Vacation: Day Three

I’m taking off the three days before the Thanksgiving day break. Counting the weekends, that’s a total of nine days off! Woo hoo! I don’t know when I last had so much time off to myself when I wasn’t going off to visit various people.

Sometimes, I need to just decompress. And I’ll have that chance! Yay!

So, today is Monday, day three of the nine day break. So far today, I slept in late, finished reading a book while still lying in bed, took my dog out for a stroll around the neighborhood and then to the dog park, came home and put in a load of laundry, and posted some comments on some blogs. The next thing for me is to start cooking dinner at some point, maybe around 3? It’s going to be the oven braised version of the short rib dish I made some time ago. I’m hoping I learned something from last time: use only a little bit of liquid, cook at a lower temperature for far longer, and use more seasoning.

I’m hoping I’ll get a little nap and some cleaning done too. Hee hee. I am giddy just thinking about the afternoon nap.

—

I’ve been messing with WordPress and have migrated a snapshot of my blog to this test set-up. The thing I like about it is that all the entries are stored in a mysql database, and switching layout and themes is simply a matter of switching the css file, rather than having to “publish” all the content again to html files, as with blogger. I appreciate that the content is in fact quite independent of the layout. It makes a former UI engineer’s heart sing.

At the same time, I feel wary of moving it over, as I don’t know if frequent visitors will dislike the commenting system, or if I’ll get spammed by the blogspambots (whatever they are called). I also like that blogger has an external (to my server) backup of all my data, if something should go wrong with my setup.

—

We booked a place to stay in London for our honeymoon! It will be half a block away from Oxford Street, right by the northeast corner of Hyde Park, a wimpy child’s stone’s throw to an Underground station. And what a deal it was. I highly recommend looking into Bidding for Travel, quite an aesthetically displeasing website that nonetheless has an amazing amount of information. It’s a website where people provide (free) expert help on bidding strategies on Priceline and Expedia. For instance, for hotels, here is a 13-part form you have to answer about where you want to go stay, what kind of accomodations you want, and what the lowest advertised fares you found were. Then they give you back a complete and detailed bidding strategy on how to get what you want at the lowest price. These people are scary, but really really competant.

I was able to take advantage of a bunch of discussions people were having about recently accepted bids in London, so I didn’t have to fill out the form. Now, we are trying to figure out which exact place to stay in Paris. We are going with our friend’s recommendation and will arrange for accomodations with Kudeta Home. They have several places where we want to stay, so we have to figure out which we like.

Seppo and I are quite excited about the prospect of eating our way through London and Paris. It’s so terrible! Yet so awesome. 😀

—

Our invitations are coming along nicely. We’ve been playing with paper and fonts and think we are pretty much settled on what we want. Yay!