Where do you get your news?

Katie Couric is apparently throwing in the towel on this whole "hosting the evening news" gig...but I don't care.  Well, and you probably don't either.  And based on her ratings, neither do a whole lot of other people.  But I really don't care because I don't get my news from the evening news.  I'm rarely home in time to watch it anyway, and even if I am...I'd rather watch a rerun of Scrubs and then catch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a few hours later in the night to fill me in on what's really going on.

If I watch TV "news" at all.  Isn't that really what the interwebs are for?  I spend my day in front of a computer, and why would I want to watch the news when I can selectively scroll through whateverwhatever.com and pick the headlines I'm interested in?

I'm afraid the days of Tom Brokaw (or, for an earlier generation, Walter Cronkite) may be over.  Those dramatic "breaking news" moments are a little less dramatic when Twitter exploded twenty minutes earlier with all the "news" you need to know. 

I'd rather just read The Onion. 

Southern delights, part 4 - Savannah start

We made it to Georgia, ya'll! (channel a Paula Deen voice for that one - can't you just hear her welcoming us??)  After dropping loads of suitcases and stuff at our ADORABLE Savannah home (of which I somehow managed to only take one exterior picture, on our very last day - come on, Erin, excessive photography is your thing!), we swung by the grocery store to pick up provisions while we still had wheels at our service.  Cut it a little close on time, and we were NOT going to get zapped with one more day of rental fees on the (overpriced as it was) car, so we made our drop-off and took a quick taxi home to throw groceries in the fridge and chill a bit (us, not the groceries...although the groceries in the fridge were actually chilling...ok...) before heading out to dinner. 

Besides, sitting in the Budget office and waiting on a taxi gave us plenty of time to whip out the magical Google devices provided by Pdub and evaluate our dinner options...so we snagged reservations for that night at the Olde Pink House, which sounds stuffy and conjures up images of floral wallpaper and cranky old ladies (at least to me - I think I fixated on the "pink" and "olde" bit), but isn't like that all.  It's a beautiful old house that, granted, has a pink exterior, but also has a beautifully restored interior and serves a damn fine meal.  This was pretty much celebration night for us (we all made manager at Pdub effective July 1, woot woot!, and you KNOW we needed a good meal and a night of festivities to celebrate this...well...milestone...or whatever it is), so we did it up right.  Yes, I'm going to wax poetic about the food now.

But first, our waiter...absolutely adorable.  We spent 2 1/2 hours or so at this amazing dinner, and it wasn't all because of the food.  Love you, Jeremy.  No, really, love you.  Why haven't you called?  Kidding, kidding.

Of COURSE we would like the amazing bread basket filled with biscuits and cornbread!  Oh, and go ahead and bring out that first bottle of sauvignon blanc, if you don't mind.  We'd love to start with the mac & cheese jalapeño poppers, actually...these sauces are amazing!  And yes, I'd still like to dabble in the soup/salad course - she-crab soup, please.  Creamy deliciousness.  And then I'll have the crab-stuffed grouper with green beans and mashed potatoes.  And yes, I'm full, but we'll go ahead and break out a second bottle of wine AND have dessert...that pecan pie sounds divine, would you mind bringing me a piece?

Absolutely STUFFED.  Delicious and amazing.  Fantastic service, delicious food....great, great dinner.  So...we kept the festivities going and headed downstairs for a drink in the rather charming and classy basement piano bar at Olde Pink House (Charleston = rooftops, Savannah = basements...who knew?)...and then over to the recommended-for-live-music Mercury Lounge for maybe one more drink...and then home to bed because we were exhausted.  Excellent dinner and night out with gals.  I love vacation.

You know, I think it was in our favor that the next morning dawned a little on the dark-cloudy-rainy side of things.  Although if it was dark-cloudy-rainy, then did it really dawn at all?  For another time...  I slept in more than I'd been sleeping in, and we curled up on the couch, had a late breakfast, and worked our way through a few episodes of "Sex and the City," which just never gets old.  When hunger for something beyond Honey Nut Cheerios and berry salad finally drove us from the house, we made our way down to the riverfront along Bay Street and managed to duck into Vic's on the River for some much-needed sustenance and a view of the river boats (and cloudy, dreary skies...so much for the oppressive sunshine, but we'll definitely take these cooler temperatures).  More Savannah adventures to come...hopefully without raindrops...

In case you were wondering about the cheese...

...you know, the anniversary, thanks for all your hard work, here's what five years gets you cheese?  You probably weren't wondering about it, actually, but I figured the cheese review should go ahead and make an appearance here on the blog.

And yes, I've been a little blog-absent over the last week and a half or so.  I promise there's a total crap good reason for this - I was volunteering evenings at a local animal shelter, assembling care packages for our troops overseas, putting in extended evening workouts to burn off things like strawberry pie ... obsessively watching the first three seasons of "Friday Night Lights" thanks to the evil geniuses at Netflix who made it available on instant viewing.  Consider yourself warned.  Also consider yourself warned from catching the first three episodes of season four on Hulu and the remaining season four episodes through Comcast On Demand so that you're completely caught up and ready for tomorrow night's new episode.  Yipes.

Anyway, back to the cheese.  I received a shipment of the Cowgirl Collection from Cowgirl Creamery, thereby discovering from a quick trip to the website that my five years of service add up to $55 plus shipping and taxes.  Hmmmm.  Although in today's trying times I suppose I should be happy to receive anything at all.

Back to the cheese again.  I decided to practice for my trip to Spain and have a tapas-ish dinner, celebrating the glory of the cheese with a few olives and piquillo peppers and crusty bread and cured meat.  Not the healthiest of dinners, I realize, but I'm an adult and can eat whatever I want for dinner.  So, when all was said and done, I ended up with this (and yes, I realize how organized it is - have you met me?).

See that cheese in the very middle of the plate?  Notice how it's not quite as organized, and how it's missing its rind?  Yeah, that's the incredibly smelly cheese that actually comes with a warning label regarding its smelliness:

Thanks for the warning and all, but...dang, this was a smelly cheese.  In fact, I'd left all of the cheese sealed up in the styrofoam container it came in just to prevent the smelly cheese from smelling up my entire refrigerator.  And when I finally cracked open the smelly cheese, its appearance and even stronger smell wasn't really doing much to appeal to my taste buds or olfactory senses.  But I bravely cut a wedge...and hacked off the rind to try to get rid of some of the offending material...but I just really couldn't get past it.  It smelled horrible, and I just couldn't handle that when trying to eat it.  Red Hawk...fail.  I had to wash that smell off my hands so I could actually enjoy the rest of my meal.

Come to think of it, anything wrapped in nettles doesn't exactly look promising, either.  St. Pat cheese over there to your left.  Smelled a thousand times better than the Red Hawk, which already had it off to a good start in my book.  And it was edible!!  Not the most amazing cheese experience I've ever had, but I didn't have to pinch my nose to try to get it down, so let's consider that one a success, even if it does look a little scary.

And then...and then I didn't have to try to look past the Day-Glo orange smelly rind or the nettles reminiscent of mold.  And then...I found a winner.  Mt. Tam.  A "smooth, creamy, elegant, 10-oz, triple-cream - made with tasty organic milk from the Straus Family Dairy...firm, yet buttery with a mellow, earthy flavor reminiscent of white mushrooms."  Now THIS was tasty cheese.  Not as squishy as Brie, just a touch firmer, and crazy tasty.  This cheese is gone now, and not because it met an untimely end in the garbage...ahem, Red Hawk.  I just couldn't do it.  But Mt. Tam I could do.

Maybe I should have gotten that crystal bowl after all.

Nah.

Then my taste buds would have been bored.

Now what do I do at night?

Oh, Olympics, how I love you.  You captivate me with your impressive showings of athleticism, emotional and tear-inducing life stories, NBC's truly ridiculous amount of coverage, CURLING, and general awesomeness.  I'm a total Olympics junkie and have spent a slightly obscene number of hours taking in the Vancouver games.

Take that, Trinity.  Ok, the opening ceremony is not the most fascinating thing, but you know how awesome it is with DVR?  Skip the boring parts.  It's life-changing, it really is...the DVR, not the opening ceremony.

Now I give you...random Olympic musings.Pride for your country.  Waiting four years for your next opportunity.  Eeekk!!  It gets me all worked up for these people.

Oh, and I liked how the Vancouver bouquets weren't too girly.  Nice and green, suitable for the feminine and masculine of all disciplines.  Then the boys didn't have to feel too silly holding their flowers.


Female figure skating: yes, there's a part of me that would like every skater from South Korea and Japan to totally bust it on their triple jumps so America can make it on the podium.  But they're also carrying the weight of a nation on their shoulders.  Anything less than gold and these gals are shunned.  Dang.

I love all the stories.  The sheer joy of those first time medal winners.  How everyone comes together.  Mushy mushy!


I get all warm and fuzzy cheering for my fellow Americans...or for the single athlete from countries like Turkey and Hong Kong who want nothing more than just the chance to compete at the Olympics. What guts it must take to make it all the way to the Olympics and go it alone, knowing that you don't have a real shot at a medal, but you can sure as hell take to the Olympic ice and make the most of it.  I knew I would never be a stellar athlete and realized early on that my brain power would lead me down a more successful path than any other muscle in my body...but maybe I'll take up curling or archery so I can go to the Olympics.  Ok, not happening.  But I am slightly intrigued by this "shuffleboard on ice" business. 


The Olympics are waaaaaay better on DVR.  Love you, Olympics, but sometimes I do need to skip a little bit of you along the way.


I will never, never get tired of listening to our national anthem while one of our proud athletes stands atop the podium.  I'm also somewhat inspired to actually learn the words to "Oh Canada" past the dramatic opening "Oh Ca-na-da".  It could be fun - give a little shout-out to our neighbors to the north.


I'm totally a gasper.  Most of my Olympics viewing is done from the privacy of my couch, and Harrison really doesn't care about my reactions at all, but when I was home in A-town with the family for a few days, they were exposed to my...enthusiastic...level of viewing.  My poor sister.  Between my dad and I gasping and exclaiming, she didn't even really need to watch the television - we told the story through our sharply dramatic intakes of air and bold exclamations.  All while chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A," or perhaps rooting on Canada in a sport that our great nation particularly sucks at (ah-hem, curling...again with the curling!  Maybe I do have a shot at the team...).


Oh, and thank goodness this time zone lends itself to decent watching times.  Some live viewing is much better than recorded everything.  Although as I take in the closing ceremonies and NBC's take on the games, I realize I could have many hours of my life back had I just waited for this highlight reel of the last two weeks.  Oh well.  Then I wouldn't know as much as I do about curling.

Televison...possible intervention needed

I think DVR is an enabler.  I spend too many hours escaping reality and indulging in ridiculous TV shows because...I can watch everything more efficiently!!  That makes it ok...right? 

No, it's not ok.  I know it's not.  But at least I fast forward through commercials and the completely irrelevant parts of the shows that focus far too much on sequins and flab.  Which at least makes it a little bit better.

In the interest of full disclosure and possible self-humiliation, I'm going to share my entire list of series recordings.  Enjoy.

1. 30 Rock (it's laugh out loud hilarious!  Liiiiiiz Leehhh-mooooooon!)
2. No Reservations (unfortunately not new at the moment, but I'm kinda in love with Anthony Bourdain and all of the amazing places he visits AND all of the FOOD!)
3. Top Chef (my money's on Kevin - I mean, he used bacon jam and pretty much won over my heart)
4. Biggest Loser (some fast-forwarding involved here, especially since spunky Rebecca got the boot)
5. Glee (I LOVE musicals and therefore LOVE this show, even if there are some cheesy plot holes.  I almost bought the soundtrack.  I am in LOVE with this show.  Apologies for the three uppercase loves.)
6. The Office (Must See TV still exists!)
7. Modern Family (loving it more every week - yay for funny new shows)
8. Daily Show (dose of liberal)
9. Colbert Report (dose of conservative)
10. Iron Chef America (culinary showdown, baby)
11. Barefoot Contessa (I pretty much want her kitchen and her job)
12. Tyler's Ultimate (most of the savory ultimate recipes involve bacon - it has to be good)
13. Dancing With the Stars (I can't help it - the sequins...shiny, shiny!...draw me in)
14. Mad Men (WHY did Season 3 have to end?!?  I'm going through withdrawals on Sunday nights at 10 PM)
15. Crossroads (I delete about 80% of these, but sometimes there's some pretty cool music)
16. Project Runway (this season has been subpar, but I'm sticking with it - go back to NYC!!)
17. Inside the Actors Studio (James Lipton is wacky, but if there's someone on I care to know a little bit more about, I'll tune in)
18. Amazing Race (I kinda want to be on this show.  Or maybe I just want a whirlwind tour of the world...without the crazy challenges.)
19. Community (funny...and then not so funny...and then funny again.  I can't decide if I'm keeping it or not)
20. Survivor: Samoa (yes, yes, I've been a Survivor person this season, which I'm a little ashamed to admit.  But...the social dynamics are kinda fascinating this time around)
21. How I Met Your Mother (I'm finally all caught up on this one and watching the current season!)
22. Say Yes to the Dress (don't judge - it's amusing background noise, and can't a girl dream sometimes?)
23. Next Iron Chef (it's filling the Sunday night void left behind by Mad Men)
24. Julia/Jacques Cooking at Home (have you ever watched this?  Julia and Jacques are hilarious!!  I love how she orders him around)

I also have every episode of Planet Earth saved.  And some assorted movies, just in case.

Caveat - I do not watch all of those shows religiously.  Some sit on the DVR forever or hit their four-show save limit and cycle in and out.  But maybe I should get away from the TV and do a little bit more living.

Oh, wait!  Glee's on!

MIA

Not even MIA, really, more just MIP - missing in posting.  As in posting blog entries.  How is it October 18th??  Yes, I started a new job two weeks ago (still at Pdub, of course, just rotated into my next group - international tax, woohoo!), and I've been working a little bit later, and there have been bouts of blah weather that make me curl up under a blanket and watch mindless television rather than doing anything remotely productive, AND I've spent an absurd amount of time researching and testing and finally purchasing this:

My new baby, the Nikon D5000, complete with starter lens so I can figure out what I'm doing before investing wads o' cash in another one.  Major props to Mom and Dad for generously chipping in on the purchase (happy birthday to me!), and I CAN'T WAIT to play with this thing.  And learn all about cool things like aperture and f-stops and filters.

So, there are my lame excuses for being a bad blogger, but rest assured that I'm still alive and kicking and there are stories to come.  Especially since CBS has yet to realize that they should probably plan on the afternoon NFL game running late and adjusting their programming accordingly.  Just how many interceptions can two teams throw in overtime?  Someone win this game already!  I'd rather be watching Amazing Race!

Where have you been all my life?

Welcome home, Erin! What are you in the mood for today? Some culinary adventures, perhaps the latest sports headlines? A dose of news mixed in with comedic writing, most notably of the Colbert or Stewart variety? Oh, if you had a long day at work, Anthony Bourdain's biting sarcastic wit might just push you over the edge, so maybe you'd rather wind down with some easy laughs from those adolescent-year sitcoms. Really, whatever you'd like, just let me know.

Is that your phone ringing? Don't worry, just pause me and I'll be right here waiting for you. Take as long as you need!

What was that? A fire truck screeching its way down 5th, temporarily robbing you of your ability to hear anything, most notably the comments at judges' table on Top Chef? Quick rewind coming right up! You won't miss a thing! Oh, and did Fabio's Italian lilt garble his words a bit? We can back right up and catch that again, too.

Remember last Sunday when you didn't realize a new season of Amazing Race was starting until you caught the last ten minutes of the premiere? I've got it all taken care of - Travel Channel is showing that episode again (what a great agreement, CBS and Travel Channel!) later this week, which you probably didn't realize, so I'll just save it for you and you can catch up whenever you have some free time.

An extra-long episode of Top Chef? That's ok, I promise I won't switch over to the Daily Show - I know Top Chef means more to you, so I'll make sure to get all of that one. You've gotta have your priorities!

Oh, DVR, where have you been all my life?

Planet Earth is a pretty rockin' place

I have to admit that I'm a bit of a Discovery Channel junkie. It's in my usual suspects for channel flipping, and more often than not I find myself drawn into the workings of a crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea and whether or not a car can be blasted fifteen feet in the air with the water pressure from ten fire hoses. Lately I've been catching reruns of Planet Earth, and I realize how very little of our planet I've actually seen and how much there is to know about it. I'm not saying I'll ever base jump into a cave (well...maybe....but probably not) or encounter a colugo gliding through the Malaysian rain forest, but there's some pretty cool stuff going on out there that's outside of my knowledge realm. Did you know that there are pretty much a bajillion kinds of penguins and that some really neat glowworms live in massive caves and that time-lapse video is just ridiculously amazing AND that Coke pretty much got it right with the cuteness of polar bear cubs? I've grossly oversimplified what you actually get out of watching, so just take my word for it...better yet, try to catch it in reruns or add it to your Netflix queue. Check out the way cool shark video, and I highly recommend wasting a little time in front of the TV to take in some of the amazing scenes from this project.



And yes, they're also showing episodes on Animal Planet, and I'm watching it right now. I'm avoiding the adult things I need to do, such as changing my address in eight million places and sorting goods into come with me/go in peace to Goodwill/what can I get for you at Half Price Books piles. It's for the sake of knowledge, though! And never-before-seen footage of adorable baby animals!!