Introduction: The First Post

College Park

College Park is a suburban town dominated by two influences: The University of Maryland, and the Washington DC metro area. The University ensures that the town will always be populated by young students and every business and traffic pattern must bend to that reality. The Washington DC metro area is divided into 3 parts, the area that includes everyone that works in DC, the area inside the DC beltway, and Washington DC proper. The proximity to DC means that there is a subway system with a station in walking distance of my house, and I generally get the services of a large city.

More importantly it means hat everyone has around 1 degree of separation from the federal government:

• If you live in DC, you live on property of the federal government.

• If you are a fed, you are...the man.

• If you are a contracter, you work for guys who sell to the fed.

• If you are a lawyer, there isnt much you do that isn't political or connected to the federal government.

There are old timers too here, from a time before the beltway, when this area was farmland ready to be bulldozed into outer boony burbs for a new wave of pregnant mothers who needed cheap houses in which to raise the baby-boomer offspring of federal employees.

How I got here

I'm from New York City originally; born, raised, and hastilly emigrated. I went to RIT out of high school, and after 2 quarters there, decided two things: RIT was “Hell in an igloo” and I never wanted to see winter again. So, my then-future-wife and I picked some state schools south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and ended up at UMD. I love it here and loved attending UMCP, the architecture, the people, the climate, the scholarship, the money that falls from the sky at this campus, spent intelligently on things that make one proud to be a Terp.

After school, I got job at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and stayed in the same apartment I had lived in in college. After my wife and I got married, she got sick of rental service living (and more importantly, our third annual $100 rent hike in a row), and we started house hunting.

By this time, we had thoroughly explored the beltway and firmly decided on college park as a place to live. We wanted to live in Maryland (as opposed to Virginia or DC), and we both hate Montgomary county, and needed to be inside the Beltway.
While it's a long story in itself, we picked a cute brick box of a house that was in need of some TLC and vision. The house was a dump when we got it, but it quickly became a home, and eventually became a very relaxing place for anyone who visits.

What we like doing

Cooking – Kim and I are avid cooks. We catered our own wedding of 40, with 14 dishes that stuffed to the brim, the carnivores, vegitarians, and allergics (gluten and onions).
Drinking – There are 4 kinds of drinkers:

1. Beer: Correlated with beer-guts, testosterone and sports
2. Wine: Correlated with women and people that live in Mediterranean climates.
3. Soft drinkers: Correlated with Muslims, recovering alcoholics and children. If you are in this category there are only the aforementioned three reasons why.
4. Mixed Drinks: correlated with every american idol of the baby boomers, hardcore drinkers, and people for whom cooking includes alchemy without solid ingredients. My wife and I meet each criteria.

Gardening – Im big into composting, my wife has the eye and flare for the actual plants. We will get really good at it eventually, but right now we are really young. This blog will be about the transition between the two.
Entertaining – Cooking and drinking for oneself is impolite. So we make other people fat and drunk because we are debaucherous pushers...and great hosts.
Video Games – We play video games. A lot. But blogging about an imaginary world you interact with by yourself is pretty boring, and indicative of people I dont usually like.

What the blog is about

Blog came from weB LOG. This is exacly what it will be, a log of experiments in cooking drinking and gardening. I suppose I will write at least one book on at least one of these topics later in life. This will be the notebook from which published material will be honed into a product that someone might decide to pay me for.