A new Café diary by suskind can be found here; repair thence to continue our chummery!
<keys jangle jangle> <click!> <creak> <creak>
Well, the doors to the Café are open, c’mon in and set a spell! Give ol’ BroFel your order, and he’ll whip up something for ya right quick. We’ll be serving breakfast all day, regardless of your time zone, so whether it’s granola & a bran muffin, or a large bowl of Froot Loops, or a full-on, heart-stopping Irish fry, we’ve got the good eats to keep you going all day.
So, what’ll it be this evening?
A note from the Proprietors: We’re always on the lookout for friendly, enthusiastic volunteers to join our merry band! Hosting the Café is an excellent way not only to get to know your fellow Tribbers better, but also to gain confidence in your own writing and diary-making. Drop an email to the host of any current Café for details.
So did I miss anything fun or interesting yesterday? Did you crank up the karaoke machine again? I’m but a shadow of the party-hound I used to be, but still live a little vicariously through my night-owl acquaintances.
Coffee and a #3 please — eggs, sausage patties, potatoes and fruit, right?
I’ve got images.google.com — henceforth to be referred to as “the griddle” — all fired up, and couldn’t pass up these:
I think prop foods are hilarious!
Jokes!
I come in here starving and sure I’ll be served the best meal of my life (would I do less for you?), and I get served a plate of jokes!
If you want to get revenge on the good Brother, show him a delicious-looking crossword puzzle but don’t give him the clues.
<chuckle>

I hope the mini-muffins will help make up for my weak joke.
ummm, that’s more like it!
Hey – I think I recognize those prop foods – preschool
“kitchen center!”
I definitely like breakfast but if I eat a big one, the first thing I want to do afterward is go back to bed for a nap.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Which is why I wash down a huge breakfast with copious amounts of full-octane coffee! That sort of fuel will keep me going all day, literally. I’d rather not think of the long-term health costs….
I have been lowering my caffeine intake but even when it was its height I still had to avoid big breakfasts. I have the same problem with big lunches, too. Fortunately, my metabolism seems to straighten out by dinner.
Well, I wasn’t around all that much but I do know that we met a nice new BooTribber, PeteyP, and another fun new Tribber, Suskind, enthusiastically volunteered to host the cafe some time. (Diane, did you see that?)
I stayed up til almost two reading the new HP.
May I have a smoothie, please? Something pretty and healthy and cool?
It’s not a prop, I promise!
Thank you. I feel better already.
?
Yes, and I’ll tread very carefully here. I’m loving it. Adored the first chapter. I wasn’t as crazy about the last book as I was about the previous ones, and I didn’t like the last movie much at all, so I am delighted to be liking this so much. I’m afraid to say more. Don’t want to spoil ANYthing for anybody. I hope you get your copy soon, kb. Damn it, this would be a perfect time to have it, while you’re feeling yukky and have to rest anyway.
I’m so happy that you are enjoying it more than the last — that is always a happy event with a series!
Don’t feel too bad about my not having it now. I bought it to read on my vacation (the first 2 weeks of August). So the longer it takes to get her, the less temptation I have to read it early.
And I suspect that this year I’ll be reading it to my mom while she recovers from her knee surgery (which is scheduled for the day before the vacation).
And now I have no fears of feeling let down, Thank You!
Sure did see that, I invited him to join the group, hope he got the email.
Morning all, and I will have a smoothie as well, with boysenberries, please.
Hmmm, well “boysenberry smoothie” didn’t turn up anything, but I found this under “berry smoothie:”

Boysenberries are dark blue-purplish, aren’t they? Sorry for the wait; susanhu’s been very busy on the front page today!
<rubs hands> Fresh meat, excellent. We do have an open date tomorrow, as it happens. And on the same subject, I’ll edit the diary with another call for volunteers. The more the merrier, as they say, though sometimes I’m not sure how much merrier we can get in here!
I want to add to ‘suskind’, please respond to email from team site, and check in there and then more info can be found, plus templates and pics for posting, etc..
If you did not get the site email, then email me at my address below and I will send another.
So if anyone sees him around today, will you relay that info to him…
Anyone else interested in hosting as a ‘fill in’, please email me and I will send you an invite to the team site.
It is 19:47 GMT. I’m just up from sleeping in the office again… so that explains my appearance…
Would like a coffee Jamieson, please….
I’ll check my e mail
mikesmithtel
at
yahoo
dot
co
dot
uk
I’m new to the cafe, but not new to the Trib, I used to be another writer before I was this writer, and, thank God, I’m becoming another writer yet…..
Grouchy, need Coffee with a Shot, please.
mikesmithtel at yahoo dot co dot uk would like an Irish Mist with a few ice cubes…. want something stronger, but the mind comes up a blank… any 12 year old Irish whiskey would do, Brother….
I’m getting grouchier by the minute…. I don’t think I’ve got the personality to be a good barman….
Monday would be a great day for grouches at the cafe…. the food is burnt, the coffee is weak, the service is grumbling, and the jokes are wicked
Make it one more for my baby, and one more for the road, please, Brother. Have to go back to the grind.
Good morning Brother!
I’m just going to sneak this tea off back to my room and get back in bed. . . .have a lovely day all. . .don’t get too close, you don’t want this fluie bug I’ve got. . .
Too late for me, I’ve got it already — or something similar, anyway.
Oh, sorry you have it too. . .have you found anything to calm the stomach down? Tea, green tea with ginsing is all that seems worth having the past 2 days for me.
Poor babies! I have very slight symptoms of something myself. Are we not washing the glasses well enough in here?
If you happen to have any fresh ginger around the house it makes a wonderful, stomach-settling tea. I just peel and chop a couple thin slices and steep it in boiling water. Add lime and honey if you have it.
Hope you feel better.
ginger I have. . .chop I will. . .thanks Laura.
Bed now. . .
Actually, the stomach thing was last week, now it’s more the coldlike flu/cold.
Although maybe the reason my stomach thing has settled down so much is that all I get served around here is
Good morning to you, too! It’s just a little hot & sticky here so I’m glad to have Café duty keep me indoors.
The 3 days to go till vacation hike is in Glacier National Park. It’s a 20 mile hike that starts at the Jackson Glacier Overlook, climbs to Gunsight Lake and then to Gunsight Pass, a total of 2500 feet. It then drops down 1000 ft and then makes you climb them back up again to reach Lincoln Pass. Finally you drop 3500 feet to Lake McDonald. Along the way, you get a very satisfying buffet of everything this wonderful park has to offer — forests, lakes, glaciers, mountains, wildlife, cascades.
Some foolish old farts who shall remain nameless decided to do this as a dayhike. The gods, as is their right, punished their hubris appropriately.
Gunsight Lake
* This hike is blue dot free.
Funny you should mention it because we have decided that Glacier NP has the highest “wow factor” of any place we have ever hiked.
There’s that blue dot again. Spreading out a little aren’t you, AndiF?
CabinGirl brought it up first last time, not me. And, besides, you outed me by “posting” my picture.
But I don’t want to be seen as a meanie so I’ll make you a deal. You don’t post my picture again and I won’t bring the blue dot up again and I’ll even bravely resist CG’s baiting 😉
Lol! Yes, now everybody on the internets knows what you look like. But well, okay (she said grudgingly), I guess the blue dot could get old, but I do dearly love the blue dot jokes. <zips lip. Tries to grin with lips zipped. Says, or rather mumbles, “Ouch.”>
Your hike looks glorious!
I wasn’t planning to drop them (especially since they would probably fade away once i go on vacation) but I thought maybe you were tired of them. I should have realized with your wicked sense of humor, you were good to go.
And I should give a girl a chance to get some coffee first before I start making blue dot fat jokes, :).
My evil mind keeps stuttering on blue d
and fills in blue dress
before double backing and getting to
blue dot
and it does it all the time. It’s why I’m such a lousy proofreader — I just read whatever the words should be rather than what I’ve actually typed.
I think I just woke up and you weren’t saying I was spreading out the blue dot joke but the lake was the blue dot. Now I’m not sure. I think you shouldn’t be so subtle with me and make my brain work — it’s too haaarrddd.
Lake Blue Dot, yes. (Sounds of laughing from a certain state in the middle of the country.)
Last night I forced myself to watch “The Day After Tomorrow,” which undoubtedly is the dumbest movie I’ve ever had to sit through. Bad on so many levels, not the least of which was the (ahem) climate science they used as their disaster device. There’s no doubt large climate swings have occurred and will occur again, but they take place over decades, centuries, and millenia, not a couple weeks. On the other hand, if one of the right-leaning, gas-guzzling sheeple were to ask me, “Gee, could that really happen?” I’d be sorely temped to reply, “Why, yes. Yes, it could. Stop driving your SUV or you’ll be a frozen corpse like those poor schlubs.”
The amusing part was that during the awful storm sequences, there was a tremendous thunderstorm here in DC. For a while there, it was a challenge to distinguish the lightning & thunder on the TV from the lightning & thunder outside. And frankly, at this point I’d almost welcome a new Ice Age; this hot-humid murk we’ve been suffering through is just too much. I’m on record preferring the cold anyway.
Any other weather complaints? This is the place!
Retirement and employment lie side-by-side in the morning light at Penn Cove, Whidbey Island WA.
The 90-year-old sailing Scottish fishing lugger Violet rides at anchor, having been renovated and retired into cruising service by her present owners.
In the foreground is an active workboat for the famous Penn Cove mussel farms that are just off to the right of the picture.
This also shows us a contrast in eras and sustainability. Violet is of course as green as they come, being a sailing vessel, but her catch was almost certainly predator fish in the North Sea off Scotland that have become drastically overfished. The mussel boat is harvesting farmed grazing shellfish, a very ecology-friendly process as I understand it that benefits from a special natural nutrient mix in these waters. But the boat’s engine and hoist, of course, run on petroleum.
Another late start in the Scribe household; the spouse let me sleep in today which was nice of him, but probably means sitting for 2 hours at the clinic — high blood pressure isn’t exactly major priority. I’ll bring along plenty of reading material; when the spouse got Harry Potter yesterday, I got a few books myself. Two books are to help with my writing, but the third looks intriguing; it’s called Star Wars and Philosophy.
Tiger looks well on the way to winning the British Open, and it sounds like Lance has still got a good lead in the Tour de France.
Must admit I’m a wee bit concerned about the spouse’s health issue…but we’ve dealt with work crises before. I’d love to host the Cafe, but I need to get through this minor bump in the road first.
Will check in later…
It’s past noon here – brunch time. I don’t come here for the food – I’m looking for jokes. And beautiful pictures, loved the plastic stuff. The music is a treat too. Nothing beats birdsong during breakfast.
Oh my – I’ll have to dig really deep here. . .
What do you call attorneys who sky dive? (skeet)
On that lame note, I’d best be on my way. Wishing everyone a fabulous day filled with peace, love, hope and joy (along with a sprinkling of fluffy bunnies, kitten purrs, unicorns, rainbows and a liberal SCOTUS. . . :^)
How ’bout a big orange juice and some high-octane java to get it moving…too much Te-kill-ya w/ Senor Peeg and the nighthawks in the cafe last night…whoa! At least we didn’t leave a mess…heh?
I,d planned on bringing some TerrArt from space in celebration of the Shuttle flying again…but noooooo…Anyhow, since I already have it queued up we’ll just have to call it #4:
Landsat7 images Our Earth as Art
Enjoy!
Von Karman Vortices: Alaska’s Aleutian Islands
Lena River Delta: Lena Delta Reserve wilderness area, Siberia
Peace
OJ & jo:
Love the satellite art; takes me back to my remote sensing courses in college, when I’d be able to tell you what channels they assigned to what colors just by a quick glance. That delta shot is amazing. (Those pics are taking a while to load, even on my fast connection; can you resample them down a little? I only ask because some folks are still using dial-up.)
I downsized them to 300 px initially…sorry ’bout that. I’ll keep that thought handy for the future.
Yeah, don’t worry about it too much. Even when you resize it in your IMG tag down to 300px, the client’s browser still downloads the entire thing, then resizes it. So setting the image size in the tag helps keep the thread margins from going way off to the right, but doesn’t do anything to decrease the filesize or download time.
What I do with my images is edit a copy for online use in Photoshop.
I set the image width to <= 400 pixels, then when you save, Photoshop offers a “quality” range. I select 3 to 6 out of the maximum of 12. I use lower numbers where the quality of the scene isn’t the main purpose, higher when it is.
Perhaps some of you have better suggestions.
usually use Photobucket for image hosting…they also have another site tinypic.com that automatically sizes everything to 250k…will that solve the problem? I’m pretty much illiterate w/ computers and not friends w/ them at all…it was a major feat JUST posting images…Ha!
Gorgeous pictures, BTW!
That’s pretty much on the money. Lowering the quality lowers the filesize, if you’re keeping the dimensions of the picture the same. The cool thing about PhotoShop & other image-manipulation programs is that they’ll often state the filesize of the image before you save it. For landscapes like you & AndiF post, filesizes of 100-200KB would be fair; for all the little food pics we post for people’s orders, 10-40KB would be what to expect.
Folks who are still on dialup (56k) will generally download material at about 5KB/sec, so a 150KB picture would take approximately half a minute to appear. Multiply that by a bunch of pictures, and refresh the page a bunch of times, and you can see why (a) we ask people to limit the amount & size of pictures they post and (b) we switch over to a new Café diary every so often. Thanks for helping out with that, and keep posting your cool Puget Sound pics; this urbanite likes to see scenes like those.
that’s inspiring stuff, dada
wow
Is that orthoclase feldspar or plagioclase feldspar, or maybe “just not quartz, please”? Just wondering….
I haven’t measured my potassium content lately, so couldn’t say with precision whether I’m more ortho- or plagio-. Let’s just go with the “not quartz” option for the time being. You & dada (above) are really testing that ol’ college degree of mine — I’m going to have to dust off some textbooks….
I’ve got one of those old degrees, too! I had to push back the cobwebs to come up with that one! Thanks for hosting the cafe today.
For all who have followed the story of my Iraqi friend Diva, I just heard from her on Instant Message, just a brief chat, she does not sound good, says she is ‘still on the earth’, could not keep her job due to the threats she received, still lives with Uncle and was briefly stopping by old apartment to pick up things and use her computer, she can not make the trip often.
She wouldn’t tell me much else, though I did press her a bit, time was limited and then she was gone.
On another note, my daughter is forcing me to go see Star Wars today,,,,seems I must have told her I would go with her ‘sometime’ and she is calling in the cards. If I survive the outing, I will let you know here in cafe…send out search party if I do not return…
Good to know she’s still alive! Thanks for the update.
I’m relieved your Iraqi friend is still with us, but am concerned about her welfare. Hearing personal stories from Iraq, on every side, tears me up inside. I’m thankful that personal contacts like yours will help keep some semblance of humanity among all of us.
No doubt you’ll survive seeing Star Wars. I did, though it was touch & go there for a bit! What this geek took away from it was closure, and little more.
It’s 8PM where I am just waking from 8 hours on the office couch…. I am feeling like an office couch grouch….
I would like coffee with a shot of Jamieson, please…
and that other order I placed up above, don’t cancel that one either…
Are there any Sunday papers left?
I suppose it’s time to check in with the Loved One… we’re on the outs again… like so far out there’s no swimmin back…. must perk up….
Here’s some coffee, irished up for ya:
There are plenty of papers, but they’re all out of order, and (ahem) someone already tried all the crosswords, yeah, sorry ’bout that.
Glad to have ye on-board.
And God Bless the Barman
Now, I think I’ll get organized….
Diane, KatieBird, reporting for duty…. tell me how do you run this place??????? What can I do???
Should I go to the FroggyBottomCafe Training Manual???
hmm…. maybe this job is beyond me….. feeling out of sorts…. it’s the news…. and the love life… and the health…. and the career….. and the home life….. sleeping in the office….. oh good grief….
what’s a nine letter word for a puzzle within a puzzle?
Check in at the group site please and then someone will tell you what to do….Perhaps you should take a night shift, US time, which will be day for you and you could start tomorrow night, US time, but go to the group site first please…
and blessings upon all our readers. Hosting a café doesn’t have to be strenuous duty, especially since there’s a bunch of us who will help out if things get too busy (or too slow). We’re working on a manual, such as it is, but there really isn’t that much to it. Hop on our off-site site so we can coordinate when you can have your first go at it. I take it you’re in another timezone somewhere….
Just stopping by to say hello to everyone. I’ve joined kansas at Hogwarts if you need me for anything 🙂
I am just back from the Star Wars movie with my $15.00 popcorn and 2 giant drinks, one for me that I only drank 2 inches out of the cup and a giant popcorn we didn’t even eat half of.
Strange movie if you haven’t seen all of the other ones..
Anything going on here…
And Hollywood wonders why ticket sales are down! Prices of tickets and concessions go higher, quality of movies goes lower, and the whole “experience” of going to the cinema often just isn’t worth it. This very afternoon I joined NetFlix, and look forward to seeing all the recent movies I didn’t get around to seeing in the cinema, in the comfort of my own home.
Been a quiet day, on the whole, now that you ask.
I just set up the:
Not the FBC and Not Open Either
Would you, Diane, KatieBird, kansas, and Cabin Girl please check in and help me set up…. I never got my training manual by e mail and I could not find the “Group Site” but I think I’ve made an adequate start to what should be a very interesting day.
suskind…. workoholic, alcoholic, sexoholic (when I’m lucky)
On our morning doggie walk I noticed that my Polaroid sunglasses were really bringing out colors in the water and sky. So I tried taking some pictures through them and got one really nice take. I held them right up against the lens, and this shot has the sun directly behind which gives the maximum effect with the sunglasses level. At other angles to the sun you need to rotate them.
Sure beats spending ca. $80 on a circular polarizer, that’s for sure. That filter is definitely my favorite; I love what it does to blue skies.
Arghh-another big mug of Earl Grey please! Can’t seem to wake up despite it being nearly 5pm here in the 503. Spent far too much time yesterday building tomato cages out of decrepid highway barricades-I wanted something that wouldn’t fall over when the plants get huge and would fold up small in the garage at season’s end. Good thing I’m not trying to do this for money because I definitely went in the hole on this one. Good concept, poor execution. But they will function. As my surrogate dad, the late Papa Ray Meyer, used to say,”Do you want it pretty or do you want it to work?”
I did various activities and chores today wearing my magic sundress-it seems to somehow increase my self-esteem and interaction with others (especially men) when worn even though it doesn’t fit as well as it used to. I thought that it was the cleavage aspect but I wore a tank top over it to go to the temple and it still worked.
Pleased to be of service–
Sounds like this cuppa was well-earned.
Funny what you said about the magic dress, I had one also, a number of years back and every time I wore it ordinarily serious men would act silly and flirty, it was not revealing at all but it had a flare to the bottom part with a wide ruffle and tight over the hips, (when the hips were thin), kind of like a flaminco dancer would wear, but not elaborate, and I think that’s what it was. But the dress had no pretenses, it was green with white dots, and not an especially flattering shade of green.
Great dress for wearing when you are feeling down. Isn’t it interesting how clothes can make you feel, esp. women.
As for tomatos your cages sound better than mine, the wire round kind and the plant soon leaps to the top and over, then all the part that is in the cage is brown and withered. My sad tomato story.
This Café diary is hereby CLOSED, in preference to the new diary by suskind. Enjoy!