Thursday, May 31, 2007

Eat'n Park Goes Smoke Free


Smiley
Originally uploaded by erink
After a court ruling ended our 12 hours of smoke-free bars and restaurants in Allegheny County, I was bummed. But now I have hope. One of the biggest regional family restaurant chains has voluntarily gone smoke-free.

Eat'n Park is a Pittsburgh institution. It has good breakfasts and huge salad/brunch bars and some locations are open 24 hours. They have nice blueberry pancakes and this amazing thing called "grilled stickies."

The smoking ban apparently affects 68 restaurants in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They also have restaurants in Ohio, where there is a statewide smoking ban. They serve 350,000 customers a week in southwestern PA.

I'm not sure where all the pouting teenagers will spend their weekend nights now, but I'm sure some of the waitstaff is not mourning their business.

I went in specifically today to buy baked goods because I thought I should reward them with some business. I realized that I haven't sat in the left side of the Squirrel Hill restaurant in about 20 years. Once they get it cleaned up I'll have to try that.

Here's their press release. http://www.eatnpark.com/newsDetail.asp?NewsID=117
And more info about the county smoking ban: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07143/788180-85.stm

Thursday, May 24, 2007

What's Up

In the absence of actual inspiration, here's a random sampling of what I've been up to recently.

Reading Sandman.

I'm finally reading the Sandman comic series, for the first time. Yes, even though I collected comics all through the 80's and 90's I never managed to read Sandman. I don't know why, maybe because it was a DC book and I was a Marvel girl; it was expensive and I was cheap; it was pretentious and I favored mutant super heroes in primary-colored costumes. I picked up a bunch of the collected books at Pittsburgh Comicon and I've got through the first few now and ordered more from Amazon. It's keen.

Wearing Geta.


I bought a pair of these traditional Japanese sandals in San Francisco on a recent trip, and now I'm practicing wearing them so I can wear them with my Japanese outfits at Pennsic in August.

These are a bit big for me, but I was happy to find them at a reasonable price ($12) since I'll never get around to making any myself.

Running.

I'm in the worst shape I can remember, and without an ultimate frisbee team to whip me into shape I'm on my own. I have two more out-of-shape buddies and we've been guilt tripping each other into running a few times a week. Last night was the least horrible, and it actually was quite pleasant, but the other three times I was sucking wind big time.

Feeling Lush-ous.

I ordered some of these froofy natural-handmade-boutique skin care products from Lush. No bath bombs (I don't remember having a bath in my adult life), but I was intrigued by the solid shampoo and I ended up also getting a pretty soap and a facial scrub and a moisturizer. True to form, I chose the one moisturizer designed for men. The face scrub and moisturizer feel a little oily but they seem to be working out.

Ironically, I've been getting Lush catalogs since I moved (the previous homeowners apparently were fans), but it all seemed too neo-hippie pretentious until I heard actual People Who I Can Vouch For As Reasonable Folks gushing over their products.

Thinking about Buying a Mac.

The idea of switching teams is kind of scary, but I do need a new laptop, and they just seem like less work and more fun. They're big and heavy (same size as my 6-year-old Sony Vaio) and they have a funny shaped screen, but I hear they can run all the apps I need now....

Meeting Chewbacca.

At the aforementioned Pittsburgh Comicon, Peter Mayhew was one of the guests. Not that he has anything to do with comics, but hey, maybe I wouldn't have gone if he wasn't there. I paid $20 for an autographed photo, which is silly, but whatever. He seemed like a swell guy.

He told a nice story about playing Chewbacca in Revenge of the Sith. Of course since it was 20 years later they'd improved on the original Chewbacca costume, and they'd added all these robotic/remote control elements in the head and face. So they had puppeteers running facial expressions for all of the Wookies, and Mayhew said the whole time they were running film all he could hear was the whirring and buzzing of the robotics. They finish up their action scenes and they go to shoot the close-ups with Chewbacca. They start shooting and all of a sudden the motors stop making noise. Mayhew says hey, what's up, the gadgets stopped working. And George Lucas says no, we turned them off. You don't need them.

Mayhew is actually quite knock-kneed, which you can see in Chewbacca too. I was wondering if he has medical problems from being so big (and he's over 60 now), but he seemed fine.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Go Sens!


Ottawa is within a game of eliminating the Sabres in the Stanley Cup semifinals.

Not to jinx it, but actually they're within a game of sweeping the Sabres.

The Buffalo Sabres. The juggernaut of the 06-07 regular season. The team that dominated the entire league from day 1, winning their first 10 games. By mid-December they had just seven losses on their record and had not lost consecutive games. Yeah, they came down to earth a little at the end of the season, but they still won the Presidents' Trophy, and they beat the rest of the Eastern Conference by six points.

And Ottawa? A team that's named after politicians. How tough can they be? Apparently, pretty damn tough. Tough enough to knock out New Jersey, who finished at the top of our division (and second to Buffalo in the conference).

At any rate, Pittsburgh's elimination (by Ottawa, in round one) is looking better and better.

P.S. In other hockey news, Colby Armstrong scored the gold medal game-winning goal for Team Canada in the IIHF World Championship yesterday. Go Armpit!