Deb's Lunch ... and dinner and breakfast too » library conferences

What could happen next

DebS — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:57:43 +0000

Mark seems to have gotten a case of food poisoning. We went to a place called Villa-O, kind of organic Italian. It was a little noisy, but we liked it. We ate different entrees – I had scallops with a fennel crust served on top of basil vinaigrette with arugula & tomatoes & a few fried potatoes, Mark had the Waygu beef Bolognaise on top of their homemade penne. We shared pizza bread and I had a few bites of Mark’s wedge salad with bacon and creamy Gorgonzola dressing, and we both ate focaccia with herbed oil from a bottle on the table. I tasted Mark’s pasta and he ate a little of my scallops. We cabbed back to the hotel – our driver, who was listening to coverage of the South Carolina Republican primary on NPR, thought Newt Gingrich is going to be the next president – he saw it in a dream. We watched TV for a bit, the remote crapped out, and Mark starting throwing up at about 9:00 p.m. That’s actually how I knew he was sick – Mark’s not, as are virtually all males – not likely to be stumped by a remote. One minute he was standing there with the remote in his hand looking baffled, the next, lunging for the bathroom, and stomach-emptying sounds ensued. I’m not sick. I suspect the oil, or the meat sauce. Or the salad – but not the Gorgonzola cheese, despite the fact that Mayo Clinic told Mark it was the culprit.

Pizza bread at Villa O

Scallops at Villa O

ooops…..

DebS — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 03:09:16 +0000

So far, this is the conference day when nothing’s turned out as expected. First, the meeting in a private suite in my hotel with recruiters from a big library consortium, to talk about placing library school students from my school in fellowships & internships, turned out to be from 9:00 – 11:00 instead of 10:00 – 11:00 like I thought. Then I trekked up to one of the most far away hotels, for another meeting and once I located the empty locked meeting room, realized it’s tomorrow. I was already 20 minutes late for any of the other things I could have gone to in that time slot, plus I was a 20-minute walk away. So I found another of Dallas’s subterranean Starbucks with really well-hidden bathrooms – I assume to protect them from street people. You had to go up a closed escalator and ask the security cop – who directed you to the bathrooms behind an unmarked door.

I had signed up for a lunch – so went and got food, and then proceeded to my next meeting, one where I thought I was my division’s liaison to a larger organizational committee. And there was another person already there in the role. We worked it out without blood after – this was my last meeting; he’ll start now – but I still have to write the report. Shucks.

Not sure what can happen next – here are some pix from last night and today.

The joy of travel

DebS — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:00:03 +0000

I’m in Dallas for the librarians’ conference. On the way, I was stuck in the Denver airport for about an extra hour – Frontier airlines seemed to have lost our pilot, so my plane that was to have taken off at 1:05 didn’t leave until more like 2:30. And why I had to go from Madison WI to Dallas TX by way of Denver is a mystery only Frontier knows the answer to – a symptom of our shrinking airline market – the airlines are all buying each other, so as a consumer, I have less choices of when and how I want to get anywhere. The plane just sat at the gate with its cute little raccoon tail & all. The advantage to the delay is that I got enough work done on my online course so I could send a welcome email to students, telling them a little about what to expect when the course opens on Monday the 23rd.

And I got to do nature photography of the birds that live on gate A30 in the Denver airport.

I rode the train into Dallas, which took about 2 hours – 2 buses from the airport to the train station, and then the train ride itself – but when I stepped off at the final station, I could see my hotel. When I got to the hotel lobby, the line to get checked in was ridiculous, so I left my bags with the bellman, and went for a drink. Even that was little difficult – had to go to the wine bar in the chop house, because the sports bar was too full. And when I opened my credit card wallet to pay for the wine, one of my cards was missing. After some minor panic, I figured out that I used that card to pay my bag fee when I checked in for my flight when I was still in PJs at home, and eventually Mark found the card in the pocket of my sweatshirt, that was hanging on the bathroom door, safe at home.

I did a little searching for pizza, but the better sounding places didn’t deliver, so I went with the bellman’s suggestion – and got a roasted corn pizza and an iceberg lettuce salad for about $15 – and 2 room service beers for another $16. And watched The Sting on TV. Pretty standard for a first-night-at-conference hotel night, except usually I’m with Mark.

This morning I had to get up 15 minutes early to shave my legs – it’s too warm in Texas for leggings or tights. And I did my Rodney Yee a.m. yoga DVD, too. I found the closet Starbucks – subterranean, in a shopping mall under a big bank building – 2 ways to get there – from the bank plaza or enter the parking ramp of another building across the street. And I took pictures of the leftover giant Christmas tree ornaments that are still decorating the lawn outside my hotel – sitting on brown sod.

Racoon on plane wing

One of the birds on A30 in DIA (Denver Int'l Airport)

Group shot of the birds in A30

Platform waiting for the train to Dallas - in the middle of nowhere

Wine bar in the Dallas Omni hotel

Giant Christmas Balls

Giant Balls from above

Beignets in NOLA

DebS — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 02:39:38 +0000

Plate of beignets

Beignets & cafe au lait

Cafe au lait

Even ate (most of) the last one

Bitten beignet - this one's the money shot (ha!)

Ceiling fans

Only in New Orleans

Slippery sidewalks in the French Quarter

This was on the big loom - I love how the patterns in the fabric being woven in makes the weave look more complicated

This is my new kitchen rug - French red stripe

This is what we're gettingffor Ethan - they call it field of flowers

Close up of field of flowers

On my last morning in New Orleans, I went to one meeting and then got coffee & beignets. Then we went and bought rugs, from a place that custom weaves rag rugs, in the Quarter, Lousiana Loomworks, where we’d gotten stuff before. Mark’s got a kitchen rug from them, and I have two, although they’re older now – one of mine’s in the basement by the washing machine, and the other I use by the back door in winter. We ordered a little rug for next to Ethan’s bed in the dorm when he goes to college next month.

Little camera in NOLA

DebS — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:37:37 +0000

Flowering bush by House in a tree art

House in a tree art

Bark of the tree in house in a tree art

Plaque on the house in a tree art

Tree with pink flowers

Food at SLIS reunion - stuff that looks kind of like cat puke is sweet potatoes mashed with sugar & nuts

Food at SLIS reunion - cheese, stuffed mushrooms, fruit, gumbo, red beans & rice

I had a little extra time, so I took the little camera out on the walk back from the convention center to Mulate’s for the (not-too-well-attended) SLIS reunion. I think this is kind of a low-attendence conference in general; no one has travel money, and librarians are still iffy about coming to NOLA.

In NOLA

DebS — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:13:05 +0000

So I’m in New Orleans for the librarians’ conference. We were last here in 2006 – the first big conference to come in after Katrina.

The opening general session started with inspirational videos, like a high school age girl singing “I need my library”. I suppose I should’ve been more inspired, but it’s hard not to be cynical when one of the kids in the vid said he needed his library because high school’s such a noisy fast place.

The real keynoter was Dan Savage. I’ve read him for years – when the ALA prez was intro-ing him and talking about all his good works, I kept thinking, “yes, great, but let him come out and talk – we want to hear him ‘cuz he’s funny”. His current project is it gets better – again really good stuff, helping gay teens, preventing suicide. Even on such heavy stuff, Savage was funny. I noticed that he’s kinda pumped up now – big biceps – but all through his book The Kid, he says that he wanted to have a kid, be in a committed relationship, so he could get fat. Let himself go, not have to workout.

I didn’t bring my real camera. Mark loaned me his little one, since maybe we’ll get one of these new little Canons. Mark says it’s got a really big CCD for a point & shoot. And I could get an SD card for it that has wifi for getting the pictures out of the camera. The theory is that this would give me a way to shoot food while traveling and blog the pix that would look a bit better than iPhone pictures.

I dunno – I tried using the little Canon last night to take pix at the Gumbo Shop, and felt like a dork.

Cigarette butts stashed in a corner of our balcony

Bread, unbroken

Bread, broken

Shrimp Creole

Macque choux corn

Dinner table at the Gumbo Shop

Ceiling fan at the Gumbo Shop

Toulouse Street

Pool at the Hotel St. Marie - in the dark

posted from my iPhone

A week of conferences

DebS — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:10:34 +0000

First, WiLS OCLC Peer Council. The conference was Tuesday, but our friend and colleague Eric Childress came in on Monday, gave a little talk at the library school, and we took him out for dinner. The Old Fashioned was too crowded, so we went around the corner to Underground Kitchen. Eric, who lives in Columbus OH, kept saying he’d been hearing about the Madison protests all winter. He was hoping to grab a sign and use our time waiting for a table to protest. We got a meat board and cheese board – and a vegetable board by accident, because the waitress messed up. I followed with a salad. A nice meal, despite the reviews I’d heard that the Kitchen tends to be either wonderful or abysmal – we were somewhere in between.

Tuesday evening after the conference I biked out to the MACSAC office to have a meeting to talk about teaching some cooking classes on how to use your CSA box later this summer. By the time I got home, I was so cold and tired, I stuffed leftover asparagus salad into pita and wolfed that down. Then Al & I went out to REI to get him a leatherman knife/tool/thing for camp. I had a coupon, plus REI was having a sale, plus I used up my patronage rebate, so we got a $60 knife for $29 something. As Al said cheaper than Dick’s.

Wednesday & today were the Teaching and Learning Symposium. I stayed all day Wednesday, including facilitating a lunch table. Mark & Ethan and I had leftover pasta smorgasboard for dinner – the chicken and asparagus lasagna, and the Arrabbiata pasta that I made Sunday, from the Cuisine at Home recipe that I like, that I first made for John’s golden birthday, 18 on March 18th in 2005. It has salami in it rather than pancetta or Canadian bacon (what Mark uses).

Tonight I came home early from the conference, and made an asparagus frittata with a few strips of bacon, cold cooked asparagus, a dash of cream, 4 eggs, and a handful of cheese. I melted butter in the dish I cooked it in in the oven, and poured the egg mix in while it was hot, to give it a nice crust. I think I tossed a touch too generous a lump of butter in there to melt. Rich, but good. We ate it with challah, and I didn’t butter my slice, to try to average out the butterfat content – seemed to work OK.

Asparagus frittata

Monday night & Tuesday morning on my own in San Diego

DebS — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 05:10:13 +0000

I had walked up to Balboa Park using the Google directions, and that sent me past a community college AND a big high school, at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Just as I was starting to hate all teenagers, and thinking that we should really do as the Brits do (the ones that can afford it anyway), and send all our kids away for most of adolescence (to boarding school), I had to cross a driveway and the kid who was driving out it stopped and backed up to let me pass, and even smiled at me.

Wall I went past - ghosts of grafitti - or paint ball?

On the way back, I went closer to the Harbor, down 5th St., closer to where we’d stayed in Little Italy the last time we were in San Diego in 2003, and I liked that a lot better. I think generally, I like San Diego better farther up the hill, away from the tourist-y, New Orleans Bourbon St.-like Gaslamp district.

I managed to make it to the 4:30 showing of The Fighter – the acting is great, they’ll all get academy awards, but I’m not a boxing fan, so the fight scenes were hard to watch, plus it’s really about how awful people are in families, and that was even harder to watch.

I met Martin & Suzanne for dinner at Operacaffe. We shared bread & balsamic vinegar and oil, and a mushroom salad and some bruschetta. I had these Asiago gnocchi that were really fluffy.

On Tuesday I had time before my flight, so I decided to try to find what I had thought was a bigger Starbucks when I saw it on the walk down the hill the day before. More power to Starbucks for creating all these spaces where people can hang out, but the Starbucks closest to our hotel, in the Gaslamp, had a slightly smelly clientele, who obviously spent long hours there. The up-the-hill Starbucks turned out not to be bigger, in fact, it had no seating at all. The customers were all on their way to work, and the staff had definitely been taking happy pills – the guy who waited on me almost cheered when he saw me haul out my own to-go mug. I ordered a chocolate croissant, and he said, “oh do you want that heated? They’re really good that way!” I walked a little further down the hill, and came across the hotel where Suzanne was staying, in a converted bank. I sat in their lobby – a nice lobby indeed, with high ceilings and columns because it used to be a bank – and ate my croissant and drank my coffee and read my vampire book on my iPhone. So I guess I did find that more upscale experience I was seeking.

Still in San Diego

DebS — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:43:59 +0000

Saturday night was our big night out for dinner with librarian friends. I chose the restaurant – Bice – and mostly it was a good choice. I didn’t like my salad all that much – it was a chopped salad, a pile of dressed, chopped vegetables, with a few cherry tomato halves and shaves of cheese on top. There was something in there that was a little bitter, even to my taste buds that Mark insists are typical middle age female taste buds, that like bitter tastes, like Kale & Brussels sprouts and stinky cheese. Bice was also really loud, and our table for five was large, so carrying on conversations was a little hard. Fortunately our group was all library conference presenter types, so we could all project. I had a pasta – orrichetti, the little ears, with broccoli & spicy sausage. The dish had cheese and crumbs baked on top. All good, maybe a little oily. We split a panna cotta, also good, almondy, but they could have left the sliced almonds off the top for me, and the balsamic strawberries were a bit too tangy.

It became clear that Mark was going to have to leave the conference early to go help with his 90-year-old dad, who’d had an accident while on a cruise, and was being med-evac-ed to Florida. So, on Sunday, after conference stuff all day: breakfast meeting (mini-croissant, decent coffee); lunch meeting as well for me (roasted vegetable sandwich, that didn’t taste liked fake smoke flavor had been painted on the veggies, happily), and a reception with some cheese & nuts & crackers at 5:00, we went to Ghiradelli Chocolate and split an ice cream sundae for dinner.

Monday I had a breakfast meeting at 8:00 a.m. – there were scrambled eggs and hash browns and bacon and sausage. The potatoes and bacon seemed kind of greasy to me, but there were bottles of organic juices and bagels, too (that I skipped). Then I borrowed the wifi at the convention center and worked until almost 2:00. As I was walking back to the hotel to dump my bags and head out for real touristing, I was thinking about returning to Ghiradelli for chocolate, despite the breakfast. I passed a gelato cafe, and indulged in a double indulgence – nutella toast with strong coffee, and re-reading one of the vampire books on my iPhone. I think I should serve this at School Woods – probably without the vampires.

Dinner at Cafe Chloe

DebS — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 02:31:28 +0000

We ate at Cafe Chloe last night, a tiny French Bistro in San Diego. I ate two dishes from the smaller plates selection: frites with trio of sauces, and scallops with candied squash. The sauces were [basically] ranch, a spicy ketchup, and mustard. The scallops came with not only the cubed, candied squash, but also a little puddle of a creamy squash purée. San Diego. Mark & Martin had the beef – the whole place smelled of it when we came in.