It’s not quite the haul from our original trip, but we did manage to bring back a dozen bottles of fine tequila on our trip to Julio and Liliana’s wedding in Arandas, Mexico:

Once again we had no breakage or theft, in spite of packing everything in our suitcases (because of the War On Moisture), including two bottles that cost more than $100 each…

Two years ago, Rochelle and I were held captive during the imfamous Tequila Hostage Crisis of 2003. This month an article in the San Francisco Cronicle describes a local journalist’s experience on a similar trip.

Tequila trail leads to innovation gives some of the highlights, which we remember well, and alludes to the impact of the more intense moments of the trip (of which we remember little ;-), by describing the author’s regimen of no alcohol and lots of exercise for 10 days before the trip, and no activity at all for 3 days afterwards.

Entertaining and educational to read, there’s some good new tequila drink recipes as well. We will have to visit the local bartenders mentioned, and try them all out!

We’re back from Palm Springs, where we had a great time. The cats decided to let us live. We’re still digging out from under all the mail, voicemail, and email that piled up. Should get caught up by Monday.

We didn’t do nearly as much as we’d have liked to accomplish on our various projects, but that just means we had a good time. This assertion is supported by some of the debris we left behind in the room, our empties, mostly champagne and vodka bottles…

Since getting back I’ve had my birthday. We went out for three straight nights, once for my birthday, once to someone’s Halloween party, and once to someone else’s birthday gathering. At least for me, the most fun was on Friday at Tres Agaves, which just opened last week. (Highly recommended, even though they are struggling under the load of instant success.) We started with drinks in the (packed) bar, and then moved to dinner. Where it turned out there was yet another birthday going on at the table next to us, except the ladies dressed up in theme. It was destiny that we would meet:

No wonder we still haven’t unpacked completely! Anyway, if you’ve been waiting for a phone call or email, we should be back to normal after this weekend. Talk to you soon.

Rochelle and I are currently in Palm Springs, on vacation for two weeks. So far we have done very little except eat and drink and sleep and…play Scrabble.

I don’t usually talk about our vacations on this weblog while we’re away, because I’m too paranoid: I don’t like telling people when it would be easy to break into our house. But this trip, we’ve taken the most valuable (to thieves) stuff (our computers) with us. (Plus we have house sitters for most of the two weeks. House sitters keep the cats from revolting while we’re away…)

Rochelle and I both have projects we’re working on during our two week “retreat,” and most of them involve or require the use of a computer. Sounds crazy, but it really is relaxing to be able to go away, and concentrate on things you’ve been meaning to do, but can’t find the time, or have too many daily distractions. And the things we’ve been meaning to do — writing, organizing photos, leaning new skills for work — are all intimately tied to technology. Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose.

At any rate, we’ll be back to San Francisco in a week or so.

I was just referred to the Fire & Knives cooking and food site with the “recommendation” that “Here’s a nice little food site that is snobbier than youse guys…” I decided it was a keeper when I laughed out loud at this description of wonder bread in a new shape:

Cunning bakers have responded, not with an authentic baguette but with a preservative-laden, turd-shaped travesty called — with callous humour — a French Stick. It’s exactly the same rubbish they extrude into white loaves but delivered in a staggeringly inconvenient shape. Trying to eat a sandwich made with one is like trying to fellate a torpedo.

But where he really got me was with his description of real fast food, as in, food prepared by a short order cook. In Boston last year I sat at the counter in Charlie’s Sandwich Shop, and watched one man prepare maybe 35 dishes while I waited for and then ate my breakfast. The cook, who reminded me of Robert Forster, was an absolute machine, keeping as many as 8-10 dishes on the stove and griddle at once, keeping everything going in parallel, but staggered so as to bring each table up together, without making other dishes wait and get cold.

Most impressively, he never seemed hurried, let alone overwhelmed. Indeed, when a second guy showed up to help plate finished dishes, it seemed like the two of them were less efficient than the cook had been by himself. It was amazing. Although I’ve eaten at the kitchen table at Charlie Trotter’s, where I’ve seen fine food at its finest, that morning in Charlie’s Sandwich Shop was the virtuoso cooking performance I’ve seen in my life.

2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this weblog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.

For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

After a frenzy of traveling in 2003, we mostly stayed at home in 2004. A short trip to Boston, where Rochelle was attending a conference and I was eating cannoli, was the furthest we went. We also made our traditional Thanksgiving visit to Rochelle’s family in Texas. And our longest trip was a road trip down to Palm Springs, where we stayed for two weeks in a condo, while Rochelle wrote the culminating papers for her Masters degree. (Which was Rochelle’s biggest accomplishment of 2004, successfully completing her Master’s program. All over but the paperwork. Yippee!) I mostly loafed around and read a couple of books; in fact I think that was the only fiction I read all year long.

I did get a chance to enjoy more fiction than those couple books, though, by finally giving Audible.com a try. Rochelle started her subscription to the service last year, and has really enjoyed listening to the audio books on her player. When I gave her an iPod mini for her birthday, I inherited the Audible.com Otis player she had been using, and started using it while I was driving. While the Otis sucked, the audio books are fantastic, and there is no better way to enjoy them than on a digital player; CDs and tapes are more expensive, and you have to constantly change them to keep going. Not with the iPod, or even the Otis, which can store almost nine hours — or hundreds of hours for the iPod.

We continued to improve our home with a number of projects, including replacing the solid wood back door with a wonderful wood door with glass panels that lets in far more light. In spite of the glass, with the redone (and now straight) door frame and new weather stripping, the kitchen is much warmer now than it was with the solid door we replaced.

Also in the kitchen we added a display shelf along one wall, to better show off the ridiculously large collection of champagne bottles we’ve amassed. I’m sure we’ll have to purge the collection at some point, but for now it’s fun to have them all in a row, and know that we’ve found and enjoyed some really fine wine in the last couple of years. The bottles on the shelf are only from the last two years, but it represents far more champagne than I drank in my entire life before Rochelle.

We painted our bedroom from top to bottom. Rochelle picked out three new colors that matched our antique bed frame, and over the course of a week, we stripped and repaired walls, and painted painted painted. The results are not perfect by a long shot, but it’s still a tremendous improvement for us.

Also in the bedroom we ended up replacing all but the headboard of that bed frame, which lowered the mattress and gave us a much more stable bed. The antique bed frame itself was quite solid, but the queen conversion kit that came with our McRoskey mattress replaced the solid side beams, and made the bed horribly shaky.

The biggest improvement we made was replacing the old, grim gray carpet that Rochelle picked out 10 years ago with new carpet that is warmer-toned, and coincidentally hides cat stains far better. That went into our parlor, office, and bedroom, as well as the hall closet, which we somehow omitted from the hardwood floors project a couple years ago.

In the office, we replaced almost all of our furniture, getting rid of our desks and a chrome shelving unit, and replacing with much bigger desks and some standard shelving from IKEA. They’re not perfect, but they look a lot nicer than what we had before, and work a whole hell of a lot better with the computers, etc., than the old stuff did.

We didn’t eat out as much this year, and so we discovered fewer new restaurants than we usually do. We still found a few, including Saha, where Rochelle’s favorite chef from last year went after he sold and left our favorite find of 2003 (which is no longer particularly special). The cuisine can best be described as Arabic fusion, and combines Middle Eastern spicing (the chef is from Yemen) with French technique. It’s extraordinary, and everyone we’ve taken there has agreed that the prix fixé dinner would be a bargain at twice the $27 it currently costs.

On the topic of food, I took HomeChef’s “essentials” cooking course (4 hours one night a week for 12 weeks), and had a blast. I made a lot of the food at home during the course, but haven’t cooked as much as I’d hoped to after the class ended. Still, I probably cooked more in 2004 than in 2003, which is a trend I’d like to continue in 2005.

We only threw one party in all of 2004, and it was on the last day of 2004 (more on that in another post). Shame on us. Look for that to change in 2005.

On the technology side, I got a new computer, my first laptop, and have really enjoyed the new mobility. Before the current generation of PowerBooks, I always felt that getting a laptop was too big a compromise. There’s still a big performance gap between the PowerBook I got and Apple’s professional desktop systems; and my hard drive size is limited compared to what’s available in full-size systems; and the PowerBook’s screen is quite a bit smaller than what I had before; etc. But with the current laptops, the hardware has advanced so far that what you get is more than good enough, and the trade-off of headroom I don’t need for mobility I want is now possible.

We also switched to a new DSL provider, Speakeasy, which is both saving us money and providing better service. We stuck with our reduced cable plan, which is $14 a month, and we (mostly) don’t miss the channels. At the end of the year, we signed up for Netflix, so we could get the movies back. Minimum cable plus Netflix is less than half what we were spending for our premium cable services, and gets us pretty much everything we want. Except for ESPN…

I made roughly 60 posts to this weblog. And I sold zero BeBoxes. Both of these numbers need to go up in 2005.

I gained back much of the weight I lost at the beginning of last year. That number needs to go down in 2005.

The cats all stayed healthy and happy, and we didn’t add any new ones. The number of cats in our house needs to stay the same in 2005.

And that was my 2004.

Mentioned in the lead paragraph of that NYTimes article is the spreadsheet which Rochelle put together prior to our trip to France in 2002. Since publication we’ve actually had people inquire about getting access to it, so I thought I’d put it online. If you’re impatient, you can find a download link toward the end of this story. But some background will help you make the most of it.

Rochelle created the spreadsheet in an attempt to duplicate the really amazing experience she had using Vindigo on her Palm handheld when visiting New York City in May 2002. She did a lot of pre-trip research, and entered addresses and venues of interest into Vindigo. Then, while in NYC, she was able to tell Vindigo where she was, and get a list of places within walking distance, along with step-by-step directions for getting there. It made her touring the city (while I was locked in business meetings) efficient and fun, while still allowing for serendipity to influence where she went.

However, there is no Vindigo for Paris, or for any city in France. So we set out to try to duplicate the most essential features, by tying every location of interest to the nearest Metro stop and its arrondissement. We thought that this would let us figure out where we were, and then find interesting places nearby. In the end, it was only partially successful for us.

We had the most fun when we used it at the beginning and middle of the day, during breakfast and lunch, to plan where we would spend the rest of the morning or afternoon. When we tried to use it to follow whim after whim, which Vindigo had done successfully, we ended up pretty frustrated.

The other thing that didn’t work out the way we envisioned was the Palm version of the spreadsheet. We managed to download the data into Rochelle’s Palm, and use a micro database called JFile to be able to search and sort it, etc. But without a lot of additional development, having just the table of data was simply too hard to use on a Palm screen, it’s just not wide enough. With a search engine, hand-crafted results and detail pages, cross references, etc., the electronic version could have been pretty good…but even if I had put 20 hours into it, it would still have been nowhere near as good as Vindigo.

In the end, the printout of the spreadsheet was a tremendously valuable tool for us, and we’d never have seen as many cool places without it. And even if Vindigo had covered Paris, we’d still have wanted to pore through all the guidebooks and websites that Rochelle found. We would never have depended on Vindigo’s content. But having Vindigo to organize our own content by precise location, instead of rough chunks, would have been pretty darn cool.

Anyway, the spreadsheet was put together prior to our trip to France in October 2002; some things are now surely out of date. We’ve made no attempt to clean up Rochelle’s unique annotations and categorizations (Rochelle is an information organization specialist), which will likely be meaningless to you. And you don’t get our copies of the guidebooks, where were marked up and bookmarked with color-coded flags, and cross-referenced in the spreadsheet; we used those constantly, too. But if you still think it might be useful to you, here’s the spreadsheet.

Last note: this only covers half our trip, the time we spent in Paris. We also spent a lot of time in the Champagne region. We didn’t make a spreadsheet for that part of the trip, which (except for our first hotel and one meal) was entirely unscripted. Instead some photos and some weblog entries may give you some useful information about that.

Enjoy France!

Rochelle and I were quoted in the New York Times again, this time in the travel section, an article about people who base their vacations around food, so-called “gastronauts.” It’s a fun article to read; better do so quickly, before the story disappears behind the for-pay firewall.

It looks like the story might have gotten chopped up a bit in editing, because I am a San Francisco-based software developer, not LA-based. And, while the Klausners may also have done so, I know we told the reporter about our trip to Chicago to eat at Charlie Trotter’s, which turned into a week-long eating binge though much of Chicago’s best-rated food establishments. (Our vacation eating focus is much less high-end these days.)

If I was going to offer once piece of advice to other food enthusiasts who were going to plan a vacation around that passion it would be this: walk everywhere you can. There’s no way you can put everything of interest in a spreadsheet before you get on the plane; walking will take you past things you could not possibly have planned for. And if nothing else, it’ll keep you from gaining too much weight while you’re eating your way through the local food scene.

On our trip to Mexico’s tequila region last year, we met the proprietor of an establishment in Austin, Michael Parker of Opal Divine’s Freehouse. Rochelle and I were thrilled to hear about a good place for tequila in Austin, and at the trip’s end, promised to visit him at his restaurant when we flew back for Thanksgiving, less than a month later.

And visit we did! We hit Opal Divine’s our second night in town, and liked it so much that in spite of a compressed schedule visiting Rochelle’s relations we found a way to squeeze it in again right before our return flight.

Opal Divine’s is quite a bar, with a truly fabulous selection of most liquors including tequila, a stupendous selection of interesting beers from here and abroad, and what must be a U.S. Top 5 selection of single malt Scotch — certainly the best I’ve seen (and we have a great Scotch bar in SF, The Irish Bank).

Rochelle and I certainly know how to entertain ourselves in a good bar, but what takes Opal Divine’s up to the next level, to our only must-visit in all of Texas, is the food. Really, there’s no requirement for Michael to have such good food — decent pub grub would be more than enough to make the patrons happy and coming back to drink more.

His food doesn’t need to be outstanding for him to be successful — but it is. We were reminded of that again this evening, when we made everything right with our day by going and having the tasting sampler of Scotch to start (six single malts from all the Scotch regions), and then eating a great chicken fried steak and an incredible patty melt.

We flew to Austin for Thanksgiving with Rochelle’s family today. The flight was horrible, not for the usual reason, not because of anything the airline did or because air travel the day before Thanksgiving is near chaos. No, it was just horrible passengers.

It all started so well. We made it through the security line without a huge wait or hassels. We headed to the bar with plenty of time to down a couple of double vodka tonics each. And we walked onto our plane without any issues of overcrowded overhead bins, etc. We medicated ourselves further, and then settled into our audiobook, thinking this was going to be an easy flight.

Then some skate rat hits my arm and tray table on his way past, and knocks my red wine into my lap. Not so much as an excuse me. The flight attendant was great, giving me club soda and another mini of wine, but I still had to sit in soaked pants for the rest of the flight, and until we got to our hotel room.

Then on our approach into Austin, we had to turn off all personal electronics, and thus listen to our fellow passengers. Crying babies are one thing (and we had that going in stereo), but two tech people from the Bay Area swapping dot.com-era stories, in over-loud, penetrating voices from the seats directly behind us sent Rochelle over the edge. My god, hasn’t everyone told or heard that same damn story a hundred times by now? It’s only interesting the first time — except, apparently, to the person telling it to the stranger sitting next to them, who is only pretending fascination so they can tell their own story next.

Note to dot.bomb participants and victims: This is 2004, it’s been three years, your stories are officially boring. Find something new to talk about, please!