I’d like to try to tell you that I caught James’ very first time standing, but these things don’t happen when you’re holding a camera, and it doesn’t last long. Sometime about 2 weeks ago, James began standing for sometimes up to 5 seconds without assistance, but yesterday he managed to stand for 20-30 seconds … Read more
30 minutes after the first pizza, I was back at the table with this pizza. Cooling the oven failed to have the correct results, the stone didn’t loose temperature, but the ambient temperature apparently dropped. The second pizza was still burnt on the bottom, but the toppings failed to cook. Another thing I noticed, the … Read more
No life-long search for the ultimate pizza could be complete without attempting to take matters into one’s own hands and create it oneself. I have spent years looking for pizza crust recipes, and no matter how many I find and try, I’m amazed at one salient point: There is so very little variation in the … Read more
My wife maintains a family website/blog on Baby Home which is based in Taiwan (and therefore in Chinese). It’s primarily about the kids growing up. One of the unintended side effects is that several Taiwanese mothers located in Arizona have “found” each other and formed a sort of offline group of acquaintances (I believe the … Read more
I had to go to DMV the other day to transfer title on a new car and get my drivers’ license photo updated. As you can imagine, I had a while to enjoy the ambiance of the west side DMV. One of the things they added sometime prior to 1998 (the last time I was … Read more
Here’s another half-review. I was taken to lunch the other day to Pier 49 Pizza, a new restaurant, somewhere in the Phoenix/Tempe borderland. I didn’t get a menu, and didn’t notice the prices, so I don’t have price/quantity information, but as for the pizza, here goes… I gotta say, I completely agree with Alton Brown … Read more
This was just too priceless not to take a picture of. Incidentally, despite the awful name, Dr. Milker is the most normal tasting milk I found in Taiwan. I’m not an expert on pasteurization, but I couldn’t help noticing that the description of the process on Taiwanese milk usually involved phrases like, “Ultra high temperature … Read more
We’ve been awfully busy/sick lately and just haven’t had much time to post… besides, when you’re sick/busy, there’s nothing much really to tell. I offloaded my cellphone photos tonight and discovered I had a few leftovers from Taiwan. This was one of my favorites. As we were waiting in the airport terminal, in the food … Read more
You see? It really is for the kids. When I came home today Michelle was all wound up, wanting to decorate the Christmas tree. We had to make her take a nap she was so jittery in anticipation. All the while it was being decorated she’d look at each new decoration, or each change in … Read more
OK, so I’ve never really come up with a good, non-religious name for the good old fashioned Christmas tree. “Holiday Tree” just doesn’t have much pizzazz. Did you realize that Christmas Trees are really not all that old? The first known one in England was Queen Victoria’s. In fact, that whole Dickensian Christmas thing was … Read more