Surely a sign that hell has begun freezing over, I voluntarily drank (and didn’t dislike) an entire glass of vanilla soy milk. Not even a week ago, I would have preferred to eat a pound of sala (Russian salt-cured pork fat) rather than take even the slightest sip of soy milk. Lo and behold, people can change and so can tolerance for foods. Besides, maybe migrating from milk to soy will help me get rid of those extra few pounds I can’t seem to shed. It’s one of those 2008 resolutions. =)
I was making some BBQ shrimp last night (in the rain) on our deck and I noticed that the light was hitting an evergreen in a particular way that made it sparkle. I got up close and noticed that the sparkling was due to tiny water droplets that had been caught in between the needles of the tree. I thought it looked neat until I got my 100mm macro lens. The closer I got to the droplets, the better they looked.
P.S. The shrimp was awesome!
Most people think that vodka was invented by the Russians. From what I know, it originated around Poland some time in the 13th or 14th century. It was referred to as ‘hot wine’ or ‘burning wine’ (gorilka).
It wasn’t until nearly 100 years later that the word ‘vodka’ was used by the Russians. ‘Voda’ (the Russian word for ‘water’) was used to dilute excessively potent grain or bread-based alcohol. Because Russians loved the voda-distilled drink so much, they gave the word voda a standard grammatical twist to indicate affection and reverence. To do this, they added the suffix -ka to voda (adding -ka to a word or name in Russian is like turning Joe into Joey or Bill into Billy in English) and thus voda was renamed vodka.
Blah blah blah… long story short, vodka is popular all over the world. Personally, I had enough of it while living in Moscow. Portland-based Medoyeff, however, is really impressive.
I took this photo at the Medoyeff distillery today, where world-class vodka, gin and Scandinavian aqua vit are made.
