Felicidades

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We’ve got some celebratin’ to do today!

ggg|mystic_meetup/IMG_9862|Happy Anniversary, Bob and Leah!|ggg

Bob and Leah are friends of ours from ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/***. Bob lived in ***Tavilla Hall|http://www.gordon.edu/about_gordon/buildings_tour/tavilla.htm*** with ***Jeremy|http://www.thebiggspicture.org/*** and me during our senior year, where we spent many an hour hanging out in their room playing computer games and discussing theology. Bob and Leah were the previous tenants of the apartment we’re currently living in. We haven’t seen them much since graduation, but we did get to see them twice last year – once when Bob and I were groomsmen in ***Jeremy and Angela|http://www.thebiggspicture.org/***’s ***wedding|http://gallery.prwdot.org/jeremy_angela_wedding***, and again in the winter for our ***meetup in Mystic, CT|http://gallery.prwdot.org/mystic_meetup***.

ppp|Scott

Happy Birthday, Scott!

|ppp

Scott is a cousin on my dad’s side of the family. He lives in NYC and works as a composer, as you can see at ***his website|http://www.scottethier.com/*** (I had considered counting him in our earlier survey of family members with personal website, but his website is not really personal in the same way that ours is… it’s more of a business/portfolio site.). He is available for a multitude of musical services, including composition, arrangements, and coaching. Just ***drop him a line|http://www.scottethier.com/allFiles/contact.htm***!

Potter Potter Potter Potter Potter…

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fff|ggg|grab_bag/P1030822|Harry Potter 6!|ggg|fff

Our copy of aaa|Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince|0439784549|aaa arrived today, courtesy of ***Jenn|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/***! Jenn picked it up for us at ***Barnes and Noble|http://www.bn.com/***, at which there was an unexpected (to her) ***book signing|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_junefourteenth_archive.html#112165374777365434*** by the illustrator of the Harry Potter novels, ***Mary GrandPre|http://www.marygrandpre.com/***! Jenn was able to get both her copy and our copy signed. Woo-hoo!

Becky’s already devouring it, and after she’s done, I’ll be reading it too. Exciting!

Mouth-Watering

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Last week, ***I wrote|http://prwdot.org/archives/002634.html*** about visiting the Slice of Life restaurant in Oak Bluffs. Now I’d like to expound on my experience there.

The Slice of Life is an offshoot of the ***Sweet Life Cafe|http://www.sweetlifemv.com/***, and is located just across the street from its more expensive counterpart on Circuit Ave. There is a cafe counter where you can order baked goods and sandwiches for take-out, and there is also a fairly small selection of inside seating. We were able to get seats in the front of the restaurant right at street level. Very good for people-watching on Circuit Ave.

The Slice of Life menu includes soups, salads, pizzas, sandwiches, burgers, and more. Most items are priced at $8-$15. I ordered a burger with bacon and cheddar, and a side of fries. It was good.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

My burger started out with a ‘rustic’ bun – a hearty, country-style bread with a very thick, porous crust. It was crusty and delicious. Upon this bun rested what was surely about a half pound of black angus ground steak, cooked to order at medium well. This was topped with a slice of tangy cheddar cheese and two thick strips of fresh, juicy bacon. Finally, there were some fresh cut pickles, a thick slice of ripe tomato, and some mixed greens. All of these combined to deliver a burger taste like none other.

And then there were the french fries. Ohhhhh, there were the french fries. Every person at the table sampled them, and all would agree they were the best fries in the world. They were hot, crispy, and light, sprinkled with sea salt, and oh so delicious. Just thinking about the fries makes me salivate. Surely such things are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy (apologies to Mr. Franklin).

The ingredients in the food overall were extremely fresh, of the highest quality, and very well prepared. None of the food was even a bit greasy, soggy, stale, or otherwise bad tasting. Each bite left a delightful taste in my mouth, and even afterwards, the food sat extremely well in my stomach. I truly felt as though I had eaten a delicious, wonderful, nourishing meal. I felt full, but not the bad kind of full where your stomach cramps up and you groan about eating too much. It was a good, happy full.

The burger itself was about $8, the bacon $2 extra, the cheese $1 extra, and the fries $2.25 extra. All told, it was $13.25. Let me tell you, it was worth every penny – even if my parents hadn’t footed the bill (thanks Mom and Dad!). Seriously. I think this will be our new favorite place to eat on the Vineyard – it’s much easier to get to than Espresso Love, and definitely worth the money you pay for it.

P.S. If any of the other meal attendees feel like reviewing their experience at Slice of Life, please feel free to do so in the comments of this entry. 🙂

Pardon Our Dust

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First, in case any of you tried to access our website from 8:30-9:30 a.m. EDT today, I apologize. The machine prwdot.org runs on at ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/*** was down. As a reminder, I have an externally-hosted blog set up on ***Blogger|http://www.blogger.com/*** at which I will ***post updates|http://prwdot.blogspot.com/*** in the event that there is an outage on prwdot.org. In the event of an extended/catastrophic outage, I can even have all requests for prwdot.org redirect automatically… but I most likely won’t go through that trouble unless the downtime exceeds more than a couple hours. This blog also has an Atom feed, so you can subscribe to it in your favorite news aggregator.

Second, if you have noticed the appearance of our site being a bit funky in your web browser, that’s because I’ve been doing a bit of tidying in the underlying XHTML and CSS code of our site. I have been reading ***Jeffrey Zeldman|http://www.zeldman.com/***’s excellent book ***Designing With Web Standards|http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/***, and have been compelled to do a lot of cleanup and reorganizing. If everything is working normally, things should look basically the same as they did before. The changes are almost totally under the hood, so unless you’re a real XHTML/CSS geek, there’s not much to see. (If you do want to see, you are more than welcome to ‘View Source’.)

If things are still looking weird in your browser, just hold down the shift key and click your browser’s refresh or reload button. That should clear things up. If it still looks weird, then please leave me a comment with the version of your OS and browser, and the nature of the problem you are seeing.

Yellow and Pink

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fff|ggg|baby_quilt/P1030803|Pink and Yellow Quilt|ggg|fff

We know two baby girls who celebrated their first birthdays this summer. I sent off their gifts already, which were little summer outfits made from cute, pink, tropical fabric.

I had some of this cute fabric leftover and I had a little brain storm. A baby quilt! So, last weekend I got to work and made such a little quilt. Currently, I have sent presents to all the baby girls I know, so it will have to wait before being gifted to anyone.

It was my first foray into machine quilting, and while it worked well, I know that there are things I’d do differently next time. All in all, however, I think it’s pretty darn cute. More photos can be found ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/baby_quilt***

Willy Wonka

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On Friday night Peter and I joined the hordes at the movie theater to see ***Charlie and the Chocolate Factory|http://imdb.com/title/tt0367594/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9MXxmYj11fHBuPTB8cT1jaGFybGllIGFuZCB0aGUgY2hvY29sYXRlIGZhY3Rvcnl8aHRtbD0xfG5tPTE_;fc=1;ft=5***. I had my doubts about seeing this film. I love the 1970’s version of this film, starring Gene Wilder, and didn’t know how’d I’d feel about the new film.

As luck would have it, I really enjoyed it. It was a very entertaining movie that didn’t outshine its predecessor. The elements that were the same brought out nostalgic memories, and director Tim Burton, didn’t feel the need to rehash the old jokes. Johnny Depp plays Wonka with a fresh and new perspective, and Freddy Highmore shone as Charlie Bucket.

Personal Highlights:
*Getting to see the Chocolate Factory in its “fully operational ‘heyday’ days”.
*Helena Bonham Carter’s appropriately bad teeth. (inappropriate teeth in movies is a pet peeve of mine!)
*That an entire theater-full of adolescents was laughing, cheering and enjoying a movie devoid of sex, foul language and nudity. Perhaps there’s hope after all!

ps. My college roomie, Melissa, will be relieved to hear that this movie is also lacking in a certain song entitled “Cheer Up Charlie.”

pps. Fun Fact- I once knew Roald Dahl’s first wife. She is a lovely woman who still carries her “old Hollywood” air about her.

Forest Hills Lantern Festival

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fff|ggg|forest_hills_lantern_festival/P1030776|Lanterns|ggg|fff

I recently read an ***entry on Exploit Boston|http://www.exploitboston.com/archives/2005/07/annual_lantern.php*** about the ***Forest Hills Cemetery|http://www.foresthillstrust.org/***’s Lantern Festival. Becky and I took the Orange Line out to Forest Hills on Thursday night to attend. Though Exploit Boston links to a Wikipedia entry on the Chinese ***Lantern Festival|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantern_festival***, the Forest Hills event was actually closer to the Japanese ***Bon Festival|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Festival***, both in calendar date and content. Overall, however, the festival was a amalgamation of various Asian traditions, with some local cultural flavor thrown in.
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A Shot in the dark.

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Earlier today ***Ben|http://www.theholtsite.com*** posted a little essay contest. While talking about his newly purchased iMac he mentioned that it came with an iPod Mini that would be surpurflous in his household. He suggested an essay contest to determine a new home for the little Mini. Tongue-in-cheek as it may have been, I decided that it would be worth the required 1000 words if there was a chance of scoring an iPod.

There were two essay topics to choose from: “Why Macs are near and dear to my heart” and “Steve Jobs is a Hottie”. I chose the latter. So, for your reading enjoyment I have encluded the entire essay here. Just click to read the full article!

Why Steve Jobs is a HOTTIE
~by Rebecca A. Wood
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Calling All Family!

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Between Becky and me, there are two siblings, four parents, five grandparents, 25 aunts and uncles and 14 adult cousins. That’s 50 adult people. Most of these family members have a computer at work, school, or home, and most of them have Internet connections.

According to a recent* ***Pew Internet|http://www.pewinternet.org/*** ***phone survey|http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/report_display.asp***, 13% of adult internet users said that they maintained their own personal websites. 13% of 50 is 6.5 people… so one might conclude that in a family with 50 adults, you would expect to have at least six people with a website. Well, Becky and I have one, so that’s two, and Corey ***has one|http://corey.prwdot.org/***, so that’s three… but that still leaves us with three more people who ought to have a website of some sort. (Note: Even if we were to remove five people from our sample because, for whatever reason, they weren’t able to use the Internet, that would still leave at least 5 people who ought to have a personal website.)

Now, I know that many of our family members read this blog, so I’ll put the question to you:

qqq|

Dear Woods, Keefers, Lowes, and Quitadamos,

Where are your websites? Do any of you have personal websites that we don’t know about? If you do, please leave us a comment so that we can check them out! If you don’t, and are interesting in setting up a website, leave us a comment and we will help get you started!

Sincerely,

Peter and Rebecca Wood

|qqq

* Actually, it’s two years old. So if anything, I would think that the percentage would have increased since then…

Hasta La Vista!

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fff|ggg|vineyard_20050712/P1030637|Mom and Dad in Edgartown|ggg|fff

My parents have just left the North Shore to head back to Ohio. We enjoyed the time we got to spend with them this week…

On Monday night when they arrived, we went out to ***The 99|http://www.99restaurants.com/*** for dinner and then came home to do our Russia slideshow for my parents. That slideshow takes a while, and we didn’t get through the whole thing… but they really liked seeing the photos up on the big TV screen and hearing our commentary. We always enjoy giving the slideshow, so if you’re in the Boston area and you haven’t seen it yet, just let us know and we can give you the full narrated slideshow experience! 🙂

On Tuesday, we took a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. We drove my parents around on a tour of the island, went to ***Polly Hill Arboretum|http://www.pollyhillarboretum.org/***, ate lunch at Espresso Love Cafe (note: I found the website of the company that designed their website, but couldn’t find any links to the actual E.L. website itself!), and then relaxed back in Oak Bluffs. We went out to dinner at Slice of Life, which is run by the same folks who run ***The Sweet Life|http://www.sweetlifemv.com/***. (I had perhaps the best burger and fries that I’ve ever tasted in my life… I think that restaurant will merit its own entry.) We had a full and fun day exploring the Vineyard. You can see our photos ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/vineyard_20050712***.

Last night we had dinner at ***Acapulco’s|http://www.acapulcos.net/home.htm*** in Beverly, then went over to their hotel to swim at the hotel pool and look at the rest of our ***photos from Russia|http://gallery.prwdot.org/russia***.

All in all we had a wonderful time getting to see them and catch up on things, and we are looking forward to seeing them again later this year!