Here’s some photos of the fish paintings we made for Claudia’s room a while back. Christine and Claudia did the backgrounds and I did the cartoon fish. You can see pictures of Claudia working on them here.

Here’s some cool stuff that Claudia made at school:

The leaves are falling, the air is crisp. Fall is right around the corner, and being back in the Midwest I feel a strong connection to the seasons. Summer has been a season to enjoy food, the company of friends, and the outdoors. Here are my three favorite recipes from this summer:

Truck-Stop Buttermilk Pancakes. Mark discovered this recipe when he was planning for our Memorial Day Pancake Breakfast. Now it is in our regular breakfast rotation. The secret to successful pancakes appears to be butter! and buttermilk! This one will get carried through to fall and winter, I’m sure.

Zucchini Fritters. I was inspired to seek out this recipe when thinking about how to make zucchini into a filling and satisfying meal. This recipe was perfect (I didn’t use scallions because we didn’t have them). Using olive oil to fry the fritters, rather than canola oil or something else, makes a huge difference. Also, salting the zucchini to get rid of the excess moisture makes them fry much better. I cooked some Indian-inspired chickpeas with onions to go with the fritters.

Plum and Peach Crisp. Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks is awesome. I had been wanting to try one of Heidi’s dessert recipes, and the perfect opportunity presented itself when I was searching for a good dessert to pair with a Mediterranean meal we were making for some friends. We had grilled vegetables, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, tabouli, Moroccan spiced rice, marinated feta, spiced almonds, olives, and plum and peach crisp with vanilla ice cream. I used brown sugar in the topping, used cornstarch for the arrowroot, and skipped the orange blossom water. I really liked the yogurt in the topping - this crisp was not too buttery or too sweet, and the fruit to crisp ratio was perfect.

@leonatkinson Yeh, I’m starting to find FF to be pretty annoying in general.

Holy crap! I mailed in my passport renewal last week and I already got it back!

My mom is now on Facebook.

Downloading the Howard the Duck soundtrack: http://tinyurl.com/5pk6nd

Hmm… if I start using Twitter regularly, is it going to enhance my life in anyway?

Testing out Twitterific

As a community planner, I’m fascinated with places. I love bustling historic neighborhoods and sparkling modern buildings alike. I also like looking at maps as abstract representations of these places. Our current mode of operation in culture is certainly postmodernism - a collision of different systems, different perspectives, and different points in time coming together to make something new. Mark shared some blog posts that highlighted two incredible postmodern places.

The first is a burrito restaurant in Berlin that emulates the style of a taqueria in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. Having experienced the authentic, no frills, but really tasty and filling burritos widely available in the Mission, and having eaten curry wurst at Octoberfest in Stuttgart, I could really appreciate this. When I go to Berlin, I want to try this place.

Link to the post on Laughing Squid.

The other postmodern place is a google map made real as an art installation. I don’t think this place would be quite as fun to visit, but it makes me laugh to imagine it. I love the idea of a real place making you think of a database map place, and being funny to boot.

Link to the original post in we make money not art.