I grew up in New England. There, even though the population didn’t seem very diverse, there was always a good Chinese restaurant somewhere nearby. It might not look like much, and not every restaurant measured up (I remember one in Cambridge, MA that delivered a thing of soy sauce with a dead roach drowned in it), but there was always a good one that wasn’t too tough to find. Even in North Haverhill, NH we could find one a short drive away! It was as de rigeur as a good pizza place.
Then we moved to Maryland. Each Chinese restaurant we tried disappointed us. Even the couple we were cautiously optimistic about went downhill within two visits. Other cuisines here are great—Viet-Thai Paradise is one of our favorite Annapolis restaurants, and Plaza Garibaldi has awesome Mexican food—but there’s just something about Chinese restaurants in this area.
Finally last night we found one I’m hoping will stick. They’ve been around since ‘93, and I found a bunch of positive online reviews about them. Much like the ones up North they look like a litle hole in the wall, and it isn’t high cuisine, but who needs high cuisine when you’ve got good egg rolls and those little fried crispy noodles on the table?! If you’re in the area and wondering, it’s Chopstix in Pasadena, MD.
Meanwhile, I have a couple of new reviews up! For books, check out Patricia Potter’s Behind the Shadows. (Next up: the anthology Witch High.) But best of all, check out the Calphalon No-Peek Waffle Maker!!!
YES! This time I get to participate (for the second time) in Dewey’s readathon! It starts at noon GMT, which should be in just over half an hour, giving me just enough time to have breakfast and a cup of coffee before it starts. I can’t participate in the whole 24 hours since I need to be awake tomorrow, but at least I should be in for more than 12. I plan to use the time to catch up on reviewing as well as reading; that’ll reduce my page count a bit, but I really need to catch up on that.
Here’s the template for later reference, altered to suit my purposes:
Title of book(s) read since last update:
Number of books read since you started:
Pages read since last update:
Running total of pages read since you started:
Amount of time spent reading since last update:
Running total of time spent reading since you started:
Reviews written:
Now that we’re in Maryland we couldn’t possibly let a summer go by without our trip to the renaissance festival. The performances are wonderful and the food is sinful, but honestly my favorite part is the crafts and other such joys. I wish the economy was better this year—we only brought home a couple of things, and you could tell many of the artisans weren’t having quite their usual booming business, which is a shame. I’d far rather spend my money with artistic, creative individuals living their dreams than with faceless corporations running assembly lines, so we did get what we could, planning ahead for winter gift exchanges and such. Anyway, here are a few photos of very nifty crafts from the faire. You can click through for larger versions, as well as notes regarding each artisan:
How cool a last name is “Smith-Smith”, anyway? Ya gotta have parents (or a spouse) with a sense of humor to end up with a name like that! What a great way to turn the most ubiquitous, bland name ever into something much rarer and entertaining.
New review of Deidre Knight’s Red Fire is upcoming in a day or two. I’ve also been playing around with wire-wrapping some semiprecious stones I got at the faire and turning them into pretty pendants.
I’d heard there were people predicting the LHC would bring about the end of the world, but it was kind of hard to process. I didn’t really take it seriously until I saw someone online yesterday talking about how scared they were and how they were just sure that even if the world didn’t end, something would go horribly, awfully wrong. And even then I thought they were joking at first.
*listens*
Nope, we’re all still here.
What really got me was how this person seemed to think there was some sort of huge conspiracy of silence and secrecy surrounding the project. I mean, come on. If this is a grand secret conspiracy, then someone’s doing something very wrong:
Anyway, there are far better things to be scared of than some boogeyman ‘OMG they’re performing SCIENCE’ media frenzy. If I’m going to get stressed, it’s going to be over something that actually has a real chance of ruining my life.
So, all that aside (you did watch that video, didn’t you? If not, go ahead; I’ll still be here when you get done laughing uncontrollably), here’s yesterday’s book review: James Dillehay’s Pricing Your Craftwork. I should have another review up tomorrow. In the meantime, we now have a total of 30 items up at our etsy crafts store (including two more bookmarks!), and have sold our very first item through them!
Question: How many Apple & AT&T techs does it take to get voice mail working on your brand-new iPhone?
Answer: Six. Or was that seven? I’ll have to ask my husband whether he spoke to one or two reps the last time he called.
Okay. It isn’t too fascinating a story, so I’ll try to keep it short. Our old cell phones were about four years old and desperately needed replacing. We already had AT&T as our carrier, and we decided to pick up iPhones. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s ragging on them, it’s cool to hate the iPhone. Well, too bad. We like them. I like the features. I like the fact that, historically, Apple’s had a good track record when it comes to producing working hardware. Okay, so there’s a chicken-and-egg problem regarding reception (AT&T didn’t want to roll out lots of G3 towers until they had plenty of customers for them, so the coverage isn’t good yet), but we aren’t far from DC, so we didn’t think that was likely to be a huge problem. I heard rumor of iPhones being fragile, but everyone I talked to who actually had one said they were amazed by how durable the things were.
So. We got ‘em on Saturday.
The good: TOY! Weather reports, maps, driving directions, a good contacts database, etc. I can customize which ringtone matches up with which caller so I know who’s calling. It doubles as an iPod music player. I’m no power-user, but it certainly meets my needs and then some. The battery life so far has been wonderful. Best of all: the reception is AMAZING. My old phone sucked. This one’s fantastic, at least where I live and where my husband works and in the spaces between.
The bad: the voice mail button didn’t work, and anyone who called us got told we hadn’t set up our voice mail boxes yet. My husband had to go through five levels of tech support over the course of more than an hour, repeatedly trying the same things over and over again, until he reached a ‘voice mail specialist’ who sent something to the sim cards on our phones and had the problem fixed in under five minutes. Oh, except I guess the person who force-activated our voice mail boxes didn’t realize we were supposed to have the ‘visual voicemail’ feature, so that’s what the second phone call was about.
On the plus side, by that time they were so worried we’d be unhappy with them that they were going out of their way to make us happy, including not only back-dating the minute plan downgrade we wanted to the beginning of the month, but also rolling over all our extra minutes to the new plan, which usually you can’t do. Just try getting a company like, say, Comcast to stick with you long enough to fix this kind of problem, let alone volunteer to do nice things for you afterward to make up for it. So while it’s really silly that it took that many people to fix our voicemail, it’s great that they kept at it until it was fixed and then tried to make sure we’d be happy customers.
Today’s review is of a kitchen-related gizmo: the Wine & Dine. Yesterday’s isn’t exactly a review, but rather a non-review of Melina Morel’s Prey. And this is the necklace & earrings set I made this morning. Best viewed in full size (click through and click on the image to enlarge it).
Today’s review is of Shiloh Walker’s upcoming novel, The Missing. Do yourself a favor and pre-order a copy today!
I’m still beading like crazy. A couple of thoughts:
Etsy appears to be an absolutely fantastic place to sell your wares. The storefronts are highly customizable, and it’s a popular enough place that nearly every crafter I run into on DeviantArt or Craftster seems to use it. Speaking of which, Craftster is a decent place to get some feedback and suggestions regarding your work, and DA is a nice place to get exposure and feedback as well.
When buying in bulk (and even not), Fire Mountain Gems blows me away with their prices, selection, and customer service. I highly recommend ordering from them.
States seriously, seriously need to acknowledge the fact that there are now a lot of small-time home-working crafters who like to sell their wares, and streamline some sort of business process for them. Having ethics is a serious challenge, I swear. If I were willing to cut corners like most online folks, I’d just set up an etsy shop and make a little money. But legally, if I want to sell my wares, I have to collect sales tax from any other Maryland residents I sell to, and that means that legally I need a business license and all that rigamarole. You’d think that for one-person self-run small-time businesses they’d come up with some sort of simple “yes you can collect sales tax without being a business” easy certificate, but no. So, we’re working out how to fold the crafting into the ErrantDreams.com, LLC pre-existing company. Once that’s done I plan to open an Etsy store. It’s driving me a little nuts having to wait, but, that’s life.
In the meantime, you can get a glimpse at the kinds of things I’ll be selling at first by looking at my DeviantArt craft photos.
