April 14, 2024

The Las Vegas travel guide for families: come for the chocolates, stay for the surrounding cactus garden.

As an aside, is there anything more American than being so bored in retirement that you start a new business which 20 years later gets sold back to your old company?

A variety of short cacti in front of the “Ethel M Chocolates” factory.

April 13, 2024

This page from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World was common sense when it first came out almost 30 years ago. Today it reads like a revolutionary screed.

Photo of page 434 from the book The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. It talks about the importance of freedom of speech and the scientific method.

April 12, 2024

What war on Christmas? The magic was alive and well in DC last year.

Children looking through a shopping window at a holiday display featuring an old toy TV set with a decorated Christmas tree inside.

April 11, 2024

As tall as they all are, Honolulu’s skyscrapers still respect the sky.

Honolulu skyline as seen from the elevated National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

April 10, 2024

We had great hopes for the Dole plantation on Oahu, being great fans of their pineapple soft serve. Alas, it was a pure tourist trap.

The train ride was the only good part: the soothing sounds of the engine combined with the rocking and the outdoor breeze led to the best nap I’ve ever had.

Small, bright yellow train labeled “Pineapple Express”

April 9, 2024

Our first time at a Michelin star restaurant was in Tail-Up Goat a few blocks down from our first DC apartment in Adams Morgan. It was one of those places where you needed a flashlight to see your food, and the crispy salt cod was more salt than crispy. We have avoided Michelin stars ever since.

Close-up photo of a restaurant menu. The first item is crispy salted cod.

April 8, 2024

These signs work for raising awareness as much as they do for prevention. Case in point: we were half an hour too late to see those sea turtle eggs being deposited, so the next few mornings we were up even earlier for our morning walks hoping to catch another nesting. Without any luck, of course.

Four yellow posts cordoning off a square section of the beach. “Sea turtle nest” is written on one of the posts, with smaller print underneath.

🍿 Paddington 2 (2017): even better than the first. It doesn’t look like Paddington 3 is in the cards, but what a fun set of movies this has been. Just compare it to what we had back in the day.

The new and improved list of recommendations made using the new micro.blog interface is now on my profile. The next step is to figure out why they’re not showing on this page even though I’ve included the shortcode.

April 7, 2024

🍿 Paddington (2014) is the perfect family movie to which we were 10 years late, but it was worth waiting for every family member to be able to appreciate it. Too sappy and twee for adults? Perhaps. But did it make our kids laugh and cry? Also, yes, and you don’t often find the crying bit in movies like this any more.