I came across a rather catchy song on how United Airlines broke a musician's guitar. Enjoy.

-Trevor

I was shopping at Albertsons the other day (though as Mike had mentioned when down here, it is not owned by Supervalu) when I came across some rhubarb for only $1.99 a pound. Of course everyone knows what one does with Rhubarb other than to collect its leaves for the toxic oxalic acid, make Strawberry-Rhubarb pie. I was going to originally use a recipe from Grandma's recipe books, but she did not include cook temperatures and times, definitely a no-no for someone just starting out in the pie trade. Instead I came across a rather simple recipe off of the Food Network. The ingredients are shown above.

The preparation was amazingly simple and I was amazed at how the sugar turned the mixture into a quasi-jelly. Even more amazing is my physics lesson on volume. I was certain I messed up my measuring that there was no way the amount in my mixing bowl would fit into my small pie tin (which I was able to by with a graham cracker crust in there.






I found out how unhealthy my pie is as well. I found a neat website at shopncook.com which can create custom nutrition labels so I gathered the nutrition information for my pie and created this label which should give everyone the impact that just one slice can have. Though it is definitely not as unhealthy as Death Pies. Though I suppose one could argue that even the Death Pies can be part of a balanced diet if kept to special occasions though I do wonder how my grade school classmates who had these every day for a snack didn't end up morbidly obese, though this may also be due to the fact that we weren't as slothful back then??

-Trevor

I woke up this morning and went for a run with a friend; it has certainly been a while since I have run a couple of miles. It felt really good to get up at 6 in the morning, sort of. It rained steadily during the night so it is very humid today, but at least there is not any dust in the air.

Hopefully everyone is going out and having a good day today. By virtue of not working all day as I did last year, I will have a wonderful day. I am attempting my first Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, I'm very excited. I will probably even document the experience. Also going to do some grilling this afternoon. Hopefully the pesky monsoon rains will hold off long enough.

By the way, I found a different host which seems to have more responsive servers than what I currently have. You can go check out my progress at my new site. I will eventually have this domain point to the new server so hopefully there should not be any problems with the transition, though if you happen to get the RSS feed of the blog, you may want to grab the new one.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

-Trevor

It has been over a year since I have last posted anything to this blog . After someone had hacked my host they posted a nasty little script on my site. I guess at the time I was rather busy in DC at the time and didn't have a chance to look at it and then time sort of passed. I thought I would spend a couple of minutes last night fixing the site, but that turned out longer than I had planned, but this was largely due (in my humble opinion) to my host whose server doesn't seem to be working consistently; I seem to be getting random errors that I don't seem to be able to consistently figure out. I am considering finding another host, but we will see what happens.

Everything does not seem to be yet fully functional, such as my Gallery, but I will have to look at that later.

-Trevor

I try and try to think that I will consistently post on here, but perhaps it is not meant to be. Anyways, had a pretty relaxing week, with the exception of a rather large mechanic bill that will definitely make my summer living a bit more conservative. But anyways, on to the good stuff.

About two weeks ago, my neighbor (in my duplex) asked me whether my swamp cooler was working, which was about the same as usual, not too much, but I have survived a couple years. Anyways, she was pretty crabby with a bad back and 85 degrees in her place, so of course she complained to our landlord about the swamp coolers, who decided that she would have them replaced. The new coolers are amazing, it not only keeps me cool throughout the day, it has temperature control! Before, it would continuously pump in the cool desert air at night and I would wake up to 60 degrees in my house in the morning (very cold) to a not so cool 80-85 degrees in my house when the temperature would reach 105 outside. While that is cooler than outside, I can now keep my place at 75-77.

On another note, I had the pleasure of watching my same neighbor's cat hunt a pigeon today. I was up fairly early and while reading, heard some crashing sound in the back, only to see the cat pawing at a pigeon with a rather large gash in the back. Sadly the pigeon was still alive and making some sounds. The pigeon tried to run off, but wasn't too successful. Later the cat decided to have the pigeon for breakfast right outside my front porch. I got some poor quality photos of it that I may upload later.

As an aside, I just finished "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. It is about Chris McCandless who tried unsuccessfully to live in the Alaskan wild for a summer. It is a pretty amazing book, definitely worth the read. For me the book surfaced memories of the road trips that I have taken across the country either by myself (down to AZ) or with family and friends. While my trips are significantly less rugged, my road trips always bring about feelings of limitless possibility, and I am sure that McCandless certainly must have felt that when in Alaska. Some of my fondest memories are when I was riding along with Dad in his old van as a kid and I would see an out-of-state license plate. I would dream about where they were from and the amazing places they were going to go visit.

The book has recently been adapted into a movie. I think after reading the book, I don't believe the movie can capture the emotions that Krakauer conveyed, so unless anyone has seen it and can vouch for the movie, I will pass.

-Trevor

For those of you who wonder what I've been up to this year, and of course I'm wondering that myself some days, I've been working a lot on analyzing the housing market during the Great Depression. This all dates back to me going to College Park, MD last summer and taking thousands of photos at the National Archives, though of course through the grant that my adviser got, so I definitely can't take much credit. Anyways...

Some of the photos I took during my trip to the National Archives last summer were of various maps that indicated survey neighborhoods. These surveys contained a lot of neighborhood level information that we can do some pretty cool stuff with. Anyways, a side project of mine which may be useful in my dissertation is to digitize some of the old maps. My initial work has been in New York City, which unfortunately a hired gun took some not so fantastic photos of the maps . However they are mostly good enough to get started on digitizing. Anyways, take a look at the photo that I uploaded where I'm transferring the old map of Staten Island onto Google Earth. It is a bit tedious, but surprisingly a lot of fun (at least for me).

-Trevor

It has been a while since I've consistently posted, but I thought I wanted to let those who read this know about a classmate of mine who has some tough luck recently. For those who don't know Steve, he's got to be one of the greatest guys that I've known who always has something good to say about everybody. Furthermore he knows of and has been to St. Joseph, MN, so that instantly puts him in a league of his own. Anyways, earlier this year he was diagnosed with cancer on his tongue which spread to his lymph nodes. What's worse is that it has now spread to his lungs.

Anyways, I basically hope that if you get a second, check out his blog: http://stevenmanos.blogspot.com and make sure to keep him in your thoughts.

-Trevor

I think this may have been the longest it has taken me between posts. Hopefully I will be a little bit faster next time. However, a stalker with an ip address near Avon spurred me to post lest I find myself kidnapped and raped. Anyways, this post is unrelated to my return from my squash hiatus. It was certainly good to be back on the squash court tonight, though it will be awhile until I am back in form.

BTW, here are a couple of shots of Tucson as viewed from the Catalina highway up to Mt. Lemmon.

-Trevor

Here's a video of Robosaurus that I took while at the Barrett-Jackson car auction. It looks pretty scary, so try not to defecate yourself.

-Trevor

Christmas ended up being much busier than Christmas Eve this year. Dad and I went to my Grandma's this year and had lunch with her and my Aunt Elaine and Uncle Bob. Anyways, lunch was not bad for $3.00: chicken kiev, wild rice, and some mint cheesecake for dessert. As usual when my Dad, Grandma and aunt get together, I get to learn about some "ancient" Stearns county history; however, it is pretty interesting .

When we got home, we began preparing dinner for the Kollmann family's 1st Annual Authentic German Christmas Dinner. I originally came up with the idea after thinking about my unfortunate birthday experience from last year. After going through some websites and cookbooks, I decided that it would awesome to make up some rouladen, sp?tzle, and pfeffern?sse for dessert. If you think we are good "Germans", you'd be wrong since no one in my immediate family (myself included) ever had prepared any of this before. Basically, rouladen is a sliced roast that we wrap up around some bacon (we used turkey bacon), pickles, and some onion. Sp?tzle is an egg noodle, and pfeffern?sse is a christmas cookie.

The dinner definitely required more work than I originally thought and got some great help from the whole family which really added to the whole "togetherness" feel which I hoped. BTW, the picture is of the rouladen cooking. The sp?tzle definitely required some work as well. I had grabbed a recipe online for it and the directions were sort of vague, like a particular direction telling us to add "some" lukewarm water to the dough. We used a potato ricer to make the noodles which only take about 30 seconds to cook in boiling water.

Overall, the dinner turned out awesome, but mostly thanks to my family. We were all pretty surprised and definitely hope that it turns out this well every time we experiment on random food, though I suppose it doesn't make me feel more German . I think we've all agreed that this is a tradition we should keep going for a while.

-Trevor

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas / Holiday Season. My parents and I are having a low-key Christmas eve this year as my parents are recovering from a cold and don't want to spread the cold at my relatives since my grandpa just got back from the hospital . However, we are still planning on having an authentic German dinner tomorrow. We are making some Rouladen with some sp?tzle with pfeffern?sse (cookies) for dessert. However, we bought some Argentine wine, but it came highly recommended, so we were willing to make some sacrifices.

BTW, I was in the giving spirit today so I uploaded some photos from Sweden in my gallery. Check them out, they are chock full of useful information if you want to take your next trip in Sweden.

I'm also in the process of redesigning my website. What better way to spend my off hours on vacation than doing a little PHP programming. I picked up a couple of books to help me with a few things I've been working on. I even created a couple of b2evolution plugins, I was pretty excited about that. I don't know if you will see the redesign before the New Year, but you can see how the design is developing by checking out my Test Blog.

-Trevor

Sorry for the late post, I kept on putting off this post. I originally wrote it while waiting in New Jersey, so it was fresh in my memory.

How can I spend my last day in Europe? Well, it did not end quite as well as I would have liked. It was fairly cold today, being cloudy, cool, and breezy. So since I had planned this day as a walking tour of Copenhagen, I decided that dressing in layers was the only way to go. With two t-shirts underneath my sweater as well as two pairs of socks, I thought I would be well off. It helped. However, despite the cold weather, the walk ended up turning out pretty decent, I saw plenty of very interesting sites.

I started off checking out the royal palace at Christiansborg Slot. While it is no longer used as the royal palace, it is still used for important state functions. However, tours did not open until 1 pm, so I did not think I would make it back in time, so I thought pictures of fa?ade was sufficient. Actually, from the outside the building was fairly unremarkable, but the guards had nice bushy hats. Afterwards I checked out a couple of churches (Copenhagen seems to have plenty), one being the city?s cathedral, Vor Frue Kirke. To say that it was the brightest church is an understatement. The exterior is drab, but the interior practically radiates light. If I was a better Catholic, I think it would be easy to be moved spiritually.

Maybe I was just getting tired from traveling over time, but it seemed that after a while, many of the buildings sort of looked the same. Of course in central Copenhagen there is Nynhavn, which has a pretty rough past. It is next to a navigable canal and once was essentially the red light district for incoming sailors. Walking through, it seems to have cleaned up, and is now content to house plenty of trendy cafes.

In northern Copenhagen, I first walked to the Amalienborg Slot. Most of the palaces there appeared to be under renovation, but there was, yeah you guessed it, another church. However, Marmorkirken (aka. Frederikskirken) has a very unique dome and really dominated the buildings in the area while not clashing. Inside were some pretty nice postcards for 5 DKK each. Luckily for the church, I only wanted two and only had a 20 DKK coin on me, but I thought donating a little extra to the church probably won't come to any harm.

After this church, it was time to walk further north and find the famous statue, ?The Little Mermaid? cast by Edvard Eriksen who used his wife as the model. It was around this time that a group of Chinese tourists came out of a bus with their stereotypical SLRs strapped on their neck (Actually I think the stereotype is Japanese, but anyways, they fit a stereotype as perhaps I did as well). I was glad that I was no longer the only tourist who goes to Northern Europe in the winter. The mermaid statue is near Kastellet which was a fortress surrounded by a star-shaped moat. The fort evidently is used as an academy, so no luck on entering any buildings (I was able to walk around the hill that followed the moat).

By the time I made my journey around the moat, I was freezing. I had been walking around town for almost three hours and my mouth was getting a little numb. So I thought it was an excellent time to get some lunch. It seems that Europeans are really in no rush to eat lunch, so the whole process will always take a minimum of an hour. That was fine by me. I found a little basement caf? and had an open-faced sandwich with smoked salmon, cheese, and a sauce which I believed contained avocado. It turned out to be pretty decent and much improved over the wrap from the night before.

After lunch, I knew I was getting pretty tired, so I wanted to finish up the day on a good note, so I stopped at Rosenberg Slot. The castle/palace is set around a park that I imagine must be gorgeous during the summer months. I was able to get tickets for the treasury and a couple rooms of the castle. Inside they had some royal jewelry, including some crowns. The details on the crowns were amazing, it is so amazing that anyone was able to manipulate gold and precious stones as well as that. I finished up the day by checking out the botanical gardens. It seemed to be reminiscent of Munsinger Gardens in St. Cloud, but on a larger scale. They had some greenhouses featuring cacti (some of them were from Arizona!), as well as other exotic plants.

Maybe, I didn?t quite end the day on a good note. As I had mentioned, I wanted to check out McDonalds, and I had a huge hankering for a good American burger. I got there, and the atmosphere is much different. Being Denmark, the McDonalds has a lego themed playroom, while Euro-techno music is playing through the speakers. It seems to be a fairly trendy area. I ordered a cheeseburger from the centomenu which most items being about 10 Danish crowns (about $2). I also ordered my usual strawberry shake, but I found the food to be disappointing. While McDonalds is not great, I expect a certain level of quality that just was not present. I think it still must be good enough for most Europeans, but the shake tasted just too much like cardboard to be able to finish it. However, one bad meal does not a ruined journey make.

While I won?t bore you with the details of flying home, overall this was a great trip. I was amazed about the level and range of emotions I felt on this journey. I learned a bit about myself as well as other parts of the world. I also learned how to swallow a lot of pride and ask people directions; Arnab has some firsthand experience on how difficult it was for me to ask for directions when lost in San Francisco (maybe not lost, we were just getting our bearings.) Overall, while I am going to be a bit financially constrained for a while, I think I would go on this trip again if I had to do it over again. I would like to say thanks to everybody for being very supportive. It made the trip much more bearable when I know that there were people in the U.S. wishing me well. I really appreciated seeing e-mails and comments about my trip. BTW, I have postcards from the trip, some with stamps on them, but unfortunately, I wasn?t able to find a mailbox in Sweden to send them off in and the worker in the hostel in Stockholm would not mail them off for me. For those who requested postcards, you will be seeing yours shipped via first class U.S. mail.

-Trevor

P.S. The flight from New Jersey was delayed, but I was lucky enough to get an in-flight meal as a way of saying sorry. This was good considering that I had no food at home and all the grocery stores near my place was closed by the time I got home after 1 am.

So my day in Copenhagen started later than I originally planned. Our train was having "technical difficulties" and we ended up having to transfer in Malm? and take another train into Copenhagen, a process that caused me to arrive about 90 minutes late (the train from Stockholm that left an hour after us passed us in Lund). Anyways, the weather was still a bit colder than what I had expected, but it was sunny which was a positive. I found the hotel pretty easily, though the lights almost make it suggest that it is a little bit seedy, but it is alright, albeit very small.

Afterwards I walked around a bit to the R?dhuspladsen which is a plaza next to the City Hall (R?dhus). It appears that the city is getting ready for Christmas and put up a tree. Inside the city hall was interesting, but I guess not spectacular. They have a tower that one can get a good view of the city from, but is only open once a day at noon, and I don't know if I will be in the area when I go traveling later today.

One of the things I noticed at least around the train station (which is near the city hall) is the city is dirtier than Stockholm, which puts it on par for most American cities. Also the advertising is more blatant. On many of the buildings, there are plenty of electronic billboards spouting various products, many of them American. One of things that I noticed is that McDonalds and Burger King love to advertise in both Sweden and Denmark, there are advertisements everywhere. I think I may stop at one just to see if the food quality is any different than in the States.

On a whim, I decided that I was going to go check out the NY Carlsbe Glyptotek. Actually, it was not a whim, it got some pretty high marks from my travel guide... Anyways, I went in and was amazed about the sculptures in the museum. If my readers have not noticed by now, I am a museum junkie and this was fantastic, having some great marble sculptures and some paintings by Picasso, Manet, and Monet. Oh and it had some Egyptian mummies. And, I got to take pictures! My camera sure got a lot of use today, but you will have to wait till I get back to see more in the gallery.

After the museum, it was starting to get dark so I walked around the shopping district. After a while, the stores started looking all the same, though I noticed that there were a couple of Native Americans dancing and playing music (though not definitely not traditional). This is something that I suppose can only happen in Europe. I ended up going to a rather bland cafe with mediocre service. I tried a local beer that had a Christmas beer which was much better than the Cajun chicken wrap that had no flavor. Dinner in Copenhagen is expensive and I perused plenty of menus around the central area only to find that it mostly burgers, pizza, and wraps, no authentic cuisine is to be found, or at least at my price range. I suppose I would have to travel outside of the central trendy area, but I can't go out to one of the "suburbs" on a chance to find good food.

Well, after the cafe I was feeling more than a bit buzzed and decided to call it a night, which was still particularly early. I fell asleep to watching episodes of the The Simpsons. Below are a couple more pictures from the museum.

-Trevor

I arrived in Stockholm around 11:40 am on Sunday. Luckily I found the local convenience store in the train station and picked up a 72 hour travel pass. It allows unlimited travel by train, subway, bus, or ferry within Stockholm which for me is a blessing for a tourist who is not completely familiar with the layout of Stockholm. I had my first subway experience out to Kungsholmen where my youth hostel was; it is an island to the west of the main part of Stockholm (Norrmalm). I ended up walking around for a half hour, at one point even walking past the hostel without noticing it. I guess I missed the glaring red sign saying HOSTEL right above me.

The hostel certainly was new, but the hospitality was certainly lacking. They charged 20 SEK just for storing my luggage and breakfast was 60 SEK. Then there was of course the community kitchen, to use a fridge cost 20 SEK, so that made buying my own breakfast prohibitively expensive. However, in the end it really did not make a whole lot of difference because the rest of Stockholm was a lot of fun. For lunch, I stopped at Lind?s Caf? and had a pretty good lunch. For a starter I had some toast with a spread that consisted of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, as well as some onions and horseradish and mayo. It was surprisingly good. For the main course I had a steak with pretty good mushroom sauce. Since it was my waitress who initially helped me find my hostel, I left a nice tip.

After lunch, I took the metro (subway, but in Stockholm it is the T-bana) to Gamla Stan. It is part of the ?Old Town? and so there were some very tight winding cobblestone roads to walk through with plenty of shops. The shops are all pretty small and so window shopping is a lot of fun. The amount of people walking down the streets was amazing; it really made the city feel so vibrant. There was a square with a bunch of very touristy goods and was near the Nobel Museum. The museum was interesting, but way overpriced for the value. After the museum it was about 4:30 and was already very dark, so I decided to head back for the evening. When I took the subway back, I was still so amazed about the pace in Stockholm, everything is so fast, I think the pace of life at times is much faster than it is in Tucson, there are always people rushing from one subway track to the next.

The next morning I got up and finished preparing for the things I wanted to do when it got light. The breakfast was not all that spectacular. I seem to be adjusting to the Swedish breakfast of cereal and with some bread with meat and cheese on it. After breakfast, I picked up some band-aids for my blisters. My last band-aids required scissors to cut and with no scissor I was forced to do some butchering with a knife in the hostel kitchen (which did not really work). The grocery store did not have a knee brace and the pharmacy across the street from the grocery store did not open until 10 am. With the sun setting so early, I could not afford to wait, so I decided to just ?suck it up? for the day.

I stopped first at the train station to pick up my train ticket for Copenhagen. I found a pretty good deal for the 6:20 train which for me works great because that way I could get to the station and beat out rush hour. Afterwards, I went back to Gamla Stan to get some pictures that I was not able to get when it was dark out. There is very interesting church called Storkrykran near the royal palace with brick columns. Evidently people consider it Stockholm?s cathedral. The palace itself is closed on Mondays and it was not all that spectacular on the outside, but the size was certainly impressive.

I eventually found my way to Djurg?rden (pronounced Yoor-Gorden) which is pretty much an island forest. However it has some very cool museums. One of the museums, the Nordiska Mus?et, documented Swedish society throughout the 19th through 21st century (and some of it older). It had some interested things on the indigenous people (S?mi) of the Northern Scandinavian areas and it seems to me that the interaction between them and modern society has not always been perfect. After that, I stopped at the Vasamus?et. This is a museum that houses the warship Vasa that sunk in 1628 on its maiden voyage in Stockholm Harbor. Supposedly faulty engineering was to blame for it capsizing after a gust of wind. The brackish waters kept it very well preserved, and the carvings were amazing, though a bit hard to see in pictures due to the poor lighting.

After the museums, I walked around the park for a while. I originally wanted to see a museum that had some painting from Edvard Munch, but some poor directions from the information kiosk at the Vasamus?et and a change in bus routes due to construction left me to miss the museum. However the walk was great. The houses in the area were very nice, but I suppose one has to have a lot of money to have a lot of property in Stockholm. I walked around for a while until I found a bus stop that would lead me back to the central station. When I got there I decided to just walk down the shopping district for a bit. I found a couple of clothing stores with some very nice clothing, but if the dollar was stronger, I would definitely have picked some up. It actually seems that clothing in Stockholm, even trendy does not seem to be very expensive (at least for the natives ).
I found a Turkish restaurant for dinner that had a great special on lasagna. I picked some Falcon beer and a starter of dolmades. The reason that I tried the lasagna was that I was particularly interested on how a Turkish restaurant in Sweden would make a dinner that is Italian. Ultimately it was good, but nothing like lasagna in the United States, it was much more like a meat loaf. In the end, I think I am very happy that I went to Stockholm. While I really liked Lund, Stockholm by far made the entire trip worthwhile. It just would not have had the same charm had I stayed in the Sk?ne. I?m writing this as I am going down to Copenhagen, so it has a high bar to surpass at this point. However it will be about 15 degrees warmer and now I picked up a knee brace which should make walking a lot less painful. Of course I will go see the statue of the Little Mermaid, no trip to Copenhagen would be complete without it.

-Trevor

P.S. I saw a guy at the train station with the same North Face backpack as I have, but maybe I should not be surprised because it really is a great bag. So as a quick review, it is very comfortable to walk around town with it carrying around all of luggage (knee pain aside).

Sorry for not updating sooner, but the hostel I am staying at has a computer hooked up to a decent LCD televison, but does not have wireless so I can't add any photos, not to mention that I've been ?ber busy these last couple of days in Stockholm. I've been trying to find out what to do in Stockholm as well as prepare my trip back to Copenhagen, thus I do not have time for a full post. I'll try to get one in Copenhagen, but it has been a lot of fun. The subway (T-bana) system in Stockholm is amazing, and surprisingly fun (for at least me) to ride. I got to see a lot and took some good (hopefully) photos to share when I get back and will try to post some tomorrow evening. Anyways, I head out 6:20 local time tomorrow morning, that way I can do a little sightseeing when I get into town tomorrow.

-Trevor