Ice cream run amuck?

I love ice cream. It's one of my many great weaknesses. I buy specialty ice creams from local dairies and mail-order via the wonderful icecreamsource.com. In ice cream, as in many things, I am prone to overdoing it a bit, or so some folks tell me.

Consider this example, and judge for yourself.

Saturday night, I'm throwing a belated birthday party for myself here at our house. (In our group, one tends to throw one's own parties.) Somewhere between 17 and 20 of us will attend. We'll have two cakes, but of course we need ice cream. I mean, what's a party without ice cream?

So, I went online to the aforementioned site and started ordering. Here's how my thinking went.

Zanzibar chocolate; hmmm. Everyone loves it, and everyone who wants some should get some, so I'll order four pints. (I actually started with five but talked myself down; such self-control!)

Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, of course, is the perfect chocolate complement, as well as a chocolate option for those crazed souls who don't love Zanzibar. Better toss in three of them.

I had a request for cinnamon, and I love it, too; let's grab three of those.

I need some non-chocolate. Man, that maple ice cream we had a while back was dee-licious. Let's get a pair of them.

Scott loves strawberry, and as my son his opinion counts. Throw two in the virtual cart.

Of course, one cake will be chocolate, so I better grab a couple vanillas. Done.

Then again, I do love cherry ice creams; let's take two of those cherries jubilee pints.

What about gelato fans, though? Yeah, a pair of red raspberry pints should serve them.

Okay, might as well have a cherry-off; it's fate. Let's take a pint of that Door County cherry gelato.

And that's how you end up with 21 pints of ice cream and a tab of over two hundred bucks (one-third of it rush shipping).

Now, lest you feel I went too far overboard, I should note that we will actually eat these over four nights, and Kyle is visiting, so I had to lay in some extra for him.

When you think about it, my order really was only sensible. Prudent, in fact.

Maybe too prudent. I wonder if I might need some more; maybe a trip to Maple View Farm is in order.

I like calling North Carolina home

It's a line from a song, but in my case it's also true. Tonight was one of the many reasons why.

On a whim of mine and with organization we did only in the mid-afternoon, but with unanimous agreement, a group of nine of us, family and extended family, headed out for an early dinner at Panzanella. Panzanella is a lovely Carrboro restaurant that specializes in serving locally sourced food. I ate an appetizer soup of potato and smoked gouda, then an entree of seared scallops and risotto. Both were delicious, as were all the other dishes I tasted--though, to be completely candid, the soup really could have benefited from bacon. (To be fair, most things would be better with bacon.)

We then drove over to Maple View Farm, a local dairy and meat supplier that I've mentioned before. We ordered cones and bowls of ice cream they make and serve right there. We ate on picnic benches and watched the sun vanish and the night slowly creep up the sky. The combination of a cool summer day and cold ice cream left some of us cold, and many huddled together for extra warmth. Some kids played on a mound of hay. Firefiles buzzed around us. Bats flew overhead. Absolutely nothing of consequence happened, but sometimes that's exactly what you want. It was a wonderful evening.

I never planned to settle anywhere. I grew up assuming I would move around. But I'm here for good, and though I often travel and hope to do so a great deal more, I'll always come back here. It's a great place to live, and I feel fortunate to have ended up here.

Random walk

If you live in this area and want some incredibly tasty, local-made ice cream, look no further than Maple View Farm. They operate an ice cream store in Carrboro, and from the two flavors I've tried their offerings are competitive with anybody's. The Double Chocolate is particularly good.

Joss Whedon is teaming up with Eliza Dushku for a new TV series, Dollhouse, that's due in early 2009. For diehard Whedon or Dushku fans this is doubtless old news, but I only learned about it recently and am quite hopeful that the team will produce a good show.

Saturday night, a few of us watched the UFC PPV that aired earlier in the day live from the U.K. No fight stood out as great, but they were all good enough that I didn't mind having paid for the PPV. Future hall-of-fame fighter Matt Hughes looked simply out of his depth against his more complete opponent, Thiago Alves, and now many folks are calling for Hughes' retirement. I suspect he won't retire and will at least fight Matt Serra, but I believe this match showed that his skills just aren't as broad as those of the best of the younger competitors.

A big advantage writers have over fighters is that we can, barring horrors like Alzheimer's, keep growing our skills even as our bodies age. Slanted Jack is a better book than One Jump Ahead, and I believe Overthrowing Heaven will be better than Slanted Jack, because I'm learning and improving as a novelist. I believe I can continue to do for a very long time. I certainly intend to do so.