Only 8 more weeks to go…

I can’t believe all the amazing products there are these days for cloth diapers! I’m so excited to start cloth diapering. It seems almost as easy, way more budget and environment friendly, as well as sooooo much cuter than disposable diapers. I ordered a variety of brands and types to start with, so I can try out different options and configurations, including one Gro Baby–which is my favorite so far. It’s the softest and has the best closures of them all. Plus, I love the colors. Which is why I entered this little “Feed your Stash” giveaway at the Cloth Diaper Blog for two Gro Baby diapers and why I’m posting about it here.

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Ginger Cafe / The House

I really like this place. We had dinner here last night for less than $30, and we ate well. It’s a kind of swanky place, with great atmosphere. If Anthropologie were a restaurant in Asia, this would be it. (Oh, and they do have a really nice boutique attached, too. A little pricey, but some cool stuff.) There are actually two restaurants on the lot: Ginger Cafe and The House. The latter is a little fancier–both in menu and atmosphere. Both have great food. In the evenings, apparently both places allow you to order from both menus as well as from a tapas menu.

We did the tapas option last night and were very pleased. We ordered my favorite Pomelo Salad (Yam Som-O), sesame-crusted seared Phuket tuna, a mini steak, fried goat cheese balls with honey (yum!), chorizo and potatoes, bread basket with roasted red pepper and eggplant spreads…I think that was all. Everything was very tasty. We’re going back for our anniversary dinner on Friday, when we will sample the fancier, pricier House menu.

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My List of Entities

I always have trouble remembering entity codes, and I never seem to find a list that includes the ones I need. So, I have gathered a bunch of the ones that I use and am putting them here. May take me a little while to complete the list…

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Our DC Go-To List

I’m making a list of our favorite places, so that everytime we leave DC and come back we don’t have to keep re-creating this list. We always forget some, which is why the list is short for now. It’s in no particular order.

1. Austin Grill
2. White Tiger
3. Southside
4. Saigon Saigon
5. Misha’s
6. Malibu Grill Steakhouse
7. Dukem
8. Colorado Kitchen
9. China Star, Sichuan Food, Annandale, VA

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My DC “To-Eat” List

1. Restaurant Eve: Heard good reports from a variety of sources. Will have to go one day.
2. Rasika: looks like very nice, upscale and interesting Indian. I have high hopes.
3. Makoto Restaurant: Never much of a sushi fan, now I’m on the hunt for sushi in DC that suits my finicky taste buds.
4. Burmese in Falls Church: Supposed to go with friends, still on the list.

Posted in Food, Washington, DC | 1 Comment »

A Place To Try

I just heard about a new place in DC called The Heights, and I’m adding it to my list. I’ll report back later.

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Solidifying Some Fundamentals of XHTML: Page Titles

In working on the design for a new project at CHNM, I sat down today to write page titles for each page of the site. These titles will be dynamically generated. Writing a page title has never been so hard before, but in thinking about all of the things we’re supposed to do these days to keep sites semantically marked up, accessible, and optimized for search engines, I paused and asked myself “what exactly makes a good title?” A quick Google search turned up a 2003 SimpleQuiz discussion on Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits website, and I thought it was worth bookmarking here. In a complex site, as my current project is, in which the core and majority of content is historically valuable information in a database. Questions of how to organize and access this information through a web browser are paramount. And, if someone finds a document he likes, and he chooses to bookmark it, what title should appear in the bookmark list? If Google scans our site, what titles will make sense? I can come up with many ideas, but some are so lengthy they seem useless…off to the drawing board to figure out the optimal solution.

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Brie & Cie

If you happen to be passing through Knowlton, Quebec, and you’re in need of refreshment, I would highly recommend stopping at this charming little cafe, Brie & Cie (291-C chemin Knowlton Road). They have a great selection of cheeses, deserts, and other foods that you can take to go, or you can eat there. Really lovely and very tasty.

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Bilboquet

Our favorite ice cream in Montreal! Bilboquet (1311 Bernard W) is charming and delicious. It’s fresh, not overly sweet, and often in interesting flavors. I’m traditional and usually stick to something “boring” like chocolate chip, but I love it. The other thing I love about the place is that it is the quintessential neighborhood ice cream parlor. It’s classic: just an ice cream bar and a few tables. You can also buy pints and a few other baked goods as well. Yum!

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L’Oeuf

One day we took a long drive and came across a place called L’Oeuf (229 chemin Mystic, Mystic, QC). Well, I should say that I read about it in an article, and we went in search of it while taking a long drive through the country. It wasn’t easy to find, as I remember, but well worth it if you’re in that neck of the woods. We only had time for a little ice cream, but it was such a quaint shop and restaurant that I wish we’d had more time to visit again. The ice cream was fantastic.

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