Passport Covers

Travel influencers urge us to buy unnecessary gear, such as a document organizer, a hotel room blacklight, or an in-flight clip-on cup holder. I add passport covers to that list.

Surprise BOGO

It has been an inflation-beating week. Tuesday: 20% senior discount at Coastal Seafoods. Later I learned about Wedge Co-op’s 5% off for seniors on Wednesdays. Today: a surprise BOGO (Buy One, Get One) on ice cream at Lunds & Byerlys. (Grand Ole [Creamery] is a local ice cream maker.) Life’s good.

Categorized as Eat

Found Money

Noticed this announcement at Wedge Co-op where I stopped to cool off with a dish of vegan vanilla coconut milk soft-serve. We spend a lot of our grocery dollars at the Wedge, so I think we’ll be making a point of shopping there on Wednesdays from now on. Maybe we’ll get carded!

Categorized as Eat

A Seat at Al’s Breakfast

With most university students gone for the summer, it was finally possible to quickly snag one of the 14 stools at 1950s-era Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown. The corned beef hash with a fried egg on top in the narrowest restaurant in Minneapolis was sublime.

Coffee in Bed While Traveling

Hotel rooms in Japan typically provide prefilled coffee filters like these in sealed packets. Today, received empty filters from Amazon we’ll use on future travels to hotels that don’t provide coffee in the room. We’ll simply spoon in ground coffee before pouring the hot water.

Migrating Our Digital Recipe Box

Converted our digital recipe box from Evernote to a folder of .docx recipe files in Google Drive. Evernote is changing ownership, with substantial layoffs, which makes me want to secure our recipes in a standard, open, Web-accessible format that is not dependent on a single company.

Categorized as IT, Cook

Ben, Jerry & Rhubarb

Today is Sausage Saturday, a tradition that always includes ice cream. The big question is: which flavor goes better with rhubarb sauce, vanilla or caramel? I suspect the answer is: both. Yesterday, Dwight made the sauce from rhubarb he’d harvested from his sister’s garden.

Categorized as Eat

Tired Time Travelers

Problem: Working through a 14-hour time difference, and too lazy/tired to cook dinner. Solution: Walk across Washington Avenue to Maxwell’s.