July 10, 1997

So it's my birthday

Work was uneventful, and I ate two meals out, which is pretty good. I don't like to cook all the time, and certainly not on my birthdya. Neither meal was stellar, but I guess that's what you get for going to Friday's for lunch. There are all sorts of terrific restaurants in Bethesda proper, but &diety help you if you expect to park a car there, especially at lunch. Thus, I drove to Friday's in Greenbelt so that we could combine lunch and a trip to REI for topo maps.

REI was rather a disappointment. We just noticed that they don't have any maps for Pennsylvania, and they didn't have the maps that we wanted for Virginia. This means that we'll have to get them directly from USGS in Reston. At least Tino ordered the index maps via the Web, so we'll have a good idea what teeth are still missing from our George Washington National Forest maps.

We trucked out to Reston for dinner (of course it was far too late to go to USGS by then) and ate at the tortilla factory. Man, is their food bland. I've eaten there before, and I didn't remember that. It's rare in these parts to find a Mexican restaurant that doesn't put lard in their beans and render everything inedible for veggies - otherwise, I'd never advocate driving to Reston for beans, rice and tortillas. Their sauce is good, and they have a really good selection of grocery items that I can't get in stores here. Most are La Victoria, but they have a few obscure hot sauces that I fondly remember from my life in Chicago. I do have absurdly high standards for Mexican food. I lived in a Hispanic neighboorhood for 5 years and Chicago is full of Hispanic folks and all manner of their cuisine.

More Paranoia

Tino bought me a really great book for my birthday, Spoiled - a Food Chain Gone Haywire by Nichols Fox. I'd heard the woman who wrote it on NPR earlier today, and I knew I had to have it. I had a hard time putting it down once I opened it. This woman is from Virginia, in fact, and many of the foodborne breakouts described are local to the DC Metro area. I'm hoping she's going to get to the water supply soon. Of course, that might be a whole separate area, but it seems to apply.