| Out of curiosity, I wanted to figure out how far I traveled in 2008 by various means of transportation. So for your amusement, here are the numbers:
By plane: 7,951 miles
By car (only counting trips of 2 hours or more): 1,762 miles
By train: 1,423 miles
By ship: 801 miles
By ski-lift: 15,975 ft. (~3 miles)
Grand total: 11,930 miles
My plane, car and ski-lift numbers are pretty accurate, while the ship and train numbers are more of a wild guesstimate. In any case, it'll be interesting to see how I do in 2009. | comments: 19 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | I'm happy to see that history has been made tonight. I only wish that Obama's grandmother could have lived to see this. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| One of my hobbies that have developed over the last two years is cooking and trying out new ingredients and dishes. I often find myself thinking "Gee, that would be fun to make", but I keep forgetting to write them down. So I'm going to try to maintain a "wishlist" of things I'd like to try over the next few months. If you've made any of these items and have some advice, let me know. Or, if you live in the area and want to come over for dinner, you're always welcome to come on over. :)
General/American
-Make bread from scratch (I've tried 3 times so far without success- on my next attempt I will be trying a different type of flour which should work better)
-Black bean/veggie burgers
-Spinach dip (I might make this next month when the girls come over to my place).
Italian
-Eggplant Parmigiana (Will be making this later this week)
-Make a pizza crust from scratch (Once I figure out how to bake bread correctly, I'll take a shot at this next)
-Make pasta from scratch
Japanese
-Tempura
-Sushi
Indian
-Naan bread
-Some kind of dip for the bread
Spanish
-Empanadas
-Salsa
Thai
-Pad Thai
-Chai tea
And these are just ingredients that I want to use in a recipe sometime.
-gnocchi
-scallops
-this funny plant called "name". I've never heard of it been used in anything, so it's piqued my curiosity. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have a confession to make- I really enjoy grocery shopping. Cooking is a hobby for me, so I love going to the store and finding new foods that I've never cooked with before. I especially love looking through the ethic food aisles. It's like traveling through other countries without ever leaving town.
But grocery shopping is also a fun challenge for me. How can I get the most food for the fewest dollars? Grocery stores are always offering coupons, buy-one-get-one-free (BOGO) deals and discounts on various items. Every week the local grocery stores around here mail out a flyer listing their deals for the week. I use to just toss these out, but after reading some personal finance blogs, I got motivated to see how I much I could actually save.
I started by picking recipes that used ingredients that were on sale. I also kept an eye out for deals on things that I buy all the time, even if I wasn't out of that item at the moment. That way, I could stock up and not have to buy them later when it's not on sale. Such simple tactics have help to reduce my grocery bill by about 10-20% and don't require much extra time to do. Since I was already doing things like figuring out what I'm going to cook ahead of time and making a grocery list; looking at flyers and such adds maybe 10 minutes to the planning process.
This month, I'm seeing if I can reduce my overall grocery bill by 25% without having to resort to eating ramen noodles. This will require a bit more effort then just looking at flyers. I'm not a big coupon-clipper, but I decided to try collecting coupons and seeing what I could do with them. I started collecting the coupons last month by pulling out of flyers, checking the newspaper at work and by getting them from the little coupon dispensers at the store.
I didn't find many useful coupons, but I was able to get some for some of the cereal that I like to buy. And lo and behold, the grocery store is offering a BOGO on some name-brand cereal this week! Plus they had a lot of other BOGOs on other stuff I like to buy. Between all the BOGOs and the coupons, I was able to save about 35% off my bill! And this is after I do things like buy generic brands and sticking to my list.
Who knew grocery shopping could be so fun and rewarding! | | comments: Leave a comment |
| One of the fun things about flying is checking out new airports and airlines and finding all the cool features about them. It's also fun to mark off all the routes I've flown and slowly create a neat spiderweb of flights. However, keeping track of those flights has been getting harder to do with every flight I add to the list. One tool that I was using to track and share my flights with others has been the Great Circle Mapper. It's a website that allows you to type in your route and it will calculate the distance between your flights. By typing in the airport codes of the places I've been to, I was able to quickly create a free map that shows all the routes I've flown so far.
This tool can be used for more then just pretty maps. It can also be used for planning purposes by calculating distances for future flights. This is particularly useful if you're trying to earn or burn a certain number of miles for a frequent flyer award.
However, the downside of this map is that it can't be saved anywhere through the website (I ended up bookmarking the finished map URL in my online journal). It also doesn't provide any way to add additional information about the flights, like what airline they were on or the type of plane flown.
Enter Flight Memory. This website allows you to not only enter all the routes you've flown, but also all kinds of information about each flight, including the flight number; date and time; the type of airplane; plane registration number; seat number; whether it was for vacation or business and lots more information. It even has a box you can use to type in additional notes about the flight. After entering in all your information, the website will save it so you can reference it later. It will also provide a statistic page showing not only how far you've flown, but how long you've been in the air, how many times you've circled the earth and other interesting information. It's probably more information than the average flyer would want to keep track of, but it's fun for plane geeks to play around with. The downside is that it can take a while at first to enter in all your previous flight information. It took me about an hour to enter in thirty flight segments. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I've had a lot of free time at work lately, so I created my own Flightmemory page. So if you're really curious about what flights I've taken throughout my lifetime, how many days I've spent in the air, or you're just bored and need something to read, feel free to go take a look. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| If you know a child who is excited about all things travel-related, you might encourage that passion by giving them a toy plane, model train, a boat or even an entire airport to play with.
However, Playmobil decided to take those simple toys one step further by creating the "Playmobil Security Checkpoint" set, complete with mini TSA agents. Yes, now your child can have the pleasure of making passengers suffer by having them dump all their liquids, take off their shoes and subject them to secondary screening. What more could any aspiring young traveler want? The only thing the set is missing is freedom baggies and about 300 more passengers to simulate the mobs at a real checkpoint. I'm just waiting for Playmobil to introduce a second set featuring the bodyscanner next.
And if you have a spare moment, the product reviews of the checkpoint are quite hilarious to read. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I'm back from my amazing trip! Whistler was an awesome place to visit- it snowed every day! I first saw snow going along the sea to sky highway. It didn't look real. It looked like someone had dumped mounds of shaving cream along the road. Outside of the hotel I picked up a ball of snow and it felt exactly like ice from a snowcone machine. The first night it snowed I couldn't stop staring at people's clothes because I could see tiny snowflakes on them. It was just so cool being in a winter wonderland for a week.
I did try skiing and started to get the hang of it towards the end. It was also great seeing my family from Atlanta and meeting my future cousin-in-law for the first time. Vancouver was also a fun city to walk around in, especially along the waterfront and in the huge Stanley Park area.
I fear I've become addicted to traveling. I don't have any more big trip plans until October, and that's six months away. The thought alone of going so long without a fun trip makes me a little stir-crazy. Granted, I do have some plans and ideas for fun things to do around FL. But I'd still love to get out and go somewhere on a weekend trip, especially once the heat and humidity kicks in around here.
One of the first things my future cousin-in-law said to me is "I heard you're the professional traveler in the family." While I don't think the comment is quite true, it is flattering and rather cool that people think I travel a lot (one of my co-workers said to me "don't you travel like every two months?" when I told her I had no plans until October). It's one indicator that I'm living out my dream of traveling and seeing the world if other people are starting to take notice of it.
I'm already pondering trips for next year. I'd love to go overseas, as I've never traveled outside of the North American continent. I would also like to get back into traveling to do volunteer work. When I was in middle and high school, I took a week-long trip every summer and went to several states and Canada to do major home repairs for people who were either physically or financially unable to do it themselves. I like doing volunteer trips because not only am I leaving the world a better place, but I get to see the world as the locals do. It will take time and sacrifice to make these trips happen, but they are well worth it. :) | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
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