Posts

  • Posts

    A Weekend of Food & Books

    no more whrrk posts for awhile

    Friday we had a really fun impromptu (as in – we started inviting people over less than 24 hours before) dinner party where I tried to recreate the excellent pork dish Emily and I made at her friend’s house in San Francisco a few weeks ago for about 10 people. What makes this dish unique is the honey glace with dried apricots and cranberries that have been soaking in sherry cooking wine. It is simmered and reduced for about an hour and served atop of the pork loin steaks. Unfortunately, I entrusted the preparation of the meat to my Dad – and it ended up very overcooked – I think because pork isn’t something he is used to making. Pork is hard to keep moist.

    Regardless, we had enough risotto, asparagus, buttery rolls, and the glace (which is delish all on its own) to satisfy. Top that off with about 4 bottles of various red wine, carrot cake, and a few pots of French press coffee and we were set. We played boardgames until the early hours of the morning when our last guests were finally too tired to keep their eyes open.

    Starting off the weekend like that certainly made it feel long. On Saturday we woke up late and enjoyed brunch at Denice’s Place on 160th before shopping for some solar lights to try out in the yard and invitations for Tracy’s baby shower. We went to Panera in Redmond for lunch because Kevin loves it, but it (as usually) disappointed me, this time with lukewarm soup. After some mandatory caffeine ingestion at Starbucks we went to the Macy’s home store to look at couchs, and we were finally able to agree on one with a matching chair. My parent’s gave us the gift of a furniture shopping budget for Christmas, so we’ve been meaning to use it since then. It is amazing to me (although I understand why) that it will take 10 weeks to have it delivered. Imagine how long people had to wait 200 years ago (it was probably made locally and took less time!). After that, we headed over to Whole Paycheck for dinner ingredients and I prepared some zesty fajitas using flank steak.

    I was up until the wee hours again reading and Sunday morning I didn’t crawl out of bed until about 11am. I took a brisk walk to the grocery store to pick up breakfast ingredients and then prepared a very traditional breakfast of eggs, hash browns, bacon and toast. Yay for cooking – and YAY for BACON! Today has been able more reading, writing, thinking, listening to music and re-charging for the week ahead.

    So… that’s a weekend in the life of the Morrills I guess.

  • Posts

    Whrrl – Noise Pop 2008 Official Web and Mobile Sponsor

    In a press release this morning, it was announced that Whrrl.com is the official web and mobile sponsor for Noise Pop 2008. Noise Pop is a staple of the San Francisco indie music festival circuit each year, and this years performers include Minipop, Stellarstar, She & Him, and plenty more. For a full list check out the official Noise Pop 2008 website.

    Whrrl Team on the Ground in San Francisco

    Starting Tuesday (2/26), members of the Pelago staff (makers of Whrrl) will descend on San Francisco to promote their product at the various Noise Pop events. They will be giving away all sorts of merchandise, including sweatshirts, stickers, buttons and they are also rumored to be giving away some mobile devices as well. This street team is interesting, because they are not just hired guns for this event – they are the people who actually work on bringing the product into existence. Engineering, design, infrastructure and marketing staff will come together to evangelize their product at venues throughout the city.

    I flew in last Friday and I’ve probably already logged 20 miles on foot even with the rain – what a cool place to explore. I’m Danielle Morrill (or Danielle M.) on Whrrl – let’s be friends!!

    —–

    Disclaimer: I work for Pelago, Inc. the company that is proudly bringing Whrrl to hipsters, soccer moms, students, and generally people everywhere. Anything posted here may be biased, self promoting, and quite proud. Anything I see here is my opinion only, not an official statement from Pelago, Inc.

  • Posts

    Whrrl Introduces Events –

    A quick heads up: I work for Pelago, makers of Whrrl, so this a shamelessly self-promoting, proud, and biased post – ENJOY!

    Today Whrrl.com launched a new feature, which allows users to search for events in major cities across the United States. This means concerts, movies, gallery showings, and more – they are all on Whrrl and more importantly they are in your neighborhood, maybe even on your street, just waiting for you to discover them. So get onto to Whrrl, so you can get off the internet, and into the real world!!

    http://www.whrrl.com

  • Posts

    Pelago Day 2 – and other notes

    Today wrapped up day two of my new job at the Seattle start up Pelago, where I am working on the data team. I am very excited to be working for this company, I am surrounded by really smart passionate people and that is just the best thing for me. I have already been working on really interesting things that have me thinking in new directions and stretching parts of my brain that have be used, but never to this extent. I like that I am outside of my comfort zone, and my whole goal is to be as much of a sponge as possible. The work enviroment is really fun and laid back, and people still work really hard in this kind of enviroment. It is just a huge change from what I used to see – I can’t even imagine wearing my suit into this office and never will. I wore jeans and my chuck taylors to work today! It is really different, I am still figuring out what makes me comfortable.

    Our new Dell computer came today at home and I am still enjoying my first hour of pleasurably faster, well, everything. Vista is actually really cool on a computer that is powerful enough to run it, and everything looks beautiful on the gigantic monitor. Kevin is de-cluttering the house and I suppose I should be helping, but I am not very motivated. He is talking about putting our condo on the market after looking at houses on the east side this past weekend, but I am not really interested in going through yet another major transition in addition to getting married and changing jobs, at least not just yet. He thinks that this de-cluttering has to do with staging the house to show – but really I think it is just about living better. No two people were ever better suited 820 sq. ft., mainly because neither one of us is here all that much.

    I finally broke down and got a Gmail account yesterday, since most everyone in the office uses Gtalk to message each other. I actually really like it, it is much more user friendly than Hotmail/MSN/Livemail (whatever they are calling it these days). I think I am slowly being weaned off Microsoft products, although my new machine at work does run Vista.

    The next big purchase thing I need to figure out is what phone I want to have, since I really need to upgrade to some kind of smartphone that has email and a web browser, at the very least. There is the iPhone of course, and also the Blackberry, Treo, and some other stuff. I am tempted to just go for the iPhone since I know I would have so much fun with it and I experience excruciating gadget envy whenever I see Blake or Andrew with theirs. I really should just do it – my hot pink LG Chocolate phone is all scratched up, and besides having a pink phone is so, like, 2006. hehe. I also would really like to have an MP3 player. I know this is really weird, but I have never ever owned one. My phone now can actually be an MP3 player for a fat fee – but we have iTunes on our CPU and I’d rather just upload my songs to the iPhone.

    The only other big purchase that I am looking forward to is, eventually, having a car again. Basically what I decided when I left my job at Expeditors was that, since I was living downtown, I might as well let my Dad take over the payments on the Land Rover so that my sister could take it with her to college at Washington State University. I feel badly because the car has recently started to have engine trouble and I know it is a hassle for them, but he also had the car for a month while I was on vacation and even took it to mechanic so I don’t feel like I was dishonest, it’s just unlucky. He should have looked at the consumer reports. Of course, it was already partially his liability, since we were both on the deed together – now it’s just his sole liability. On the flip side, I am very happy to be rid of it. I am not sure what kind of car would be practical and enjoyable yet, I feel like I lean towards something with good performance – but I also like having a larger car that is a bit luxurious and can seat more than two people. I think the solution to this might be a BMW M3 convertible. 🙂