Winter Sunset

After a weekend filled mostly with working and catching up on errands, given that Emily was also working, I managed to find a brief (and let me stress brief) window of time in which to get out of the indoors and smell some fresh (sniff, sniff, is that cow shit I smell?) air.

This last weekend was mostly pretty overcast, but if 28 years of living in the midwest has taught me anything, its that even on the cloudies of winter days, there can often still be snippets of interesting sunsets, if just for a few minutes. This was the case yesterday, as leaving work (on a sunday!) at about 3:30, I had about an hour of sunlight (mostly obscured by the clouds) left. So I grabbed a sandwhich, and with only my dental macro/telephoto lens in hand from work, headed out to Lake McBride for whatever potential photo fodder might be in store.

And the photography gods humored me, as a decent sunset was had, I was just wishing that I had my landscape lens available, as the colors were even better than what I could capture at 105mm.

Drinkin' Palin

Sometimes after a hard, stressful day at work, the best medicine is a good glass of wine (or two) with dinner. So on the way home after a fairly crappy day, it became obvious that a reasonable solution would be a great dinner, with a bottle of wine to boot. Being a thoughtful husband, I called Emily and recommended that she use up the salad supplies remaining in the fridge, and prepare the last of the remaining sweet potatoes.

For my share, I would be stopping at the local Co-Op to pick up some beef tenderloins and a bottle of wine. Both of us agreed this sounded like a plan, and so it was. I first went about the task of finding two grass-fed tenderloins, and then headed over to the wine aisle.

Sometimes when I head to the wine aisle, I know specifically what I'm looking for. Tonight was not one of those nights. No, I was more in the meandering mood, open to anything in the red family, specifically the deep and oaky reds, as we were after all going to have it with tenderloins. So after about ten minutes of mindless staring and reading several labels, I came across a wine that caught my eye...a Syrah named Palin.

No, this was not the wine of an Alaskan vineyard, the organic grapes were not crushed under the feet of a straight talkin', rifle-yielding, high-heel wearing 'hockey-mom'. Rather this wine was from a place below rather than above the earth's equator, a country called Chile, on the continent (not country as some past republican VP nods might have confused it with) of South America.

The unfortunate part about this wine was that despite all its name-based shortcomings, it was really damn good. And according to this article, it may soon be easier to find, as sales of it seem to have mysteriously plummeted since the 'other Palin' from up north arrived on the American political radar. So Emily and I both say emphatically, even if you are like us and didn't have the desire to vote for Palin, it doesn't mean you can't drink Palin. I guess you could say this is our way of drinking in a bi-partisan manner.

"Song of the Day":

CAD/CAM MacBook Pro

At the meeting I attended recently in Nashville, there was much talk of how CAD/CAM processes are completely revolutionizing the way models and restorations are fabricated, but I figured instead of boring you with dental videos, I'd show an example of how a more common product is also starting to be milled via CAD/CAM processes into something more recognizable. And Dell wonders why they continue to lose market share...

Reflections on Obama Win

...HOME

...ABROAD

Incredible!!!!

Rose II

A Nashville Halloween

This past weekend I had the opportunity to travel down to Nashville, TN to attend a meeting , and of course, have a little fun. While most of the day was spent listening to the latest technology developments on CAD/CAM and virtual environments in dentistry (pretty cool), the evenings afforded myself and some colleagues the opportunity to get off our butts (literally) to experience an evening in downtown Nashville...it just so happened that this night was Halloween...spooky.

So put together cross-dressing country musicians, banjos, beer, more beer, what seemed like a million Packer fans in town for the Packers-Titans game, a pregnant nun, "Brian Seay in drag" with more tattoos than I can count, the real Albert Einstein, and me eating Sushi for the first time, and that makes for an odd Halloween. Nonetheless, this was the case, and, it was a good time.