Offbeat Eats

One of the joys of going to London is that it gives me a lot of opportunities to explore cuisines that I usually don’t find in New England, and may even have trouble finding in the US at all. In this case, my visit gave me a good chance to visit a second location of Iberia that recently had opened a short walk from my Brother’s London flat. To get something out of the way, “Iberia” is an interesting placename; Western European and North American English speakers usually use this term referring to Spain and Portugal (the Iberian Peninsula, after the ancient Greek name for the river, Íbēros), but the term also applies to another ancient geographical region almost 4000 km to the east, the ancient Georgian kingdom of Kartli, which was also known to the Greeks as Iberia. So Iberia in Pimlico is serving up classic Georgian food, and since it has been several years since I last had a foray into Georgian cuisine, we decided to make that our last major meal of my visit.

Well, it’s been quite a week. A week ago, there was a lot of rumbling in various events I’m involved with whether or not it was prudent to hold events, ranging from FIRST Robotics competitions, beer festivals, and even trivia night at the local coffee shop. Then, over the space of a week, things have escalated from “caution” and exhortations to wash our hands more to wide-scale travel bans, bans on group gatherings, and wholesale shutdowns of bars and restaurants. Friday, under the loom of potential closings, I had a very nice dinner with friends at Fox and Harrow in Royalton, VT. By mid-afternoon on Monday, restaurants are now closed across the entire region. While many places locally are hustling to try to find ways to adapt to take-out and delivery, other places are rapidly deciding that, at least for now, they’ve got to close up.

You’ve probably noticed that my posting rate has slowed down a bit. It’s not that I’ve not been traveling or eating, I’ve just been involved in another project. Specifically, GnomeLand! As part of a very elaborate prank, we made and installed over 500 handpainted concrete lawn gnomes in and around my coworker’s house.

I had to do some major retooling of the website (the perfect activity when stuck home with a kidney stone). This site makes intensive use of the Google Maps API, and until recently used version 2 of the API, which is getting deprecated in May. In order to keep your Offbeat Eats coming to you without interruption, I had to migrate the site to use the newer Version 3 API. And it’s not simple, since I’m often mapping hundreds of points, with use of bounding boxes, autoscaling, and map clustering. Mostly, this will be an improvement. Mapping should be faster, with more options. But a few things will work a little differently. And I’m sure a few things will need tweaking. But please let me know if you find anything that’s not working how you think it should.

Subtitled: Kidney Stones Are Rather A Nuisance. You’ve probably noticed by now that my normal at-least-weekly posting rate has dwindled to nearly nothing. The reason is two fold. The minor reason is that I haven’t been traveling much (aside from a bunch of repeat trips to Boxborough, MA), so I haven’t encountered my usual number of new places to try. But that’s not much of an excuse, since I’ve still got a good half dozen local places that are still overdue for a review. The other is that three weeks ago I was diagnosed with a kidney stone. It started as a minor inconvenience, but then as the weeks of discomfort, pain, and nausea (especially the nausea), last Tuesday the docs took one look at my x-ray and decided that action was required: in this case a stent (to stabilize the kidney, the stone is still in there). I’ve discovered that while kidney stones are a huge amount of, well, un-fun, the stent isn’t much better. So until this situation rides itself out and I’m given a clean bill of health, I’m on a regimen of bed rest, painkillers, and non-confrontational food. So, in the meantime, enjoy the rest of the blog, stay healthy yourselves (drink lots of water!), and I hope to talk with you soon.