Today we left the car in the garage and rode from the house to my office in Herndon. I’d been toying with the idea of biking to work occasionally, but Kathie had the good idea of trying it together during a weekend first. It was 7.1 miles each way, and surprisingly almost all of it was on residential roads, the Fairfax County Parkway Trail (really just a wide sidewalk along the parkway), and the W&OD. There’s also a short jaunt through the woods at the end of our street, a 100-yard path that saves 1.5 miles and eliminates “roads you’d be crazy to bike on” like Seneca Road, Georgetown Pike, and Rt. 7.

The last mile of the trip, on Van Buren St. was more of a challenge, since we had to choose between the sidewalk or the road with no shoulder. We tried both, and while the road was fine on a Saturday morning at 9am, I’m not sure if I want to do that during rush hour on a weekday. Fortunately the speed limit on the road is 25mph and it’s aggressively enforced (don’t speed in Herndon!). Bicycles are allowed on sidewalks in Virginia (yield to pedestrians) so I’ll have to try both. It was a fun morning, and we’re both looking forward to a lot more biking!

Fortunately, my Crohn’s has also been completely gone since the surgery, so for the last 18 months I’ve been healthier than any time in the last 20 years. The only undesirable side-effect of having working intestines is that actually digesting my food has caused me to gain considerable weight — 30 pounds compared to where I’ve been the last 10 years or so. This year I’m making some lifestyle changes… I’m not calling it a diet since diets tend to be temporary things. We’ll see how it goes, but the goal is to exercise more and eat healthier in general. It’s only been 1-2 weeks so far, but by writing it down here, I’m creating more incentive to continue.

I learned today that earlier this year, the company (small, privately owned) was bought by ConAgra, one of the largest packaged food companies in the U.S., and the popcorn is no longer available. I’m assuming ConAgra plans to mass-produce the stuff, which could be good (cheaper, more easily available), or could be really bad (lower quality). Either way, today the popcorn isn’t available at all, so we’re going to start rationing what we have in the freezer.

There are a lot of bagel shops around here, and they’re all quite different. Many are good, but don’t serve what I would call bagels. For example, Einstein Bros. serves round baked doughy things with holes in the middle that they call bagels, but they’re not (in my book anyway). Bagels need to be boiled, which gives them the hard, shiny outer shell. If they’re baked or steamed, they come out quite differently.

In any case, here’s where to find good bagels around home:

1. KSB Bagel Cafe in South Reston. Best bagels around. Quite a hike from our house though, so we only go there once every few weeks, and we buy a half dozen or so.
2. Manhattan Bagel chain. Very good. There was one really close to us in Reston until a couple years ago when it closed. Very sad.
3. Panera Bread chain. Pretty good.
4. Einstein Bros. chain. Taste good, but very different from bagels… very doughy. Unfortunately they put carroway seeds on their everything bagels.
5. Bagel Cafe, nearby in Herndon, Kathie likes them but I find their bagels to be too bready.

1) Primo Italiano (Reston): Small chain, just a few stores. My favorite. Unfortunately, they don’t deliver this far out, and they’re closed on Sundays.

2) Mama Lucia’s (Reston): Small chain. More of an eat-in restaurant. Good, but a little too greasy, even for N.Y. style. Great free appetizer bread.

3) Deli Italiano (Great Falls): Non-chain (as far as we know). Delivers to the house, good pizza, especially the crust. This is what we usually eat, because of the delivery. A little pricey.

4) Emilio’s (Sterling): Eat-in restaurant. Brick oven, crispy crust. Quite good.

5) Pizzarama (Great Falls): A mile from our house, but doesn’t deliver. Pretty good, though the sauce is a little too sweet for me. They are the only place we’ve found in VA that has garlic knots like N.Y., so they get extra points for that.

If you know someplace else we should check out locally, let me know!

Where am I going with all this? Well, you probably figured it out from the blog title, but hell has frozen over and I’ve started drinking diet soda! I still think Diet Coke is pretty gross, but I sampled some Coke Zero to try to offset some of the 3-ish cans of Coke per day I’ve been drinking most of my life. Coke Zero isn’t bad, and I’ve switched over to it almost 100% at home. Diet Coke came out around the same time as the ill-fated “New Coke”, and was based on the same recipe. Coke Zero is based on the Coca-Cola Classic forumula, and thus tastes much better. Of course, using it to wash down bags of Doritos still isn’t going to help too much, but I’ll work on that next.

1. Sauron (3.77): Leonard Kreusch Piesporter Michelsberg, 2006
2. Frodo (3.42): Maple River Rhubarb Wine
3. Treebeard (3.31): Rapidan River Semi-dry Riesling
4. Galadriel (2.80): Horton Viognier
5. Gollum (2.54): Monkey Bay Chardonnay, 2004
6. Aragorn (2.5): Smoking Loon Chardonnay, 2005
7. Eowen (2.39): Big House White, 2006
8. Legolas (2.00): Patianna Organic Sauvignon Blanc, 2005
9. Arwen (1.88): Valminor Rias Baixas, 2006
10. Gimli (1.80): Running with Scissors Chardonnay, 2006
11. Gandolf  (1.15): Copolla Chardonnay, 2000

Several of us were surprised at how badly the Copolla did, so we suspect that either 7 years was too long to keep it, or it was just a bad bottle.  Don’t worry Pablo, it was educational

Well, about a year and a half ago while reading the Crohn’s message board I found the answer: B.K. Heuermann’s microwave popcorn. Their popcorn has been selectively bred for the past 10 years to have virtually no hull — the hard covering of the kernel — making the popcorn softer and fluffier and more enjoyable to eat. It also tastes really good.

They have several flavors (Kathie’s favorite is the kettle corn, and mine is the movie theater style) available for mail order, so if you like popcorn, give it a try!

The first seminar, last week, was all about tasting wine. Through the course of the evening we sampled 12 different wines and learned about the proper way to taste wine — as opposed to drinking wine — as well as how to classify things like appearance, aroma, feeling, flavor, finish, body, and style (old world vs. new world, and sometimes international). It was a very fun and enlightening evening. The next two seminars are about “Enjoying Wine”, mainly covering practical info like how to store wine and how long to keep it before opening it, how to store an unfinished bottle of wine and for how long, how to order wine in a restaurant, etc. The final class is about matching wine with food.