Home Sweet Home

Hallo and greetings from lands to the East! I'm happy to report that I have arrived safely home, a bit more bruised and battered from the first stop but with lots of time in Madrid to recover and recoup. Both conferences were extremely informative, I'm pleased to say, and since that was really the main point of the trip then that's all good!

Right now I'm jetlagged as all get out, seeing as it's just nipping on midnight for my body clock. But tomorrow I will begin the painful process of unpacking, and the more pleasant process of uploading pictures and starting to get those posted.

I did wind up keeping somewhat of a pen and paper journal while I was away in lieu of my laptop, so I will try to start adding entries to the blog and pretend like I wrote them in real time. ;)

Even better, I will try to remember and start each entry - or perhaps post intervening entries - with a recipe from the region I was visiting! (Ian and I both being huge foodies, I picked up cookbooks from both Spain and Turkey and also attended a Turkish cooking course one evening - so I have lots of material to draw on, based on the fantastic food I ate.) You'll have to provide your own wine though - and if trying a Turkish recipe, make sure to add a 250% tax to what you pay for the wine as well. That's their current solution to enforcing appropriate morality without seeming too conservative - and while I don't necessarily approve per se, I have to admit it's a fairly ingenious way of cutting down your population's drinking without actually forcing people by the use of prohibition or making wine and alcohol consumption illegal. In fact, it's mighty similar to what we do with cigarettes, now that I think about it...so who knows, as a business model it might have merit - sure beats the morality police that other countries employ.

In any case, stay tuned! The travels of the Clockwork Canard will follow soon! (And little did I know how prophetic the "travails" part of the blog header would turn out to be when I came up with it, right? Here I thought I was just being witty.)