life according to kathryn

i wrote a post called Adobe AIR in Action: Monitoring Sockets for insideRIA which was published today. it covers socket monitoring in AIR.

insideRIA is a joint adobe/o’reilly blog covering rich internet applications and related development technologies. i’m an avid reader and happy to now be a contributor as well.

friday i took a bus out to a lake in connecticut to spend the weekend with matt’s family. it was so refreshing to spend a couple of days off the grid, away from the laptop and blackberry and with a cell phone out of batteries. saturday focused entirely around swimming, grilling, and enjoying the sun and breeze.

it was great. i really should get out of town more often.

for a while now i have been having cheerios every morning for breakfast. in the early part of the year, they were one of few foods i could manage. i pour lots of milk into the bowl, and drink what’s left at the end, along with my vitamin. the bananas are a new addition, hopefully their potassium will help my calf muscles to chill out so i can get a better night sleep.

it is funny how cereal has become a morning ritual. i think this is the first time in my working life that i have consistently eaten breakfast every day, at home, before work. i am really coming to enjoy it.

in may i had the pleasure of working closely with león coto and gabriel montagné to code this camp rock microsite for target. we used the cairngorm framework, with all the product images, positions, and descriptions loaded at runtime via xml.

this entry is an ode to the delicious grilled cheese sandwich at red stripe in wayland square. we usually order this for pick-up, since the restaurant is generally a bit too noisy for comfort. the sandwich is enormous, with two slices of pain de mie, prosciutto, roasted pear, basil, and gruyere i think. it is so big that i can’t ever finish more than half at one sitting.

today i convection-reheated my leftover 1/2 in the toaster oven, and ate it with a little salad of avocado, strawberry tomatoes, and romaine with mustard vinaigrette. yum!

after montreal, we set out to visit matt’s brother and his wife in buffalo, ny. we spent one night in oswego, simply because it was en route. the city is a bit run down, we observed, as we walked around the “farmer’s market” (which sold mostly baked goods). however, the franklin square b&b is a lovingly restored and beautifully decorated sanctuary. we stayed in the chinese lantern room.

a storm woke us up in the middle of the night. the thunder and lightening came in such a constant stream that it was impossible to tell their distance. i really enjoyed listening to the thunder and rain.

in the morning, the danish innkeeper prepared a delectable breakfast. it started with strawberries and cream, followed by toast with homemade jam, then an omelette and bacon, accompanied by orange juice. this was my favorite meal of the trip.

we drove to rochester, where we had lunch with matt’s aunt, then on to buffalo where we stayed with matt’s brother and his wife. while in buffalo we made waffles, then went to the farmer’s market and had a nice walk along the shops in elmwood. we also played board games and the boys got some quality time talking about maximum entropy.

i seem to have stopped taking pictures when we arrived in buffalo! perhaps we were a bit tired by the end of the week, but overall our road trip was a success. it was so nice to take a vacation with matt, before he starts his summer internship, and before our lives change in a big way in the fall.

our second destination was montreal, quebec. the last time i visited montreal was on a whim — i was visiting a friend in vermont, and we decided to take a day trip. we crossed the border with nothing but our drivers’ licenses. but times have changed since then, and over a sushi dinner in stowe, matt and i wondered if passports were now required. the answer, as of january 31, 2008, is yes. so there we were, an hour from the border, without our passports. we hatched a plan… we would drive the 4.5 hours back to providence that night, sleep, get our passports, and drive the 7 hours to montreal the next day.

this part of our trip was long. but i am proud to say that i drove from the beginning of vermont all the way to our bed and breakfast in montreal. since i only learned to drive manual transmission this year, i was proud to handle both highway driving (it was my first time in sixth gear) and city driving at rush hour (on a hill, no less).

after settling into our comfortable suite at the university b&b, and getting lots more sleep, we set out for a fun day in montreal. we walked around the shopping district, and saw interesting sidewalk paintings.

we also visited the biodome, an indoor zoo where you can walk through a few different climate-controlled habitats. then we caught the new indiana jones movie at the nearby cinema. we took the metro to the old city, and ate dinner at a polish restaurant called stash, before walking along the water and getting ice cream.

matt and i took a road trip to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. our first stop was stowe vermont, about 4.5 hours north of providence.

we spent a fantastic anniversary there. in the morning, we visited the ben & jerry’s factory, then we stopped for lunch at the austrian tea room beside the von trapp family lodge.

in the afternoon we played miniature golf. matt made an impressive hole-in-one but in the end we tied, which i think is a good sign that we are well-matched. afterward, we drove through smuggler’s notch. the weather was sunny, warm, and perfect for driving with the top down.

we stayed at the auberge de stowe where there is a charming black labridor named max, who would bark at us for a bit, then realize we were friendly and proceed to find something else to bark at. unfortunately i did not get a picture of him, as we ended up leaving town a day early… to be told in part II.

yesterday on a walk matt spotted this cool curly plant. what is it? while inspecting it closer i noticed a ladybug.