While I was making chai ice cream for our IT Dinner two nights ago, I discovered that with the addition of six new bottles, my spices have outgrown their little basket. It just won’t do anymore!

There’s got to be something around the house that could corral these bottles in an organized fashion.

Why, hello!

A simple cutlery tray purchased from IKEA before I found out that it was too wide for the kitchen drawers.

It’s perfect! It even holds the spice sachets from Spice Merchants in Kerrytown. Yay!

“The Ice Cream Bar” opened a 2-minute walk away from the house. Naturally, I had to go. For a place with sadly unoriginal name, it had a stylish personality. It was a hip little shop with a statement ceiling and funky seating. I loved the orange tile walls and lamps! The glasses hanging behind the counter were a nice touch too.

It’s just as I suspected. I speak machine.

While most people get frustrated talking to interactive voice response systems on the phone, I’ve never had any problems making myself understood to them. Perhaps my voice is naturally perfectly calibrated to the necessary sound patterns? Who knows. But it comes as no surprise to me that dictating into my new speech recognition software feels just as normal as, if not even more comfortable than talking to a person. I absolutely love it! Finally I can give my poor abused hands a break.

The software is called MacSpeech Dictate and it’s built on top of a licensed Dragon Naturally Speaking core. So far I’ve dictated an email, chat session, notes, and this here blog post. It does get stuck on homonyms every now and then. And I have yet to train it to recognize names. It’s my favorite thing of the moment! Next month I’m going to be doing a lot of writing so this will come in very handy. Wahaha. Get it, computer? It’s called a pun. Exclamation point.