Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is . . .

Neil Patrick Harris



plus Nathan Fillion



plus OMG musical numbers.

I really should act on movie recommendations more quickly. This is marvelous.

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BAH, I say. And again I say BAH!

Sounds fascinating, right?

This mythic place is in Mexicali, capital of Baja California Norte, and according to the interwebs is a result of influxes of Chinese laborers to build railroads and irrigation systems.  It's also only a couple hundred miles away.  Roadtrip!

The ride out was interesting.  At least 75% of the traffic was RVs or border agents.  I suspect the RVs were heading out to Arizona, but OMG, the border agents. Once we reached the desert they were everywhere.  About every half a mile we'd see one in their white SUV, slowly driving along beside the highway dragging a skid made of four tires.  Every high point in the landscape had a watch tower.  It was fairly creepy.

Finally, we arrived in Calexico and drove around for quite a while before finding the one parking area that didn't have a two hour limit.  This was the first serious hint that  this was not a tourist-friendly area.  Crossing into Mexico was, as usual, very easy and completely uneventful. Immediately upon entry it became even more than obvious that tourism is not on Mexicali's priority list.  No helpful kiosks.  No helpful signage (even in Spanish).

The people were perfectly nice, even though we were the subject of significant interest.  Two obvious foreigners wandering the streets somewhat aimlessly?  I'd stare too.  But no one was threatening in any way, and only a couple asked for money.  

Overall the visit was pretty dull.  La Chinesca wasn't all that Chinatown-ish.  We did eat a a buffet style Chinese restaurant, which wasn't bad and tasted surprisingly like what you find in the States.  There was also a shop with lots of imported Chinese tchotschkes, and that was about the extent of it.

Still, several interesting things were learned.

1)  My Spanish is better than I thought
2)  It's easiest to get pesos from an ATM
3)  You must watch where you walk.  Deep, open pits are common in the sidewalks
4)  Sears is a seriously upscale department store down there
5)  Next time I go to a border town, it'll be TJ.  A higher risk of beheading is worth a two hour shorter drive and more interesting things to see.

One of the nice things about California is the tradition of closing early the day before a holiday. This allows me my ritual holiday thrift store tour wherein I hit some stores that are usually too far away to get to before they close. My most recent trip was very fruitful, and one of my new treasures is a copy of Great Home Cooking in America, copyright 1976 (a good year for americana).



CONTENTS

Part I: Our 200-year Heritage of American Cooking
Chapter 1: American Food Originals
Chapter 2: Southwestern Specialties

Part II: From the Old Country to the New Land
Chapter 1: The Heritage of English Cooking
Chapter 2: The Heritage of German Cooking
Chapter 3: The Heritage of Dutch Cooking
Chapter 4: The Heritage of Scandinavian Cooking
Chapter 5: The Heritage of Eastern European Cooking
Chapter 6: The Heritage of Italian and Other Mediterranean Favorites

Everything in this book looks tasty, but I'm starting with Boston Baked Beans because a) the recipe is early in the book, so I saw it right away and b) I already had everything necessary except the beans. At the risk of copyright infringement, here's the recipe:

2 cups dry navy beans
6 cups water
1 tsp salt
1/4 lb salt pork
1 medium onion (optional)
2 tsp dry mustard
1/3 brown sugar, firmly packed
1/4 cup molasses

- Wash beans. Combine beans and cold water in a large kettle. Bring to a boil; boil 2 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand 1 hour. (Or soak beans overnight.)
- Add salt; simmer about 1 hour or until beans are tender. Drain, reserving 1-3/4 cups bean liquid. Add water if necessary; set aside.
- Cut a slice from the salt pork and put it in bottom of bean pot or Dutch oven. Add beans. Place onion in center of beans.
- Mix mustard, sugar, and molasses into reserved bean liquid; pour over beans.
- Cut 3 gashes in remaining salt pork; place on beans, rind side up.
- Cover and bake in 300º oven 5 - 7 hours, adding more water as needed. Remove cover from bean pot the last 30 minutes of baking so pork rind will brown and become crisp.

Makes 6 servings.

Today I finally got around to uploading the pics from this year's National Train Day excursion to San Juan Capistrano. It was originally to be a reprise of last year's Santa Barbara day trip, but those nasty fires prompted Plan B.

Yes, there is National Train Day (May 9 this year). Yes, most people on the train that day had no idea there was such a thing. Yes, I slightly regret not buying an "I Ride Trains" t-shirt. (heh!)

The outgoing trip was lovely. We met a PhD student who's writing her thesis on the ascendancy of modern Cuban art. She had great stories about her trips to the island and life there. There was also a surprisingly cool film student who was on his way to Huntington Beach to pick up his car that died there. Plus there were Deadheads. Lots of Deadheads. I didn't even know there was a Grateful Dead to follow around any more.

San Juan Capistrano is a nice little tourist town. They have several cutesy, overly expensive shops and, of course, the mission. The mission is much larger and prettier than I expected. And the "Great Stone Church", which was partly felled by an earthquake in 1812, is HUGE.

 

More pics from the Mission are linked here.

I regret not taking pictures inside the chapel, but it felt . . . wrong.  Even I have my acting like a tourist limits, and it's still used for services.  Also, I'm pretty sure that M. is going to hell for peeking in the giant gilded ice bucket by the altar that presumably holds holy water.  Well, maybe not ONLY for that, but I bet it's a factor.

My friend M. has been feeling a bit deprived since his doctor has mandated lower cholesterol levels, and mentioned donuts as a contributing factor. I warned him I would not be a good influence, and proved this when I didn't protest going through the Krispy Kreme drive-thru a couple of weeks ago. I have further demonstrated I will not impede the occasional slip by suggesting a visit to the Donut Man when he called to find out if I wanted to do something.

Long before I moved to California, I had heard stories of the Donut Man -- magical stories of wondrous pastries, told with rapturous looks. All the stories are true. Them's some good donuts.



We drove the 30-ish miles from my house to Glendora.  We cruised up and down a couple of miles of Route 66 because the Google directions were wonky.  We stood in line with a likely meth-head and her boyfriend (or john, perhaps?).  We marveled at the abundance of trailer parks.  We scratched Glendora off the list of places we'd consider moving to.


Next on the agenda was a stop in Little Tokyo on the way home, since M. wanted to pick up some Japanese candy for his ESL class.  Apparently a shopping center/mall in the neighborhood has the largest Japanese supermarket in the US.   This market is indeed quite impressive.  I'm planning on going back to stock up on emergency supplies.  They seem to have a dried version of almost anything you could want, and M. was particularly excited to find single-serving packs of freeze-dried coffee that included sugar and creamer in the mix.

By then the sugar crash was hitting hard, so we stopped in at Aoi, one of the little restaurants in the area.  It reminded me of my favorite greasy spoon diners, only with Japanese food.  The food was not outstanding, but not bad either, and the owners were incredibly sweet.

Little Tokyo is really quite nice early on a Saturday evening.

I was a little concerned about taking a night class at the community college, but it's all good as they say.

The instructor is very cool.  He's about my age, a doctoral student at UCLA, and entertaining as heck.  He involved everyone, answered questions efficiently and helpfully, and even dropped a few "colorful" terms that might be useful if say, you're looking for a hooker in Dresden.  Actually, that's not the scenario he set up, but still.  No other language teacher I've ever had would even mention something along the lines of "if you don't pronounce 'listen' correctly, you could be saying 'whore' instead."

And since when are most of the college students twelve years old??

durgablue is the big fan of Flight of the Conchords, no? Well, lookie who's playing Tampa in April!

Flight of the Conchords Tour

Michael talked me into walking with him in Runyon Canyon Saturday morning. It was a beautiful, cool day and my butt was kicked good. Which is really not a bad thing because a) it's a good thing to bust my delusions of physical fitness and b) it's a good thing to do something about my lack of physical fitness. I can walk all day on flat surfaces, but this place has some serious grade.

Also, my 365 project has (not surprisingly) bit the dust. However, I do bring a camera along more often than I used to. Here are some pics from Saturday in the park:

The Pacific from our parking spot


Downtown


The Hollywood sign 

 Yes, I have been taking pics every day.  I've just been lax about posting them.  And to spare everyone having to look at 365 postings, here's the Flickr link for future reference:

Flickr Link to Lisa's 365

It's gonna be a long 365 days. I was tempted to give up already.

So very MySpace, I know. It's been a long day.

While perusing teh interwebz, I noticed that the charming Edgar Wright has stated he will be posting a picture a day to his MySpace blog.  So me, who was flirting with the idea of doing a 365 project anyway and clearly has too much time on her hands, said:  "I'll try that!"  First one goes up tonight, since I don't usually carry a camera around.

I'm such a bandwagon jumper on-er.