bloom of youth

The cashiers at the grocery store by Miss Shirley's house never card me when I buy wine. I'm insulted. It's right there on my last receipt - "Customer ID Verified - Visual Approval." I assume that means "looks old." (Even if it means the dude lied about checking my ID - that still means "looks old.")

weird drinks

Nestea has the most nonsensical ad campaign going on right now. They've put up a ton of ads in the metro about a new drink that purports to disguise antioxidants with delicious tea.

Isn't that backwards? I think consumers have generally caught on by now that there's a lot of products with antioxidants in them, thanks to companies advertising the heck out of pomegranate juice and whatnot. And, thanks to that advertising, I think antioxidants have more of a delicious image than not. So it's weird to be all, "we're disguising the antioxidants!" And what are they disguising it with? Green tea. Normal people do not like green tea. They drink it because they think it's healthy. (Actually, the one on that poster might be black tea. But anyway.)

Yesterday S.Vix and I were walking to lunch and came across a bunch of people handing out free samples. I got a bottle of the "Green Tea with Natural Citrus Flavor and other natural flavors." The name was my first tip (that's a lot of "flavors"), and the bad feeling intensified when I read the ingredients - both high-fructose corn syrup *and* sucralose. Yeah. It wasn't enough to use high-fructose corn syrup, they had to throw in an artificial sweetener, too.

It was totally gross. I opened it at my desk, and kept sipping at it because it was there, but finally I was motivated enough by disgust to put my shoes on and go dump it out. Ugh.

omg I thought I was the only one

Sometimes when I drink certain things I get a shooting pain around my jaw joint. (The TMJ, if you prefer.) Usually it's sweet alcoholic drinks. Hard cider can be lethal, and last night's May Punch started stabbing me toward the end of drink #2, particularly when I ate the alcohol-soaked strawberries. But it doesn't have to be alcohol. I've had it happen with orange juice, too.

Today for the first time it occurred to me to google this thing and see if I could come up with any explanations, and the *only* thing I could find was this. It's a forum on some kind of health site where basically everyone says, omg I thought I was the only one! Which I did. But people seem to be describing a variety of different pains and anyway, nobody has any idea what it is. Well, people have many ideas (allergies! blocked salivary glands! Hodgkin's disease!) but no evidence.

Ever heard of this? What the heck?

evening

Here's a way not to run an evening reception:
6:30 scheduled start of program
6:45 actual start of program
7:30 scheduled end of program
8:05 actual end of program
8:10 people descend on food-and-drink area
8:12 to discover that it's more drink than food
8:13 and some of these things are really not meant to be finger food
8:15 and, hello, dinner time was two hours ago and we came from work
8:45 and the celebrity panelist doesn't seem to be at the reception
9:00 patrons leave, drunk and lightly fed on greasy food

honey-spice

Krakow's old town has about five million (give or take) adorable shops and galleries geared to tourists. For example:


This shop had a couple dozen giant glass vats of booze with all different flavors; you taste them, choose a bottle (from a cute selection), and get it filled. This was very cool. It would have surprised me even more if I hadn't been in a shop that worked on exactly the same principle 10 years ago in Nice. Apparently this is the kind of shop you put in heavily-touristed old towns. Anyway, lemme tell you, the honey-spice vodka is deeeeelicious.

Have you ever seen one of these shops? Are they everywhere? We don't have them in the U.S., do we?

soda pop

Would it be weird to organize a whole vacation around this store? (Hear the radio story here.) Who's with me?

maple and whiskey

I had some of this last night and oh my it was delicious. It was at the Grande Fête de la Francophonie, about which unfortunately my overall review is "eh." It had a bit of a trade-show atmosphere; it was brightly lit, noisily musicked, and extremely crowded after the first half hour or so. The first half hour was pretty good, though, and Ogram and I met some nice Canadians. And the maple-whiskey liqueur? Outstanding!

creme brulee

Last night I learned an important lesson: You should not try to broil the sugar on top of your creme brulee in an unfamiliar oven after two glasses of wine.

I was invited to a dinner party for Diwali, and Chatty asked me to bring dessert. So I thought, hey, creme brulee, that's a nice light dessert after a big Indian meal. The only problem is that you have to do the hard sugar finish on top at the last minute. And then I had two largeish glasses of wine and was unable to come up with the idea "if the sugar is charring, you should turn down the flame." I'd also never broiled anything in a gas oven before and was confused by the broiler being next to the floor.

Well, anyway, it tasted ok after I took the worst of the charred part off. And I have one unfinished creme brulee left over...I may do it tonight with the torch.

all galaed out

Tonight was the big fancy gala for the Christmas show. I got to wear my gala dress again (thanks again to Tall L for helping me find it). It was good times. I know and love, or at least tolerate, most of the people there, and enjoyed all the dorky singing by the whole crowd. There was also singing by the madrigal group, which is why I was there. The line on the souvenir wine glass is from one of the madrigals we sang. People said the madrigals sounded really good - even one person who knew the songs well enough to hear all our mistakes and near-trainwrecks. So...yay! Miss Shirley and I put one of our musical parties in the silent auction - we show up and throw one at your house - and it only sold for $280, but it went to nice people, so it's all good.

linie

Another alcohol picture from the week in the mountains:


Linie Aquavit is called that because it crosses the line - before they bottle it, they age it by sticking it in barrels and packing it up in ships that cross the equator. The name of the ship and the dates of the voyage are printed on the back of the label - you can read it through the booze. In this picture, we're sitting around a table in candlelight late at night drinking duty-free aquavit, which is about the most Norwegian thing you can do. (Ok, some people were drinking duty-free whiskey, but that's plenty Norwegian, too.)

last of the .He wine

My ski-dance roommate, M.He, brought a five-liter jug of homemade berry wine to the hotel. The story behind the wine is long and fascinating, with tragic elements, but I'll compress: a freezer was being sold at auction and she talked the auctioneer into letting her rescue the contents, most of which were berries that she had picked. Then she and a friend turned the whole mess of berries into 45 liters of wine. (They threw in a package of bananas that was in the freezer, too.) The result was deeeelicious.

In this picture, she and I are chilling before dinner (ok...several hours before dinner) (ok...strictly speaking, not that long after lunch) with the berry wine and some mixed nuts. This, my friends, is vacation.

it's just orange soda

When I lived in Norway, Solo had the best advertising campaign. Here's one of the TV commercials: A guy and his son are in a boat in the middle of a lake. No shore is visible in any direction. The guy is trying to start the motor, and he's pulling and pulling on the string, and it won't start, and finally he stops, takes a big swig of his Solo - angels sing - and gives the string one last mighty yank. The motor falls into the lake. The slogan: «sannsynligvis den eneste brusen som ikke hjelper mot annet enn tørsten». That is, "probably the only soda that doesn't help you with anything but thirst."

Also, everyone knows this is the soda of the great outdoors and traveling, so I bought this one to cheer me up on my Bus Ride of Extreme Longness.

still life with beverages

I haven't posted any of my beverage photos lately. This is from lunch with a couple of colleagues on Thursday.

Mango lassi...mmmmm.