I've been doing a lot of thinking--about the conference mostly, but odds and ends, too. Like why expensive chocolate tastes better than the cheap stuff, and why anything "made in Switzerland" is usually better than Godiva. Yesterday, I bought a Frey Japonais bar, because anything with the word Japonais in it draws me like a magnet.
Japonais is the pastry term for hazelnut meringue, and this bar was delicately creamy, with little flecks of actual japonais, unlike the pastry I bought (because frangipane draws me too). I figured--okay, it's a fancy bakery, they're "European", and it says, "rustic blackberry frangipane tart", which translates as free-form pie with some kind of blackberry filling and a layer of almond pastry cream.
I should have stopped at almond, because there were a lot of chopped nuts. In my fascination with Kaffeehaus and Konditorei I've noticed Austrian-Hungarian pastry doesn't contain a lot of whole or chopped nuts. Sure, there are pastes, and finely ground nuts, and sometimes there are caramelized nuts for decoration, but chunks of almond in a frangipane are the bakery equivalent of Panda Express. European pastry for people who really don't like European pastry.
I've also been messing with my business cards. Cowboy did a wonderful template using my raven logo, and I meant to take it down to OfficeMax, but there's a minimum 500 order, and it's way cheaper to buy 1000. Which I'm never going to use. A thousand business cards??
What if I change my phone number?
So I bought a pack of clean-cut cards and ran off a hundred. They look good, and even a hundred are way too many. I plan on luxuriating in the lectures, uhm...yes, I'm a geek--eating myself silly at the spotlights, and taking lots of pictures. With any luck--it won't be like the last time, where I was stupid enough to fly United, got delayed six hours, and got to the conference just in time for volunteer clean up at the book fair.
Luckily, I didn't know they canceled my return ticket, because it would have put a damper on things.
Only twenty five more days. I can't wait.
1 comment:
I can't let this post stand with no comment.
It's not right.
And! I always printed my business cards on perforated stock. Saam the aardvark (not a donkey) was charmer in and of himself.
That said, I hope you have one of the best times of your life.
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