Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Our first day in Dallas, here for the eclipse (of which the weather is doubtful, but at least we have a couple of days out of town without the kids (doggies)). We got in about 2am local time, pretty much as expected. Had an excellent Mexican dinner in Hobbs, a real jumping place. We were planning on hitting Target to get Russet a swim suit and chocolate, then on to Trader Joe's for plunder. For whatever reason I zoomed out on TJ's, seeing what restaurants are in the area.

And I found one. A French restaurant called Rise Souffle.

It was 4.4 stars with 1900 reviews on Yelp. And it is well worth it.

We had a salmon souffle and a Salad Niçoise, and both were tres magnifique. The salad had seared Ahi tuna, fantastic. The souffle had salmon with every bite. I definitely seared my tongue a bit by not letting it cool a bit after I pierced the top.

We also had what they called a Marshmallow Soup: a carrot/tomato soup topped with what I think were ricotta or similar cheese fluffy pillows shaped like marshmallows with a pesto drizzle. VERY yummy. I wanted the chocolate dessert, Russet did not. We might return tomorrow night just for that.

Iced tea was chardonay/passion fruit, IIRC, and quite lovely.

The souffles take 25 minutes to prepare. It is a very nice slow dining experience. And it is charged as such. For the two of us, with tip, plus an extra $15 for the kitchen, it was about $115. I don't mind an occasional splurge, it was well worth it, and very satisfying.

Reservations are recommended. I called ahead and told it would be about a 45 minute wait list. Gave them my name and phone to get on the list, took us about half an hour to get there, and we were seated immediately! We were given a bread board that had a bread knife/guillotine cutter that was pretty cool! And we were seated outside, couldn't have asked for nicer weather or better service.

Definitely recommended. This place rocks. They have three locations in the greater Dallas area.

The Trader Joes is in the same shopping center, five minute walk away. They also got a goodly amount of cash, needless to say.

https://risesouffle.com/

https://www.yelp.com/biz/rise-souffl%C3%A9-dallas-dallas

This is all LJ's Thespain15's fault, a map of the states I've visited. I've done these maps before, but the last time must have been before I got married.


Create Your Own Visited States Map

Some have just been drive-thrus and meal stops, but most I've stayed in - none have been fly-overs or flight layovers. Back in the early '70s my dad bought a tent trailer and drove the family through a lot of the Civil War battlefield states, up the eastern seaboard, through DC and New York, up to Niagara Falls, then across to South Dakota and Mount Rushmore and Wyoming and down and back to Arizona. My parent's relatives took us throughout the southwest, then my own travels had me driving up to up to Oregon and Nebraska, work had me flying out to Florida and Louisiana, and work and DragonCon had me visiting Atlanta. Then marrying Russet had me back to Ohio then later up into the New England area. So I just have to look at the map and say WOW!

I was a little surprised to see that I've now done 90% of the United States, I've also done day trips into Mexico and spent a few days in Canada, all pre-9/11. A friend moved to Anchorage, I had hoped to visit him and his wife up there, but they since moved to Arizona and now to Minnesota.

Internationally, I've only been to Germany and the Czech Republic. Next year is our 15th anniversary, I'd like to go back to Europe, I know my wife said her preferred next destination for such a trip would be Italy, we shall see.

It's kind of funny. My first boss at the blind school is retired Air Force. When I started there he was close to retiring there. While in the USAF, he'd been all over the world, but had never seen much of the country. He was planning on traveling all over the USA. Same thing with my chiropractor in Phoenix after he retired, he had an excellent motorhome, his wife was also a chiropractor at the same practice and retired at the same time and they just packed up and left, returning to Phoenix for the holidays. A guy I worked with at the Air Force base a couple of years ago was born in and grew up in El Paso, a hundred some miles south of here. Enlisted in the Air Force to 'see the world'. Got based in Alamogordo, a hundred some miles north of where he was born and grew up.

Life can be a funny thing.

I won't claim to have seen all of the country. Yes, I've been in almost every state. But that doesn't remotely mean that I've seen everything every state has to offer. But at the same time, I have little desire to see everything that every state has to offer. I'd rather see more that the world has on offer.

And if you're interested, ask me about any state that I've been to, and I'll tell you a little something about it from my travels.

As I've previously talked about, my working MacBook Pro suffered a casualty: the accelerated video card failed. The solution was to unload all of the accelerate video drivers, which turns it in to a monochrome laptop. Not black & white, but a gray scale laptop. And I'm fine with that. I turned it on earlier this week and tis image came up - in gray scale.




This is the Berlin Olympic Stadium where, in 1934, Jesse Owens, a black man, kicked the cream of Germany butt. Now here's the nasty bit - he was treated better by Hitler than by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hitler liked him because it reinforced his theory of natural selection that Africans were better suited to their environment and it was OK for Owens to beat the Germans at running, it didn't diminish his belief that the Germans were still the master race.

But that's a side story, nothing to do with the photo.

When I started up the damaged laptop and saw what image was the random laptop's wallpaper, my brain said 'that photo looks kinda neat in black & white!' so this morning I took some time to do a little Photoshopping to see what it looks like in B&W, and the results are under the cuts.

As always, clicken to embiggen.
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Yesterday I took my mom to do her grocery shopping. I didn't want her doing it alone as it's bloody hot out there -- right now, at 7:45am, it's over 95f. At the second grocer that we went to, I parked next to a Mazda Miata. Nothing unusual about that, it's a VERY common car that's been around for ages, at least 20 years. It honestly wasn't in very good shape: it had been banged up and equipped with a roll bar, so the owner apparently did some racing of some sort in it.

Personally, I'd love to have one. I've driven one, and it was crazy fun. And the roads where I live, on top of the mountain, would absolutely be a blast in a nice little convertible sporty car. And it's fairly inexpensive.

But that wasn't the cool thing. The cool about this car was that it had historic license plates.

Not a remarkable car, but it was old enough to qualify for historic plates. That, in and of itself, is not difficult -- the vehicle only needs to be 20 years old. I have cameras older than that.

Still, I was amused.

* * * * *

Just now I came across something interesting. I'm in a weird place right now, and by place, I mean mental headspace. I'm at my parents, in this blistering heat, and I'm having to deal with the fact that my dad has cancer. Well, I'm an information junkie, so I'm doing what I do best: organizing information. I'm scanning lab reports and such to PDFs as they come in, such as the full workup for his emergency room/hospital stay, and providing them to other doctors as needed. When my immune system went on permanent vacation seven years ago, I started learning what I could about my condition and possible long-term problems that could result. And I really don't know anything about cancer, just the odd bits that you get from TV, so I went to one of my favorite bookstores and got two books. One that I got I had learned about from a radio/podcast interview with the author when his book won the Pulitzer Prize, it is The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. He is a cancer physician and researcher, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, and a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He is also a Rhodes Scholar. In other words, a smart cookie.

But my second interesting bit of random strangeness isn't about the book per se -- it's about what was in the book.

When I bought the book, used, I noticed a bookmark in it. Nothing unusual about that, but it wasn't my preferred bookmark. Kinda stupid how a person may have a standard for bookmarks, but there we are. Today I have to take my dad to one of two (or three) doctor appointments this week, and I decided that I needed to start reading this book, so I put my preferred bookmark in it. And while fanning to where the sub-standard bookmark was, I noticed a piece of paper. Fanning back to it, I saw it was a boarding pass. Thinking it was a boring domestic flight, I looked at it, and it was decidedly not boring. The person in question flew from Copenhagen to Amsterdam in late September. I thought that was cool, but then again, I'm the weird guy who has standards for what bookmarks he uses. Then I found a second boarding pass, this was a few days later, flying from Copenhagen to Newark. I was a little disappointed in the second trip -- Newark is a pretty scuzzy airport IMO, but sometimes you have to fly where you can, not where you might want to.

The bookmark also had an interesting characteristic: a receipt that showed the purchase of the book in question at the Phoenix airport, Sky Harbor, in 2011 for $18, the cover price of the book, and the first paperback edition was August 2011, so in all probability the receipt was for this particular book.

The question is: are the receipt and the boarding passes related? There's no name on the receipt, except the clerk who rang up the sale, and oddly the boarding passes don't have the year on them. The receipt was mid-September, the first flight was about a week later, the second about five days later. And if they are, when did the book go from Phoenix to Amsterdam, though it may have stopped somewhere first. Presumably it made that trip the day of the sale -- one doesn't go to airports to buy books -- but there is no physical evidence. I'm curious if the book went, more or less, directly from Phoenix to Amsterdam, or what significant intermediate stops were made.

And then there's the fact that I bought the book in Phoenix. So presumably there was a flight from Newark to Phoenix, and the person then ultimately sold the book to the bookstore where I got it. Coincidentally, when we flew back from Berlin to Phoenix last July, we also went from Berlin to Newark, then on to Phoenix.

I am tempted sore to look up the name on the boarding pass. I suspect there is a high possibility that if I were to search, I might find the person in the Phoenix area. Possibly in my vague local area, since the bookstore is only 2 miles from my parent's house.

Is there a point to this? None whatsoever. But they are interesting artifacts that appear to show a book that has been to another continent, then back to Phoenix, Arizona.

Originally, I was going to throw the boarding passes away. But now I think I'll keep them and try to work them in to a role-playing game scenario. I occasionally run a spy game, and they could be an interesting prop.

I posted a photo album on my web site from the camp. Though they're not explicit, they're not much fun.

I'll be getting more pix up tomorrow hopefully from Bad Schandau and the Saxon Switzerland park which was absolutely amazing. Got 'em uploaded tonight.

It looks like we're going to be doing a ten day river cruise from Prague to Berlin in a few weeks. One of the flight options is a six hour layover at Heathrow, and I thought that might be enough time to spend a three hours or so in London. I assume that we could take the tube in and back and wander around a bit.

The question is: would it be worth it or should we just aim for a shorter layover and just get some food and charge our devices? I have two concerns: our carry-on baggage and going back through Customs and security. I assume that if we stay in the airport that we won't pass the Customs barrier and that won't be an issue. But it would be an opportunity for me to get another stamp in my passport, a silly thing, but it is a virgin and UK would be its first stamp.

Fortunately it's only a two hour flight from Heathrow to Prague.

I wish we had more time. I think it'd be awesome to spend the ten days in Scotland and England, but the river cruise sounds absolutely incredible. I know we'll be shepherded around, but we'll be going to some great places and the photo opportunities will be tremendous. And the boat has WiFi! I can post pix en route!


Gotta remember to check with Verizon on adding international to our plan. That, or buy burner phones when we get there, might be cheaper and we could use them for future trips.

False positives 70% of the time and they can be tricked up by sweaty people? One of the Slashdot comments said he was flagged by the scanner for wearing loose cargo pocket pants and had to have the grope.

A few weeks ago I flew to Washington DC for my annual NIH visit. Got selected for the scanner in El Paso, told them no, so we all had to wait for an agent to be freed up so he could grope me. DC, waltzed right through coming home.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jGUyRTjF-WA40GLjIMEo6dFgSxlw?docId=CNG.d76d1890df3edca8dd08181cb6808c7f.881

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/sweating-over-scan-new-airport-body-scanner-doesnt-like-perspiration/story-e6frfq80-1226106381522

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/08/06/0113259/In-German-Trials-Airport-Body-Scanners-Easily-Confused

July 8-10: tiny li'l fanfic convention in Las Vegas (w/Russet). They had a group outing to go see X-Men First Class! (my second viewing, my wife's third). Lots of fun, group lunch at Gorden Biersch, I'm going to push for Bucca di Beppo next year if we go.

13-15: Las Cruces (solo), conducting an HTML training class, Wednesday was Intro, then we split the class Thursday/Friday for Advanced & CSS. It was kind of weird: lots of energy and fun Wednesday/Thursday, VERY quiet Friday. Totally different group dynamic, all the outspoken people were in the Thursday class. Still, it went quite well, and I learned some interesting way to break HTML/CSS....

17-20: Bethesda, MD, my annual NIH visit (sadly again solo). Very nice hotel, the Marriott, but they put me in a handicapped/accessible room initially, perhaps because of NIH paying for it. I certainly don't need those features (for now...), so I asked them to change it out, which they immediately did. Therein was a mistake: the bathroom in the first room was wonderfully large, the second one it's one of those closet bathrooms where you have to close the door in order to get in to the shower/tub.

This trip should be fun, going to have dinner tonight with an old friend whom I've known for almost 30 years now and worked with at two places, but he's now a Washingtonian now and as his parents have passed on, he doesn't come to the Southwest very much any more, tomorrow night having dinner with some new friends whom I've known online for a couple of years but finally met FtF last year. And I'm going to get to either the Smithsonian (Castle) or the Spy Museum for some sight-seeing, so that should be cool!

(but damn, I'm really going to be glad to get home! Haven't spent more than two full days in Cloudcroft in a month and a half!)

Well, not by the time, as I've already arrived. Lots of stuff happening.
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