July 2002 Archives

I'm on vacation. Right now I'm sitting at my father-in-law's computer, doing a little tinkering with my fantasy baseball teams for next week and hoping things go smoothly. The anxieties of a baseball geek, what can I say.

Tomorrow, sometime in the early afternoon, we'll all get in the car and drive down to San Diego to get on a big boat. We're "in the chute" at this point - I have a few things to pick up at the store tomorrow but we're basically ready. Last night was a different story. I was up until past midnight ironing clothes. Ack!

When somebody tells me that they had to buy some new clothes for a vacation, I normally assume they are talking about shorts, or maybe swim trunks. For me, on this particular vacation, however, it meant dress slacks. And ties. And a new pair of dress shoes. As an engineer today, my business wear consists of chinos and short-sleeve woven shirts. I haven't really had to dress up for work in the last year or so, and my dressy wardrobe had gotten pretty thin - of course, you realize you need a jacket and tie in the main dining room, at least a couple of the nights of the cruise.

I'm going to look damn good in that dining room, I tell you. But it still feels weird to buy dress clothes for a vacation.

Today I thought I'd dip into the Flying W Mailbag and see what the readers have to say.

In response to my July 23rd comment about some homebrewers labeling their beer with a Sharpie marker, DT from Duncan, Oklahoma writes:

And what's wrong with a sharpie? What can I say? I'm lazy.

Yes, indeed, Mr. T. Yes indeed.

An explanation of the path that the King of Instruments might lead you upon comes from MW in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She writes:

What is a poor person who falls in love with the fascinating characteristics of the combination of the "legato" touch, the many facets and tonal possibilites of the instrument, and the possibility of playing with the feet to do to earn a bit now and then but to tie up their Sabbath days holding forth? There aren't many places like the spot in San Diego on the beach. It's regular work you know.

Later she adds this re: the perils a Church Organist regularly faces:

There are so many things to think about when you are playing. Both hands and both feet of course, what stops to set to begin with, how to increase/decrease the volume with the louver pedals while playing a pedal line intact, when to add or subtract a piston, which hand, what beat and where is the stop exactly (so that your hand or toe can dart to it and back), when to push a piston with same considerations, adjust the balance, keep the tempo going, think about the music, turn the page, try not to pay attention to the elders who keep climbing into the lectern area via the steps on your right, keep an eye out to see what is going on in the congregation, filter out the conversations that are taking place nearby and there are no doubt more that don't come to mind presently.

Looking to gain fame and notoriety? Send some email to me, and maybe I'll put you in the next Mailbag.

I am furious about this wildfire. Some moron let their campfire get out of control - in a spot less than 50 yards from an inexhaustable source of an amazing fire retardant - known commonly as "water" (the Kern River) - and now 50,000 acres are torched.

But why am I furious about this particular fire, and not the one set in Colorado under similar moronic circumstances? Because the McNalley fire is, as of 1:00 AM on July 25th, within 2 miles of my favorite place in the Sierras. It's a nice campground about four hours from our house - with a small stream that runs through it. It's not big - probably three feet across at most points - but it's got enough water year-round to support a wild trout population.

People who flyfish talk about their "home waters" - the river or stream that they know like the back of their hand, the place they can go and know where the fish are and what they'll rise to. It's not the closest trout stream to Los Angeles, but Salmon Creek is that place for me - and I would be crushed to lose it. Damn.

Next!

I needed to get my beer bottled before we go on vacation and Wednesday night ended up being the best time to do it. Of course I didn't get started until about 9:30, and so there I was at one in the morning cleaning the kitchen counters. (Insert lament re: the hard and lonely life of the brewmeister...) That's all the bad news, though. The beer is now happily self-carbonating in 28 22oz bottles on my utility room shelves. The final specific gravity reading showed about 1% potential alcohol content remaining. You might remember that the original product had about 7% potential alcohol, which means Worker Bee Weizen should live up to it's slogan ("Catch A Buzz!"), clocking in at a healthy 6% alcohol. Woo Hoo!

While in Temecula this weekend, I raided my host's library for something to read and came across Michael Ruhlman's "The Making Of A Chef."

The author attended the CIA - that's the Culinary Institute of America - in order to write a book about what it takes to become a professional chef. It opens with him straddling his worlds - one foot working on this book and the other attending three weeks of Skills classes. This section is fascinating if you are interested in cooking or ever wondered just what was happening behind the scenes at a "nice" restaurant.

Sadly, he abandons the normal class track after this three-week block to flit about the rest of the curriculum - the part of the book I'm reading now - and it becomes instantly less interesting. The book goes from autobiography to documentary across two pages. Ruhlman spends much of the first part of the book mildly complaining that he isn't taken seriously by his fellow students - and then, 100 pages in, verifies their gripes by jumping in and out of courses whenever he felt like it - a day here, two days there, la la la, isn't this fun! I wonder how much better the book would have been had he stayed the course of the entire curriculum.

I have learned that I have zero interest in becoming a chef. I like to cook - but I don't think I'd enjoy making umpteen plates of tonight's special, and oh by the way, it has to be perfect, and hurry up, they are done with the soup and are ready for the main course and they're in a hurry, they've got tickets to La Boheme (it's an opera you uncultured sweat monkey, where's my food!) etcetera etcetera etcetera

Boy am I full of news tonight. As you can see, Katy left me at home alone with the computer again.

If you've been following Flying W Things you know I have a batch of beer in the middle of the fermenting process. (If you haven't been, well, now you're up to speed.) Now is the time for beer naming anxiety - the beer is into secondary and should turn out ok - but what will I call it? I have some homebrew friends who label their beer by putting a letter on the bottle cap with a Sharpie marker, but I like to do labels.

I've discovered that it's pretty much hopeless for me to solicit other people's ideas for my beer names. I generally don't like them, and Katy (the primary "other people" in the previous sentence) has gotten to the point where she knows not to make too many suggestions - probably because she got tired of me scrunching up my face, nodding slowly, and saying, "Hmm. Maybe..." So I am alone in this exercise, which seems to be the way I like it.

A couple years ago I made a honey porter, which I dubbed Worker Bee Porter. (The sharp-eyed among you will note that this beer was *not* brewed at the Flying W Brewery - it was not until two batches later that I began using that marque for my work.) As this batch is a honey wheat beer, I think I'll continue the line and call it Worker Bee Weizen.

I have some strange rules for labels on stuff I make - be it beer or music mixes. I feel like the label should be mostly hand-lettered and should show some personal touches. I can't quite explain why I feel that way - but I'll try to anyway.

These things are products of my own personal time and effort - and should have that touch upon them, embrace it. I am not a manufacturing plant, and there are going to be small variances - for example, some bottles of a batch of beer will end up better carbonated than others, and there will be a little more or a little less beer from bottle to bottle. I feel like a completely computer generated label misrepresents that somehow. It's too orderly. Does that make any sense?

We are going on a cruise to Mexico next week, courtesy of Katy's folks. I needed a new passport, so I sent away for it - mailing the expired passport and some awful pictures of myself - one for the passport and one for the State Department to look at when they need a good laugh.

I got my last passport in 1992, when I started to work for Iwerks. It was kind of neat to thumb through it and see all the stamps in it.

I wonder what kind of stamps this passport will get between now and 2012.

Another busy weekend - Sunday was my niece's 3rd birthday party, so we were down in Temecula for most of the weekend. We did get home today in time for me to mow the lawn though, so I wasn't completely unproductive around the house.

I was driving back from Temecula this afternoon and everybody else in the car was asleep. I have always said that I like to drive - but I have discovered that at least part of the Joy of Driving comes from listening to good Driving Tunes. It is fairly boring driving in a completely silent car.

Anyway, with all that time for my mind to drift, I got to thinking about my Mom's job as a church organist. (Don't even ask about how I got there.) I decided that the risk-reward curve for church organists is very similar to that for engineers - if you do a good (or even great) job, well, heck, that's what we're paying you for, right? But if you miss a note, or accidentally lean on a key reaching for some dropped sheet music during the service - what a hack! You stink! Combine that with the job's hours - Wednesday nights (choir rehearsal night the world over) and Sunday mornings (All morning. Both services.) and it's no wonder there aren't people beating down the doors to get those jobs.

I was also trying to come up with a description of just how much sound one person can make with a big pipe organ. It's not really fair to compare an organ to a single instrument, but it's pretty impressive nonetheless how much oomph a good-sized pipe organ can deliver - and it's under the control of one person. There are those who believe that classical music is mostly quiet and boring - but they aren't considering the total sonic overload possible when a big pipe organ really gets opened up. (If you're curious, ask me and I'll provide some specific examples.)

From the Did you know? department: The phrase "pull out all the stops" is from the world of pipe organs - each "stop" is a different instrument voice. When you pull out all the stops on an organ, you are "turning on" everything that organ has. So that's pretty much as loud as it can go.

Next!

I got my copy of Better Off Dead on DVD in the mail this weekend, so I forced Katy to sit and watch it with me tonight. (Well, ok, she sat next to me on the couch and read her book while I watched it.) It's always been one of my favorite dumb movies and I'm pleased to have a copy on DVD. It is, however, an extremely feature-poor DVD. The "special features" amount to being able to turn captioning on and off. The scene selection is well-done, however, and it's easy to quickly jump to, say, all the "I want my two dollars!" scenes, or all the scenes where people are asking Lane if they can date his ex-girlfriend - two running jokes in the film.

I think that if you were trying to make this movie today it would probably get a rewrite. Lane Myer, the protagonist, starts out to kill himself four times in the film - hanging, jumping off a bridge, asphyxiation, and dousing himself in flammable liquids. He talks himself out of it, or something happens to distract him, every time. Are the scenes funny? Well, yes, I think so. Uh-oh, here comes a left turn...

I think I just talked myself out of that argument. I was about to say that political correctness (and fear of litigation) would keep that sort of thing off the Silver Screen. But Hollywood is an exceptionally crass place. The film would get made as-is, especially if it could be done cheaply and was projected to turn a decent profit.

Back when I was a poor college student, we would often drink Lucky Lager. The price was its primary redeeming quality. It came in 12-packs of 11oz bottles. That's not a typo - 11oz bottles. (No wonder it was cheap, they were basically selling you eleven beers in twelve bottles.) Anyway, each Lucky Lager had a rebus (those little picture puzzles) on the back of the bottle cap. We would joke that Lucky Lager came with its own built-in sobriety test - if you couldn't solve the (typically lame) rebus you were too drunk to drive.

Well, times have changed, and Katy and I finally came up with a test that is more relevant to our life. Do you remember Dr. Seuss' "Fox In Socks?" Here's an excerpt:

Who sews crow's clothes?
Sue sews crow's clothes.
Slow Joe Crow
sews whose clothes?
Sue's clothes.

Sue sews socks of
fox in socks now.
Slow Joe Crow sews
Knox in box now.

Sue sews rose
on Slow Joe Crow's clothes.
Fox sews hose
on Slow Joe Crow's nose

Hose goes.
Rose grows.
Nose hose goes some.
Crow's rose grows some.

The whole thing is like that. It's crazy fun, I tell you. We have declared "Fox In Socks" the new Flying W Household Sobriety Test.

On to something else. The following is a partial transcript of a conversation I had with Cameron last night. (Some background - Cameron was with me last weekend on my pre-party beer run. He wanted me to buy a six-pack of stout - he called it "black beer." I told him that was more of a cold-weather beer.)

C: Why aren't you drinking the black beer Daddy?
B: Because I didn't buy any, remember?
C: But when it's colder you can buy the black beer, right?
B: That's right, it would be better when it's cold.
C: In the winter when it's cold you can drink the black beer. But it doesn't snow here.

I can't decide whether I should be pleased or mortified by all this. Good grief, he's three!

Last night I was up late transferring my beer from primary fermentation (a big plastic bucket) to secondary fermentation (a big glass carboy - think the big five-gallon jug of water for a water cooler). It takes a while to sanitize the carboy and siphoning gear and then transfer the beer so I had the TV on.

Blade Runner was just starting on USA network as I started. It's been a long time since I saw the movie and I'm sure USA cut the heck out of it but I found myself getting sucked in. Around 11:30 I managed to turn it off at a commercial break and get to bed.

The thing that struck me is that the setting is still believable. So many movies based in the future look really dorky after 10 or 15 years. It's hard to believe that Los Angeles is going to look like that in fifteen or so years - the timeframe for the movie - but it's not hard to picture a future that does look like that.

I guess I'm saying that Ridley Scott's vision seems to hold up, just not his time sense. Maybe that just means that the story he tells is broad enough that we relate to it apart from its setting. Or perhaps the setting - mainly seedy - is familiar enough to be easily believed.

Ok, enough of that. Goodnight.

I borrowed a digital camera from the office over the Fourth of July weekend. (Witness the photo links in that weekend's entries, and the photos accompanying the beer story.) Now I want one. I have resisted it for a long time - I remember very distinctly telling one of my friends three or four years ago that I was digging my heels in on the whole digital camera thing - not that that's a particularly big surprise, I'm a notorious late adopter. But now I think I'd get good use from one.

I think I will mainly use it for family photos (holiday snaps? click-click-nudge-nudge-wink-wink?) and other snapshots. It will likely not get used much in any manual modes, so an extensive feature set there is probably a waste. I've got an entry-level AF SLR 35mm camera - a Nikon 4004 - it was a college graduation present, lo these many years ago. I have used it a lot, and it's been around the world taking great pictures, but I can count on one hand the number of manual exposures I've shot with it.

So what do I want? You're smart. You tell me.

I put together a summer mix CD. Many of the Flying W faithful already have a copy, but if you would like one, drop me a line.

Let me know if you want an audio CD or an mp3 CD. (If you opt for mp3, there will be room for me to fit other strangeness on the CD...)

One of my favorite guilty pleasures of summer is the midweek day baseball game. Sneaking out of the office to sit and watch baseball while drinking beers and eating sodium-rich snack foods is not just fun - it's part of the rich tableau of American Life. It's your heritage, I say! (I'm assuming here that Flying W Things has not picked up too much of an international following.)

At my last place of employment I would regularly schedule "doctor's appointments" on the day of such a game, and then slip away around lunch time with the promise to return "if possible." But it turns out target="_blank"my boss is a co-conspirator. So today's trip to the stadium showed up on my calendar as an "Off-Site Management Meeting." Excellent.

Today was a good day to go to a game. It was clear and sunny - hot, but not too hot. Shade was available to sit in. The Dodgers put up a good fight until the seventh inning, when Hideo Nomo threw the ball away on a sacrifice bunt, allowing two runs to score. That turned out to be the break the Cardinals were looking for, and they went on to win 9-2.

So that's how that went.

Whenever I sneak off to the ballpark like this, I can't help but think about a similar trip from four or five years ago. I had arrived at the park and was waiting out front for my co-conspirator to arrive. I could hear the PA start announcing the visiting team's lineup inside the stadium. Just then my pager went off.

Of course, it's the office. Hmm. Can I just ignore it? My conscience bothered me too much for that, so I found a pay phone and called in.

It was the project lead I was currently working for, and he had some question that I don't remember. As we're talking, the PA announcer finishes up introducing the visitor's team and starts in with My California Angels. (You should know that the Angels, like many teams, shoot off fireworks when they introduce their lineup. And yes, I know that they are now the Anaheim Angels. I will always think of them as the California Angels.)

So I'm talking on the phone, muffling the microphone as much as I can with my hand and desperately trying to wrap up the call, when the shells start exploding. I'm probably 50 yards from where they are being launched. Unsurprisingly, they are loud as hell. Unsurprisingly, the guy on the other end of the phone asks "Where the hell are you?"

Thinking fast, I say "Oh, I got your page while I was still in the car - I pulled over at a gas station to call you. Looks like there's some construction across the street."

Just then they finish up the intros and launch a nice multi-shell salvo. Even louder. Great. The guy says "You better get out of there! Sounds like they're knocking down the building." I agree and hang up. Whew. Crisis averted.

It goes to show you that most people will believe a plausible story told with a straight face.

(Oh, and the Angels lost that day to the Oakland A's. Bummer.)

Sports analogies and references pervade our culture - heck, I've heard many an argument presented in football terms. Many people find this tiresome, and I can understand their position.

Having said that, this is the funniest sports-related comic strip I have read in a long time. I LOL'ed when I read it. (I did not, however, ROTFLMAO. Nothing is that funny. Well, very few things anyway. Far fewer than you would be led to believe by people who forward jokes via email.)

If your paper doesn't carry this particular strip you should consider asking them to. It's generally quite funny - and rarely about sports, for those of you who are concerned about these things.

Another weekend update: Sunday my baby sister competed in her second triathlon. (Apparently insanity does run in the family. I can understand doing one, but signing up for a second?) In all seriousness, congratulations Meg!

It's been a busy weekend. I'm pooped.

Tonight we had some people over for dinner - three other couples, all with twins within a few months of Cameron and Claire's age. Eight three year olds do a pretty credible tornado impersonation, let me tell you. You'd be pooped too.

Other thoughts from the weekend:

I was looking through the sports page of the paper on Saturday morning and noticed a story about the previous day's Tour de France stage. It was considered a "sprint stage," you know, because it was mostly flat, so people just sprinted through it. La ti da, ho de do, spin spin spin. Umm - excuse me - the stage was almost 124 miles long. A sprint? Are you kidding me? I mean, I thought a long sprint was 400 meters. The winner averaged a little under 28 mph for almost 4 1/2 hours. Sounds like a typical Los Angeles commute to me - in a car.

I realize that cycling will never be a popular sport in the US - bicycles are viewed as a means of transportation for kids, fitness wackos in spandex, and the occasional homeless person with 5 trash bags full of aluminum cans - but the guys that ride this race are in unbelieveable shape. The things they do are hard for me to comprehend. They ride 2000 miles over the course of the race - that's a nice family vacation - in a car. I follow the Tour every year just because I can hardly believe these guys can really do what they do.

In the Good Things Come to Those Who Wait category, I was in Trader Joe's today and found the beloved Spaten Optimator (see Friday's entry) for a mere $5.99 a six-pack. Granted, we're pushing in to the dog days of summer, and dark beer is probably the furthest thing from your mind - but it has been cooling off a bit in the evenings. A bottle of that would go down real nice on the patio after the kids are in bed...

Yesterday I participated in a Lunch Outing. My boss saw a segment on Food TV's "Unwrapped" about a store in our area that sells all manner of sodas, old and new, strange and mundane, virtually all in bottles. Gasp! Not just bottles, glass bottles. This I had to see for myself.

It was pretty slick. The store was what I expected for the most part - many aisles of drinks, most of which I had never heard of. Check their web site for some idea of what they've got - if it's on their page, I saw a bottle of it on the shelf. I have never seen so many varieties of root beer in my life. And ginger beer, and birch beer, and sarsparilla, and cream soda, and on and on. (Sadly, no Fizzy Lifting Drinks were available.)

Anyway, I did avail myself of the opportunity to purchase two six-packs of Crush - one orange and one grape. (I was never much for the strawberry. Too sweet. I know, that doesn't make a lot of sense.) When I was a kid we would have ice cream floats made with various flavors of Crush. When I saw those bottles I could practically taste one - especially those last few gulps - you know, when the ice cream has all melted and you're left with a creamy semi-fizzy drink. Yum.

The bottles are now safely ensconced in the pantry at home, awaiting the arrival of vanilla ice cream. I can hardly wait to share an Orange Crush float with Claire and Cameron.

There's more to the store than that, however. They also have an impressive selection of beer. The domestic stuff is pretty well represented, although California microbrews are better represented than some - not surprising, I suppose. But they also have an amazing selection of European beers, especially German. It took every ounce of restraint in my body to not stock up on Spaten Optimator, Celebrator Doppelbock, and the only true dark wheat beers (dunkel weizen) that I have ever seen in real life. Now I know where they are, though, and I will return.

(While tracking down those links I discovered proof that beer is good for you! Does it surprise you that a brewery would say such things?)

But back to the soda - I was thinking about why there was any allure to drinking soda from a glass bottle on the way to work today. (I have plenty of time for such idle thought during the daily commute.) I couldn't really put my finger on anything other than plain old nostalgia, and that nostalgia then led me to a story I hadn't thought about in a long time.

When I was five or six we went on a family trip to Michigan. At some point we stayed in one of those little roadside inns for a few days - well, not an inn exactly - I seem to recall it was a lot of little cottages. At some point during our stay I was playing on the grounds with a little girl who was also staying there. I don't really remember much about her except that she seemed to be a little older, and she knew Lots of Things.

Anyway, at some point we were in front of the soda machine - and she let me in on a Great Secret. We were going to get rich!

All we had to do to make our fortune was put an upside-down bottle cap - there were plenty laying around on the ground - in the change slot of the soda machine. She informed me that the bottle cap would silently catch all the change coming out of the machine! The unsuspecting soda purchaser, having heard nothing, would assume they had not gotten any change. We could then come by later and reap these rewards for ourselves!

I'm sure you can figure out how this one ends. We clearly underestimated not only people's hearing and math skills, but also the obsessive behavior most people exhibit towards coin slots.

While I was at the movies, the 2002 MLB All-Star Game was being played in Milwaukee, Wisconson.

Apparently "back in the day" there was a lot of healthy competition between leagues at the All-Star Game, and managers played to win. But nowadays, for better or worse, it seems to have turned into "an exhibition, not a competition." As such, the managers seem mainly interested in getting everybody on their rosters into the game for an inning or two. I don't have a problem with that.

However, this need to get everybody some work backfired last night, when the game was tied 7-7 after 11 innings. Both managers were out of pitchers! Oops. Commissioner Bud, current Scourge of Baseball, decided unilaterally to call the game. Nice move, bonehead.

Here's the thing - I understand that Freddie Garcia (the American League pitcher when the game was called) has Real Games to pitch soon, games that may affect his team's chance of making the playoffs. But this is baseball - there aren't ties in baseball. You play until somebody wins. There were two better choices, as I see it:

1. Both pitchers just start grooving batting practice fastballs down the middle. Nice slow easy ones. Somebody will score.

2. Move the pitcher out to right field, and let the position players take turns pitching.

I tend to favor number 2. It would be fun to watch - as in madcap knuckle-curve fun, not 103 mph fastball fun - and likely would lead to some quick scoring. It would have turned the 2002 All Star Game into an Official Baseball Memory, one of those "do you remember" stories people would talk about when they got all reminiscent about baseball. (It's hard to believe this actually happens, but it does.) As it stands, Bud Selig has another black eye, and people will remember the game - but not in a good way.

According to ESPN.com, Commissioner Bud vowed Wednesday to make changes to the All-Star game to avoid ties. Umm, Bud - how about letting them play until somebody's ahead?

Last night there was a brush fire between me and home, and the freeway was closed. It was a good night to see a movie after work.

So I finally got myself down to the theater to see Star Wars Episode II. As my comments on the film come a good six weeks after it's release I'm not going to exhaustively review it, that's been done. Neither am I going to apologize for any spoilers contain herein. But here are my thoughts on the picture, in no particular order:

1. I will go to see any Star Wars movie in the theater. It doesn't have to be good. When I'm in a theater, and the Star Wars title comes up with the soundtrack blaring, I'm transported - for a moment - back to 1977. I'm ten years old again, sitting in the front row of the Vesta theater in "downtown" Weatherford, anticipating the first movie I ever stood in line to see. In the time it took you to read that sentence the feeling had come and gone, but the hair was still standing up on the back of my neck, and I had a big goofy smile pasted on my face. Heck - $8.50 for a sip from the fountain of youth is a pretty good deal if you ask me.

2. Ok, I get it - there's a lot of traffic on Coruscant. There isn't a shot of this planet that doesn't include zillions of little ships, streaming by in neat little lines, in the background. Every shot! It was starting to make my eyes hurt.

3. Lucas should steer away from writing dialogue. Especially anything "romantic." Wowwee! is that some bad stuff. I wonder if he raided some poor lovesick 15-year-old's poetry weblog.

4. When it happened, I realized I've been waiting all these years to see a big bad bunch of Jedis all swinging light sabers in a big fight. One of those moments where you just try to soak up all the action.

5. How do those "laser" weapons work? Some of them have recoil action. From a beam of light? And all of the bolts of light seemed to travel at a speed less than light. (I know, scientific rigor is the first casualty of science fiction. It was the recoiling cannon that put it over the top for me.)

6. I had a definite "Star Wars Meets Apocalypse Now" moment when I saw Yoda sitting in the Galaxy Far Far Away Huey Helicopter equivalent, telling the clone pilot - and then the whole clone army what to do. Very strange.

7. Yoda. Light Saber. Awesome. Cool scene. Too short.

Anyway, the movie did not impress me as a whole. Some interesting stuff, some nifty "back story" kind of info (Jango Fett/Boba Fett/Stormtroopers), and some cool things to look at, but not a compelling package all in all.

A "You Need A Weblog" Story

In the past, I would occasionally come in to the office with an amusing story to tell. On some occasions these stories would elicit the comment "You need a weblog for this stuff," from my boss. Well, now that I do indeed have one I decided to run some of these stories.

About three months ago I came home late from a poker game to find my street teeming with activity. Kids were all over the place - milling around, yelling, drinking, smoking, and generally acting like the hormone-imbalanced crazy people that teenagers are. I pulled into my garage and went in to see what Katy knew about it.

"Apparently somebody's parents are out of town," I said to Katy after I made sure she knew I was her husband and not a burglar. She woke up enough to let me know that (a) the party started around 9:30 or 10 PM and (b) she had seen somebody peeing in the street. I went to the front bedroom windows to check out the action.

It looked like the party was winding down - more and more people were wandering around the streets looking for their cars - and once they got in their cars, honking and peeling out. I decided that it was a good thing I moved my sprinkler controls into the garage - I could turn on the lawn sprinklers should any of the party-goers decide they needed to rest or take care of any other business in front of our house.

Within about twenty minutes the street was clear - well, clear of people. I could see a lot of trash and bottles by the streetlights. Hmm. I went to bed.

The next morning we were up early and out the door for a volleyball game. On the way down the street Katy was quite vocal in her displeasure at the mess in the street - and rightly so. There were food wrappers, bottles, boxes, cigarette butts, and associated junk all up and down the street - a very unusual sight in our normally clean suburban subdivision. I figured I'd clean up in front of our house when we got back, and we drove away without thinking much more about it.

We were gone for a few hours for volleyball but when we turned up our street we noticed a transformation. The street looked great. All the trash was gone - it practically looked like somebody had scrubbed the curbs. And when I went to check the mail I found this letter in the mailbox. I almost died laughing.

And Katy's anger melted away.

Last night Katy and I went on a date.

Is this all that remarkable? I suppose not - although our "regular" babysitter has gone home for the summer - so they are much fewer and further between these days. This date, however, was 100% totally new and unique - at least for us.

Katy's favorite movie is The Sound of Music. There isn't anything else even close. I like the movie as well - I don't have any commemorative plates or anything, but I vividly remember seeing it as a kid and being caught up in the whole thing, and I still enjoy watching it. (Favorite quote: "Apparently we're both suffering from a deplorable lack of curiousity...")

Anyway, when we missed last year's inaugural Sound of Music Singalong at the Hollywood Bowl there was at least muted disappointment around the house. So when I saw it on this year's Bowl schedule I bought tickets at the first opportunity.

There will be some who read this entry with a smug smile and a little bit of attitude, thinking "poor sap." Well, let me tell you something - It was a lot of fun. It was like somebody gave The Sound of Music the Rocky Horror Picture Show treatment. I kept expecting people to throw toast. Quite a few people were dressed up in costumes - some literal, some not so literal, some truly bizarre. Prop bags were handed out. People yelled at the screen. Copious amounts of wine were consumed - the picture is over three hours long, you know.

But above all, people sang. I mean, really sang. If you've ever been to a ballgame with me you know that I sing the national anthem - yes, even before last September - I like to sing, what can I say. I am usually the only person for a couple sections in either direction singing along. It was fun and wacky and strange to be sitting in a venue that large and have literally everybody around me belting it out at the top of their lungs. I haven't had that much fun, or laughed that hard, in a long time. I can't think of another time when I've seen so many people having a collective shared experience of a good time.

It goes without saying that we will be attending next year's event.

Of course, we didn't get back home until early this morning (our babysitter can likely pay for next year's college from the evening's proceeds) - so of course the kids were up at 6:30 this morning, full of demands. "I want some milk," and "I want to watch Sesame Street," and oh by the way, "I wet my bed Daddy." Oh well, back to reality. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu...

Oh, and yesterday I brewed some beer.

The Fourth of July is a day marked by many anniversaries - other than the better-known national holiday type - at our house.

Number one, Katy and I had our first date on July 4, 1992. Ten years ago. Wow. That seems like a long time to me.

Number two, C&C both slept through the night for the first time on July 4, 1999 - three years ago. Strangely, that seems like an even longer time ago. It's hard to believe that they have grown up so much in a mere three years.

We had a busy Fourth. The day started with a trip to the local parade and then some friends' for lunch and swimming. Then home for an extremely short nap. Then a small get-together with some of our neighbors, followed by the traditional fireworks viewing - from a spot about 50 yards from our house. We can see three different shows from there, plus all the miscellaneous illegal stuff getting launched in the surrounding neighborhood. It made for a long day but it was a good day.

Here are some pictures: Claire caught some candy, and wore mom's hat. Cameron watches for more old-fashioned cars. Then we all went swimming!

Yesterday I made homemade ice cream for the holiday. It's kind of a tradition for me to make a gallon of the stuff under the pretense that it's for the little block party we usually have in our cul-de-sac, and then have nobody at the party want any. So then (horrors) I have a lot of ice cream left and I have to (gasp) eat it myself. Of course, now there are a few more kids on the block, and they will always eat some ice cream - but nobody over four years old (myself excepted, of course) had any last night.

Here are my quick tips for good homemade ice cream:

1. Make it up the night before and chill it in the fridge all night. Most recipies I have seen call for an hour or two but if the mixture isn't totally chilled you can get ice crystals in the end product. And who wants that?
2. If the recipe has eggs in it, strain it through a sieve before you chill it. Invariably there will be some bits of egg white that didn't get broken up when you were beating the eggs, and they will end up as little cooked egg bits in the ice cream. If you were planning on using that as an excuse to eat it for breakfast, well, leave them in - but it kind of grosses me out.
3. Mix something in with the ice cream. I myself am a big fan of crushed oreos - but anything will do. It's hard to get perfectly smooth homemade ice cream, and something that adds a little texture to the end product will mask any graininess in the ice cream.
4. Use whole milk - and don't skimp if the recipe calls for heavy cream or half and half. Come on, it's ice cream - live a little! It makes a big difference.

Last weekend we went camping with the kids. As with many activities involving young children, if the kids have fun then the adults have a markedly better chance to have fun as well. Let's face it - if the kids aren't having a good time, nobody is. Luckily C&C had a great time and as a result we did too. I am now really looking forward to our "big" family camping trip in early September.

The weekend was not, however, without it's share of sorrow. Things did not start out particularly well on Friday night.

We got to the campground around 6:30 and the sun was starting to sink into the trees. After circumnavigating the campground three times to assess the merits of various sites we managed to pick one and started getting set up. The breeze was starting to blow, and Katy and I were both surprised at how cool it was getting. I started laying a fire so we could keep warm, and Katy got going on dinner - spaghetti and a salad, an old camp standby, and always good on a cool evening.

I was just finishing up getting the last of our things put in our huge tent (Huge, I tell you! Big enough for two, yes two queen size air mattresses, with four feet of space between them. Needs a lot of flat land though.) and Katy had finished boiling the pasta. She was getting ready to drain it and was looking around for a likely tree to anoint with hot starchy water.

(As an aside, have you ever seen somebody draining pasta over a sink, using the lid to the pot they cooked it in to hold the pasta in while the water drains off? If so, have you ever watched helplessly as, across the space of one eyeblink, the pot lid slips aside ever so slightly and the newly-unguarded pasta shoots down the drain, disappearing like some kind of offering to the garbage disposal?)

Let's just say it's somehow more dramatic to watch something like that happen into the ground instead of a sink. Poor Katy - the lid slipped, and all of our main course ended up in the dirt - powdered with dust and bark. She had decided to only bring enough for the one meal as she figured (rightly so, in my mind) that the remaining half-bag of spaghetti wouId have gotten wasted anyway. I don't think she knew whether to laugh or cry. I managed to not laugh myself - at least for a minute or two.

Anyway, we didn't starve - there was plenty of peanut butter and homemade strawberry jam. And the weekend improved immeasurably from there.

A couple weeks ago, the floor lamp in our family room started acting strange. Not "Poltergeist" strange, mind you, just flickering on and off and generally responding only to basic established fix-it techniques - shaking and wiggling - to get it back to normal.

As an electrical engineer, this troubled me. I immediately supposed that there was a shorted wire in a lamp, and that sounded like a house fire waiting to happen. I unplugged the lamp, thinking that I would check the socket for loose connections and replace it if necessary.

My excitement for lamp repair did not exactly hold up, however, as it wasn't until last night that I got around to checking the lamp. I pulled it into the kitchen - better light there, you know - and started fiddling around. First, I plugged in the lamp and tested it as-is. Switch-switch-switch-switch. Nothing. Switch-switch-jiggle-switch-jiggle-jiggle. Nothing. Hmm. So, I unplug it, take off the shade, and start unscrewing the socket from the wood base. Hmm. Visual inspection of the socket showed no damage. The cord did not feel loose.

Suddenly, a brilliant idea strikes me. Perhaps I should try it with a different light bulb! (I have heard that these things sometimes burn out.)

I put the lamp back together, install a brand-new light bulb, plug in the lamp, and turn the switch. Eureka! Light! "Katy, I fixed the lamp..."

To summarize: Yes, it took me two-plus weeks to change a burnt-out light bulb. And yes, I had unplugged the lamp in the meantime as a safety precaution. Please feel free to provide your own punchline to this "How many bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb" story.

And yes, this whole thing is my boss' fault. Blogs, indeed.