Life in the key of E flat minor

I am a chocoholic. I only recognize chocolate as a proper dessert or sweet treat, outside of a few exceptions. I will scoff at bananas foster, cherries jubilee or apple pie. However, one fantastic exception is a shortbread biscuit: a solid yet flaky cookie that's heavy for its size and tastes buttery with a hint of sugar. I can't control myself when they are around. Can you hear the bagpipes? Today is my father's birthday. And one of the many traits that I share with him is this love of shortbread.  Since I'm traveling from Glasgow to Oban (in the above mentioned Highlands) today, I baked some shortbread fingers with love and sent them home last week via my mother so that the delicate slightly-sweet treats will be there for my dad in the morning.  All the while, I've been picking up different brands of commercial shortbread. Detail of the opened package - it didn't stand a chance Shortbread is simple to make; traditionally it's made from th...

As I prepare for my 40th birthday holiday through the British Isles, I remember that I never posted this entry about my September vacation. I microblogged my trip through Europe using twitter and foursquare, even creating my own hashtag for the vacation, #CJintheUK, and tweeted happily along (usually when I could find abundant free wifi.) I think that it makes an amusing travelog to follow - complete with foursquare check ins, twitter conversations and selected uploaded pictures. (I am including the time and date stamp which came from the backlog in HootSuite, which is presented in Eastern Time.) I didn't really edit the tweets, except for an occasional misspelling which I caught, a foreign word needing to be italicized or if a tweet needed a little clarification. I left in the hash tags, probably to the chagrin of some of you, though I thought that it could be interesting to see what topics or words I was tagging in order to make my tweets searchable.  For those of you who don...