Nine Great Driving Destinations

Irv Gordon and his multi-million mile Volvo were in Lindsborg recently as the Volvo Car Club held its annual gathering in conjunction with Lindsborg’s Midsummer’s celebration last June. Juliana found this press release and I wanted to pass it along; Lindsborg is in some good company in this listing! Here’s the quote about Lindsborg; the full article follows below the fold:

Lindsborg, Kan. (a.k.a. Little Sweden) “Lindsborg is a real taste of Sweden hidden 150 miles west of Kansas City. The town is beautiful, neat as a pin and the townsfolk are just as friendly as can be. Swedish pancakes and other specialties are served in almost every restaurant in town. Swedish Midsommer celebrations with Swedish folk dancing take place in June each year. Don’t forget to stop by the bison ranch nearby and check out the wildlife.”

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I came across this today and just had to share:

Yeah, it took me a few seconds …

(Later: I remembered where I found this: Stu Savory’s Blog.)

On Friday, we attended Lindsborg’s theater under the stars, Broadway RFD. This year’s show was State Fair, the charming musical by Rogers and Hammerstein featuring the adventures of the Frake family as they seek fame and love at the 1946 Iowa State Fair.

I have to admit I was a bit skeptical about this choice, but within moments of the show’s beginning I found myself totally captivated! I forgot how much I enjoy musicals, plus the actors’ performances were uniformly very strong; to single out any one cast member would beunfair to the others, though I do have to comment on how hilarious the judge was. She cracked up the audience with her rendition of a judge who greatly enjoyed the mincemeat that contained Pa’s (and Ma’s) special ingredient, brandy.

Broadway RFD is the longest running outdoor theater in Kansas and celebrates its 50th anniversary next year with the classinc musical, Annie Get Your Gun.

I took almost 200 photos, but given the low light levels, many of them turned out blurry or very blurry. The best have been posted here: Flickr Broadway RFD set, and I’ve also created a Broadway RFD photo slide show for your enjoyment.

A baker’s dozen of my favorites are shown below:

Honey Ginger Soy Chicken

Taking advantage of ingredients on hand, I whipped up this light Asian chicken dish tonight. It was good enough I decided to write it up for future use. With that in mind, note that I didn’t measure anything, but this is my best guesstimate as to the amounts used.

1/4 C soy sauce
2 Tbs honey
1 Tbs vinegar
1 Tbs grated ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp cracked pepper
1/8 tsp Chinese 5 spice
water to yield 1 C total

7-10 chicken wings (thighs or legs should also work; breasts might be a bit dry)

Mix together the first 7 ingredients, then add water till there’s one cup total marinade.

Marinate the chicken if desired and then bake in a foil-wrapped dish at 350 degrees until done, about 40-45 minutes. I actually start the chicken at 500 degrees and turn it down after 3-5 minutes.

Remove cover and broil until skin starts to turn brown.

Serve with coconut rice, recipe below.

Coconut Rice

1 C rice
3/4 C water
1/2 C rice
1/2 tsp salt

Bring ingredients to boil, cover and reduce heat to low simmer, cook till liquid is absorbed.

The drippings from the chicken may be spooned over the rice for a bit of added flavor.

Update: As a result of this posting, I was contacted by the Customer Service Director for Dotster. We discussed the issues surrounding my situation and what they might do to help prevent this from happening to others in the future, such as allowing for multiple email contacts to be listed.

While I’m still unhappy that I had to waste a couple of hours on this, at the end of the day my primary domain is working and I’m very satisfied with Dotster’s response to my issues. The fact they were able to refund my entire redemption fee didn’t hurt, but neither did having a great customer service experience.
End Update

After a 10 year relationship, I’m considering breaking up with Dotster. Neither the best nor the worst domain registrar, and neither the most or least expensive, I started with Dotster around 10 years ago, as they were one of the best at the time.

So, why am I thinking of leaving after all of this time? It’s because I lost 2 domains, including one I had owned for 10 years, due their lousy system for processing updates and sending notifications regarding pending renewals. They didn’t auto-renew my domain, even though I have that setting enabled, and all of their renewal emails were flagged as SPAM. Interestingly, the dotster messages were the only false hits in the last 6 weeks; that tells me the problem is on their end.

It cost $99 to get one of the domains back, and the other one just isn’t worth it.

Plus, even after I paid the ransom for my kidnapped domain, I had to make a 20 minute call to tech support, and get a bit huffy with them, before my domain was restored. They kept trying to tell me it would be 24 to 48 hours until my domain was active. Sorry, wrong. Today, a domain is usually active within minutes after being purchased.

To their credit, once I let the customer service rep know I knew what was going on, she escalated and within minutes, my domain was back on the air.

Then, when I called sales to let them know that the $99 would cost them that much and more due to the lost revenues when I move my domains, they transferred me to tech support. That wasn’t so bad, as they were able to refund half of the ransom fees; ICAAN gets the other half.

In terms of my second domain, it’s not worth $99 or even 1/2 of that, so I’ll take my chances on being able to purchase it once it completely expires.

So, bottom line, I have issues with Dotster, but their customer support was pretty good and given the amount of effort to switch registrars, I’ll probably just stay put … and hedge my bets as well; the next domain I purchase will be from another registrar, likely pairnic.com, and we’ll see how it goes with them.