This Boy Elroy

Pride '08

Another pride has come and gone and once again Brad and I celebrated with our friends in the City. The weekend was full of great fun and great time with friends, I'm exhausted but it's a good exhaustion.

We started out the weekend at one of the oldest gay bars in the City, Cinch. Dan suggested the place since it was out of the Castro and we could go someplace off the beaten track. It was a great suggestion, and the entertainment was deliciously edgy. We even saw a unicorn!

Here we are with our cocktail waitress whom we called many names ranging from Margot Kidder, Tootsie, Sally Jessie Raphael, Linda Lavin, etc. She was a bit loopy but fabulous!

This one was selling corndogs and "Charro" Churros in the bar.



The unicorn.

Saturday we had our party which went very well. Pink Saturday party is much more fun watching from a window up high. Everyone stayed for a long time so that's always a good thing. It was nice to have old friends over to our new place. Kalvin and JR came over and brought a friend who is also a sometime contributor to GayGamer.net, PixelPoet. The next morning I got a flood of SMSes thanking me and Brad for a great party.

Sunday Brad and I woke up early at headed to the parade.

I got a great photo of Cindi Lauper.

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.



Love this sign.



Menz.



A great shot of Leslie Jordan.

After the parade, we headed over to Civic Center for the festival. There was a really cool with by this guy who makes figurines of Sci-Fi geeky characters our of junk. Here is Moby with Wall-E, aptly sculpted out of junk. The guy running the booth said they're not supposed to sell these but he had them anyway. Incidentally we saw Wall-E afterwards, LOVED IT!

That's about it. It was a fun, whirlwind weekend. I'm glad that this week will be a short 4-day one. Brad and I are planning a day trip next weekend to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and Santa Cruz. I cannot wait!

Calf Anyone?

I had a very odd dream last night that I think could be a sign that I am perhaps taking my workouts and nutrition a bit too seriously. On a typical day I eat between 250-300g of protein per day, it's not all in the form of solid food, much of it is supplemented with smoothies/shakes. Times when I know I won't be able to reach my protein intake goal I must admit that I get a bit edgy and start to panic about getting enough protein, this is where I think my dream stemmed from.

So in the dream I was at home and had no meat, there was no meat to be found in Dallas. I was just in from the gym and was in one of my weird "must have protein fits." This is where it gets gross/odd. I look down at my calves and decide the look pretty meaty so I cut some meat off my leg. In my dream I even commented on how nice the meat looked. The cutting didn't hurt, there wasn't any blood, and I was sure that my calves would just grow back. Everything was so damn surreal that in my dream I even said to myself while I was flexing my carved calves in the mirror, "This has got to be a dream."

Needless to say I woke up in the middle of the night and grabbed my calves to make sure they were in one piece.

New Year's Day

Happy New Year everyone! Brad was pretty wiped out from his trip to Baltimore so we opted to stay in on NYE. We picked up a bottle of champagne, some cheese, and a piece of cake and got comfortable.

I made my traditional "chaise" that I have to make whenever I open a bottle of champagne.

You know you want to sit on Madame Clicquot's face.

For lunch Brad, me, Dorothée, and Jay went to dumplings at our favorite dumpling house, Jeng Chi. The tradition originates from my family. Because my mother would slave away in the kitchen all through the holidays, she insisted that she would not cook on New Years Day so we went out to eat. The only restaurants that used to be open on New Years Day were Chinese restaurants so we'd always go out to Chinese food. When Brad and I moved to Dallas we found out about Jeng Chi from a review in D Magazine and have been eating there ever since. The dumplings, in my opinion, cannot be beat!

The hot and sour soup is the best I've had other than my mom's (mom took Chinese cooking classes and makes some really great dishes), and it's loaded with good stuff!

Scallion pancakes, just delicious.

Pork and napa dumplings.

Small juicy dumplings, these are our favorite! Inside the soft noodle is pork and an extremely flavorful broth. They're small, they're juicy, they're delicious.

After the feast that only cost $34 we went for a stroll in the shopping center.

We found a store that has a ton of Sanrio stuff. Brad and I were so pleased to see so much Chococat merchandise, we're big fans of his. I had to hold Brad back or he would have bought every Chococat item in the store, remember I said we need to be more abstemious this year, but at least I know what to fill his stocking with next year!

Our final stop was the Asian grocery store. I didn't realize there were so many varieties of instant noodle soups and in so many colorful packages.

For the piece de resistance I give you this photo that I have titled, Only In Texas. It's self explanatory.

Bored at work? Make a crown. That's what I did.

Take a boring old DVDr spool label:

On the back draw your favorite crown design, I chose the classic fleur de lys:

Cut pattern out with a razor blade:

Try the pattern on before proceeding:

Break for lunch.

When you return, use pattern as a guide to cut foil to cover your crown with a metallic facade:

Wear your finished product whenever you like, however you like:

Bottled Water Redux

I wrote this letter to Whole Foods in May expressing my concern about importing bottled water from New Zealand.

Then I didn't hear from them and I wrote them again and cited an article in the New York Times about how some restaurants are refusing to serve imported bottled water because of the carbon footprint it leaves.

Whole Foods wrote me back recently and it was mostly gobbly gook about how the shoppers demand water from exotic locales. Yeah, well I think it'd be convenient if Whole Foods started carrying chemical cleaners so I didn't have to go to Target but I don't think they'll start selling Lysol products anytime soon. They also wrote about how shipping is the most efficient form of transporting goods across the world:

A great example of this difficulty came up in a discussion that our CEO, John Mackey had with Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, at UC Berkeley recently. As john pointed out in that discussion, the majority of food shipped internationally is shipped by relatively energy efficient ocean vessels. If you live in Berkeley, you may actually use less fossil fuel and produce less carbon dioxide by buying rice from Bangladesh than from certain parts of California, as ocean vessels emit dramatically less carbon dioxide per pound of cargo than trucks.

Wow, that's great...IF you live in Berkeley. News flash, not everyone lives and eats in Berkeley.

The email also mentioned about how they promote local farming and they have a Local Producer Loan Program. Red herring, thanks.

Anyway this issue seems to be getting legs in the media lately. In a recent issue of Business week there was an article about carbon neutrality and importing water: How "Green" Is That Water?

Today, a reader emailed me this story from the San Diego Union-Tribune: Pour choice - Restaurants make money on it; consumers drink it up; but the environment has a tough time with bottled waters

Let me say that I am not totally against bottled water. Many of these articles cite statements saying that municipal water is heavily regulated and is just as good as bottled water. Here, in Dallas, the water tastes like ass. A couple of months ago I purchased refillable bottles and I get my water, for $0.39 per gallon, from Whole Foods. The water is filtered from a municipal source on the spot, I walk home with the bottles from the store. At work, I drink Ozarka bottled water, which is a bottled water that comes from a source in the region and doesn't travel far to get to me. I do my best to recycle the bottles, but will be putting more effort into that from now on. I used to buy sparkling Italian mineral water from Whole Foods as well but have since stopped and now purchase locally produced (it's just filtered water that's been carbonated) and canned club soda.

Think about what you eat and drink. Think about where it's made, what it's packaged in, how far it had to travel, and how many resources were used so it could get to you.

Unholy Chimera

Saw this at Whole Foods and I find it horribly disturbing.

Gross

So we're at Whole Foods tonight foraging for food because we're too lazy to cook. While we're waiting for our turkey to be sliced we look over to what I consider a sacred altar, the olive bar.

Near the olive bar is what can only be described as a tribe of Euro-trash. There are two men in obscenely tight jeans and shirts with indescribable silk screened patterns on them that have a haute-shabby-chic look to them. One of them is holding a baby in nothing but a diaper and a yellow shirt. With them is what I assumed to be the mother of the child (who the father was I couldn't tell you) who has a splint on her nose, clearly from her recent visit to the plastic surgeon (this is Dallas after all).

Well, to my horror I see them, all of them, using their hands to sample olives from the olive bar. This alone is enough to gross me out, but they had to take it to the next level. After each olive, they were licking their fingers and going in for more like it was an all you can eat buffet. Then, to add insult to injury, the man holding the baby switches the hand he was using to hold the child so that now the hand reaching into the olives was one that was gripping the diapered butt of the baby.

In summary:

Euro-trash, now more than ever, have my utmost contempt.

Handling of babies should be kept at a minimum in grocery stores IMO.

This Italian-American boy is grumpy because now he cannot, in good conscience, get olives from an olive bar again and he misses his dad's homemade sicilian-style olives even more.