By Julie on 2/27/2009 9:06 AM

On Monday evening we grabbed a cab to Fillmore Street to have dinner at Via Veneto, a very good Italian restaurant. I highly recommend their olive oil dipping sauce they bring to the table with freshly baked bread. The olive oil dipping sauce sported whole roasted garlic cloves in a high quality olive oil with some other seasonings that I couldn't quite discern but enjoyed nonetheless.

While strolling down Fillmore, we happened upon a skinny little store called O&CO. which sells, what else, olive oil and other gourmet food items. (It seemed to be the evening for olive oil.)

The highly energetic young man working there plied us with lots of samples of their most excellent oils and other concoctions. We walked away with a bottle of their White Balsamic Condimen ... Read More »

By Julie on 2/26/2009 7:19 PM

We are back from San Francisco. Here are some highlights of our trip:

• It rained 3/4 of our time there. We are accustomed to Texas Gulf Coast rain: it rains and gets it over with! Not so in SF. It lightly rained for days on end with few breaks. Very annoying when you are trying to traipse through the Muir Woods.
• The one day we rented a car to drive outside the city, we went up onto the Marin Headlands to attempt to take pictures of the Golden Gate bridge. We were stymied in this effort by vertical rain and cold-ass wind. Bridge was barely, barely visible through the mist.
• Lefty O'Doul's on Geary makes fantastic oatmeal for breakfast.
• The San Francisco Brewing Company on Columbus Ave serves great beer with wacky names but desperately needs a sign outside to alert visitors to their actual whereabouts.
• When catching a cab at Oakland airport, check the tires on the c ... Read More »
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By Julie on 2/22/2009 9:03 PM

I am in San Francisco for a few days for meetings. I tacked a couple of days onto the trip in order to do some sightseeing. This is a picture we took of the underside of the Golden Gate bridge while we took one of those boat tours of the Bay.

By Julie on 2/20/2009 12:00 PM

My mom came to visit us last weekend. She rode down on the train rather than flying or driving. This was her first train trip and she really enjoyed it. She says that she now plans to take the train as much as possible in the future when she travels.

Train travel is a comfortable and environmentally conscious way to travel if you have the time. For example, the flight from northern Alabama to Houston takes about two hours plus a hour drive time to the airport in both locations. Total: 4 hours travel time.

If you drive the whole way, it takes 12 hours driving.

If you take the train: 1.5 hour drive to train station in Memphis, 9 hours on train Memphis to New Orleans, 9 hours on train New Orleans to Houston, and 1 hour drive time Houston to my house. Total: 20.5 hours. Plus, the trains in New Orleans don't sync so you have to spend the night in NO on the trip.

But mom says that it was well worth the added time becau ... Read More »

By Julie on 2/11/2009 5:46 PM

In the year 1909 my husband's family came over from Czechoslovakia and their ship docked at Galveston Island, Texas. They settled here in south central Texas in the Wharton area.

And that same year, the Shiner Brewing Association began brewing the best beer in Texas in the tiny town of Shiner, Texas. This year commemorates the 100 year anniversary of Shiner Beer with the brewery producing small batch special beers starting in 2005.

The bottle on the far right is the Shiner 100 which will be produced ... Read More »

By Julie on 2/9/2009 8:30 PM

BLUEFLY's Flypaper

One of my favorite blog sites is over at Flypaper. This is the company blog for the fabulously popular BLUEFLY.com . Stop by there each day for the latest fashion news and advice. You can also be privy to these amazing short-term sales (I'm talking like an hour or so) where you can buy great things like Hermes purses for $599 and so forth.

By Julie on 2/5/2009 8:41 AM

 

Tiffany

My friend Tiffany is flying in from Florida today for a long weekend in Texas. I have just checked the liquor cabinet to make sure we have enough tequila for her visit ;) We are out of Patron but we do have a nice bottle of Milagro and one of Herradura, a very good tequila that we picked up in Cozumel.

We had a very quiet January. We mostly stayed home in the evenings playing Scrabble and watching BBC America. After all our travelling in December, it has felt quite good to stay home for awhile. But now we have a full roster of visitors (various family and friends) coming for visits over the next three months. And we have some more ... Read More »

By Julie on 2/3/2009 5:31 PM

We've all heard of Power of Attorney. But do you have someone who has Power of Blog for you in the event that you die or become unable to write? This question came up for a blogger that I have been following for about a year now. She is about my age and she has been battling cancer for the 3rd time. She is now in hospice care and has a matter of weeks or months to live.

She has appointed a friend of hers the Power of Blog for her website Clusterfook. This friend has authority to post for her once she is unable.

By Julie on 2/2/2009 7:18 PM

Awhile back someone made one of those off-hand comments about Gilligan's Island. You know how it is, Gilligan's Island is one of those things that our generation grew up watching as re-runs along with the Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy. I don't even remember now what the comment was but my daughter piped in and wanted to know what Gilligan's Island is.

So we ordered the first season of Gilligan's Island shows on dvd and my daughter has been entralled with them for a week now. She loves the show so much that we have broken down and ordered the second and third seasons also. There were only three seasons of this iconic show.

This morning, my daughter asked how old the actors were who played the parts on Gilligan's Island. So we went to our go-to resource: Wikipedia. Most of the ages were no surprise, except for Mrs. Howell, played by Natalie Schafer. She was 64 years ... Read More »

By Julie on 2/1/2009 8:26 PM

Last week we had lunch at a new place (well, new to us anyway.) It was the Fish City Grill in Pearland. It is located in the new shopping center in Pearland that seems to be the newest wave in shopping centers. Builders are creating these shopping centers that look like vintage downtown streets with brick streets and old-fashioned street lamps.

Fish City Grill was very good. I had the Mahi Mahi Fish Tacos, although they roll them up like burritos in flour tortillas. Traditional fish tacos are served in corn tortillas.