One of the many ways I use this blog is as a dumping ground for information I might need again later. Sometimes, it’s helpful to other people; other times, it’s just for me.

So I was shocked to discover that I hadn’t blogged about the most important datum I acquired on my trip to Scotland back in July/August 2005: the name of the brand of sherbet lemons I’d been hunting for a decade.

The subject came up in conversation today with a friend who’s about to leave for two weeks in Scotland; since he lives in Massachusetts, it’s not really convenient for him to bring me a couple of pounds of candy, but it would be impossible without the name. I checked my blog, and couldn’t find it. Eventually, I dug it out of my Lotus Notes mail, but that was by sheer happenstance.

So I shall blog it here. I strongly recommend Tilley’s Sherbet Lemons, as found in Woolworth’s in Glasgow.

*whew*

I’m attending an internal IBM conference this week at IBM Research in Yorktown. While I don’t expect anything as personally interesting as the Ben Zander talk at TLE, I did get a chance to satisfy an urge on my way from JFK to the hotel.

Most people coming to a conference in Westchester County choose to fly into White Plains or LaGuardia, because of the shorter drive. I usually choose Kennedy, and there are two reasons. One, of course, is that I can get a nonstop, and that saves me time and removes one source of problems. But the other is that I can stop in Valley Stream and visit Ralph’s Italian Ices.

It’s not far out of the way, though there’s often a long line (tonight, it was 15 minutes long, and it wasn’t even a hot night). But it’s worth it — we just don’t have anything like it at home. I just wish I’d known about Ralph’s the entire time we were visiting Diane’s family in Valley Stream; we only discovered them about five years ago — that’s twenty-five years of visits wasted. At least in one sense.

And I have the return flight on Thursday afternoon, and then another trip next week…but I still won’t make a dent in the flavor list.