Episode CXII: Home for the Holidays

This year's holiday trip to California was chock-full of activities, with nary a moment for boredom or dullness. It was a pleasure to have the entire immediate family together at once, staying and doing fun things together. A good deal of our time was spent traveling places throughout California and Arizona. Among the places we went were:

The Grand Canyon, which is lovely (and not so crowded) in winter:

Sedona, a charming little city amidst high desert and sandstone formations.

The Getty Museum, featuring world-class art (and spectacular views):

And the world-famous San Diego Zoo:

 

We also engaged in some traditional activities, including Christmas with the Norrises, Christmas at Grandma Shearer's, lots of Super Smash Brothers (the video-game) and a shopping trip to The Goodwill Store for items that we don't need...

A New Year's Eve party in LaVerne...

And a 5th-Sunday-of-the-month softball game...

(Incidentally- a couple of hours of softball, plus a couple of hours of volleyball the next day, plus a few hours on a plane the next day adds up to some very sore legs when all is said and done.)

In other news, Dad officially became old in 2012, receiving his first-ever senior citizens discount. (You wouldn't believe how much joy Mom got out of this occasion.)

Episode CXI: Escaping Thanksgiving in Canada

This Thanksgiving I rekindled a personal tradition and used the break from school as an excuse to go on a road-trip. This time I brought my lovely wife along with me, and we set our sights on a foreign country (where, as it turns out, they had no idea Thanksgiving was going on [but they did know all about Black Friday.])

En route to Canada, we stopped at a number of places in upstate and western New York, including Saratoga National Park, location of the Battles of Saratoga during the American Revolutionary War, and a major turning point in the history of the country.

Despite the historical import of the battlefield, Meg's favorite part of the experience was the fact that there were literally hundreds of deer grazing on park land, and my favorite part was that I got to imitate Benedict Arnold (still an 'American' at this point) turncoating.

We next stopped at nearby Saratoga Springs, which (among other things) has real life actual spring water spouting out of the ground throughout the city. Here we stumbled across a spring featuring high levels of natural carbonation (no kidding!) Coincidentally, we had just purchased some pizza, for which naturally carbonated spring water was the perfect accompaniment.

Another stop on the way was Buffalo, New York, where we toured the grounds of a lovely Frank Lloyd Wright house...

And ate at the birthplace of the Buffalo Wing!

 

Finally: Toronto, Canada. Here are  Meg and I sitting on a canoe with the CN tower and other buildings in the distance.

A few salient features of Toronto: (1) Its skyscrapers stretch east-to-west along Lake Ontario, as well as a substantial distance to the north, giving it the feeling of a sprawling city. (2) It is full of Canadians (walking, driving, biking- it is a crowded downtown.) (3)  There is a remarkable degree of ethnic diversity (it is the self-proclaimed 'most multicultural city in the world') which means all sorts of fun food (e.g. Chinese, Jamaican, Italian, Jewish, French, etc.)

['Mother's Dumplings']

 [Quintessential Thanksgiving meal- A 'Reuben sandwich' in the form of a French crepe (delicious)]

 [Peameal = 'Canadian Bacon']

 We did a whole lot of the touristy things that one can do in Toronto. This included two world-class museums (the AGO art gallery and ROM history/cultural/science museum) as well as some tall tower:

Here we are standing on a glass floor, over 1,000 feet above the ground. Pretty cool.

We went to a unique (read: over-the-top) mansion built for financier Sir Henry Pellat, who, among other things, helped bring electricity to Toronto by developing hydroelectric stations at Niagara Falls. Due to some bad investments and government takeovers of his businesses, he went broke before the house was truly completed. Today it is a tourist attraction and a set for numerous movies (for instance, it appears as Dr. Xavier's 'School for Gifted Youngsters' in X-Men.)

This year we 'celebrate' the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, and it turns out Canada loves its War of 1812 (they consider themselves to have won said war.) We visited Fort York, the first real European settlement of Toronto, and a famous battle site from the war in which Americans invaded and conquered the British stationed therein. Many of the original buildings survive (two seen in the photo below) though the fort itself is now engulfed by Toronto, bounded by a 10-lane superhighway to the south, the skyscrapers of downtown to the east, and a dilapidated pit to the north.

[I certainly didn't learn about the U.S. invading Toronto in my history classes...]

One of the more unique things you're liable to experience as a tourist in Toronto is the Bata Shoe Museum, housed in a building that was designed to look like a shoebox. It is a really nicely done museum, tracing the shoe from the dawn of history to the 21st century (turns out, just about every culture in all of human history has worn shoes!) and includes examples from Native Americans, African chieftans, Tibetan monks, Renaissance Europeans (fashionable men wore high heels), The Beatles, Shaquille O'Neal, James Bond, etc. Here I am posing with a pair of socks worn by Napoleon Bonaparte himself (!)

Finally, after a whirlwind tour of the city, we headed back home. On the way back we stopped by Niagara Falls, as well as the college town of Ithaca, New York, set in a particularly lovely area known as the Finger Lakes Region. Here we are on the campus of Cornell University overlooking Cayuga lake, which is around 40 miles long but less than 2 miles wide (thus the name Finger Lakes.) This was the last stop on our Thanksgiving 2012 Road Trip.

Episode CX: All the Restaurants in Lawrence

Here is a story I forgot to tell back in the days of the Epic Ballade of Kansas:

Shortly after arriving in Lawrence, I realized I was in a town (population ~80,000) where, if I tried hard enough, I could feasibly eat in every single restaurant in town. It took me my whole five years of residence there, but I am happy to report back that I succeeded!

 The list I made, based on the official Lawrence.com restaurant listing page (plus a few hole-in-the-wall places they missed) came out to a little under 200 restaurants (which, looking back, seems like a whole lot of restaurants.) It was quite a pleasant adventure, teaching me about different nooks and crannies of Lawrence, and exposing me to all sorts of restaurants that ran the gamut from stomach-churning to mind-blowing.


Pleasant surprises included such finds as a tiny Amish deli/bakery near the outskirts of town, a fantastic Italian joint run by local chefs out of a gas station convenience store, a Chipotle-like fast food restaurant specializing in Philly Cheese Steak sandwiches, and two different all-you-can-eat pizza joints for dirt cheap (student prices as low as $3!)

The quality and price of the food in Lawrence varied substantially. At the high end there was a place like this:

 A Japanese / sushi restaurant with a total of two tables, and two seatings per night. It was one of the most lovingly prepared and creative restaurant meals I have ever experienced. Also, I'm sure, one of the most expensive (although I do not know exactly, as this was Rafael's birthday gift to me...)

And then there was the low end. My eating adventure certainly brought me to plenty of sub-par eating establishments in Lawrence, but one restaurant easily topped the list of lousy food: Border Bandido, on 23rd street. The tortillas were stale, the ingredients clearly came right out of cans, the cheese was homogenized, the 'beef' (hamburger) was cold, and the 'salsa' was the consistency of a beverage. This was one of the few times in history when I, Adam David Norris, did not finish my meal.

My favorite Lawrence restaurant (when you factor in affordability) would have to be The Burger Stand, a restaurant that we were around to see the beginning of. A local husband-and-wife team who used to be fancy chefs decided to open a joint selling high-end burgers for reasonable prices, and boy have they succeeded. Meg and I agree on this as our favorite Lawrence restaurant, and try as we might (and boy have we tried) we have yet to find a suitable replacement in the entire Greater Boston area.

The final restaurant to cross off on my list was a local burger-and-shake type of restaurant that I put off eating at until my very last day in Lawrence. The reason I had avoided eating there was that it aired these consistently lousy, poorly-produced, incredibly annoying commercials during sporting events. These commercials tended to make the viewer uncomfortable, annoyed, nauseous and mildly depressed. Don't believe me? Try one:

Anyhow, out of principle I waited to eat here until the day Meg and I were moving all our stuff out of Lawrence into a moving container. Here I am, with a look of sad triumph, conquering my final Lawrence restaurant. The best I can say is that it did not make me nauseous.

Having accomplished my remarkable ~200 restaurant feat, I now live in the Boston area with my wife. Needless to say, there are a lot more than 200 restaurants to defeat here. In fact, there are over 200 Zagat rated restaurants alone in the region. While it won't be possible to make much of a dent in the local restaurant scene, we sure have been enjoying a delicious range of cuisines here (e.g., Himalayan, Cuban, Ethiopian, Portuguese.) Indeed, we recently ate at a very nice restaurant owned and operated by the brother of Hamid Karzai. But that, alas, is another adventure for another day.

Episode CIX: A Home for the Norrises

Meg and I recently went through the thrilling-but-harrowing process of home buying, and emerged victorious. We are now the proud new owners (mortgagers, more precisely) of a lovely little second floor, one bedroom condo in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We are really big fans of the place. The materials and appliances are well-made, thoughtful, and of high quality. The layout is open, roomy and slightly modern. High ceilings, hardwood floors, and contemporary touches. And the location is fantastic- walking distance to Harvard, walking distance to MIT, walking distance to church, and a short bike ride to the heart of downtown Boston.

The place is a 1 bedroom condo, with a little extra room / office, which is currently serving as our music room.

 There is a living room:

 

Bedroom:

Dining 'room' (more like a nook in the kitchen):

Bathroom, replete with appropriate IKEA designed accoutrements:

I like the sink design well enough, I will show you another picture of it:

One of the most striking things to me, having lived in the condo for about a month now, is the spectacular number of lights and light-switches we have. Keep in mind, this is a small 1 bedroom condo, and yet I counted (at least!) 33 total light bulbs and 23 light switches. And that doesn't even count any lamps or appliances that we brought on our own.

 

Here is Meg's favorite part of the house. It's the kitchen. The centerpiece of the condo. It's smack dab in the middle, opening out into both the living room and the dining area. Nice granite counters (lots of counter space), furnished with quality appliances, cabinets of a nice bamboo type wood with lots of nifty nooks and crannies and rollers and glass panels and what have you. We both enjoy it.

Here is my favorite element of the house. It's the 'door' to the bedroom, only it's a floor-to-ceiling, solid wood and frosted glass behemoth of a sliding door. How useless-but-super-cool is that!

But I think the main item that really sold us both on this place is the remarkable openness of the living space. For example, in the photo below I am in the living room taking the picture. You can see the living room, breakfast bar, and kitchen in the foreground.  In the background you can see through the bathroom into the bedroom, where Meg is sitting on the bed, and at the same time you can see through the aforementioned sliding door into the bedroom's closet area, where there is a reflected image of me in the closet mirror. Point is, with the doors open, the entire condo is a single unified living space. And we both like that quite a bit.

Episode CVIII: The End of an Era

Today it is my bittersweet duty to announce that Trusty Rusty, my longtime companion and friend, is no longer with me.

After marrying my lovely wife and moving to New England, it quickly became clear that there is now little need for my truck's services- my wife's car is newer, quieter and more fuel efficient; the truck has never handled winters particularly well; and what with my wife working at the same University as me, I go essentially nowhere without her (and we thus have little need for a second vehicle). The final bittersweet icing on the cake is that we are now moving to Cambridge, which is both metropolitan and old, and thus parking/storing my truck would have been well nigh impossible.

And so the decision was nearly made for me: the time had come to sell my truck.

I advertised on Craigslist, and found a buyer who, eerily enough, proclaimed upon coming to see the truck: "This is the exact model my grandfather owned!" He promised to take care of the truck (indeed he even used the words 'well loved') and I couldn't have asked for a better outcome for the situation.

[The new owner, and the old owner]

I must say, Rusty has had a good life. His original owners were my Shearer grandparents, from whom I took over around 2001, at the age of 17. I have now owned Rusty for over a decade, and we've been so many places together- the beach, the mountains, the desert, the Midwest, etc. We've been up and down The Rockies (with all my earthly possessions in tow), we've gotten stuck (literally) in the Mojave Desert, and done so many other adventurous/dangerous things together that I shan't bore you with today. He was my lone companion on many a camping trip, providing both transportation and a fairly roomy instant-hotel-room. By my count, Rusty and I have been together to over half the states in the union (see map below). How's that for a 26-year-old vehicle?

[States that Trusty Rusty and I have visited together are in black]

The few remaining mementos I have left from Rusty include one license plate (the other went to my grandmother) and this old pair of sunglasses which were in the glove compartment the day I got the truck (seen here on my face the day I gave the truck up.)

And so it is, a very bittersweet moment. The passing of the rust-colored torch. I can at least rest happily that he has gone to a good home. Below is the last picture I have of my old friend- one last hug!

Keep on trucking Rusty! Here's to 25 more years!