I absolutely hate the word “blog”

I’ve never been a huge fig person before — not because I don’t like them, per se, but more because I have no idea whether I like them or not. I guess they don’t seem to have a particularly distinctive flavor, at least according to my palate. I know they’re all the rage with foodies, though, and I was feeling hungry, bored and adventurous. And Grant was off at some football thing, so I was left to myself to figure out dinner plans.

Enter Pagliacci. Their current seasonal offering is the Prosciutto Fig Primo, and it made my mouth water when I heard the description over the phone (text doesn’t do it justice):

PROSCIUTTO FIG PRIMO 
The thought of a sweet fruit on a pizza is often considered a foreign concept. We pushed the boundaries of pizza making with our Pear Primo and thanks to its continued popularity, we knew figs could be a hit too. We combine figs with prosciutto, basil and fresh mozzarella on an olive oil base for the perfect balance of lightly sweet and salty flavor.

Our usual standard is their Parma Primo, which has prosciutto plus basil, tomato, olive oil, mushrooms, fontina, mozzarella and goat cheese on an olive oil base. So this was close to home while still being adventurous and fun. And I actually think there’s a higher ratio of prosciutto to other stuff with this special.

At the end of the day, the fig primo had definitely won me over, even though it was a bit pricier than our usual (extremely expensive) favorite. The only improvement I would make is to add some tomatoes.  It was so very sweet that it seemed like it could use something tangy to balance it all out.  Still, it turns out that a) I like figs in some contexts, and b) I’m not yet over the fruity pizza trend.  Mmm mmm!

So my most recent Costco run yielded a box of chanterelles, of all things.  (I think of Costco as more of a bulk mouthwash and paper towels kinda place, but hey… they were cheap, fresh, wild-harvested, local, and bright orange with gills, so how could I refuse?)

I’d never cooked anything with chanterelles before, so I decided to just sautée them in a bit of butter and chicken broth, and let their natural flavor shine. Ahem, that was LET THEIR NATURAL FLAVOR SHINE.  (They didn’t hear me.)

Turns out chanterelles don’t really *have* much of a natural flavor.  In fact, I had to drizzle a bit of white truffle oil on them just to make them fun enough to eat!

Lesson learned: while the name may sound all French and elegant compared to, say, oyster mushrooms, the latter is actually much tastier.  Now I know!

Trumpet, like most cats, can be a bit of a picky eater. But I have been wanting for ages to try and switch him to a more natural brand.

A couple years later, I’m *actually* getting around to doing something about it. I got him using Wellness brand dry food that’s well-geared for his particular needs (he’s UTI-prone). But I tried giving him wet food from that same company, and it was a no-go — he only likes stuff with a sliced/chunky texture, and not that godawful horrifying pastey mixture that most wet cat foods possess. (And I totally sympathize. We don’t want to have to open cans of that shit for him, either.)

Thankfully, I’d bought those cans at a small, locally owned pet food store in Whitecenter, near my old work. They guarantee all their foods, so they reimbursed me even for the cans that we had opened up and rinsed out — no hard feelings! Given that I figured it would take a few more tries before I found a natural wet food that Trumpet would touch, I was bummed that this refund-friendly place was no longer convenient for me.

I popped into a local Mud Bay Granary just to see if they could be of any help, and they very much were! They lay out all their cat food brands and the reasoning behind them on their site, which is very helpful.  And they gave me three free BIG cans of wet food for free, just to see if he liked them.  And they said if he didn’t, I could come back in and get three more free cans.  And then they gave me free salmon treats to try out on him.  And they have a zillion convenient locations all over western Washington.

Have I mentioned that Mud Bay is awesome?

No, not the cheesy Shakira album. I mean actual, paid laundry service.

See, we have assigned time slots in our building to do laundry in the shared, coin-op laundry room. And lately, some inconsiderate neighbors have been stealing our time slot, despite the fact that we repeatedly leave increasingly frustrated-yet-still-begrudgingly-polite notes about it. (At first, we figured it couldn’t possibly be the same people over and over again, and that it must just be new-ish tenants who didn’t realize there was a schedule. But then, our caretaker informed us that it’s the same assholes over and over again, so now we’re in full combat mode.)

Needless to say, the fact that they’d thwarted our FOUR most recent attempts to do laundry had left us with quite the backup. So I caved, and we looked into getting professional laundry service. And can I just tell you, MY GOD IS IT WORTH IT.

For a mere $0.95/pound, Russell will come by your place, pick up all your dirty things, wash them according to your specifications with your choice of products, and return them within a day clean and dry and nicely folded and bagged. You don’t even have to drop it off or pick it up. He says his rates may go up soon, but considering that we did at least four loads worth for $35, I’m not too freaked out about it.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a major splurge for us, so it will probably never become our principal form of laundry-doing (at least not unless we’re making six figures each). And now that we know we have the building’s proactive caretaker in our court, we’ll probably continue to do battle with our neighbors until we win. (Next week: Me sitting in the laundry room reading, waiting until they show up so I can confront them in person. Fun, fun.) But still — this was a very welcome help-in-a-pinch option, and I plan on having Russell come take care of our excess sheets and towels again the next time we have houseguests!

I’ve wondered for the past couple of years why Google didn’t have a Web browser, and I guess now I know… they were working on it, just not talking about it. Chrome is their brand-spanking-new, just-released-yesterday browser that’s built by design for today’s Web, which is heavier on applications than when the Internet first came to power fruition.

Along with the release came a nifty little e-book, which is geared more towards other developers than to consumers. Despite this fact, it’s a fun read that gets into some of the more complex aspects of the project’s programming, while still being peppered with cute jokes and references.

The e-book was made public a bit too early, according to Google. However, they immediately jumped on board and made the comic public.

And how is the browser holding up? So far, sorta good… and sorta buggy. Not exactly a shock, the day after its release — but I was hoping to be blown away! So far I’ve experienced at least one crash that brought down the entire program, even though they intentionally designed thing such that crashes would remain isolated in the tab where the problem originated.

That, and performance has been VERY slow so far, compared to the semi-recent Firefox 3. Like painfully, get up and do something else while the tab loads slow. And this has been the case for a lot of lower-memory tabs that performed super-fast in other browsers. GAH!

Plus — and this is just a language nerd’s pet peeve — the text in almost all of the warning/message banners is cut off. Not the case for Grant, though. I’m running Windows XP Home Edition and I have a wide-screen laptop, and I don’t do any weird text magnification settings… and I don’t think I have *that* unusual of a set of circumstances. How come he gets complete, pretty-looking text and I get pre-beta-looking stuff? No fair!

Don’t get me wrong, though — Chrome is already set as my default browser, and I trust that it will only get better with time. (I did read the book, after all.) I just hope the speed thing gets resolved soon!