Tuesday's Tunes: Glory in the Highest

Thanksgiving is typically the time I dust off my Christmas playlist, and upload it for the car ride down to my family in NY. Let's ease into the Christmas music season with Glory in the Highest, from Chris Tomlin's Christmas worship album of the same name. It's a song that really works any time of the year, I hope you enjoy it:

Tuesday's Tunes: Midnight City

Today's selection "Midnight City" by M83 is a little more outside of scope of the music I normally listen to, but nonetheless enjoy. The music video itself is reminiscent of the iconic 80's anime film Akira, and M83's music in general made for some great background music during a recent board game session.

A trip to the comic shop with author Junot Diaz

For those who have read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, you undoubtedly noticed author Junot Diaz's peppering of comic book references (whether you understood them or not). As a fellow comic book fan, it was great get a peak behind the scenes and see Diaz geek out in the video below, which I first came across from the Comics Alliance article Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Junot Diaz Discusses His Love Of Comics:


If you are even a casual fan of the medium, I wholeheartedly approve of every comic/graphic novel featured in the article.

An extended taste of the Bay Area

Blog entries haven't come as easy since I've been playing "catch up" with life after being stuck for an extra five days in San Francisco unexpectedly thanks to super storm Sandy. Luckily for us, one of T's close high school friends was kind enough to host us for all but one of our extra days and was an extremely gracious hostess!

We made the most of the trip and got to explore the city and some of the surrounding area during our forced vacation. The weather was gorgeous as well: mid 50's and a little foggy in the morning, but sunny and 70 degrees by noon! This really redeems my last few trips to SF, where I had to drive in an unfamiliar city amidst pouring rain.

Ok, now the part you probably are waiting for: the food. Amongst all the delicious things we ate, we really enjoyed the wealth of coffee options in the Bay Area:

Pour over from "Jane," near our hotel in Japan town.

A cute siphon pot from Blue Bottle Coffee

The Mrs. enjoying some coffee from Philz

Philz Coffee in particular won us over, seeing as how we visited the local chain three times. I brought home a pound of their Tessora beans, and with my trusty french press, have been able to recapture a bit of that coffee heaven at home.

Now onto the food: here's a quick bullet list of highlights of the some of the restaurants we hit up:

Obligatory In-N-Out visit

• O-Toro Sushi - super fresh
• Mission Chinese Food - spicy and full-flavored Chinese food. This is the original, and I heard they opened one in NYC as well.
• Koi Palace - delicious dim sum
• Bi-Rite Creamery - really enjoyed the salted caramel ice cream
• Golden Gate Bakery - for their egg tart
• In-N-Out - double-double animal style, check!
• R&G Lounge - repeat these words after me: "salt and pepper crab"

"Eat me, I'm delicious!"

All in all, it was a really great trip, but the next time I visit the Bay Area, we will hopefully have the opportunity to plan (and pack) accordingly!

Tuesday's Tunes: All the Poor and Powerless

I'm always excited to find a solid contemporary worship album, especially if it has multiple songs that are appropriate to small or medium sized churches. Take that as a critique on the recent Hillsong and Passion albums, which have great inspirational songs to listen to, performance pieces if you will, but don't translate well to a smaller band setting, or are downright unsingable to the average congregant.

Anyhow, I can't recommend enough All Sons & Daughters album Season One, where today's selections "All the Poor and Powerless" come from: