lee_os

Humph!

2009-08-25T03:27:58Z

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.

Ugh!

2009-07-29T22:42:07Z

So it's now 102 (not-so-fondly Fahrenheit, as 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.

HIbernating

2009-07-29T02:32:52Z

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.

The Bike Ride Home

2009-05-16T15:52:39Z

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.

So it's Bike To Work Day

2009-05-15T17:08:48Z

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.

Mmmm. Yummy.

2009-05-14T02:05:27Z

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pate1-2009may01,1,7523853.story

Just thought you all should know.

Misc Updates

2009-03-08T23:29:20Z

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.

Cassoulet!

2009-03-08T23:17:41Z

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.

Political Funny

2008-12-12T03:38:46Z

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/12/the-clapper/

Thanksgiving

2008-12-01T00:24:21Z

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.

Victory!

2008-12-01T00:20:09Z

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.

Election

2008-11-05T03:13:22Z

Well, it's starting to look like our drink of the evening is American sparkling wine, and not Canadian whiskey.

Yay!

Woo hoo!

2008-10-11T17:38:42Z

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.

Food Diary

2008-05-18T17:55:48Z

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.

Mmmmm.

2008-03-26T05:21:03Z

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.

Well, he's done well for himself.

2007-11-14T05:53:49Z

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.

Bad memer me

2007-11-08T05:44:08Z

From dendacien

Almost Not Sick!

2007-11-08T05:38:20Z

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.

An Overdue report on canoeing in the Everglades

2007-03-06T01:36:12Z

The canoe trip started out bad, ended up worse...but in between, it was pretty nice.

We stayed in Everglades City, on the west side of the park, and right on Chokoloskee Bay, which is a mile or two deep by several miles wide, rather shallow (deepest sounding: 4 feet -- varies with the tide, obviously), and ringed by islands. Our canoe path was to take us along
the shoreline, under a bridge, up the creek to a lake, down another creek back to the bay, and along the shoreline back to our starting point.

First off, our canoe wasn't there. After a few minutes spent sorting that out, we got down to the canoe entry area and started to haul our big metal canoe (read: heavy) across the mud flats to the bay. Melissa was in her Tevas, and I had my water shoes on. This was a good thing, as will soon become evident. We almost got to the water before we started sinking in the mud. Almost. Those last few steps were not to be completed, though, as we sunk up to our knees in the mud and lost our shoes (which had to be pulled out of the muck). There was another, rather more circuitous across the mudflat. That proved to be passable.

Once in the water, we quickly paddled down the shoreline to the bridge and passed under it into the oyster bar estuary. This was a wide area, not very deep. The rental agent had told us we might need to skirt around the edges where the dredged channel was -- it was low tide when we started out, and the estuary was rather shallow. Shallow indeed; when we passed under the bridge, we saw that the oyster beds in the middle of the estuary were actually out of water. This was our first hint that we had picked a day with very strong tides. We tried a shortcut to the channel; this only got us stuck. Finally, we decided we would just take the really long way
around (rather than just the kind-of-long way around).

This put us in the lower reaches of the creek, which was on the edge of town. Birds here were more plentiful than they would be in the wilderness area (though they were still plentiful there, too). On our way through town, there were five Pelicans sunning themselves next to a For Sale sign:

Once we passed out of town, the creek grew smaller and became almost a tunnel through the mangroves. The banks were steep and muddy. At this point, we'd been paddling for an hour and half or so of the estimated 6 hours of the canoe trip, and it occurred to us that for the next 4 or more hours there would be nowhere to get out of the canoe and pee. Unless you needed to pee badly enough to sink in the mud.

We'd been warned about fallen logs from last year's hurricane. Paddling up the creek, we ran into plenty of them. Several times we had to force the canoe over a submerged log that spanned the creek. Overall, though, this was the most pleasant part of the trip -- not too hot, not too cold, mostly easy paddling, great scenery. We finally came to a log in the creek that we could not bypass. We considered ways to get around it -- balancing on the log and lifting the canoe over (log was muddy and slippery), standing in the water and lifting the canoe (water was more
than paddle deep), portaging the canoe (not through the mud and undergrowth on a steep bank) -- and rejected them all for various reasons. So we turned around.

Everything was nice until we got to the oyster bar estuary. Where it became very apparent that the tide was coming in. Quickly. In the shallow water, we could see how rapidly the water was flowing upstream. We paddled quite hard to get to a small island in the estuary where we
could stop and rest. There we decided that we would just paddle straight for the bridge, hoping that oyster bar, now underwater, would be under enough water for us to pass over it. Though we were often paddling in less than a foot of water, we had enough water to pass. It was a long,
tough paddle in a strong current, though...and our troubles had really just begun. The incoming tide for the wide estuary was all being channeled through the narrow confines of the bridge...this meant that there was a lot of water moving under that bridge. As we approached the bridge, we could see whitecaps coming at us. We tried to get past the bridge for what seemed like forever, but finally gave up and pulled over to the side.

A bystander told us that high tide would be in another 45 minutes or so and the current would subside. We pulled the canoe well out of the water, walked over the road to the bay side, and had a picnic with the lunch we had brought. When we returned, the tide had come in enough that the canoe was just starting to float, and the current showed no sign of subsiding. So we clambered back in the canoe and paddled out for one last try at the bridge. The process was complicated by the fact that the current was not coming at us dead on; rather it was coming into the bridge from the right at about a 45 degree angle. This meant that the right half of the bridge had rather less current than the left half. So we approached from the right, successfully passed under the bridge, and got to the point where we were out of our shelter -- where the current hit us from the side. We tried to fight it, but the current was just too strong. It turned us around and pushed us back through the bridge -- hitting the concrete
supports several times.

We circled around and paddled through again to the point where we had to face the current. We sat there in the protection of the concrete, but we could see the current would hit us from the side if we moved forward at all. As we were sizing up the problem, a bystander offered to help us -- we gave him our rope and he pulled us out into the current and got us facing the right direction. That got us going, but it was still tough paddling -- the wind had picked up and we were padding in the face of the current, wind, and waves. We made some progress but not a whole lot. The friendly bystander told us we should just pull in and he would give us a ride back to our car. We pulled the canoe up and gratefully accepted the ride.

Later, a hot shower sure felt good.

Kudos for

2007-02-08T02:53:50Z

this reference

EDIT: link fixed.

Update

2006-12-22T03:23:51Z

Well, the chance of a Paris trip has dwindled to almost zero. :-(

On the weather front, we oddly have just had the first real snowfall of the year here in Minnesota. I worked late, and slush on the roads (at some point to freeze into a nice sheet of ice) has kept everybody off the roads. I drove home at 8, and it seemed like it was 3 in the morning. Nobody was on the roads.

Chris Floyd on Friedman

2006-12-08T04:10:04Z

Here

----------

It's really pretty amazing how the current administration has made my political sensibilities of just a few years ago seem like, well, last millenium.

A well-reasoned statement of the obvious

2006-11-27T02:43:34Z

Here

Just thought you should know.

Flying to Seattle tomorrow

2006-10-24T18:32:18Z

What's airport security like these days? Can I carry on some food? Water? A book? What can't I carry on?

For all you gamer geeks,

2006-10-19T21:22:26Z

Read this.

Don't ask any questions! Do it NOW!