City Grill (Bellingham)

Erin and I decided we wanted to try someplace new for dinner tonight. We went through our usual back and forth about Thai, Taco Down the Street, Cheap Chinese food, etc. We finally decided to try out a restaurant we had seen in downtown Bellingham back when we were doing Christmas shopping.

The place is called City Grill, and its located on Cornwall between Holly and Magnolia. They don't have any showy signs outside so its easy to miss, but make the effort to find it if you're in town. In a word, its a gem!

We got there at about six pm before any of the evening crowd showed up, and were quickly seated by the gracious and very friendly hostess. The atmosphere inside was somewhat austere, and doesn't seem to follow any particular theme, but our food is delicious . Our meal began with an appetizer of fried calamari served with tzaziki sauce. I've had calamari all over the place, and usually its pretty tough and rubbery, but this was tender and spiced just right. The hostess served us some of her almond tea which was delicious as well. I'm not sure how to describe it in any other way except liquid marzipan. Sort of sweet, sort of not. Really worth trying.

We both decided to try out their sandwiches. I got a chicken breast sandwich with avocado and bacon and Erin got a burger with bacon and sauteed mushrooms. The chicken patty was a whole breast, and not that mechanically separated crap, while Erin's burger was a freshly made ground beef patty. The sandwiches came with steak fries and a garden salad with vinaigrette. Nothing fancy, no fru-fru, simple meal, but really really really good simple meal, and pretty inexpensive too.

By the time we left a crowd was starting to build up, which made us both happy to know that these guys were getting some business. City Grill just opened a few months ago, and since downtown is kind of dead, I don't think a lot of people know about it yet. They're really worth a look, and I know I'll be going back for more.

Look at me, writing like I'm some food critic.

Its multiplying!!! AAAAAAAARRRGGG!!!!!!

What once was Here Come Dots is now Ralph and Erin's Cross Country Blog. Why? Because neither one of us can keep up a blog on our own, but maybe we can do it together. Both Erin and I will be authoring posts now, and hopefully this will become a better, happier, more productive, more alive sort of place. Site. Is a site a place? Not really. Right?

ice

Two kilometers. Thats quite a bit. Thats 1.2 miles, or 6,561 feet. For my Milwaukee peeps, two kilometers is about the distance from Sabin Hall at UWM to Vittuci's on North Ave. Or about the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Now take that and stand it up on its end. Thats the thickness of the ice mass which once crushed the Puget Sound area. Puget Sound wasn't even a sound then. Just a lowland between the Cascades, and a second set of mountains (The Coastal Range) further west. Mountains which now make up the Olympic Peninsula, Most of Vancouver Island, and the San Juan Islands.

Sometime around 18,000 to 12,000 years ago the Cordilleran Ice sheet plowed into this region from the north. It was 2km thick, massive, heavy! The ice found the path of least resistance and flowed primarily into the soft lowlands between the two mountain ranges. And there it sat. Heavily! it sat and it depressed the land! It didn't make the land want to write shitty poetry and slit its wrists (land has no wrists silly!), no it literally pushed it down! And it kept it down for thousands of years.

Warming trends began to melt the ice. As enough of it melted, waters from the Pacific Ocean were able to flow into the depressed lowlands and fill them in with sea water. Massive chunks of ice were still hanging around, and these form floating bergs that slowly melted in the water and dumped off the dirt, rocks, and other debris they had scooped and plowed up many thousands of years earlier onto the sea floor.

Over the years the depressed land began to spring back up. Much as the couch pillows slowly rise back up after my fat ass is done sitting on them. Landforms literally began to pop back up above the waters, and the sea receded. This didn't happen over night. As a matter of fact Puget Sound didn't take on its modern shores until about 5000 years ago or so. The rebound has slowed down as the land has popped back up (geologically speaking) to more or less its original elevation.

Some of the former mountains were flooded and now only their peaks show as the San Juan Islands, other islands became incorporated into the mainland as river deltas dumped silt over many thousands of years and eventually surrounded the former mountains with a mantle of rich lowland soils.

When whitey showed up in the 1850s and 1860s, they quickly found these former delta lands to be great farmland. Even today, as you drive along I-5, you see long stretches of flat land punctuated by occasional hills that just seem to stick up out of nowhere. These were once islands, but before that, they were mountain tops.

So there you go.


An ex-island near Burlington, Washington

Like Rick Perry trying to solve a word problem

Sometimes teh interwebz at my house get very very slow. I do not understand why. My connection says its excellent, neither my wife's computer or the Netflix on the Wii are running, so what gives? I have a pass-code set up for my network connection, but is it spotty-kid proof? Perhaps not!

Like A Phoenix

Its time to fire this thing up again.

I fell out of the blogosphere some months ago as I find it difficult to continuously update when changes are frequent, manifold and fundamental. Instead I like to present such things in digest form when the dust begins to settle.

And much dust there was. A recap then.

In the spring of 2010 I was offered what seemed to be a very nice position at a cultural resources management firm in northwestern Washington State. I took the bate and relocated from Tucson. I settled in Bellingham, Washington, on the Puget Sound, about 25 minutes south of the Canadian border. The new job was going really well for about 9 months, and then my wife began to make inroads into the University of Washington system as a collections manager for the archaeological materials at Western Washington University.

Things took a nosedive in the summer of 2011 when the job I moved here for ended. The particulars are not important, but the whole thing left me very unhappy with my career choice, made me question my abilities as an archaeologist, and the legitimacy of the cultural resource industry in general.

I was eventually able to get back up on my feet somewhat, and a series of events renewed my vigor for things historic. For one, I began working with another small archaeology firm in Bellingham called Rosario Archaeology. My responsibilities at the new company are much the same as those at my former job, but I get to do much of my work from home, which is fantastic.
My boss Mark is a super guy, and the only thing I would change would be to have more hours.

On the other hand, working part time has given me much time to continue working on my dissertation, and to branch out and pursue some other interests. I am currently working on my final chapter of the dis, and hope to submit a draft to committee by year's end. But whats really exciting is that I'm working on launching my own graphics and web design business.

My little venture is called Lamplight Digital Design Solutions. At the moment I'm doing some pro-bono work for friends so that I could buildup a portfolio. I did a logo for a small company in Bellingham, and am currently working on websites for a transportation company in the area, and a dog breeder outside of Warsaw (yeah!). I'm also in the process of building my own portfolio site.





So that's the long and the short of it. I hope to start posting slightly more regular updates soon.

I found this video to be very inspiring

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEiwBCpiA0E

Check this out; a group of high school kids banded together to counter-protest that detestable bunch of motherfuckers in the Westboro Baptist Church when they came to their town to shit all over everything.




Why do I have to go on YouTube to see this? This is the kind of thing everybody should get to hear about

If the popular news media can focus more on normal, kind people like this, rather than just on the teabaggers, bigots, Christian fundamentalists and other assorted pieces of shit who really only make up a small portion of America but are becoming disproportionately vociferous; people would see that this really is a good country worth believing in and striving to make a better place. Maybe some of that apathy that lets those groups outshout the rest of us would begin to be silenced.

I know I only have four or five readers, but y'all do have the power of the cut&paste and the email forward. Lets get the word out

Its been a long time

I've been asked by many to update my blog, and I must say that I haven't been able to muster up the will to do so. I have no clever and or inane insights to yammer-on about, and I've been doing so much writing between work and the dissertation, that any additional "long-writing" seems difficult and tiresome.

This morning an online friend had suggested I post something political. This got me wondering about what I may want to write. So I took a quick look at some of the political preaching that people place within their facebooks, their blogs and their tweets and all, and I must say that I'm beginning to find all of it to be very dull, and that I don't want to contribute to the public floggings of many very dead, rotting, in many cases long skeletonized, mayhaps even fossilized horses.

So my political message for the day?

Be good to one another, and be good to earth. That is all.