The Fairmount French Fling Weekend begins on Thursday, July 10, with a bar crawl starting at 7pm with Belgian Café, then moving on to other local drinkeries like Bishop’s Collar, London Grill, Rembrandt’s, St. Stephen’s Green, and Urban Saloon.

On Friday, Fairmount restaurants host food and wine tastings and dinner specials. Starting at 7:30pm, Ratatouille, Pepe Le Pew cartoons, and Paris Je T’aime screen outdoors on the lawn behind Eastern State.

Saturday brings the entire Bastille Day Street Festival, including tours at Eastern State, crafts and treats for kids, vendor tents and French foods, and live music. The storming of the Bastille begins in front of Eastern State at 5:30pm, followed by twilight tours of ESP and after-parties at participating Fairmount restaurants.

But then there’s still more food on Sunday! London Grill, Rembrandt’s, Trio, Belgian Café, and Urban Saloon offer French Champagne Brunch, featuring brunch specials with crêpes, beignets and other French delicacies.

Full information can be found on Eastern State’s website.

You see, their cheery commercials filled with things that made my tummy cry out in hunger have shown on local stations for so long, but after gloomily reading on their website that the closest location was near Ephrata (before the Morgantown location opened), I gave up. We all did. Should we really drive over 40 miles for a cherry limeade?

No, my friend. Food and Drinq has kindly informed us hungry Philadelphians that Sonic is coming closer to home.

True, there isn’t a proper Philadelphia location opening soon. The new location in Royersford opens today, and stores are set to open in Bensalem and Levittown. Definitely closer than 40 miles.

And more delicious.

This past weekend I spent my Sunday at Target, having an iced coffee at the cafe while reading a book, trying on new summer shorts and dresses, walking around the aisles checking out everything I could… anything to stay inside that sweet, sweet air-conditioned sweetness.

What are some of your free or low-cost ways to stay cool and healthy while still getting out of the house? The main branch of the Free Library at 19th and Vine has always been a summer favorite of mine—I could spend all day roaming the stacks—but alas, I am working full time now.

At least my office building is also air-conditioned.

This a specific day to get out of your house and go to a local event (with your knitting in tow) just for you and people like you. Who knows you might even bump into your neighbor! Consider this a spark, to ignite a fire; getting all of the closeted knitters out into fresh air.

There are a few Pennsylvania events listed, but only one in Philadelphia that I know of: My knitting group, the Third Street Ravelers, is hosting a KIP event at Rittenhouse Square beginning around 11 A.M. More information is available on the WWKIP event page.

Do all you knitters and crocheters out in Philly-land know about Ravelry? This site combines the best resource of patterns and yarns with all the fun of social networking. Tag your projects, tag your yarns, tag your forum posts.

While Ravelry is still technically in beta, the wait list for sign-ups is short, so withing a couple weeks you’ll be just as addicted as the rest of us.

You can join the Metblogs group or one of the many other Philadelphia based groups.

Little did I know that Pennsylvania Hospital offers free internet in the surgery waiting room! Friends and family can connect wirelessly to the network, but if their laptops only have wired connectivity, there are several network access ports near the back of the waiting area.

This is great for people spending all day in the waiting room (like myself) and needing to stay connected to others who may want to keep updated on their loved one’s patient status. This would have been so much easier for me than trying to check my work email with Outlook Webmail on a tiny Opera browser using the internet on my mobile phone.

Speaking of patient status: there are also large monitors installed in the waiting area showing the current location of all surgery patients! For privacy reasons, the list only shows the patient’s first initial and the first four letters of last name, but it’s so much easier to see that DOE, J was admitted to PREP at 10:30 than to sit around wondering why the doctor hasn’t come in to update yet.

Many other transit agencies have been sending their information to Google to participate in the Google Transit site, but SEPTA is not one of them. Also, while other transit websites are upgrading their online experiences swith interactive maps (like the MBTA in Boston, oh what a website!), we get stuck with the Trip Planner. Seriously, have you ever tried to use that thing?

Based on the awesomeness that is the NYC Subways Map, for the past year or so I’ve been working on my own version of a SEPTA transit map between my full-time and freelance jobs; however, it’s mostly been just a programming lesson in using the Google maps API with PHP and Javascript. I’ve got the BSL, MFL, and the Patco Speedline, but I haven’t even finished all the regional rail routes yet!

But the other day I ran across PhillyMap.com’s Transit Maps! Not only does it have everything I’ve been working on, it also has bus routes. Yes, bus routes. All bus routes. On a Google map.

It’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen in a while. I almost cried.

According to their website:

Studio 34 serves as a hub, both online and onsite, for healing, art and wellness information. We want people to be well—period. We collaborate with other healing and arts organizations, including practitioners of eastern and western medicine, to host workshops in several healing arts, music and creative arts events, support groups, and community meetings.

To celebrate, many yoga and pilates classes this week (March 22-29) are free! The grand opening party is Saturday, March 29 from 7-11 p.m. with live music from the Citywide Specials and Walt Bibinger with Jessi Teich.

Famous last words.

I scoured the menu. Besides the house salad of iceberg lettuce with tomato, I thought I found the lone meatless entree: classic cheese ravioli in traditional tomato sauce. After asking the waitress what exactly the stuffed rigatoni was stuffed with, and not feeling satisfied by the answer, I settled on the ravioli.

I should have known it didn’t stand a chance. As I prepared to dig into my ravioli with a ferocious hunger, I noticed something as the fork neared my mouth. Ground meat in the sauce!

The menu said nothing, absolutely nothing, about meat in this entree. I called the waitress over and told her I didn’t know there would be meat in the sauce, that I was vegetarian and could I have another order without the sauce? She answered that I would then have to pay for both dinners, so instead of chucking it I asked her just to box it up and my brother would have it for lunch the next day.

Sightings, Weyes Bluhd, Electroputas, West Philadelphia Orchestra, Mincemeat or Tenspeed at Circle Of Hope, $8 / all-ages, 8PM

Samara Lubelski and Soft People at First Unitarian Church (Chapel Show), $10 / all-ages, 7:30PM

Sunday 9 March 2008

Ghastly City Sleep and Pygmy Lush at The Barbary, $8 / all-ages, 6:30PM

Full show schedule and venue locations at r5productions.com.