Author: Jon

At my parents’ place in Alfalfa, they have a wild plum tree that produced fruit for (I believe) the first time ever this year. They were small, golden fruits that were terrifically sour as they grew, but ripened and turned a deep pink-purple and ended up being rather sweet. They picked a bunch of the… Continue reading Plum wine

In June my wife and I spent the weekend in Lincoln City, Oregon, for an anniversary trip. It was fairly low-key, and though we’ve been to Lincoln City a number of times before, we’re usually passing through; our last "big" trip there was in 2006. This time around we were able to spend some more… Continue reading Travelogue: Lincoln City, Oregon, June ’09

So about two weeks ago I saw the new Star Trek movie (at McMenamins Old St. Francis School, in their second-run theater), and this weekend I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (also at McMenamins). I really liked both of them—Star Trek in particular was fully redeemed for me after I had some serious doubts… Continue reading Blockbuster geeky movies

Ever since our friend Kina and her husband moved to Baker City to open a pizza restaurant a few years back, we’d been saying, "We’ll come for a visit" every so often, but there never seemed the time for it. Distance was a major culprit; Baker City is about 230 miles from Bend, a good… Continue reading Travelogue: Baker City, Oregon, March ’09

This year—and this summer in particular—we’ve done quite a fair bit of traveling, possibly more than we have in the past. I’ve chronicled some of it as it applies to beer over on The Brew Site, but have been sorely lax in documenting the various trips here. Here’s a summary of the notable travels, with… Continue reading Travel adventures thus far

I had bookmarked this link some time back and forgotten about it: Full Moon Names for 2009. The notion that full moons by month had names had never really occurred to me before, but upon reflection makes perfect sense—as a means for keeping track of the seasons (and in light of the human penchant for… Continue reading Full Sturgeon Moon

We’d been talking lately about taking some day trips during the summer, nothing stressful or too much driving (since we did all the driving we want just last month) but a nice getaway for a day. Sort-of spontaneous. Since we had a nice trip to Hood River last October (chronicled here) to pick apples, we… Continue reading Hood River fruit picking

A few weeks ago we had a free preview weekend of HBO and Cinemax from our cable company, and while I was flipping around to see what was on (probably Saturday afternoon), I caught the end of Star Trek: Generations. (Actually, probably the last quarter of the movie or so.) And of course, being the… Continue reading Where “Star Trek: Generations” went wrong

Last week, we went down to San Diego for a quick(ish) trip to visit my brother and his wife. We left Tuesday afternoon after I was off work, drove all day Wednesday, and then returned on Monday—doing the full San Diego to Bend drive in one day. I won’t recount the full blow-by-blow here (and… Continue reading Notes on our San Diego trip

Over on my beer blog I have an entire section of "Press Releases" that I post but which I don’t want to show up on the main page or in the RSS feed—I don’t want to spam readers with excessive marketing but I like have the repository. Since I’m now using WordPress, I figured I’d… Continue reading Excluding a category in WordPress