Category: Life

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The best damn gallon of milk ever

I came across this via my friend Chris, who sent it around in an email. I have no idea how he got it. In any event, apparently it’s possible to buy Tuscan Milk from the gourmet food section of amazon.com. Now, while we’re kind of picky about our milk around here (I avoid milk products with bovine growth hormone), It’s never even occurred to me to mail-order milk.

It seems like a lot of people commenting on amazon.com about Tuscan Milk feel pretty much the same way, and, as a result, there are many over-the-top funny reviews here on this amazon.com page for the milk. I agree with my friend Chris; the second one is especially funny.

After doing a Google search on this, I realize that this Tuscan Milk thing has sort of spun out of control. See, for example:

Ah, that crazy internets….

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Thanksgiving blogging, part 2: the pictures




Thanksgiving, CF, 2006

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I already posted about the first part of this year’s Thanksgiving gala; here are some pictures and more about the second part:

  • Friday for lunch was with Troy and Lisa at Rudy’s Tacos in Waterloo, which was great because it was a groovy place in a sort of weird industrial part of town that I had never heard of before.
  • After that, we made a run to Cedar Falls for a stop at Soho Sushi and Deli. This was mainly Troy’s idea, but we were all interested in seeing what this combo looked like. Well, it was quite the busy place, but it looked to us that everyone there was taking advantage of the “deli” part of things, and the sushi bar looked pretty lame. After that walk-through, we went across the street to Cup of Joe coffee.

  • Because this is a year in which the Krause kids spend Christmas with the in-laws, we did some gift exchange and present opening on the Friday after T-Day. The theme for gifts for the kids was books, which was good. For the adults, we had a “white elephant” style gift exchange, something I’m too lazy to explain but which only involved good gifts (not some sort of “re-gifting” and/or junk around the house). I was a skeptic, but it turned out to be kind of fun.

That was about it. Now it’s just the mad dash to Christmas and beyond.

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Thanksgiving blogging, part 1

Thanksgiving is actually one of my favorite holidays, largely because it revolves around one of my favorite activities, which is eating. Oh yeah– there’s some family stuff, too. Anyway, in no particular order, the T-Day holiday so far:

  • This year, we went to Iowa to see my side of the family. At Christmas, we’ll make the trek down to Florida. We drive to Iowa, but after about 10 hours in the car, caught in traffic etc., we started to wonder how much would it cost to fly.
  • We stopped on the way at Panera, in part because we were thinking that it was a healthy option. Well, according to Dottie’s Weight Watcher page, not so much. It’s still tasty, though.
  • Yesterday involved the running of a variety of errands– car washing, picking up pies, buying a University of Northern Iowa sweatshirt. Two things that eternally fascinate me about visiting my hometown: first, Cedar Falls strikes me as so much more “liveable” of a place than it was when I was a kid, mainly because so many more things are so easily available here than it used to be. For example, good coffee, good books, the New York Times, decent restaurants, good shopping options, organic vegetables, good cable, etc. Call it progress; call it the state of advanced capitalism.

    Second, I inevitably get lost when I come back to my hometown because a few years after I moved away (I actually haven’t lived here full-time since I was about 19, and I am pretty sure that I passed the point where I have lived more outside of Iowa than in Iowa a few years ago), they did a major road reconstruction project, totally changing the traffic patterns and right way to go. It took me more than an hour to pick up the pies.

  • Lots of play with the kids on the playground, lots of play in the backyard, card playing, eating and drinking, etc., etc. I was going to upload some pictures, but I left the cable for that at home, so it will have to wait until we get back.
  • Other than that, pretty boring stuff. Good dinner, but no green bean casserole, which is, of course, wrong. My father grilled the turkey, and at no point did anyone think about deep-fat frying it. The neighbors across the street did, but nothing bad happened.
  • Other than that, a lot of the last couple of days has involved me catching up on email and determining the schedule for my online teaching in the winter term. Really exciting stuff.

But I will leave you with this amusing item about bunnies cooking turkeys:

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Weird Al Hits Too Close to Home

I’m not sure what this says about me or the people I know, but someone I work with suggested I take a look at Weird Al’s song/video “White and Nerdy” and after I did, I realized he was singing about me, more or less.

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A good night for vampires…

Boo!Last night, Annette went to an event for the undergrad English majors club (really, literature majors club), so Will and I had a “Daddy/Will night” event: we went to see the classic silent film Nosferatu at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. A silent film, you ask? Yes, but with orchestral accompaniment, which included things like this weird wind sound effect machine, lots of other percussion, and, of course, the theater organ. And as an aside here: this is one of those reasons why I like living in this area and why we probably will be moving to Ann Arbor eventually, that it is possible to see classic silent films with music as a special event at a place like the Michigan Theater.

Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night, so that seemed to be a perfect atmosphere for seeing one of the classic (perhaps the classic?) horror/vampire film. Lots of other people thought the same thing; the place was about 2/3rds full, including the balcony.

How was it, you ask? Well, for starters, it was less than scary, which probably suited Will just fine. I’m sure the horror effect was in part diluted by the giggling junior high boys who sat behind us. But beyond that, the melodramatic and dated acting and not great special effects didn’t instill fear. I guess it was scary 80 or so years ago.

But it was still pretty cool to see, at least for me. There’s a ton of stuff in this movie that has been repeated over and over again in countless other movies, and it is one of those things that anyone who has even a remotely serious interest in film has to see. Again and again even Will was able to point out when a “famous scene” came on the screen. And the music was very cool too.

I’d say go see it yourself, but it was a one-shot deal. I guess I would say instead that you should go see another one of the other silent films they show there once in a while.

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Daily photo project

This morning via yahoo, I came across this “daily photo” project. There’s a video at the site that shows a time-lapse of this guy’s self-portraits over the last seven or so years, from the time he was 22 until now. I’m not sure, but this seems like a pretty, um, self-involved thing to me. And it doesn’t so much show off the process of aging as it shows the changes in this kid’s hairstyles. Still, it’s kinda cool….

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“The Last Unicorn” (Or Bill HD’s 91)

I appreciate that this is kind of an inside joke about Bill’s 91 in golf earlier this year (a round that was gifted to him by a unicorn), but I thought others might enjoy this super stupid video. Boing-boing described it as being like pepto for your eyes. Indeed.