At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

Despite being born and raised in the Great State of California, I was never a big fan of wine, one of our most popular exports. I always prefer a pint of beer. Barbaric, I know. So, for this reason, I don’t have a very large collection of wine. In fact, I own only one bottle, [...]

When I saw an advertisement for these shoes at the Pentagon City Mall, I wanted to vomit all over the freshly mopped floor: These Croc rip-offs are the most hideous shoes I have ever seen in my life. What’s even more insulting is that they have appropriated the term “Cali” for these shoes (I assume [...]

Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In Belarus, several thousand protesters marched through Minsk to express their opposition to the government’s recent announcement that a quarter of new college graduates would be assigned to areas that were heavily contaminated by radioactive fallout in 1986: Protester Konstantin Timokhov, 21, said he was [...]

I bought Tucker a little present while in Texas. I am trying to win his affection and make him gain even more weight: I swear, he does not normally wear a t-shirt. Attacks the panhandle first. Good boy.

I am flying out to San Antonio tomorrow for work. Again, just doing my part to ensure America’s energy needs are met. My parents are meeting me in San Antonio over the weekend, as they’ve never been there and I think they will enjoy the city. I told my mom I would be done with [...]

Unified Energy Systems of Russia, the behemoth responsible for keeping the lights on in Russia, will be disbanded and Russia’s electricity tariffs liberalized. The Russians claim that, while formulating their path towards privatization, one of the incidents they’ve learned from was the California electricity crisis (although if Enron ever tried to mess with the grandmas [...]

If this is approved by the regulators, it’s a pretty sweet deal for both the oil company and the environmentalists in Santa Barbara. PXP will be allowed to drill and profit from record oil prices, while prime real estate owned by the company will be spared development and donated to a land conservancy: A Houston [...]

Perhaps I should preface this entry with an email I received from my mom in regards to my Sunday night dinner in Houston: Subject: Texas food Lindsay, Are you nuts! If you move to Texas, I hope you don’t eat like that all the time. You will be huge, not to mention your arteries clogged. [...]

I always thought boxing would be a fun sport to try out, but as much as I’d like to put on some gloves and hit people, I have an incessant fear of getting my teeth knocked out. Really, I would never hear the end of it from my parents. So what am I to do? [...]

After having done my small part to ensure that America’s growing energy needs are being met, I arrived home from Houston late last night and discovered that the house I am currently living in now closely resembles my dorm in Moscow, without the benefits of actually being in Moscow (i.e, babushkas selling Baltika for 20 [...]