Trick or Treat?

Happy Halloween! I’ve made a few small concessions to the holiday. One, I’m wearing my Edward Gorey tie. Two, after my afternoon class I’m taking an hour or so of vacation time to go home and carve a couple of pumpkins. Well actually a pumpkin and a gourd. It was a tough year for pumpkins. Hopefully, I’ll have some pumpkin photos to post tomorrow.

NPR’s Morning Edition had its fun with Halloween this morning too. They featured a predictable piece where they listed off how much money Americans are supposed to spend on the holiday. I guess they wanted to do something scary in honor of the holiday so they added on a sensational craptastic stinger to the piece. They said you might want to avoid Peeps marshmallow candies this year because this was the first year they were manufactured in China. Evidently a country of origin is enough to guarantee the candy is chocked full of poison. Are they made by a company that’s had safety issues in the past? Is it the only candy manufactured in China? Is it fear mongering for sensational effect? NPR didn’t bother to tell me. Take a listen, it truly awful “reporting.”

Final thought for the morning (I’m almost done with my cup of coffee). I saw this article yesterday that I find intriguing. Basically a college professor got tired of students using Wikipedia as a source for term papers and instead decided to make her students research and write a Wikipedia entry. The students had to write entries on globalization and sustainable development. Most of what the students submitted got edited out of Wikipedia. There has been some grumbling that forcing students to contribute will just serve to water down Wikipedia and writing a Wiki entry should not be substituted for the experience of writing and honest-to-god research paper. I believe the criticism is valid and mostly correct. I don’t see the benefit of Wikipedia defending itself from a couple of thousand entries rehashing Shakespeare ever few months. However, there is another dimension to the Wikipedia assignment.

As an undergraduate I hated course work. Not because it was hard or it was boring. What often bothered me was the effort I put into the project was only rewarded with a grade. Basically it’s a hoop you’re jumping through. After the professor took a cursory glance at the project it would be discarded and never looked at again. That’s hardly a motivational scenario. I like the aspect of creating something that might serve a purpose past the immediate need to secure a grade. I would like to think that a few of the students might have worked on their Wikipedia entries harder because they liked the idea that their contribution could endure. I also think it’s instructive that their work was edited out of Wikipedia if it didn’t meet that scholarly body of work’s lofty standards (sarcasm). It’s important to learn that effort does not necessarily equal quality.

Whoops, time to leave the building. It’s fire drill time.

Scotland Or Bust

As those of you who read Dawn’s blog may know, we’re finally going on the Scottish vacation we’ve been talking about for the last few years. Or rather, late next year we’ll be going on our Scottish vacation. Dawn surprised me a couple of weeks ago by coming down to my office and informing me that she’d bought tickets to see Hamlet. I was thrilled, I love Hamlet. Then she informed me that it would be performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon which is freaking amazing. Add in the fact that David Tennant (the current Dr. Who or Barty Crouch Jr for those of you who track your British actors via Harry Potter movies) is playing Hamlet and Patrick Stewart is Claudius and it just keeps getting better. I’m super excited.

Another nice feature of the play is we finally have a date to plan our vacation around, it no longer is this nebulous event that we’d like to do someday. Since we’ll already be in England we might as well hop over to Scotland. Once in Scotland we might as well visit Islay, the home of our favorite scotch distilleries. We both want to visit Iceland so why not tag that island on the way home? If you fly Icelandair to/from Europe you can arrange for a layover for a day or two in Iceland as part of the trip. This far out from the actual trip our plans are pretty ambitious. We’ve roughed out the amount of time we’d want to spend at each destination and the trip will be a bit longer than two weeks. Vacation time isn’t a problem for us, but we’ll have to see how many of the financial and logistical hurdles we can clear.

Trust me, logistical hurdles abound. I’m glad we’re starting to plan a year in advance because this trip is going to be complicated. Since we’re essentially island hopping; getting around isn’t going to be easy. It will probably involve plane, train, bus, and/or ferry in addition to a rent-a-car. I know I don’t like travel by boat so I’ve been pushing to limit the amount of ferry travel. Dawn says that she’s read that the ferry ride from Edinburgh to Islay is two hours long. That sounds like two hours of hell to me. The fact that it’s traditional to eat fish whist on the ferry is of little comfort…but the prospect seems to excite Dawn.

We found out that you can take a puddle jumper plane over to Islay. It’s a bit more expensive and your travel times are more limited…but that’s what I’m opting for. I’m not a big fan of heights and I have a feeling that riding in a puddle jumper may be a terrifying experience, but the trip will be completed in half-an-hour. That’s a 75% reduction in suffering the way I see it. Dawn insists that we take the ferry back though…so it’s really only a 37.5% reduction to suffering over the round trip.

Still, all the boats and puddle jumpers will be worth it to stay a couple of days on Islay. There are eight active (soon to be nine) scotch distilleries on the island and they’re all pretty close together. The islands industry is whisky making followed by tourism for bird watching. It sounds like a beautiful place to drink. Our plan it to stay at little B&B’s and fill our days with distillery tours, pubs, and sightseeing. I get relaxed just thinking about how relaxing it’s going to be.

Random Friday Roundup

In a 700 MHz Auction Update
Verizon has officially withdrawn their legal challenge to the open access rules placed on the auction. Frontline’s (a company that’s interested in the D block of spectrum) attempt to get Verizon banned from the auction for violating FCC’s lobbying rules has been ignored (big surprise there). This seems to pave the way for the auction to actually take place on January 24, 2008. At that point we might start to get an idea of what the future holds for our precious shinny gadgets.

Americas Next Top Model Quibble
Does anything else think ANTM is being a bit heavy handed with its environmental consciousness angle this season? I have a hard time taking the show as being serious and/or sincere considering last season they were rolling around in a gianormus hideous stretched Hummer limo. In fact the show has been so much about excess in the previous seasons it seems downright hypocritical to be so preachy-preachy with their environmental activism this time around. It’s nearly as annoying as listening to those snots that drive around in Priuses.

LED Christmas Lights are In
We have finally received our LED Christmas Lights shipment. The box showed up yesterday. At first I was upset the box had been sitting in the rain for most of the day…then I remembered Christmas lights don’t exactly dissolve when left outside. The rock LED lights looks awesome.

Coat Tree in Route
I ordered a coat tree off Amazon earlier this week. FedEx estimates that it will be here in time for Halloween. I had mentioned in passing that I was searching for one and my boss told me to get reimbursed for it when it comes in. Awesome.

Halloween Festivities
Everyone planning on going to Boo tonight have fun and be safe. I have an equally awesome evening planned. I’ll either being doing homework or having to work on a work project at home. It all depends if I get enough of this project finished up today.

Monkey Kombat!

David first turned me on to current monkey problems in New Delhi. The more I read about it the more absurd it gets, making it the most captivating “news” I’ve recently been exposed to. Let me bring you up to date.

It started with this MSNBC article about how a monkey attack led to the falling death of the deputy mayor of New Delhi. Evidently New Delhi suffers from a monkey problem where gangs of Rhesus macaques prowl the city and will break into buildings and attack people in the search for food. While I’m sure this is a serious problem and that I wouldn’t want to be attacked by a gang of monkeys…it’s also rocket fuel for my imagination. I find gangs of monkeys to be positively fascinating. For me the MSNBC article’s climax was the following sentence:

“Over the years, city authorities have employed monkey catchers who use langurs - a larger and fiercer kind of monkey — to scare or catch the macaques, but the problem persists.”

Fight a monkey problem with larger meaner monkeys….it’s just too good to be true. I wonder if history can provide any examples of where solving a problem by getting a bigger meaner predator backfired? (Ok, so the langurs aren’t strictly a predator of the macaques…they’re just scary as hell.) I can’t help but picture martial art schools where the langur monkeys are taught how to effectively deal with macaques. Perhaps I’m a sucker for violent monkey jujitsu action.

Then I read a Slate Explainer article about the very same monkey problem. The title of the article is “How To Fight Monkeys: What should you do if you’re surrounded by angry macaques?” This just further reinforces my mental image of martial art schools teaching the highly effective art of monkey defense. At the end of the Explainer article is the following sentence:

“Instead, the government has relocated some of the troublemakers and even brought in langurs, a mellower but larger monkey, to scare off the smaller macaques.”

Well this doesn’t seem to jive with the MSNBC article. MSNBC claims the langurs are fiercer, Slate claims they are mellower. I’m emotionally invested in the story at this point, it works better for me if the larger monkeys are fiercer…it better fits into my preconceived and fictional monkey fight dream world. I realize I have to do a bit more “research” on the topic and discover the nature of the langur monkey.

I hit pay dirt when I find this Time article . The Time article is a delicious smorgasbord of quotable monkey laden lines. Let me pull a few choice ones out your amusement.

“And to deal with such a rare urban problem, Delhi has come up with an unusual response: it's launched a monkey arms race.”

“The arrival of the langur took things to another level. With their sharp teeth and long, muscular tail that can swot an errant ape from a couple of feet away, langurs are scary to humans — not just a smaller rhesus monkey”

“"If they hit you with their tail it will break the skin," said Khan, matter-of-factly. I didn't get close enough to test his claim.”

I suppose the langur monkeys are fiercer in the sense that you’ll fair worst if full-on-monkey-attacked by a langur, but they are more mellow in the sense that they don’t form gangs that terrorize the city. I suppose I could try and look up actual reference information about langur monkeys instead of gleaning information from sensational monkey articles, but honestly where would be the fun in that?

In case your head isn’t already buzzing with absurd monkey thoughts let’s let the Time article offer one more mind expanding monkey “fact.”

“In response, the city started rounding up monkeys and caging them in a large, dedicated prison on the outskirts of Delhi.”

Monkey prisons. Monkey prisons, people. That is all.

Chili Con Bambi

Hypothetical situation: You’ve been invited to a chili cook-off. You begin to panic….how do you compete? What can you create using the medium of chili that will demonstrate what a creative genius you are?

Well, let’s size up your competition. There are going to be a couple generic ground beef and bean chili’s. Some of them are going to be pretty good; some of them are going to be really spicy. There will be a lot of macho who can eat whose chili meta-contests…but in the end a chili cook-off is not a contest to see who can sneak the most capsaicin into a dish. No problems there. Someone will use chicken and possibly call their dish white chili. This dish will be tasty but people will mentally disqualify it because everyone knows chili is supposed to be red. You can go around changing the color of chili and expect to be taken seriously. Someone will insist on bringing meatless chili. This person should be slapped and sent home. Someone will brag about how their chili uses choice cuts of honest-to-god steak and not ground beef; they will also probably recite a list of exotic spices and mumble about their secret blend. People love to fall for this gourmet sounding gibberish. This person is your actual competition.

Don’t be tricked into playing their game. One ups-menship is for the insecure. You need to walk in there with a totally different chili (that is still red and meat based) - you need to bring venison chili. Besides being slamming good chili, venison chili lets you tell your own tale. Express your rugged individualism by showing people what chili was like when men where men and deer where cows, before the gentrification of American society. I’ll show you how.

First off, secure a giant-ass deer shank. I find that one magically appears in my freezer about once a year (this year two of them spontaneously appeared). If your freezer is broken and doesn’t create chunks of meat you might have to resort to finding a coworker or friend that hunts. If that fails I suppose you could go hunting…but that involves spending copious amounts of time out in the woods…where nature is. I typically avoid nature at all costs, so I view this as a desperate move of last resort.

Once you have a giant-ass deer shank you’ll need to marinate it. I like to throw mine in a giant Ziploc bag with a bottle of red wine. I’m not exactly sure how this is supposed to work. Generally a brine or marinade has some sort of salt component, but this is what I’ve done with good results. The next day smoke and/or grill your venison shank. I like low and slow. This last time I used the Black Evil Egg and was very happy with the results. What’s that? You want to see an informational graph which illustrates what a venison shank on an Egg might look like? I could never deny such a reasonable request.

Clicky for big.

After a day of cooking you should be rewarded with a shank that looks like something that could grace the table of a renaissance feast. Go ahead and slice off some meat for dinner if you like. There will be plenty to go around. After the shank has rested put the rest in the fridge for tomorrow….for tomorrow you make chili!

The next day dice up about two pounds of grilled deer shank, the chunks should be bite sized so I like about a ¾” dice. I’ve been following this recipe with a few modifications. Since your deer is already cooked ignore the venison browning at the beginning of step 2. I suppose you could fry your bacon separately….but I just dice it up and add it to the butter, onions, and garlic. A little extra bacon fat isn’t going to hurt the flavor (au contraire). Also I don’t wait around for 7 cups of liquid to reduce down to 3 ½ cups. The recipe claims that it might happen in about 30 minutes…but recipes lie through their teeth when it comes to reducing. Other than that I pretty much follow the recipe and serve over rice.

Be prepared to be hailed as the culinary genius you are.

Disappointment

I know you’ve come to be regaled by tales of meat and view graphs of grill temperatures. A promised was made, and I wish I could make it so. Today, however the fates conspire against us. I have the photos and graphs with me…but I have not the time to commit them to lore.

Instead please accept this small morsel of diversion. Walt Mossberg, tech pundit and author of tech columns for the Wall Street Journal recently posted a blog article about how backwards the US Cell phone industry is. He makes some valid points.

Eat a Bowl of Bambi

Last night we had our neighbors over for dinner. First off, I’ve frick’n mastered venison chili…but more on that tomorrow. (Come back tomorrow for the exciting grill graph!) I thought the night was very successful due to a number of interesting revelations.

Revelation 1: Our neighbor’s kids are crazy well behaved. That’s right, we allowed kids into our fortress of hatred. I assume their children have ages….but I’m not good with kids and ages. They’re old enough to be able to carrying on complex conversations, be clever, make jokes, etc. They’re also willing to try pretty much anything I put in front of them…. Which just baffles me. I was a very picky eater as a kid, if someone had put a bowl of venison chili in front of me and explained it came from a deer some guy had killed in the woods….well then I would have regarded that bowl as highly suspicious. I’ve put some pretty strange food in front of their kids and the harshest criticism I’ve received is “I wanted to try this, but this flavor isn't my favorite.”

Revelation 2: We must be strange and random neighbors to have. I routinely cook like I expect there to be eight or so people chowing down for dinner even though most of the time it’s just Dawn and I. Pretty often, if we see our neighbors wandering around outside, we’ll invite them over for dinner or carry a portion of food over for them to try at their convenience…stuff like pork wellington, cayenne chocolates, turkey with pumpkin dumplings, or whatever we’re up to. Sometimes they’ll knock on our door to ask if they can borrow an egg or something and they’ll be greeted with us holding a giant platter of barbeque chicken or pulled pork or something like that. I can only imagine they must think we’re preparing feasts 24-7.

Revelation 3: To spite having kids our next to door neighbor is also a curmudgeon. He listed off a number of the kids in our neighborhood and reasons not to like them. It turns out that my initial impression that most of the kids in our neighborhood were either “trouble,” “bad news,” or “not right” was spot on. This verified from an actual parent who’s kicked kids he doesn’t like out of his house. (Which is awesome.)

Revelation 4: There is also one kid in our neighborhood who I had pegged wrong. There is a kid in our neighborhood who always comments on my clothes, which is just plain weird. I’ve always assumed he’s just a smart ass. What would you think if you were taking a walk and some little kids says “those are nice pants, I wonder if they make them in my size?” or constantly says something about the shirt you’re wearing. We asked about the kid who makes fun of my clothes and were told that little Tommy is incapable of sarcasm. Our neighbor’s kid, who plays with him, vouched that he just really likes my clothes…so instead of being a little hooligan he’s now sartorially gifted. I guess someone should buy him a pair of black pin-striped linen trousers (although I have no idea if they make them in his size).

Revelation 5: Our neighbors probably wish we had less video games. Actually, this isn’t a new revelation. It probably doesn’t help them explain why they don’t need the latest in video game technology when their kids come over to our place and see one of everything video game related.

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As an added bonus here is a little vignette from our weekend. I’ve taken some liberty with events as they exactly occurred in order to make the vignette more accurate.

[A couple of weeks ago]
Bill: They are going to release PuzzleQuest for the Xbox Live Arcade!

Dawn: Bah, I don’t see the point of playing that game on a big TV. My PSP copy works just fine.

Bill: (somewhat deflated) Oh…ok then.

[Earlier this weekend Bill downloads PuzzleQuest anyway]
Dawn: Hey there’s PuzzleQuest on the TV!

Bill: Yeah I mentioned it a….

Dawn: I think I’ll try it out!

Bill: …of weeks ago. Well how is it?

Bill: Does it play as well as the PSP?

Bill: Have they made many changes to it?

Bill: Hey! I’m standing over here and my face is on fire!!!!

Dawn: Huh? What? Hold on. I need to kill the skeleton right now.

Very Bad People

Let’s be honest, there is an infestation of babies and there’s nothing I can do about it. Now I could just sit here and shake my fist at the next generation…and I assure you that I plan to do at that. I’m looking forward to reaching the age when I can officially be classified as a curmudgeon. I’m going to make a fantastic curmudgeon, fist shaking and all. But fist shaking alone does not address the central question of how can I make this baby infestation work for me? Perhaps I can turn the situation for my own amusement? Dawn said long ago that even if I did want children she wouldn’t let me have them…something about a propensity for warping young minds… I think I have a notion of what she might have been going on about.

The time to act is now. If we want to be able to spin a credible story later that will cause your children to question their fundamental grasp of reality we need to start work right away. I think the important thing is to take photos, give gifts, and orchestrate situations that we can later point to as proof of our claims. Obviously the first task is constructing what elaborate lie we plan to feed to your children. So what would completely devastate a child? Claims of being adopted are traditional but ring hollow…if anyone’s had a good childhood why should they care if they’ve been adopted? If anything the implicit message in the scenario is your parents love you. Hardly the stuff of nightmares. Your parents abducted you? That’s a bit more interesting….perhaps your parents are the monsters you’ve always suspected when you’ve been forced to take that time-out in your room. Maybe things aren’t as they seem….and now the nice friends of the family, burdened by their conscious, have started providing you with hints of your true identity. Delectable.

Dawn suggested collecting baby photos and PhotoShopping them into earlier photos of the parents on vacation, thus creating evidence for the “you’re not their first child” story. Being that Dawn is an aficionado of sci-fi she opted for a very Venture Brothers, “you’re a clone” theme to the story. I like it. I’m not sure how to augment the photos with other types of proof though. Perhaps getting the children to acknowledge that they’re clumsy is all the extra evidence we’ll need.

That’s all I have for right now…it wasn’t that long of a car ride into work. Perhaps we can hash out other ways to force your children to question their origins over lunch.

Changing of the Guards

Enough time has passed that I feel reasonably able to talk about this now. I experienced a serious loss last week, my Office Coffee Maker. The Office Coffee Maker is a vital team member. Unlike its at-home sibling which wakes up late and makes coffees on the weekends, the Office Coffee Maker knows the drudgery of the work week. Every weekday morning the Office Coffee Maker provides the essential elixir which allows productive work to ensue. The Office Coffee Maker knows early mornings. The Office Coffee Makers knows long afternoons. In short, the Office Coffee Maker knows the pulse of my professional productive life.

A week ago this past Monday, the Office Coffee Maker was no more. It was a gruesome site. He didn’t go quietly in the night surrounded by his coffee cups. In the middle of the night, whilst he stood in vigil over the office he was viciously attacked by ants. I like to imagine that he struggled bravely and went out in a blaze of glory….but who am I kidding. When I made it into work I found his defaced, but technically still functioning, carcass sitting in my office encased in a swarm of interlopers. I had to put him down. It was the merciful thing to do, but it was a devastating blow. The Office Coffee Maker started working in this building with me when I first moved back to Huntsville. We were a team. We were both so excited to move into our new office…. I’m just glad he got to see the new office, to see what he made possible.

That afternoon, addled by lack of caffeine, and in grief I went out to replace him…but it was just too soon. I bought the cheapest thing Target had to sell. This cheap whore of a coffee maker was not fit to fill his shoes. Looking back I can clearly see it was a mistake, a cheap rebound coffee maker. There was no auto-shutoff feature. The carafe was only numbered on one side; presumably assuming that all the people filling it with water would be right handed. The basket swung out on a flimsy plastic hinge. This was not a coffee maker of pedigree. On the second day service the coffee maker misaligned its basket with the carafe and flooded water and grinds all over the table. It’s hobbies included cooking an empty carafe for hours on end. It was a bad coffee maker. The office deserved better, we had to let it go.

This week, still tender from my loss and apprehensive from my fling, I welcomed a new coffee maker to the office. This new coffee maker is a coffee maker of pedigree. While he might not replace the previous Office Coffee Maker he seems fit to assume his title. He features a stainless steel carafe, impervious to repeated bashings against the water fountain from which I get my water and a built in Brita water filter to make said water potable. The stainless steel carafe is a thermos which keeps the coffee hot and fresh and avoids cooking it on a hot plate. Since the thermos does not necessitate a hot plate, it turns itself off minutes after it brews. Did I mention his sleek styling? You can tell by looking at him that he’s a coffee maker of distinction. I look forward to our future collaboration and happily bestow the title of Office Coffee Maker on him. May he serve the legacy of his title and station well.

It's where I'll hang my hat.

Besides LED Christmas lights I’ve been on another quest lately. I want my office to have a coat rack. You know, one of the free standing coat trees. Besides holding winter coats, I like to keep a blazer in my office to slip on if I get chilly. As the temperature starts to dip it puts me in mind that I should figure out how to elegantly store my coats (over the back of my chair does not cut it).

In my old office I installed a pair of hooks on the wall, but that solution was suboptimal. I usually have two coats for myself (overcoat and aforementioned blazer) and now with two assistants it safe to say that there will be coats aplenty here soon. We’ll need a coat tree.

At first I didn’t think it would be hard to find an unused coat tree. I figured how many foppish people can work in the building? I assumed someone had inherited one with an old office and never used it. Not so! People with coat trees hoard them greedily. I’ve been told the proper order of things is to wait for someone to retire and swoop in and steal their coat tree and other valuables while they’re still packing the belongings into a box.

I’ve even searched surplus for an extra coat tree. That was a fun adventure. There is a building were excess junk ends up. Anyone can go there and dig through it. I found all sorts of broken chairs, mangled filing cabinets, and an impressive computer graveyard. If you need an old school computer where the monitor was part of the system AND had a tape drive….well I would recommend searching there. If you want a coat tree…don’t bother.

I’m starting to think the only way I’m going to get a coat tree in the near future is to go out and buy one. I’ve started looking on line and discussing the prospects with coworkers….they don’t seem to share my enthusiasm. We’ll see who’s sorry when winter comes and they have no place to hang their blazers…

LED Christmas, finally.

It appears that I might finally have the upper hand on this Christmas light thing. It’s about time too. Ever since I first heard about LED Christmas lights I’ve had a deep and powerful compulsion to buy them. Every year I go to the store and the small supply of LED lights is more or less decimated. [And here, Dawn, I’m using the modern popular definition of decimate, not the archaic definition by which I would mean that one tenth of the supplies were gone and ninety percent remained. I know that makes you a little sad.] Last year it appeared that the stores stocked more LED Christmas lights but by the time I got there the pickings were slim. There were definitely not enough to outfit an entire Christmas tree. To succeed in procuring LED Christmas lights I knew I would have to get an earlier start.

I assume its self evident why you would want to own LED Christmas lights. They’re only superior to yucky old incandescent bulbs in every way imaginable. They last longer, consume way less energy, and are much harder to break. The initial investment is perhaps a bit higher but I imagine that will come down in due time. Since they consume less energy there is an argument to be made that they are cheaper in the long run... if you care about that sort of thing. I think it’s hard to put a price on how happy owning them will make me.

This year I decided to start looking for lights in August. Just after the Christmas in July tomfoolery but a couple of weeks before the official Christmas shopping season starts (but not many…they keep moving that up). I was able to shop for lights online, which was nice. Last year when I tried to do that all the online places were out of stock. I think all of the municipalities that are swapping over to LED lights keep buying out many online places, even this year a couple of the places are already starting to run low. I placed my order on August 13th and promptly began waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

This year’s LED shipments hadn’t actually come in yet. I suppose they were still being manufactured in China. Part of the problem is I ordered a unique shape of light, because I wanted to grant our Christmas tree a certain idiosyncratic style. I’m excited because I think it might be a couple of years before you see our lights in the stores. It’s always fun being a trend setter. Every time I checked the predicted shipping date on my lights I noticed that the date had been pushed back….I started to fear that our Christmas lights wouldn’t make it in time for Christmas….but this week I finally got a call that inventory had finally arrived and our order is currently being filled. Hooray. By this time next week I should be the proud owner of LED Christmas lights. A 4 year quest will finally be at an end.

It’s decrepit, time to move on.

Question: What needs a new roof, reinforced soffits around the bay window, and new columns?

If you guessed our house then you’d be right. Dawn and I have recently switched our focus from “home improvement” to “keep home from falling apart around us.” It’s a subtle shift in focus. I think the best way to know which variety you’re practicing is to finish a project. At the end of the project do you think to yourself “Ah…now that looks much better” or do you think to yourself “perhaps now the house won’t collapse and kill me.” The former is home improvement; the latter is what Dawn and I now think.

I’m starting to think that the people who built our house assumed that they would later be adding an exoskeleton to it. Why bother with all the cumbersome support on the inside when the exoskeleton will take of it? Seems reasonable enough, right? Two of our current project (reinforce soffits and new columns) are because there is no support built into them. The soffits were just stuck there without any support. They’re an open challenge to gravity to try and rip them from our house (gravity is starting to win).

I find the columns to be a bit more humorous. What’s the purpose of a column? You might think the singular reason to add a column to a house is to support something…but in our house’s case the purpose is to give the impression that something is being supported. The columns “supporting” the overhang over our front door are completely hollow. They are just a box of thin, non-treated, cheap wood that is rotting. Many of the people who have come to look at our house are surprised by this fact. They assume that the cheap wooden box is meant to conceal some supporting member like an iron rod or a 6”x6” wooden post. Why waste time and money with one of those when the exoskeleton we’re adding later will do all the heavy lifting?

Also we need a new roof. Hooray.

I’ve tried to be proactive in this matter but Dawn won’t let me. I live by a simple principle that can be applied when houses, marriages, children, or social situations start to become awkward or troublesome: abandon ship. Let’s just cut our losses and move on. In fact I’ve already found something better. I’ve found the opportunity to build the perfect house.

Prepare to have your mind expanded.

Imagine a small modern house built on the prairies of central Washington State. There are lots of angles and glass to showcase the expansive sky and open land. The floor plan is small but open. It’s a nice house, all the hardware is top grade, but the small size indicates that the owner is of modest means. Oh, did I mention the sprawling underground city? Mayhap this house is built on top of an old Titan missile base? It sure is. Who wouldn’t want to have their very own underground lair? I challenge you not to be enthralled by the prospect.

I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed thinking what I’d do with this property. There’s 45,000 square feet of usable space with high ceilings (20’, 40’, 155’ ceilings!!!!) I seriously want to race golf carts around my subterranean tunnel system. I’ll include a photo for those of you too lazy to click the link…but you’re missing out.

I think the fact that this property is for sale right when we hit a small bump with our house is kismet, but Dawn refuses to invest the several million dollars it will take to make my dream a reality.

Help! My TV is stuck on crap.

Dawn and I discovered a strange bizarre-o world of TV last weekend. I guess part of making TV is to evaluate what’s been successful in the past and attempt to blend elements together to make new shows. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that what we witnessed it what happens when the new blended show is not successful.

The first show we happened upon was TLC’s Take Home Handyman. I suppose the idea was to take the “take home” aspect of Take Home Chef and apply it to a home improvement show. Everyone knows if you’re going to be a successful take home anything you need to have an accent of some sort (British seems to be a popular take home expert accent). In Take Home Handyman they’ve tapped Andrew Dan-Jumbo as the accented expert (you might remember Andrew from TLC’s While You Where Out).

I guess trying to create another Take Home a British Guy TV show isn’t all that surprising…but what pushed the show over into bizarre-o territory is fact that they had rigged it so he was helping out Angela from The Office. During entire show they got The Office cast members to make short little cameos in the pretense that they were helping Angela work on her house. Here Toby, hold this drill and smile for the camera. Hey look, Kelly is laying tile in the bathroom….for 15 minutes. Weird, just plain weird.

If that hadn’t been strange enough television we later happened upon America’s Next Most Smartest Model. Don’t read the title too many times; it will just hurt your head. Evidently VH1 wanted to get in on the hot America’s Next Top Model action…but they needed to mutate the concept a bit. What they added was Ben Stein (like from Ferris Bueller, Win Ben Stein’s Money, and all over TV and politics). To be honest Dawn and I didn’t really see this show. We just caught the tail end of it, long enough to see Ben Stein deliver some awesome deadpan lines to a bunch of stupid looking models. I guess the show’s concept is you have to be a good model and be smart enough to get past Ben Stein. From the little we saw of it, the show it looked completely awful….but it’s hard to hate Ben Stein.

If television insists on taking shows that are already out there, combining them, and pumping out new crap, then perhaps I could suggest a combination. Here’s the show I would watch religiously. “Tim Gunn and Ben Stein Critique the Hell out of You.” The show concept is simple. Tim Gunn and Ben Stein show up and make you feel stupid and unstylish. They’ll address the particular areas in which you are stupid and unstylish. Basically it’s a tour-de-force for some poor person’s self confidence. Now that would be good trashy television!

Again with the coffee plants

I feel like this blog has reached a certain rhythm. I write updates about grilling, coffee plants, random tech item. The next week I write updates about grilling, coffee plants, random tech item. It really struck me as I tried to write another coffee plant update this morning. I suppose that’s the rhythm of the interesting things going on in my life, once you filter out all the work, school, and mundane-ness.

Enough self introspection. If the interesting things in my life result in roasted meats and coffee I’ve got to be doing something right. On to the coffee plant update!

This week was the start of the big coffee harvest….six of the ripest coffee cherries were selected and picked. There’s nothing like the feeling of coming in from the field after a hard day of harvesting. Especially when the field is in your dining room and you can harvest in your pajamas while drinking a cup of coffee. Maybe farm living is the life for me (hat tip Green Acres).

Dawn and I decided to cut one of the cherries open to experience coffee fruit. The website wasn’t lying when it said the fruit was intensely sweet. It was. But I now know why coffee is grown for its beans and not for the fruit. There is hardly any fruit to speak of. It’s more of a sweet tasting membrane between the red skin and the bean than fruit. The inside is pretty much all bean. Growing coffee for the sweet fruit is probably akin to growing honeysuckle for the huge nectar harvest.

Of course with all the excitement of the coffee harvest Riblet was on hand to inspect the yield. After all she’s the one who spends her days sitting amongst the trees whispering encouraging threats.

Again with the grilling

I know what you want. You crave grilling data. At least I hope you are or you might want to skip this post.

This weekend I got the Stoker working with the data logging software. I decided to slow roast a duck for its maiden run.


(Clicky for larger image)

I set the Stoker to 200°. You can see that at about 13:15 the grill temperature reached 200° and did a reasonably good job holding the temperature. I think it’s interesting to see the three humps over 200° where the fire overshot its mark then came back to its target temperature. Each hump gets progressively smaller until at around 15:00 the fire temperature stabilizes. I wonder if it normally takes about two hours for the grill's internal temperature to stabilize? There is a lot of mass in all that ceramic so it wouldn’t surprise me.

[It might be worth noting that the sun was beating down on the grill the entire time but it held the target temperature….I think it’s safe to assume that if the grill is started while the sun is warming it, then it’s able to compensate for the extra heat source. Now I need to start the grill the night before to see if my hunch last time was correct…]

At about 16:15 I opened the grill to put a piece of salmon in for Dawn. You can see how the temperature in the grill takes an immediate 30° dip but recovers quickly. Shortly after that I set the target temperature for 300° because I wanted to eat duck sometime that day.

It’s also kind of neat to see how smooth the curve is on the meat temperature. Dawn said that it looked “textbook” to her. She also claimed that she can per her degree to use and use data provided by the graph to work out all sorts of heat/mass transfer equations on our food. How exciting is that! Look forward to sometime in the future when Dawn works out the thermal conductivity of pork butt!

The duck came out great. This time I just rubbed some salt and pepper into the skin then smeared honey all over it….then some more black pepper for good measure. I was shooting for a smoked honey peppered duck. There wasn’t really a recipe; it’s just something I made up. I thought honey and duck sounded good. I was a little disappointed that the honey flavors weren’t really there at the end….but duck looked great. I guess most of the sugar in the honey caramelized.


We had some potato rolls sitting around so I cut the duck breast into slices and put it on the roll with some more honey and black pepper. Little honey black peppered roasted duck sandwiches are a good thing.

For an encore I took the carcass and threw it in a pot with some water and onions, carrots, celery to make a stock. The stock was just ok….I was hoping for a bit more depth of flavor. I used it last night to make some Italian wedding soup. With some spice adjustment (read: added lots more pepper) it came out down right tasty.

A Catch-22

Got a problem. Ants streaming into office. Make coffee and figure out solution. Coffee maker infested with ants. No coffee, no solution. No solution, no coffee.

Bad start to week.

Man Kitchen or Goth Kitchen?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of the Porsche Design Group, they design all sorts of stuff (besides cars). Their designs always catch my eye in that they always standout and look slightly “different” but sometime they put form before function.

Recently Porsche and Poggenpohl (which appears to be a well established German furniture brand) have announced a “man kitchen.”

So this is what they came up for a kitchen “especially designed for men.” They haven’t released any real specifics yet except for the man-centric kitchen contains “no-handle cabinets, aluminum finishes, hi-tech A/V system.”

I like the use of lighting. In my opinion too many kitchens don’t pay enough attention to lighting. It’s the one room where you’re routinely going to be handling sharp objects and trying to ascertain how well something is cooked. Shadows are not invited; you want to be able to see what’s going on. Besides being utilitarian the lighting does well to accent the design.

I’m not sure that kitchen offers enough storage for my tastes. Doesn’t Porsche know that in addition to multiple sets of cookware (cast iron, nonstick, stainless steel) the modern man is going to want to have multiple sets of plates and glassware to best present the dish? I assume some of those bottom cabinets house a stove, oven, and dishwasher….so there isn’t a lot of storage there.

I’ll admit that I like the somewhat austere design, I don’t know if that has to do with being a man or just liking more contemporary design than the god-awful country kitchen that shoved into most of the houses I can afford.

Nightmare Fuel

The Bohnanza game in my dinning room.

My coffee continues to ripen. The plantation is looking healthy (I suppose Riblet is doing a good job.) I expect it won’t be long until I actually pick the coffee fruit…. which got me to wondering, what the hell do I do next?

I turned to the all-knowing internet for help. It took me a little bit more time to find the information I needed then I would have guessed. So many websites are dedicated to what you do with the coffee once it’s already in bean form. Not many concentrate on what you do with the coffee cherries (cherry is what we coffee farmers call the coffee fruit….or so I just learned).

Fortunately howstuffworks came to my rescue with a helpful article on how coffee works. One of the things that kind of surprised me is that my coffee trees know where they are (hemispherically speaking.) According to the howstuff works:

"There is usually one coffee harvest per year. The time varies according to geographic zone, but generally, north of the Equator, harvest takes place between September and March, and south of the equator between April and May."

My coffee trees have never been outside; they live a very sheltered life (both literally and figuratively.) They’ve only had a crazy gray cat to tell them what’s right and wrong. I wonder how they figured out where they are and when to be harvested….I guess it has to be based off the sun, all other environmental triggers (temperature, amount of rain, weather, etc) are more or less controlled and never change. However, I like to imagine that living in a gadget rich environment they’ve manage to tap into GPS.

The website says that the actual fruit of the coffee cherry is “intensely sweet and has the texture of a grape.” From what I understand it is usually discarded because it perishes too quickly and isn’t where the money is. I suppose I have a chance to try a fruit that I’ll probably never see in the local grocery store.

The website also has a page dedicated to how cherries are processed, which is what I really wanted to learn about. Evidently there are two ways to go. There’s the old fashion traditional way called the dry method:

"Dry method - By the simplest and cheapest method, the harvested cherries are spread out to dry in sunlight. They are periodically raked and turned for seven to 10 days, until their moisture content has fallen to 11 percent. The outer shell of the cherries turns brown and the beans rattle around inside."

Then there is the fancy schmancy wet method:

"Wet method - The main difference between the wet and dry method is that in the wet method, the pulp of the coffee cherry is removed from the beans within 24 hours of harvesting. A pulping machine washes away the skin and pulp. The beans are put in fermentation tanks for 12 to 48 hours. Natural enzymes loosen the slimy parenchyma from the parchment covering. The beans are then dried, either by the sun or by mechanical dryers."

Since I don’t have a pulping machine or a coffee cherry fermentation tank handy it looks like the dry method is the one for me. Perhaps I can talk Riblet into batting them around the room in lieu of periodically raking them.

To Sleep, Perchance to Grill

I reached another precision grilling milestone this last weekend – the overnight cook. I prepped and started a pork butt at 10:00 pm on Saturday and pulled it off the grill a little after 1:30 Sunday afternoon. That’s fifteen and a half hours of low, slow, grilling. It was all very exciting.

For some reason setting up the grill at night, with the knowledge it will be running unattended, is a bit unnerving. I suppose it’s because I’m not normally firing up a grill at 10:00 pm in the dark, I won’t be around to notice a sudden shift in the weather and take counter-measure, and leaving a fire unattended goes against everything we were told about fire safety as a kid. What I was really afraid of is the morning dew. I kept having visions of the condensation forming on my electronics and frying the Stoker temperature controller unit. In the end I put everything in a Tupperware container that I had punched a small hole in for cables to run out of. Then I plugged the hole with some aluminum foil. Nothing got fried, so I guess it all worked out. Here’s a picture of the setup that I took the next morning. I apologize that I don’t have any fancy graphs of the cooking temperature to share. I’m still having troubles getting the data logging software working. I actually spent time to make sure it would work before I started the grill this time. I plugged the Stoker in and started up the data logging software. Everything was working fine! I would hold the pit temperature thermometer and I could see the temperature spike on the graph. Huzzah.

Once I had fire started, the grill going, and had all the probes configured I tried starting the data logging software again and… no dice. The software claimed it couldn’t find the Stoker. That’s the same problem I had last time I had a pork butt on the grill, but didn’t have earlier in the day when I tested the system. I’ve concluded that it might have something to do with my actual network. Earlier in the day I had the Stoker plugged into the same router as the computer running the data logger. When the Stoker is at the grill there is an additional hub between the data logger and the Stoker. I need to see if running the software on a computer that has to go through fewer network shenanigans might solve the problem.

It’s a real shame I don’t have the graph too. I made and observation during this cook and would really like to see if the data supports my hunch. This time it appeared to me that the Stoker was doing a better job at holding the grill exactly at the temperature I set it to (220°)…until the next morning. Then the temperature seemed to hover at around ten to sixteen degrees higher than what I had set the grill to. I think it has to do with the sun. The grill is painted black and I think the sun is acting as a secondary radiant heat source that the Stoker can’t control. It can try and lower the temperature of the grill’s internal fire to compensate but the Evil Egg’s ceramic holds the heat too well and the grill’s temperature heads north with the intensity of the sun.

In the future, once I get the data logger working, it will be interesting to see if the temperature tracking plays out like I suspect. It will also be interesting to see if cooks started while the sun is beating down on the grill track better because the Stoker can compensate for the sun from the get go…

Some of you might be wondering how’d the fifteen and a half hour pork butt came out….. like only a piece of pork imbued with fifteen plus hours of smoke can…..delicious. I also made a white barbeque sauce from scratch. The ones I’ve tried from the bottle weren’t very good. I’m very happy with my version. (Hint: the pre-bottled ones don’t use enough vinegar and pepper.) Dawn remarked that she liked that we had reduced making pulled pork to something so simple we can do it on our sleep.

There’s always room for ghetto

It feels like Dawn and I fit a lot of stuff into this weekend. It would have been a perfect weekend if I had not marred it with studying.

The big story was roof and gutter area around our bay window. A week or so ago we noticed that we could see into our attic from the outside. I am not a home maintenance guru, but I believe that is usually an undesirable housing attribute. It appears as if the gutter and attached fascia and soffit are drooping which in turn leaves a gaping hole into our attic. Dawn had mentioned our predicament at work and a couple of her coworkers offered to come out a look at it. Actually they assumed it was just a gutter problem and they offered to come out and fix the situation on Saturday morning in exchange for a meal.

They showed up Saturday morning and looked at the problem, gave me a crash course on what a fascia and soffit is, and declared that the situation is much more serious than they had initially imagined.

My favorite part of the morning was when everyone took turns looking in the hole in our house. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it. Before, when I had looked into the hole, I thought: “Whoa, a hole. I bet this doesn’t belong here...[end thought].” The two of them would alternate climbing up on the ladder and peering into the hole; each time they would start exposing revelations on what the interior construction of our house was. It made me jealous, was all that stuff written on an index card up there that I had missed? There’s not search engine in the attic, where was this plethora of information coming from?

Eventually I settled on the thought that I wished construction objects had metadata associated with them. Wouldn’t that be great? I would have been able to look at the lumber around the hole and look at when it had been constructed, who did the work, and what it thought it was supped to be doing. That would have given the situation some context. If nothing else I would have known who was responsible for the work and I could have dragged them back and asked what the hell was going on with my soffit area? (I bet nobody likes to a get a call where someone demands “what the hell is going on with my soffit area!?!”)

Dawn’s coworkers spent a goodly amount of time up on the ladder evaluating the problem. In between the “they were crazy if they ever thought this would actually work” and “why the hell would anyone building something like that” they pointed out the problem was that really there wasn’t anything attaching the soffit to the roof…so our problem was just a matter of time. Most likely the other corner will soon follow suit (oh boy!)

Their opinion was that it would probably be best to repair the situation from above…where the roof is. Meaning that part of the roof would have to be temporarily removed. They recommended having a hail storm and fixing this problem while the roof was being replaced. The possibilities of fixing it from below were a bit more dodgy, there isn’t a lot of space to work in and it will involved dismantling the often talked about soffits and such. Either way they said it was out of their league and something we should get an honest to god contractor to look at. Now we just need to find an honest contractor.

In the meantime we’ve propped up the soffit on the corner that is falling. Bricks and a 2x4 holding up your house….how ghetto is that?