Wow this weather is crazy! It started snowing on my way to work around 1145AM. It is still snowing as of 745M. I dread driving in this mess, but hopefully in another hour most everyone else will be home and I can drive slowly and carefully over the river and through the woods.

The week is strangely dragging and flying by at the same time. I have a hard time believing it is Thursday when it seems like yesterday we celebrated the Chinese New Year in Wicker Park. I even got myself all gussied up in a fine blouse and made it into the official pics thanks to drunken photo-taking. This party used to take place in Minneapolis so I thought it only appropriate to share my fave news story of the week regarding the Mall of America. Shark on shark cannibalism that didn't really look like the little fellow was very alive.
As many of you might have guessed, I love and fear sharks at the same time. I am fascinated by them and yet live in constant fear of meeting my doom a la Captain Quint. My favorite movie is not some girly love fest, but in fact "Jaws." I think I either watched this movie too many times as a youngster or my run in with a school of fish while body boarding in my teens. Either way I don't want to end up like little Shark 54 there!

I am also participating in this three weekend long activity at the synagogue with the Sisterhood where we are making prayer shawls. These are called tallit or tallis to anyone unfamiliar with them. Most of the time it is only men that wear these shawls. Since we go to an egalitarian synagogue the wome ncan make pretty things to wear too! I am the youngest one in the group by maybe 15 years. I am the only one with no children. My fingernails were painted the same color as one of the 13 year olds at the luncheon last week. She did not accept me in the teenager group either. This is an interesting site about tallit if you are curious. I really dig the fact that on a site about tallit there is a big add for single muslim dot com.

I had a weird dream that I was on some European tour that involved a large bus and lots of sleep overs in hostels. Also tagging along was this guy: Mathieu Amalric If you saw Munich you might remember him and now he's the new James Bond villian, how will I ever be able to choose between good and evil??? Too sexy, too sexy. Just leave it to me to have dreams about semi-obscure French actors. (he's not obscure in France of course, but in the US a little less well-known). Now I need to find a way to get downtown to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

On Saturday, driving back to work from my lunch break, I was sitting at a red light behind a rather salty and dirty truck. There was a line along the back fo the truck that was a mass of salt and ice crystals. However, I did not see ice crystals. I saw a huge Hebrew phrase and an off-center Star of David. It took me about a miute to realize that I wasn't seeing Hebrew but just some very straight dirt crystals along the back of a truck. This is the one of many occasions where I see Hebrew where there is no Hebrew to be seen. In a painting the other day, some stylized birds looked like Hebrew letters. A few months ago I saw someone wearing the Tony the Tiger shirt and could have sworn the kanji letters were Hebrew and not Japanese.

To be honest, the letters do look a bit Hebrew...
M thinks I have Jerusalem fever. Maybe a decade ago this would have been correct. Now I'm not so sure what all this means, except maybe I should learn more Hebrew so the next time that truck with the mysterious message rolls by I will be ready.

Happy MLK Day!
I have uploaded our Phoenix pictures to Flickr. Check them out. There are a few of food from Trader Vic's. Yes, it was yummy!
I think I will also upload some older pictures from last year when we were in Hong Kong.

I describe Phoenix as being of blue sky and the brown ground. I like saying brown ground. It sounds a liitle like ground round, you know... beef. So our trip was nice. I liked Phoenix in general except for the fact that I feared for my life numerous times while driving. Arizona is not a good place for safe driving. No signaling, just mad crazy driving and merging and random braking on the highways!

Since we do travel a lot I would like to point out one glaring misnomer about Sky Harbor Intl airport. While it has one of the coolest names in airport names, it's trademarked slogan, "America's Friendlest Airport" is just plain wrong. I think I would have suggested "America's Snarkiest Airport" as an alternative title. We received snarky comments from the UA lady, the AA lady and I think the three times that we went through security trying to get on various flights only one TSA guy was remotely friendly. We watched with amusement as a Continental passenger broke in line at the security gate in front of about 15 people and acted totally nonchalant about it. I did not see one of the supposed friendly volunteers in purple sportscoats that were advertised all over the place. My other issue with the airport involved the buses that traveled between the terminals. None of them went to the right place or even suggested where they might be headed next. They all had the vague: Parking Lots & Terminals written on the side of them and required that we ask the driver every single time which direction they were heading. We almost got on the wrong bus a total of three times. That is a record for us. Heck, we traveled through the Japanese countryside on buses and it was easier than Sky Harbor!

A highlight of our trip was dinner with some friends at the fantastic Trader Vic's in Scottsdale. The restaurant is part of the amazing complex for the Hotel Valley Ho. Check it out and you will see what I love! We had these tremendous appetizers called Beef Cho-Cho that consisted of (directly from the menu description) "Folded Beef Skewers Finished on a Flaming Hibachi." They were little bites of heaven! I also drink three tumblers of a mixed drink called Menehune Juice that came with a little plastic menehune guy/girl. The pic is of the menehune with salt shakers at Trader Vic's. I did not take that picture... it came from this lovely website.



We also did some non-tiki related stuff, like a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West. We haven't yet checked out Taliesin in Wisconsin, but I think we might have to now! The building and tour were quite cool. For those of you out there that like to touch stuff in museums and then get yelled at, the tour of Taliesin West is for you. You can touch everything! They even encourage it by letting you sit in original chairs and touch the walls and the artwork. It is a rarity these days to get to touch something so fabulous and not get in trouble for it. The building themselves are remarkable and fit the landscape perfectly, as should be expected. We were the youngest people on the tour but I hope that isn't always the case.

The other cool thing we did was get a tour of the Pinal Air Park just north of Tucson. It is an airplane "boneyard" of sorts and it is really something to drive down I-10 and see a few score tails of big airplanes sticking up on the horizon. They had 747s and all the big guys represented, but my favorites were tucked into a corner near the hangar. The Chalk's seaplanes were all in a row and looking for someone to love them. They would be a great idea for a flying/floating recreational vehicle if you can get it fixed up.

So here it is Wednesday again. I have been having extremely weird dreams lately and if you know me well and have ever heard about my dreams you know that on any given day my dream will beat your dream in hand-to-hand combat. Much like John McCain, or so I have thought...

I got my wonderful shipment from Amazon the other filled with goodies paid for by my boss via a gift certificate. The gifties included the books The Year of the Goat and Atomic Ranch and the new Feist CD and a best of Supertramp. I have somehow missed out on owning a Supertramp CD until now. I am not sure why since I have always enjoyed their music and can sing most of the songs word for word. (This is also a talent I have). The CDs are lovely but I am holding out on truly delving into the books until I have finished my required Winter reading:
Sex Live of Cannibals
Atonement
A Year in the Woods
Hawaii
Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Last night between boring parts of the NH Primary (Olympics for nerds) M & I watched the new Futurama movie, Bender's Big Score. It did not totally suck but there were two things wrong with the movie as a whole: weird songs and not enough Kif. I know most people who watch(ed) Futurama dig Bender the most. I enjoy other characters more to be honest. At least they left the ending open for a sequel...

On the travel tip, M & I are going to Arizona tomorrow. I have only been to AZ once before. It was in 1987 and it was on a Southwest plane. I also never actually left the airport. It was an adventure for my 13 year old self in that my parents let me fly from Birmingham AL to Nashville, TN then to Phoenix and on to San Diego to visit my uncle Buford and aunt Neida. This is still in my mind one of my best ever trips, even after traveling to exotic locales. So I am looking forward to finally getting off the plane. I don't think we will be able to find Steve Nicks' Fajita Round-Up, but I think there will be some yummy food involved. Currently we are looking at visiting two architectural marvels: Arcosanti and Taliesin West.
There is also a Trader Vic's that we have to go to since the one in Chicago seems like it will NEVER open.

Happy New Year everyone!
I celebrated by making sock bunnies with Juuitsu Watanabe and watching a documentary called "Darkon" about people who fight with foam weapons and dress up like stuff. If you are curious, here is the wikipedia entry.
We all then joined M. in the front yard to shot off fireworks. We were chided by the police and told not to do it anymore. M. equated this warning to being yelled at by his mother as a youngster. I was very satisfied with my evening. Oftentimes I feel that NYE is a let down. Some of my more memorable NYE of past years include:
* A fancy costume party for the Millenium where I was bascially the only person there without some poor man dragging behind me.
*Sitting in a Denny's in Amarillo TX on my way to New Mexico.
*Falling asleep before midnight on the island of Palau because we were exhausted from snorkeling all day.
That last one is probably the best one I've had since I was 13.

Last weekend I also tried my hand at making chocolate babka. My co-worker had been going on and on about chocolate babka since she is a huge Seinfeld fan. After a few false starts and bad yeast, I made two loaves of delicious, buttery babka. This is the recipe that inspired me to try making Chocolate Babka from Smitten Kitchen's yummy food site. This recipe called for way too much butter. How much butter you ask? 5sticks of butter plus some extra to butter the pans. I decide to go with this recipe from Epicurious instead. The first recipe makes 3 loaves with a steusel top (Made with butter). The second only makes two loaves with no steusel. Since I have only had babka once before at the 2nd Ave Deli in NYC, I couldn't remember if theirs had steusel or not, so I left it off. I really should have taken pictures, they turned out so well. Just check out Smitten Kitchen's page instead and then imagine me in an apron and big fluffy slippers with dough on my hands, probably some flour in my hair and no artsy pictures of dough being taken or even thought about.
Also excited this week about a small mini break/vacation coming up to somewhere west and warmer than Chicago. Also getting geared up for the annual Chinese New Year party we attend at the end of January. So many things to look forward to in the cold cold winter.