Citizen's Toolkit for Bloomington, IN

The Citizen's Toolkit is an excellent resource for voter information. For example, from the 2004 elections, the "Meet the Candidates" movies helped me pick my candidate for surveyor: always vote for the guy who brings a map to his video profile session.

Bloomington Restaurants

Here's my list of Bloomington, Indiana area restaurant recommendations. You can google these or check out Bloomingpedia for directions.

Expensive
1. Restaurant Tallent: Probably the best restaurant in town. I give them bonus points for making unique meals using lots of local produce, meat, fish, and poultry. This distinguishes them from Scholars and Truffles, which are excellent but don't really serve dishes that you couldn't get elsewhere. The current location (an old house on Kirkwood) is a bit funky for Tallent's pretensions (formerly it was Flora's, which served hippie Italian), but the new location downtown should provide a more appropriate "urban" decor.
2. Scholar's Inn: New American-style cuisine. The restaurant is located in a Victorian mansion, so they win the decor award.
3. Truffles: Not as creative as the others, but better portions. Very nice interior but located in a strip mall.
4. Janko's Little Zagreb: best steaks on the planet. Ribs and spicy meatballs are good, too. Salads and decor are humorously bad.

Medium Priced
1. Michael's Uptown: classic American and Cajun dishes. Dinner specials Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday put them in my "moderately priced" category; otherwise, they skew towards the expensive. They have an excellent selection of wines by the glass.
2. Le Petit Cafe: lunch buffet on Thursdays and prix fixe brunch on Sundays. The French owners (Patrick and Marina) have lived in Bloomington for nearly 30 years, and the menu is more "Indiana home cooking by French natives" than classic Parisian cuisine.
3. Casablanca: forget their standard menu and order the fish or lamb special of the day. Lunch specials are usually the same as the dinner specials, but cheaper.
4. Esan Thai: Fresh Thai dishes, not as oily as most US Thai restaurants that I've tried. Has many vegetarian options.
5. Lenny's: this is a combination brew house and restaurant. They have very good gourmet pizzas.
6. Upland: another brew house and restaurant. They usually have interesting weekly dinner specials and better variety than Lenny's.
7. Samira: this is an Afghan restaurant with a menu that has a combination of Indian, Southwest Asian, and Mediterranean dishes. They have a very nice lunch buffet.

Cheap
1. Mother Bear's: This is an old school Midwest pizza place and a Bloomington landmark that regularly gets national recognition. I did get food poisoning here once (the Divine Swine was the culprit).
2. Runcible Spoon: cheap meals for college students in an appropriately shabby old house. They also are an OK place for breakfast.
3. Aver's Pizza: Take out or delivery only. Great pizza if you like chewy, thick crusts. They have several interesting gourmet-style pizzas.
4. Nick's English Hut: this is one of Bloomington's landmark bars, with 75+ years worth of atmosphere that you couldn't remove with a chisel and their own drinking game ("Sink the Bismark" with hall-0f-fame buckets above the bar. But I drop by for the food. The chef/kitchen manager ("Rags") serves exemplary bar food: burgers, onion rings, pizza, Italian beef, and strombolis. If you want something healthy, they have fine fresh fish available over a salad of nice greens or as a dinner. Elk and buffalo burgers are also available. They use local meat and produce extensively.

Scripps and La Jolla

These are photos from a recent meeting at the IGPP/SIO building at the Scripps Oceanography Institute. This google map
link is reasonably close to the building. Actually, if you click on the satellite view and zoom in a bit, you can see the bridge, which is just north and east of the pier.

Below is a shot of the IGPP building and the suspension walkway at sunset.


Here's another shot that shows the building a little more clearly.


A shot of La Jolla, the beach, and Mount Soledad in the distance.


Taken from the same spot as above (roughly) but looking down on the courtyard.


Also taken from the same spot as the previous two shots, but looking directly down. I liked the contrast of the trees with the repetition of the railings, but not sure the photo captured it.

Domestic Bliss: House Painted at Last

My house was built in 1970 (if you believe the county records) and has redwood siding that was originally stained. One of the previous owners decided it was time for a change and painted the whole thing baby blue by himself. It was not a good idea. Baby blue? What was that guy thinking?

Here's a photo with date shown. The brown door was removed and the shrubbery redone when I bought in 2005, but the exterior was basically the same.


Here's a nice photo showing some mildew to give you an up-close view of the deterioration of the exterior.



Enter Matt Murphy of FourSquare Painting (a.k.a "The House Whisperer") and his fine crew. Next is a shot of house as they scrubbed off the old paint. Many sections weren't primed, so the paint stripped right off.




Here's another "in-progress" photo with ladders and monolith. I gave the druids the week off.



The final results at last. The weather this week (late July 2006) has been a little overcast, so I'll replace with sunny day photos later. I don’t think photos can really capture the evenness and precision of the job.



Notice it matches my car. This was not my intention. The main color is Benjamin Moore's Arroyo Red, the trim is in a custom mixed color (will match new gutters), and the door color is a dark teal (“Mallard Green”).

Here's a photo of the patio and monolith, taken from the back yard. The gutters were taken down (see roofline of right side) and should be replaced this week, weather permitting.



Here’s another view of the back of the house.

Maui 2006 Photos

These are some photos from my recent trip to Maui to attend the ACES 2006 Workshop . The conference was held at the Maui Prince , just north of Makena State Park. Click the photo to see a larger version.

These first three are camera shots of a house just off the hotel grounds. It's a nice house, but I really wanted to get a photo to show my house painter as a possible color for my place.

These next two photos are of another house with a color that I liked. Ignore the ocean in the background. This house was a short walk north of the hotel. The hill in the background is maybe 1/2 mile south of the hotel. Big Beach is on the other side of the hill. I tried to find a trail head to walk up this, with no luck.




The rest of these photos were taken with my cell phone.

The first is the entrance to Big Beach, about 1 mile south of the hotel. I took this in the shadow of the hill seen in the photo above.


This next photo was taken on Big Beach: you can see the crater of an old volcano in the center of the photo. The hotel has a snorkeling tour out to this, which I did in 2000. The sun was so bright that I could not see my screen--otherwise I would have zoomed a bit.

This is a shot of an unusual cloud formation on the north mountain of island at sunset. It should give you some idea of the strength of the trade winds that blow in from the west. This was taken at the conference banquet...the hotel is right behind me.





Finally, here is a photo of me taken by Dave Yuen, also at the banquet (same sunset). The little nub on the ocean near my left elbow is the volcano crater also shown in the Big Beach photo.