tigertoy

Went to a new-to-me restaurant in Urbana for dinner this evening. It's a tiny hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called Huarches Moroleon. It's located at Washington and Philo, in a building that I've seen a bunch of places rotate through, but I hadn't been in it for several incarnations.

Turns out it's really good. I'm not exactly knowledgeable when it comes to Mexican food, but a lot of the things on this menu weren't the usual American Mexican restaurant fare. I don't know if that means they're authentic or creative. We started with the traditional chips and salsa, but they had four different salsas to mix and match, and they fry their own tortilla chips which are way better than average. I had enchiladas mole which were wonderful, and there were lots of other things on the menu that looked tempting. The prices were very reasonable -- I think the enchiladas were $8.

So if you're local and in the mood for Mexican, don't settle for El Toro.

On a more pleasant and less sensitive note, Mother's Day is coming up Sunday, and since birder2 is going to be kind of busy that day, we decided that we'd go out to dinner today. I had heard that her favorite Indian restaurant had closed, but I'd also heard in the same conversation that a new Indian restaurant had opened in downtown Urbana. Google found it for me; it's called Sitara. It's on Race between Elm and Main, which I drive past every week or two, but I had been oblivious to it.

The space is small -- it was a bar, the name of which I can't recall. They had several flat-screen TVs running what I assume was a Bollywood musical. (I've never seen any Bollywood fare, I've only heard it discussed on the radio.) I couldn't keep myself from looking at the TV; it was pretty but didn't seem to make much sense. The menu looked fairly promising -- not an extraordinarily large number of choices, but certainly not small. A lot of familiar dishes, but some that I don't recall from other Indian menus as well, it presented the usual dilemma, since pretty much all of the dishes sounded good. We settled on samosas and an appetizer called, if I'm remembering the unfamiliar name right, chicken kusawa. Something like that. The menu described it as having Nepali spices, which sounded novel. birder2 chose an odd named curry whose name I can't recall, but that had a j and I think a z. I chose lamb kedai. The samosas were tasty, not exceptional, but perfectly good samosas and I like samosas. The chicken appetizer was a surprisingly generous bunch of grilled chicken breast chunks, and the spicing was interesting. My curry was quite delicious, pleasantly spicy to me (which meant it was a bit too much for birder2 to sample). I had a small taste of hers and it was also tasty.

So, all the things we ate were good, and the prices were quite reasonable by C-U sit down restaurant standards. (I think all the entrees were between $9 and $11, mostly $10.) So, if you're looking for Indian, apparently you can't go to Bombay Grill on First Street any more, but you can go to Sitara instead, and it's a fine choice.

Sorry for the late notice, but there might be one or two people who would see this and care.

EFRC is one of the groups exhibiting at the annual Pet Fair at Prairieland Feeds in Savoy.  You can see Storm, a white tiger who once belonged to Mike Tyson, and buy EFRC stuff.  You can also see booths from other animal rescue organizations, and buy pet food at sale prices -- usually the best prices of the year.

We just got word, on the local newscast during All Things Considered, that due to state budget cuts, our local public radio station is eliminating its weather department.  I suspect this will not sound like a big deal to most people, because as I understand things, most people aren't used to having detailed, in-depth local weather coverage on the radio.  You're probably not used to actually hearing the dew point, or to regularly being updated on the seasonal total of heating or cooling degree days compared to the average.  You're probably used to either getting your weather forecast from a local TV station, where the weather person is chosen for their position mainly for how good they look on camera, or off of a website from weather.com.  You don't feel deprived because you never had really good weather coverage.  But I've lived in C-U all of my life, and WILL has defined my standards of being informed about what nature is going to be doing to me in the next few days.

Just a quick note, since I need to head to bed.  I arrived at Praireland shortly before the van carrying the tigers, and I ended up being there all day.  I was only at the table briefly to spell Dustin, but I still talked to more strangers about the cats in one day than I think I have before.  As far as I am aware, none of those strangers chewed their legs off to escape or were otherwise harmed.  They even seemed interested in hearing me ramble at fairly considerable length.  They weren't even put off by the way that I smelled -- Tony sprayed me very thoroughly while we were unloading the cats from the van.  My legs and feet are unexpectedly complacent about the fact that I was on my feet pretty much the whole day.  The weather was great, the tigers were never stressed or upset, and a whole lot of people stopped to admire the tigers and ask some questions.  I rate it a successful day.

If you're in the Champaign area, it turns out that the tigers will be appearing again tomorrow (though if you want to see me you'll have to actually go to EFRC).  So if you missed them, you have another chance.

I didn't have time to write this entry yesterday, precisely because of what this entry is about.

Sometime in the middle of last week, one of the folks at work emailed an announcement to everyone in the building that there was a computer recycling event this Saturday.  Since I have been tripping over a dead 21" CRT monitor in my living room for months and I have a couple of dead printers lying around, this seemed like a good idea.  Unfortunately, nothing in the announcement mentioned that what appeared to be half the population of Champaign would also think it was a good idea and the folks who were going to be accepting the junk would be utterly overwhelmed.

( too much detail about a really long wait )

I'm glad that I am rid of the junk and that it's in the hands of someone who's at least purportedly going to recycle it rather than just landfilling it.  I'm glad that the governments and volunteers who made it happen did it.  I hope they can repeat it on a semi-regular basis.  But I also hope they can find a better system so that hundreds of people don't have to sit in a queue of cars, or at the very least that they can provide some warning.

At GaFilk a few weeks ago, I actually got on the dance floor three times, and it got me thinking that (a) I would like to actually know how to dance, rather than just relying on the fact that in the sort of social dancing situations I encounter, nobody really expects me to know how to dance anyway, and (b) that if I could learn how to dance for real, and find an opportunity to do it regularly, it would be both a good form of exercise and something to do socially.

Does anyone have any advice on a good place in C-U to go to learn to dance?  It needs to be casual about dress and not hideously expensive.

And now for the real long shot, are there any women reading this who might be interested in being my dance partner?  I'm a whole lot more likely to actually do this, rather than just saying it's a good idea, if I have someone I know to do it with.