Guess I'll start with last night, when I had an outstanding dinner with Jason at Mercato Bar & Kitchen, the new Italian place downtown. I'm really happy with it. The owner and chef, a Cornell hotel faculty member emeritus, has been in the restaurant business before, not just taught about it, and it shows. He also seems to have grabbed several top people from other local restaurants. Just a killer meal and a great experience. Downtown Ithaca hasn't had any Italian food (not counting pizzerias) since Giovanni's left, so it's long overdue.

Then this morning I got to enjoy a local Couchsurfing.com gathering; one of the locals decided to hold a pancake breakfast. I brought some local Piggery bacon and my Handpresso with some espresso pods. Fun to meet a few grad students and talk about food and drink. One of them is from (I think) Taiwan, and another was Muslim, so didn't try the bacon, but we got to talk about Kosher laws and Halal. The last participant was a Florida guy who's off to San Francisco next week. Great group. We had some Oolong tea from China, and tried some durian cookies. The Asian girls seemed surprised the American guys weren't repulsed by these.

And then on my way to the office I swung by a friend's to pick up some venison he's kindly sharing with me! A couple of roasts and some ground meat. I'll probably turn the ground into venison hash. Yum.

I'm expecting it to be a very quiet day at work. Hope you're having a good one. I'm not ready for lunch yet, but when I am, I have a salad I grabbed from Mattin's yesterday, knowing they'd be closed today and most of Collegetown would be closed.