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FacebookThe Pour de France – Sacramento’s second annual Bastille Day Waiter Race
I didn't have any exciting plans for last night -- just another Thursday, and I figured I'd stay home and work on my backlog of post-processing. Then yesterday morning I got wind via Sacramento Connect that in the evening, a scant three blocks from my apartment, the second annual Sacramento Bastille Day Waiter Race would be held. Now, given that I've →
Modern-day Titanic
Let me start off by saying that not only is this not my video, but it's not my music, and it's not even my idea. John saw this first-person video taken during the tornado in Joplin, MO yesterday, and he had the bright idea of setting it to "Nearer My God To Thee", which is in the annals of history →
Taiko!
Yesterday I rode my bike down to Old Sac with John and Mike for the Asian Pacific Rim Festival. Mike wanted to have some good Asian food, I wanted to see the taiko drummers, and John got dragged along for the ride. Now, if you've never seen taiko (link goes to the Wikipedia article) I really think it's one of those →
Sorry Moose, you’ve just moved down a notch on the cuteness ladder
The stall right across the barn aisle at Moose's barn has been occupied by a pregnant goat for over a month now, and I've been checking every time I've been out there to see if she'd had her kids yet. Well, I missed the birth (Saturday evening) but I got to go out there yesterday and see the wee little →
January 10 on 10: He’s a fame-Moose horse!
10 on 10: Take a photo every hour for ten consecutive hours on the tenth of each month. A horse is a horse, of course of course, And no one can talk to a horse of course, That is of course, unless the horse, Is the famous Mister Moose! Ok, so maybe that's not how it went, but as Moose got to be on TV →
Fanfare for the Common Man
I remember first hearing Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man in junior high (thanks Pop for making us listen to your extensive music collection on the way to school and on car trips -- I'm sure we complained, but I have a definite appreciation for things I might not have otherwise!) and I've loved it ever since I first →
The sock thief
While I don't mention them very often on here, we have two cats -- Jem (black cat) and Scout (tortoiseshell), named after the brother and sister in the book To Kill A Mockingbird. Hey, I was an English major! Like their namesakes, they're brother and sister, and we got them from a feral cat rescue about a year and →
Euro Trip Day 41: Bones, churches, and bone churches
Today we got up and tried to get on a train at a relatively early hour to go to the town of Kutna Hora, a UNESCO World Heritage site about an hour from Prague, and home to a few really neat places. To be fair, we did make it on the train at a reasonable hour... and then we proceeded to →
Euro Trip Day 39: I have some catching up to do!
I'm really going to try really really hard to simplify things here, since I really need to get caught up. On Day 39 we slept in... I think travel fatigue is really starting to get to us, because we both wanted to see Prague, but neither of us was enthused about going anywhere. So we opted to stay an extra night. →
Euro Trip Day 36: Monks on Segways with flamethrowers
Since I've managed to get behind in blog posts, I've decided to make a concerted effort to post pictures and give a brief rundown of the day, at least until I've caught up. :-) July 10th John wasn't feeling well, so he relaxed and I wandered around Krakow, seeing more of the historical things to see. First I headed over to →
What's better than Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor on the accordion? Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor on FOUR accordions!!
Watch these kids on the piano (old piano with the keys fused so that it was a public art piece rather than a piano.) HILARIOUS. These accordion players are a Ukranian group called Harmonia -- I bought their CD of classical tunes. LOVE it. :-)
Euro Trip Day 34: I am 5,762 miles from home
You know how there are some sights that you'll never, ever forget as long as you live? This trip's been full of them for me, but stamped on my brain until the day I die will be watching the sun come up over the Polish countryside as the train chugged toward Krakow, and seeing an entire armada of storks stalk →
Euro Trip Day 32: I don’t care if there are other neat cities. I want to stay in Budapest, darn it
I feel like I should specify that Day 32 was July 6th, since I'm not getting these posts posted before bedtime anymore, like I'd originally intended. My plan before I left was just to post one picture and a quick writeup of the day, but I like doing the longer posts (despite the time they take) because I like working →
Euro Trip Day 31: A water day from start to finish
This morning started bright and early when John and I headed to the Szechenyi Bath. One of the things Hungary is fairly famous for is its abundance of thermal baths, and while there are at least a dozen in Budapest alone, the Szechenyi is one of the most famous, and rightfully so. It's huge, and absolutely beautiful. We got there →
Euro Trip Day 30: In which we get yelled at by an old lady on the bus, go to a Latin mass, get kicked off the subway, and end up at an apparently fascist rally
Ok, I'm a day late posting this. So sue me. My excuse is the world's.WORST.upload.speed.EVAR. Even my cell phone camera pics are going slowly, and the ones from inside the sanctuary are my big camera. I did get this post at least STARTED on Sunday, though. :-p Yesterday we got up and took a metro to a bus to the top →
Euro Trip Day 29: Art is long, life is brief.
I'm writing this post quickly because I need to get ready so we can head up to Buda Castle Hill to Matyas Church, where I'm going to a Latin high mass at 10AM. Neat! (I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it here before, but one of my goals this trip is to go to church in every country. I missed Bosnia, →
Euro Trip Day 27: Anyone know what flavor “Smurf” is?
Yesterday we slept in... we've been doing that a lot on this trip, oddly enough. I think yesterday I was tired because a horde of angry mosquitoes woke me up at 3AM. Well, the mosquitoes didn't wake me up so much as the violent itching. Have I mentioned that I don't think I've seen a single window screen the entire time →
Euro Trip Day 25: I should be packing, so instead I’m writing today’s blog post
Tomorrow morning we're heading out of here bright and early at 8AM to hop a train to Pécs, Hungary, yet another checkmark on a list of my attempts to see as many UNESCO World Heritage sites as possible (we've seen 3 so far on this trip: the old city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, the city of Kotor in Montenegro, and →
Euro Trip Day 23: Sarajevo to Zagreb
This post is coming a bit late because it seems like our internet access always seems to die on us in the evening, which is when I'd prefer to be sitting around working on things like reservations for upcoming cities and blog posts and the like. In any case, most Zagreb museums are closed on Mondays, for some reason (we →
Euro Trip Day 22: Bus ticket to Sarajevo, 24€. Watching men argue over a giant outdoor chess set: Priceless.
I'm posting early because we're leaving for Zagreb this evening and I don't know if I'll get a chance to get to wifi between now and then. This morning we hit up the National Museum and the History Museum. They were both good, but the National Museum was very stark and depressing: half of it dealt →
Euro Trip Day 17: Rain rain… is pretty nice, actually
So today we'd planned to go to Ostrog Monastery, a really neat-looking monastery built into the side of a cliff up in the mountains northeast of here. It would have been our first organized tour of this trip -- for everything else, we've just been doing stuff on our own. Did you notice the "we'd planned" and "would have been"? If →
Euro Trip Day 11: Hoping that this is as unfun as it gets
I've had better days. We slept in a bit today, had a leisurely breakfast, and then decided to rent bikes and head out to explore the island a bit. However, we somehow took a wrong turn, and ended riding 3 kilometers up a REALLY BIG HILL. I know, only 3 km -- cry me a river, right? Well, it was 90F+ →
Euro Trip Day 9: In which we get to Korčula and I wonder why we didn’t just go straight here
(Side note -- the island's name is actually pronounced "KOR-chula" -- the č in Croatian is a ch sound.) So today I discovered one of the little problems with traveling and not really having a set schedule... one forgets what day it is fairly easily. This morning I woke up gradually shortly after 8, as the sound of jackhammers infiltrated →
Euro Trip Day 8: In which my camera never left my room
Both John and I woke up feeling kind of lousy today. His stomach, never all that settled when traveling, was being cranky, and I had a splitting headache, and that persistent cough I've had since coming back from London last summer that I've been chalking up to allergies has been getting steadily worse on this trip, for some reason. I'm →