Follow me…

One of the sessions I enjoyed at WordCamPDX last week was on “Tying your tubes” about funnelling all your internet activity into a “lifestream”, a list of your activity on various social sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Reader and the like. The main thrust of it was how to include it in the sidebar using a couple of plugins, but I reckon this blog has enough going on in the sidebar without any more clutter… so, if there’s nothing much to hold your interest on this page, try the brand new LifeStream link on the top right to see what I’ve been uploading/favouriting/sharing around the interwebs. There was all kinds of things to do with Twitter too, but I still can’t work up the energy to tweet regularly. It’s all I can be arsed to do to tell Facebook what my “status” is every few days.

Also, if you were thinking this blog is taking even longer to load these days, it might be because I added a weather widget to the left sidebar. So if you’re wondering how wet it is today in Portland, scroll down a bit and on your left you’ll wonder no more.

This morning we went to the Farmers Market on the PSU campus downtown. I think Mum and Dad were doing something similar in North Petherton. But I’ll bet there weren’t any monkey heads on sale there…

Please don't handle the Monkey Head
Tribbles

Santa Teresita, where the market down the road is

composite_santateresita Click the picture for bigger, it’s a composite of 26 photos I took on Sunday standing in the market by la Iglesia Santa Teresita. Browse around on Flickr and you’ll also find pictures from La Barranca, the huge canyon where Guadalajara suddenly comes to a grinding halt. It’s also where the UdeG school of architecture is, so on weekdays the park is full of furtive young couples carrying their blueprints around in cardboard tubes. Lovely.