My hiking friends and I went on our quasi-annual Asheville cabin trip this past weekend. We had dinner at Salsa’s on Friday night. For once, our wait wasn’t terribly long, nor outside in the really really cold. And we finally had the spliff rolls.
Then we went for dessert at a little cupcake bakery, and then on to the French Broad Chocolate Lounge, where we had “liquid truffles,” which were basically highly concentrated hot chocolate drinks. I only had a sip, because I was still full from my lemon cupcake. So essentially, we went bar-hopping, but for desserts.
On Saturday, we hiked in the Panthertown Valley area. The trail wasn’t marked, and there were many little false side routes, so we added a couple extra miles for a total of around ten miles. Then back for showers, and on to Barley’s Taproom for pizza.
We spent Sunday packing up and eating breakfast at Tupelo Honey, after the usual weekend hour-long wait. But it was worth it, as usual. I spent the early afternoon walking around some of the fun little stores downtown.
Now that I think about it, this particular Asheville cabin trip was more about eating (and waiting to eat) than hiking!
More trip photos on Flickr. And here are Stu’s.
Remember when I blogged about going to the NASPA Conference in Boston last month? I had only one afternoon free over the course of the week, and I spent it walking around the Back Bay area, and over to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. I spent a lot of time here when I was younger, so it felt a little weird to be snapping photos.
This is Boston Common:
This is Trinity Church and Faneuil Hall:
A few more pictures on Flickr.
My inner classics geek loves this one:
About a year ago, the Bank of America ATM on campus stopped requiring deposit slips and envelopes. Instead, you just sign your checks and put them in the slot. Some OCR function even figures out the dollar amount on your check by itself if the writing is legible enough (otherwise it displays an image of the check and asks you to type it in yourself, which is easy enough anyway). And it keeps a running tally of the checks you’re depositing, so you don’t even have to add these up yourself.
I always thought this was great — no fussing with deposit slips, envelopes, or digging around for your account number. Until the other day when I tried to deposit two checks. For whatever reason, the ATM didn’t recognize them as checks. I’m not sure why not; I’m guessing it’s because there weren’t leading lines for the “Pay to the order of” and “Amount” spaces, or a box around the check value…? Otherwise, they looked exactly like a standard-issue check.
This would be a situation where it would be good to have a backup option. Perhaps deposit envelopes available for times like this where the OCR isn’t working correctly. In the meantime, I’ll take my renegade checks to the other ATM; maybe they still have the old-school deposit format. Or if all else fails, I suppose I could make it in to the regular bank and talk to a real actual person.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was this weekend in Durham. This was my third time at the festival; every year I tell myself that I’ll get a festival pass the next year, instead of just seeing one or two films. But then I forget. Maybe next year.
This year I saw two films. The Order of Myths was about the Mardi Gras carnival in Mobile, Alabama, and the traditions, pageantry and mystic societies involved. The film examined the racial disparities between the two separate but concurrent celebrations, as well as the conflict between integrating the celebrations and preserving traditions. The film also looked at how the celebrations were economically segregated as well. The key players in both the black and the white celebrations were from the wealthiest families in their respective communities.
The second film I saw was American Teen, which followed four students through their senior year of high school in Warsaw, Indiana. The kids embodied the common stereotypes (the nerd, the popular girl, the jock, the artsy one), but it also talked about other issues they had going on it their lives as well. There weren’t any surprises in the film and everything ends happily (the nerdy kid finally finds a girlfriend; the jock gets a college basketball scholarship and doesn’t have to join the military after all), but the film doesn’t come off as cliched. As an aside, I think it’s kind of interesting that Indiana is so often chosen as the setting for stories about life in small-town America. Why aren’t more stories set in Iowa, for example? or Michigan?