Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.
When I moved back to Grand Rapids in December of 2002, I made a promise to myself that the only place I would want to live is in Eastown, a wonderfully hip and fun area that reminds me of Ann Arbor (in which A2 is always considered to be Michigan’s answer to Berkeley), just on a incredibly smaller scale. It took several years before I would end up living in Eastown, and for 3.5 years, I had a ramshakle apartment on Norwood Ave that gave me 5 minute walk to some of the better eateries, pubs/bars and shops in the whole of Grand Rapids area. In the last few years, other walkable neighborhoods have started popping up such as Cherry Hill, Diamond District, Downtown and the burgeoning midtown areas. But Eastown has always been my first love and it is here I always come to visit when I come back to visit the ‘rents. And if there is any chance of moving back to Grand Rapids, Eastown would be the first place we would look to live.
The one thing that Eastown has that I have not found duplicated anywhere I have traveled is Wolfgang’s, one of the (bar none) best breakfast places ever. And ever, I mean ever. There is nothing like Wolfgang’s anywhere — it is not their extensive breakfast menu, their awesome hazelnut coffee or the familiarity of their waitstaff who recognize me when I come in — it’s the whole attitude of breakfast that presented. It’s not some highfalutin, overly priced restaurant where one gets some “fusion” dish that fails horribly (Muse in Royal Oak, I’m looking at you) or has a limited sampling of breakfast entrees (most breakfast places), but over and over again, they have pages upon pages of delicous, artery hardening, weight gaining breakfast. It is no wonder they are consistently voted the number one breakfast place everywhere in the local “best of” polls.
My favorite, something I have tried to duplicate by ordering separate dishes at other places, is the Keane: Southern style biscuits and gravy, topped with corned beef hash and scrambled eggs. I think one of the reasons I could never go vegetarian is the promise of no more Keane, something that I would gladly travel hundreds of miles to have.
Wolfgang’s has become the staple to visit when I come into town, not a visit goes by where I’m here at least once. When Justin and I end up moving to our nesting spot and if that place ends up outside of Michigan, I’ll lament not missing friends and family, but I’ll lament missing out on Wolfgang’s.
Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.
I’ve been a bit lax on the whole “digitally document my life” thing, understandably due to heavy work and school load this past week that was unforeseen last Sunday. I’ve got a few days to fill in (and which they will be backdated so I’m not terribly sure how they will translate to updating Twitter and LiveJournal), but I’m really keen on getting these uploaded sometime soon. Also, interestingly enough, I brought everything with me to power/transfer my camera but not the camera itself. The camera on my phone takes fairly decent shots but the system of shooting, uploading and fixing is a bit more kludgy than I’d like.
This partial weekend, I’m in Grand Rapids visiting fam and heading to a few doctors appointments. Now that my insurance has changed, finally, from one job to the next, I’m honoring a few appointments I have left before I start the process of digging for a new set of doctors in Detroit.
With that being said, Mumsy and I went out to lunch today and on our way back to her house, we stopped at Biggby Coffee so that I could load up on caffeine. I ordered a 24oz iced Mocha Mocha, which contains copious amounts of espresso but also interestingly enough, while it is labeled as “Sugar Free,” my iced Mocha Mocha came with whipped topping and chocolate syrup. What would have made this even more priceless is if I had this made with skim milk.
Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.
Darcee, Mindy and myself went to Edinburgh for my 34th birthday a few years ago. While there, we made our home at the Haymarket Bar, where I made friends with a Kiwi bartender named Bryan who helped us liberate Tennent’s pint glasses a few days before we left.
Ever since then, this pint glass has become my de facto drinking glass for everything from coffee, to beer, to pop and even the occasional boring glass of water. It’s one of my favorite drinking glasses and it has served, for the last three years, as one of more memorable tributes of that trip more than anything else.
Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.
Recently Justin and I had a quasi-dinner party where 80% of the guests were Twittering the entirety of our night. [Rats! We never incorporated a hashtag for easy following!] Justin (1), the anti-2.0 zealot, later remarked we spent so much time social networking electronically, that we forgot to socialize in person. “You know it’s bad when I’m the social life of the party,” he quipped, which is true. When dealing with a man who balks at the idea of wearing “big boy shoes” when we go out, this is not someone you expect to be flittering about the room at any social event — and yet, to some extent that night, he was.
[Insert vaguely entertaining and interesting thought process on what it means to be digital in the 21st century, having been on the interwebs since 1994.]
I had recently been thinking about how to construct digital biblotyke. and was close coming to the decision that I wanted to record every day for the next year in photos, Tweets, journal entries and more. The conversation with Justin along with inspiration of some tweeps (Fee in particular of her near daily shots of Devon) pushed me to the direction I needed to go. At the very least, I wanted a photo of my world published everyday to keep track of the world around me. There may be more than one image/photo/tweet/video/podcast per day but I wanted at least one thing everyday.
And to appease my newly honed librarian-skillz, I’m cataloging my world by creating my own folksonomy that best compliments it. So take that!
1. My boyfriend, soon to be fiancĂ©e. Often referred to as “TheBF.”
Originally published at lib schooled.. You can comment here or there.
The other morning while getting ready for work, I was thinking about the beginnings of this entry which originally started out with, “Recently, I went to my first conference…” which was not necessarily correct as I went to a student journalism conference back in the mid-’90s in D.C. and did the LinuxCon circuit across the US (San Jose -> Atlanta -> New York) in the late ’90s and early ’00s. So no, this was not my first conference. But it IS my first conference as a librarian, so we’ll begin with that.
On May 15th, Heidi1 and I went to Tech Camp unConference at Michigan State as it was local-ish, free and the content was right up my alley. After dithering about what to bring with me and getting that all sorted, Heidi and I piled into my car and drove the 1.25 hours to E. Lansing.




