Vacation, all I ever wanted

I’ve been wanting to wait until I can get through editing all the pictures (about 2,000) before I post about our trip. I would never blog again. We got to go somewhere I’ve been wanting to go for a long time:

ICELAND!

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We were only there for two days. You could spend weeks. I’m going to have to go back another time, in the fall, to be able to witness the Northern Lights.

A couple of things I learned.

1) The Icelanders favorite snack or fast food isn’t some kind of seafood. It’s the “pylsur”:

Mine is on the left. We went to “the best hotdog in town” Baejarins Betzu Pylsur. The way to get a pylsur is with everything on it. Everything includes some kind of white sauce, some kind of yellowy-tan sauce and caramelized, French-type onions underneath the dog. The sauces are a mix of savory and sweet. It was really very good.

2) Icelanders love their geothermally heated pools. There are seven, I believe, in Reykjavik. They do pools like we do Starbucks.

3) There are actually trees in Iceland. Apparently the settlers cut them all down. That’s the short story. Icelanders are trying to reintroduce trees that are native to that climate so they bring them from Siberia and Alaska. 

4) Almost every Icelander can trace his or her roots back to the Vikings and Celts that arrived 1200 years ago. This is the Solfar sculpture.


5) Icelanders like to go out. And stay out late. And talk real loud when they’re out walking in the streets in the middle of the night. They don’t get much sleep in the summer.

It was an amazing two days.

The beach and alligators

Fortunately for us alligators don’t reside on the beach. Not on this beach anyway.

We went with family friends to Wilmington, NC and Wrightsville Beach. There’s a park in town with a lake that has real, live alligators in it. We only saw one, which was enough.

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I think Alton Brown tweeted me

I’ve become more and more interested in eating more natural, less processed foods. One thing that concerns me is genetically modified food. No one, to my knowledge, has done significant and long-term testing on how genetically modified seeds affect the humans who consume the food born from those seeds. And the FDA cares not one bit (because the FDA is filled with former M0nsant0 executives. Hmmmm?!). One documentary I watched made the not-so-crazy supposition that the antibiotics that are built into the genes of GM food are contributing to antibiotic-resitant bacteria. My thought is that all these crazy food allergies that kids are now having have got to have something to do with the unnatural food (down to baby formula) that we are feeding ourselves and our children.

I follow Alton Brown on Twitter. You know who he is, right?

His show, Good Eats, is amazing and when we had cable I enjoyed watching it. He would give you the lowdown on a certain food each episode, telling you how it acts/reacts/cooks the way it does and show you how to cook up said food. Well, I follow him on Twitter and the other day I had an ingenious idea!

I would ask Mr. Brown how he feels about GM food. So, I tweeted him: “@altonbrown Being an (awesome) food scientist-how do you feel about GM seeds & food and their effects on people? Wondering if I should worry.” That was all my 140 character limit would allow. As soon as I hit the send key I thought to myself, “that’s stupid. He’s a nationally recognized Food Network personality. Is he really going to come down on one side or the other of the GM debate?” I don’t know if he has a strong opinion on GM food or not, I haven’t searched the internets to find out. I didn’t expect to hear back from him.

But I think he got the message. Later on that night he tweeted this very obscure but loaded with meaning tweet: “All gastronomy is molecular.”

Well, what does that mean? I thought he was telling me that we do need to consider, down to the molecular level, our food and its effects on our bodies. I felt vindicated and prepared to march on in this personal battle against GM food that I am just beginning to wage. That is, until I searched through Mr. Brown’s tweets to get his exact quote for this post.

As I was searching through his tweets, doing due diligence to make sure he wasn’t responding to something else, what did I come across? A tweet in which he is quoted as saying, “Molecular gastronomy won’t replace cooking basics.” Well, crap. I thought he was talking to me. I guess he was clarifying his position on the new fad of created powders and foams and weird stuff that goes on top of food. I had powdered cucumber or something like that recently that topped my lunch soup at the Museum of the American Indian. I know what he’s saying: doing weird things to food won’t mean a thing if you don’t actually know how to cook food and cook it well.

So the verdict is still out. What does Alton Brown think of GM foods? Me personally? We need to do our due diligence with studying them to know exactly what they are doing to our bodies.

Travel Essentials

Of all that I’ve run across, there has been one piece of traveling advice that stands out in my mind the most.

When you’re packing, pack what you think you’ll need. . . then remove half of that.

It can probably be attributed to Rick Steves. That dude knows any and everything about traveling. But it’s so true. Who doesn’t overpack? Even for a quick weekend trip it’s so easy to try to anticipate every situation that might come up and pack to the hilt for each. I’ve learned that 99.9% of the time, every situation does NOT come up and even if one or two of the situations do happen what you were already planning on wearing would probably suffice.

So, good. Got it. For the clothing…and maybe shoes. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop overpacking shoes. But what about all the HBA stuff? I have travel sizes of most things that I use, but now that I’m actually trying to take care of my hair and my skin–I have a lot of crap. It’s like I’m getting older or something. If I don’t continue to use all these magic potions on my trips all of my hair will fall out, my face will fall off and what’s left will be a wrinkly, pimply mess. What’s the point in packing light if I can’t make my one outfit work 27 different ways by making my hair and face cuter and more presentable? Plus, there are an overabundance of pictures taken on trips. You can’t look like a teenage hag for posterity.

For starters I’m willing to leave behind the three different nail polishes and polish remover. Jeez, just typing that makes it sound so ridiculous. But, listen to me first before you judge: I’ve got one color on my fingernails and a French manicure on my toes. Three different colors. I guess I can go colorless on my fingernails and just pray that my toes stay looking decent enough.

But what about everything else?

What do you do when packing for a trip? Do you skimp on your HBA products and do without? Do you take everything you’re used to working with and just downsize to smaller packaging?

There’s a stench in the air

You know that each house has its own smell. You can’t smell your own house’s smell because you’re in it so much. I think the closest you can get to being able to smell your own house is to go on vacation for a long time and do laundry so your clothes don’t have your smell. Then, when you come back, you get an idea of what other people experience when they walk in your doors.

So, it was kind of disconcerting today that I noticed an odor in my house when I walked in after being at the neighbor’s. It wasn’t completely horrible but it wasn’t inviting either. I had run home to quickly grab something and head back over to the neighbor’s house so I didn’t have a lot of time to play detective. I did go through the house and make sure that cat wasn’t being bad anywhere. It didn’t really smell like that anyway. I just couldn’t place it.

I wrinkled my nose, grabbed what I came for, walked out and walked into my neighbor’s nice smelling house. Only after pondering it for a while did I come to some sort of conclusion. I think it’s our pool towels. A mixture of chlorine and sweat. I’m washing these regularly, but it’s been dang hot here lately and people smell after they’ve been out in the heat. Even after swimming. I need to get more towels so we can rotate through them and leave the smelly ones outside.

That’s the only thing I can come up with. I’m going to have to burn a candle before our French tutor comes tomorrow. Or open twelve boxes of Arm & Hammer. How do you say sweaty stench in French?

In my defense, our house is about the size of a bread box so any smell, be it ever so little, can be smelled pretty much throughout the house. SO, even though it probably wasn’t that bad (right?!, right!?) I could still catch the whiff as I entered our front door.

Sigh, Netfilx…or, yep, I’m crazy frugal

Unless you’ve been under a rock or just don’t “do” entertainment you’ve either gotten a notice from Netflix or heard the chatter about Netflix going all crazy with their pricing. Those are my words. I doubt Netflix would see it the same. If anyone is cheap frugal, it’s me, and I’m all for getting something for nothing.

  • New jeans for .47 cents? That’s me
  • Free Papa John’s pizza? That’s me
  • Flying to Europe last summer for $50? That’s me (We went to Europe last summer! Can you believe I didn’t blog about that!)
  • Going to Disney world for free? That’s me (We went to Disney last December for free! Can you believe I didn’t blog about that!)
So, you can imagine my outrage when Netflix considered it necessary to split their pricing of on-demand viewing and DVDs-mailed-to-your-door viewing. I used to pay $7.99 +tax for unlimited on-demand and one movie delivered at a time. That was a good deal to me. I hadn’t watched most of what Netflix offers on demand and we don’t go to the movies very often so we were rolling for a while and our cost per viewing was cheap. Then they increased the price of that plan to $9.99 (plus $1.50 in taxes). Now they’ve notified the world they’re increasing that rate to $15.98 + tax. That’s an increase of 60%, am I doing my math right?

I have some choices to make. We’ve been watching so many shows and movies that it seems we’ve watched all the good ones. I’m stuck now sifting through B movies that I think may be good or may make me want to poke out my eyeballs. Ash and Reagan are now on their second go around of all the Phineas & Ferb episodes. We don’t use the 1 DVD out ability as much as we should. That to me is definitely NOT worth close to $20 a month. Nor is it even worth it to just do the instant streaming for $8 +tax.

I’ve looked into Amazon Prime membership because now they allow free streaming of their on-demand movies and shows. But their selection isn’t very stellar. And the Prime membership is something I’ve always gotten for free through trials, etc. I have yet to pay $79 per year and it doesn’t look like I’m going to start.

I looked at Hulu as well and their membership service just doesn’t excite me either. Plus, with Amazon Prime and Hulu I can’t watch the on-demand selections on my tv. I’d have to watch them on my computer. Lame because I’m using my computer to multitask while I’m watching the movies or shows.

I just looked up Blockbusters video rental program. That’s $10 +tax a month. I don’t know. I think I’ve pretty much made up my mind. Since school is starting back in September and I’m going to have to be a good Mommy and actually go to bed at a decent hour so I can get up before the kids and be all chipper and encouraging and ready to teach each day…I don’t need to be paying any company our money to watch stupid stuff. I’ll save over $200 a year and just hope that if there is something I want to watch I can catch it on Hulu (like The Voice this last season. I somehow rarely watched it live, but would pull it up on Hulu the next day).

So, thanks for letting me rant and hash this out. Free therapy!


P.S. We don’t do cable either.