| Humph! |
[Aug. 24th, 2009|10:26 pm] |
It's 9:30 and almost dark.
What sort of outrage is this?
In other news, my bruises from my bike accident have made it to the surface, only a week after they were incurred. |
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| Ugh! |
[Jul. 29th, 2009|03:37 pm] |
So it's now 102 (not-so-fondly Fahrenheit, as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lsanderson would say). That's the highest temperature ever recorded in Seattle.
Tomorrow is supposed to be a mere 100 and Friday 92. Strongly considering seeing if I can take Friday off, and driving up to Mt Rainier and playing in the snow. \
Google maps says it is 2 hours and 15 minutes from our doorstep to the entrance of the national park. |
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| HIbernating |
[Jul. 28th, 2009|09:31 pm] |
In the AC. Because tomorrow's predicted high is 101, which would be the all-time record high for Seattle.
Some people say there's a God. If I find him, he'll fuckin' pay. |
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| The Bike Ride Home |
[May. 16th, 2009|10:48 am] |
Hey, I made it without stopping. Well, except for the red lights.
And I'm not all that sore today. Guess I'll have to do this more often. It'll even save me a few shekels on my bus fare!
We're heading out to the Seattle Aquarium today with ogremarco and miss_sirriamnis. Then it's off to Sichuan in Bellevue. |
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| So it's Bike To Work Day |
[May. 15th, 2009|10:07 am] |
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My ride in was 1 mile of long slow downhill, one shorter very sharp downhill, and 1 mile of flat. Not looking forward so much to the ride back home. |
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| Misc Updates |
[Mar. 8th, 2009|06:20 pm] |
I got this sausage stuffer for my birthday, so next time I make sausage it will be rather less work to stuff it (I've been using the cheapo kitchenaid attachment, which is really a workout for your arm and shoulders).
We're going camping on the Oregon coast next weekend with our friends Drew and Amy. Yurts rock!
Got another Japanese knife for my birthday, too...a left-handed yanagiba (sushi/sashimi knife). Now I just need an excuse to buy a bunch of fish.
I put my money down in the latest office pool...how many wins will the hapless Seattle baseball time have by the time of the 787's first flight. My number is 15.
I've been soaking some lupini beans for about 2 weeks now to get rid of the bitterness. They're mostly there now, but really don't seem to have been worth the effort. |
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| Cassoulet! |
[Mar. 8th, 2009|06:01 pm] |
We had 8 guests for cassoulet last night. I spent all week at it -- made the confit, made the sausage, soaked the beans, cooked the beans, added stuff and let it sit, then cooked with bread crumbs on top. It was the first time I'd made confit with salt. It was quite salty eaten alone, but cooked into the cassoulet the salt wasn't noticable.
Along the way, I also made 3 versions of salame. Well, I started 3 versions of salame...it's hanging the in garage, and won't be done for another 3-4 weeks, *if* they all turn out. The 3 versions are
-- chinese 5 spice and orange peel
-- chorizo with lime peel and pasilla oaxaca
-- tuscan salame with red wine
We had a number of wines. The only clunker was the only new world wine! The list was:
1999 Piellot Roussette du Bugey "Cuvee Buster"
2000 Foillard Morgon [last bottle :-(]
1996 Gimmonet Champagne "Fleurons"
1996 Huet Vouvray Le Haut Lieu Sec
1993 Ridge Mataro Bridgehead
1993 Bastide Blanche Bandol "Longue Garde"
1995 Hermitage La Chapelle
1999 Pegau Chateauneuf-du-Pape
1988 Clape Cornas
1998 Dujac Morey-St-Denis 1er cru
some dessert wine
We also made an aperitif with passion fruit puree from the latino market and passion fruit liqueur and prosecco. It was really good (though not for the tart-averse).
We also made some little tartlets with a base of pureed sun dried tomato and manouri cheese, topped with matsutake mushrooms sauteed in duck fat. The little tartlet things at Big John's PFI were half-off on Friday, so I had to find something to do with them. |
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| Thanksgiving |
[Nov. 30th, 2008|06:20 pm] |
We went to my brother's place. The cast was me and Melissa, mom and dad, my brother Sean and his wife Ana, their two daughters Sophie (5) and Serena (7). Ana's mother cooked the turkey but wasn't feeling well when time came to eat it.
It was an interesting turkey. Ana's mother grew up in El Salvador, so we got the turkey with a tomato gravy that was quite good, as well as the usual gravy that my mom made. She made the turkey with a recipe that would have been used for chicken back in El Salvador. It was pretty good, but I would have expected a little more spice. Though maybe she spiced it down to go with the rest of thanksgiving dinner. |
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| Victory! |
[Nov. 30th, 2008|06:18 pm] |
I has beaten the faucet!
Took me most of the long weekend, and I didn't get a bunch of other stuff done, but I have prevailed. Finally. Now I can really get going on building the wine cellar. |
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| Election |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|09:12 pm] |
Well, it's starting to look like our drink of the evening is American sparkling wine, and not Canadian whiskey.
Yay! |
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| Woo hoo! |
[Oct. 11th, 2008|12:30 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Beacon Hill | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | Almost recovered | ] |
So on Wednesday I got to go on my first Boeing test flight.
It was rather less glamorous than it might sound. Mostly it consisted of sitting in a dimly-light compartment with no windows trying to stay warm enough to stave off a cold (unsuccessfully, as it turns out). Oh, yeah -- and you have to keep your headset on at all times, in case there's a problem with your system and you get called up front. So no tunes. And the light is just high enough that you can read, but after a while you start to get some eyestrain.
This went on for some 13 hours. Oh, there were three short breaks when we landed. We used a forlorn area of the tarmac at Colorado Springs for refuelling -- no facilities of any kind. So you could get out and stretch (after recovering from the sun-blindness), and it was probably warmer than in the plane.
Maybe things are better in test flights for passenger aircraft. I sure hope so. |
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| Food Diary |
[May. 18th, 2008|12:27 pm] |
Lunch: Dim Sum with the 'rents at House of Hong. Pretty good dim sum; notably better than the last place we tried. VERY good shrimp balls; less good shrimp dumplings.
Afterword, we stopped at Van's Produce Market, then Wong Tung seafood. The latter is a cute little fish market in chinatown that has great stuff at rock bottom prices (well, rock-bottom for seafood these days...). After checking out with a whole bream and a couple of thin halibut filets, I saw the next guy get his shrimp...and I just had to have some.
So dinner was very slow food, with ogremarco and sirriamnis. It was 91*, and we sat on the porch and cooked one course after another on the grill. In order:
Sliced cucumbers with vinegar, salt, and pepper
Merguez sausages grilled, then sliced
Simple grilled shrimp (these were too good to defile with sauce)
Thin halibut steaks coated with olive oil, S&P, chopped cilantro, and lemon
Asparagus with olive oil, lemon juice, S&P
Whole sea bream with dill and lemon
grilled Indian nan with various tapenades
All washed down with a couple of crisp wines (a Prosecco and a spanish Verdejo) and/or beer, and some ginger drinks I made. The latter had nice flavor but were not concentrated enough. I'll know for next time.
*Despite the beliefs of some of our friends, Seattle has very little humidity in the air when it reaches this kind of temperature. In Minnesota, we would have been sticky with sweat 10 degrees cooler. Oh, yeah...and it cooled down to 56 overnight. By the time the sun went down, it was lovely and pleasant. |
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| Mmmmm. |
[Mar. 26th, 2008|12:19 am] |
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Last night we had the best Indian food that I've had since I moved from LA (one of the very few things I miss about that town). It's from this little vegetarian place called Punjabi Sweets, probably within a mile of our place. Mmmmmm. |
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| Well, he's done well for himself. |
[Nov. 13th, 2007|11:46 pm] |
Something spurred a bit of curiosity in the ol' synapses, and I thought I'd check in and see how my old faculty advisor was doing...what kind of research he was publishing, where he was teaching, etc.
Turns out he's doing the same basic stuff that he was when I was grad school, despite his rep as flittering about...looks like some cool stuff, too. Details are here. |
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| Almost Not Sick! |
[Nov. 7th, 2007|11:32 pm] |
AmberCon NorthWest was a source of great fun and amusement...and the plague. If mr_nice_gaius was Patient Zero, then I must be Patient N+1. I didn't get the real plague until just about the time I stepped out of the car and into my apartment. But first I had a cold. Then the cold mostly went away, and I had the nasty nasty stomach flu...so weak I could barely sit in a chair and hold up the phone for a half-hour conference call. Then the flu went away and the cold returned, presumably because my immune system was at an all-time low.
So today it was soup for lunch (Tom Yum) and for dinner (Pho Tai). Mmmmm soup. |
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