thenitenote » technology

A perfect Thanksgiving for two

kate — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:00:00 +0000

Over 23 years, we’ve done the holidays every which way. Boisterous parties, dinners for twelve, warm family gatherings, once with South Park on in the background and plates set aside for the newspaper late-shifters, once in a black velvet cocktail dress. This year we were in pajamas. Just Val and me in snuggly holiday bliss. It was a quiet and modest celebration, in keeping with the serious and sort anxious season the world — and so we — are in right now.

We spent the day cooking and playing Little Big Planet — this year’s selection for the Cohen Holiday Gaming Season — and at sunset we served up our Thanksgiving roast duck with acorn squash and figs, oyster dressing, Chinese broccoli sauteed with anchovies, sweet potato puree with labne and ginger. We broke out a bottle of the good stuff and gave great thanks for all the goodness in our lives.

NightNote readers, friends, family, wandering strangers, you are on our list! We are thankful for you and hope that your far-flung celebrations were as warm, wonderful and reassuring as our own. Happy Thanksgiving!

Pike Place delights

kate — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:07:27 +0000

After Wii-ing ’til the wee hours, we lounged around over coffee and laptops all morning, Wii-ed a little more and then Val and I were off to the famous Pike Place Market of Seattle. On a misty day we wandered through the covered market tasting and selecting ingredients for tonight’s dinner for our hosts Mark and Michelle. In the meantime, we also snagged some fresh and fried oysters at Jack’s Fish Spot. Dee-lish.

On the menu: Fresh Washington chicken, roasted and served with an Oregon huckleberry reduction, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, sauteed french beans and Val’s glazed ginger carrots. For dessert: Moostruck chocolate with chilies. Update: I forgot the lovely Fresh Alaskan Halibut sashimi, served with a slice of jalapeno, Pasolivo Olive Oil and a glass of White Wall Sake. Wine with dinner = Foxen Tinaquiac Valley Cabernet Franc, 2005. Exceptionally delicious with the chicken and the chocolate.

^ The oyster tanks at Jack’s Fish Spot — Fresh Quilcene oysters waiting to be shucked for Val

^ Val selects beautiful green beans for dinner.

^ Fresh-shucked oysters at Jack’s and our yummy dinner ingredients prepped and ready to go

Update below: Michelle’s picture of our dinner plates.

Find the Cohens on the Big Graze

kate — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:00:11 +0000

Check it out! My iPhone is telling you where we are. Click here to see what it says. The map is also linked from the top of our sidebar at the left. Enjoy!

Still Utah. Still beautiful.

kate — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:17:00 +0000

Greetings from Green River UT … Tanked up ($4.19/gal) … Blogged up (another gas station in the desert, another perfectly good Internet connex) … Got to fly … Rockies still between me & the dnc ( and Andrew & the veuve) …

Loving the cloud cover

kate — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:45:15 +0000

SOME REST STOP IN UTAH — Utah is so majestic that it is hard to keep my eyes on the road! I’m running parallel to some kind of weather line that’s keeping me cool in the shade. Here’s a cloud pix. Got to make time now — blog ya l8tr …

Snug in St. Geo

kate — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:18:39 +0000

Around 6 pm, I started to feel like quitting the blast furnace, so I asked the phone for motels in St. George, UT and in a few secs I was talking to the good folks at the Best Western. They had this nice snug room with high ceilings — it is clean, comfy and COOLED. Includes all the mod cons — but its wifi seems slower than the iPhone’s 3G. Had a great dinner of Indian food packed by Val (Sorry Applebees, but I had to go for the Aloo Gobi.) A cold Bohemia and a warm shower should make for an early bedtime. The phone tells me I have 632 miles to drive tomorrow, 9 hours 12 minutes. Big day.

PS: It is 9:45 now and 93 degrees in St. Geo.

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Soup of the day: success and comfort

kate — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:28:57 +0000

Today, we rolled out the cool new literary event search features at CaliforniaAuthors. Users can now search — right from the pages of our site — for events listed in the big-and-growing BookTour event database. CSS/php master Val did a really beautiful job with the coding and I am proud and happy with the implementation. Click here to read a nice message about our partnership from BookTour.com’s Kevin Smokler. Click here to give our new search a try!

On another front, Val’s back seized up yesterday, giving his spine a disturbing “S” shape and essentially immobilizing him. So we spent the morning visiting Claudio, getting x-rays, etc. Val is icing tonight for more of the same tomorrow. So this evening we’re having comfort food: this deeply good and supremely easy mushroom soup from famously cranky TV chef Anthony Bourdain. We made ours with shiitakes.

Applewood

kate — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:04:50 +0000

So at the risk of this becoming a blog about my sick iPhone obsession, I’ll relate today’s iPhone moment: I’m at the BevMo looking for reasonably-priced wine for Josh and Adrie’s wedding brunch, checking some notes I e-mailed myself on the phone, when it starts to buzz and I get an e-mail from google alerting me that the long awaited announcement of the ticketing procedure for Barack Obama’s DNC’s acceptance speech had just been made at a Colorado news conference. I tapped — yeah, that’s the new click — the link for the story in the Merc and then tapped a link at the end of story which took me to a page that let me select my home state and gave me a phone number to call to get in line for the tickets. I tapped the number and the phone dialed it right up and in less than 90 seconds, I was giving the DNC my info for a ticket. So less than five minutes after the story moved on the wires, from a liquor store in Long Beach, I was already in line for my ticket. Ah, that apple feeling — tingly!

End notes: 1. Tickets will be free. And the DNC will begin giving them out beginning August 12 — when they will be calling or e-mailing me and the 69,999 other people who will make it in. 2. I got this cool protector film for my iPhone screen — and it’s genius! Protects the screen, reduces glare, adds traction — very sweet. You want it.

Thanks to Val and the nifty WordPress mobile app

kate — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:20:43 +0000

I can blog direct from my iPhone now. Swee. DNC here I come.

Sick!

kate — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:05:16 +0000

You are looking at M&M on my new iPhone, posted on the nightnote, viewed on MARK’s iPhone, posted on M&M, viewed on my smoking hot Samsung HDTV screen via the super-cool Playstation 3 internet browser, now posted for your enjoyment on the nightnote. Tech whore recursion at its finest! Watch the whiplash.