November 2002 Archives
Did I mention that I have my outside Christmas decorations up? Ha ha! Beat you!
If you have ever eaten dinner with children, you know that they are ready to get up from the table about five minutes after they start - usually about the time you are sitting down to eat. Last night was not much different, so we loaded up the DVD player with Snow White to keep them occupied while the adults tried to enjoy a little food, conversation, and wine.
About forty-five minutes in, the audio out of the DVD player quit. Then, in the course of troubleshooting the problem, the display screen on the front also stopped working. The player is, in the words of Weatherford, Oklahoma mortician "Stony" Lockstone, "dead, dead, dead."
One thing that bothers me (other than the obvious "having a ten-month old piece of equipment that doesn't work") is that it just isn't economical to repair. I would rather fix it, but Toshiba's service centers want $40 just to look at the thing. I can run over to (insert discount retailer here) and pick a new one up for about $10 more. I may chafe at the "disposable nature of our society," but in the end I'm voting with my wallet, adding a box full of non-biodegradable plastic and electronics to the landfill in the process.
Did I mention how upset the kids were that the movie was interrupted? By some stroke of luck, they had picked one of the few movies that we have on both DVD and VHS, so I rolled the backup tape and restored peace. For a few minutes, at least.
It's the day after Thanksgiving - I hope everybody reading this (all six of you) enjoyed the holiday.
Things turned out considerably better here than I thought they might. I was on my way to the office Wednesday morning when I got a call from Katy - "I'm sick!" The stomach flu has been making its way around lately, and it caught up with her. I turned the car around, my head filling with visions of Claire, Cameron, and I all catching it by the next day. It certainly would have been a memorable Thanksgiving.
Luckily the bug has not yet chosen any of us. Katy's mom and I did the bulk of the cooking and dinner went off without a hitch. I once again fell prey to the Curse of the Second Plate, which left me moaning that I had eaten too much - but what else is new?
A couple years ago I "made" cocktail garnishes to give as holiday gifts to all my hard drinkin' friends. I got some jars and filled them up with olives, cocktail onions, and maraschino cherries. I then poured dry vermouth over the the olives and onions, and bourbon over the cherries. Very simple.
I gave a "set" to my friend Doug, and in the course of the ensuing conversation he mentioned that he had once been served a Manhattan that was garnished with a fresh cherry. Hmm. Fresh cherries.
So, this year I decided I would try this little trick with fresh cherries. One fine Sunday morning last June I trekked out to our local farmer's market and ploinked down the big bucks for a couple pounds of fresh bing cherries. A stop at the store for a cherry pitter and some canning jars, then the liquor store for some bourbon, and I was ready to go.
I washed and pitted four pint jars full of cherries that afternoon, and poured enough bourbon into the jars to cover them. I closed up the jars, stuck them in the back of the refrigerator, and promptly forgot all about them.
Fast forward to this weekend. Katy has done her Thanksgiving shopping and is trying to fit everything into the fridge, including a 20-pound turkey. "What are these jars back here?"
My cherries! I pulled one of the jars out to check on them. But something wasn't quite right.
I opened up a jar and fished one out. Ewwww! The fruit was still pretty firm, but that color! It looked like it had been underground for several months, all gray and mottled. I couldn't bring myself to eat it. It was a Zombie Cherry.
Lest the Zombie Cherries somehow break free of their glass prisons to feast upon the flesh of the living - as human zombies are wont to do, at least in the movies - I ran them all down the garbage disposal. Sigh.
I wonder if dried cherries would work. Perhaps a small experiment is in order.
Ok, time to catch up a little bit.
1. Fellowship of the Ring Extended Version DVD. It’s quite good. But then again, the original wasn’t bad to start with. There are a few scenes that are totally meaningless if you haven’t read the books, such as the “Oh look the elves are leaving and I don’t know why but it makes me sad. Sigh.” bit near the beginning, but all in all I think the extra stuff improves the movie.
I like the additional material on Boromir – I think the theatrical release painted him as very much a “black hat” character, but I felt like the extended version gave him a bit more depth.
I didn’t like the additional scene with Aragorn saying he doesn’t want to claim his birthright. That’s not how I remember him from the books… Revisionism! Ack!
Of course, now I’ve watched the DVD – but will need to go through it four more times to hear all the commentary tracks. And I haven’t even started in on the two discs worth of “extras.” Crikey!
Enough of that. I think I’ve established myself as a major Tolkien geek.
2. I transferred my beer to secondary fermentation today. This batch will be a little smaller than usual, thanks to the half-gallon of unsiphonable sludge at the bottom of the primary fermenter. Very strange. The beer tasted pretty good. The sludge less so. (What can I say? I was curious.)
3. At work, I’ve been going to a lot of meetings lately. One of the current meeting buzzwords is “leverage,” used as a verb. As in, “We’re going to leverage our experience in widget design in our new grinkle manufacturing.”
Can we all agree to use the word “use” instead? Repeat after me, “Leverage = Use.”
Next time we can talk about taking the “pro” out of “proactive.” Redundant, indeed.
4. I mentioned a month or so ago that Claire and Cameron were likely to show up on the television show “The West Wing.” Well, they did, a couple weeks back. Of course, ultrasounds are easy enough to come by, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it. If you ask nicely I might dub you a VHS copy of the scene they were in.
I got a call on my cell phone while I was at lunch today. It was Katy. These were her first words:
"Your beer exploded*!"
Cool!
* Not really. It's in the throes of heavy-duty fermentation and foam is blowing out the top of the airlock.
As I type this, Claire and Cameron are taking their first naps in their "new rooms." Claire got moved into our old guest bedroom and Cameron is staying in the old "nursery."
It's hard for me to believe that they are old enough to have their own rooms. Sigh. Before you know it they'll want me to add them to my auto insurance policy...
Sometimes things happen that just seem better suited to television sitcoms.
Friday night, not long after I made that last post, the boiling stage of the brewing process ended. At that point you want to cool the wort (beer minus the yeast) as quickly as you can, for reasons I won't go into here. I have a contraption made of copper tubes that I immerse in the brewpot - cold water runs through it and helps speed the cooling process - think of it as a radiator, only in reverse.
The input tube has a hose connection so I ran it into my back yard to the hose bib. The output tube got crammed down the drain of the kitchen sink.
After the chiller had been running for five minutes or so I checked the hose connections to the copper tubing. The input hose slipped off in my hand and started shooting water around the kitchen and family room like a firehose. I managed to get it shoved down into the sink fairly quickly, but the pressure on the hose was high enough that it wasn't staying put - so I couldn't go outside to turn off the water.
I finally managed to reach a dishtowel, which I shoved into the drain to hold the hose. Whew. I got everything put back together and then got to spend 30 minutes trying to clean up the mess. The couch cushions dried pretty quickly and the coffee table isn't showing any real water damage...
There was a small upside to all this - as there was water all over the kitchen floor, I just scuffed around in my socks for a few minutes, eliminating any need to mop it.
It's quite late, or very early, depending on your perspective. I'm still up because I'm brewing beer, and I didn't get started until about 9 PM. I had some things I was going to type about but my brain isn't working so well right now.
So I think I'll go back to watching old Jonny Quest reruns on Boomerang.
Ok, first of all, here are the previously mentioned baseball cartoons, drawn by Kurt Snibbe:
Working in "show biz" gives me some weird opportunities. The other day I had a meeting at CAA (that's Creative Artists Agency, talent agency extraordinaire, for those of you not in the know). Sadly, I didn't have any good celebrity sightings but I am pretty sure my car was the dirtiest one in the CAA parking garage.
Tuesday was a big day in the world of geek fandom, as both Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones and the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring were released on DVD. To help me get in the spirit of things I brought some props to the office for our lunch trip to Best Buy - namely, my old horn-rimmed glasses and a pocket protector loaded with pens. I also wore a short-sleeve plaid shirt - I untucked one side and buttoned it all the way up at the store. I think I scared the cashier a little.
Tomorrow night I'll be up late brewing beer, so I'll try to get some new stuff up while the wort is boiling.
Much has transpired. I have been too busy to sit down and attempt to amuse you all with pithy little stories. Here are the highlights:
1. We've officially thumbed our noses at the local cable franchise and gone DirecTV. Being that I am a crazy engineer, I insisted upon installing the system myself. I now understand why they give this part away free - pointing an 18 inch dish at a small box 22,000 miles away is not as easy as it sounds.
2. Speaking of thumbs, I jammed my right thumb something fierce last Monday at volleyball, and tonight I re-jammed it. It hurts. For the most part it's okay, but some things just don't work. For instance, I can't start my car with my right hand. I brought this injury upon myself by saying "I've never gotten hurt playing volleyball" out loud about three weeks ago.
3. All is ready for my next batch of beer. I am going for a repeat of the 2000 Christmas beer, "Santa's Milk Stout." I found a few bottles from that batch in the hall closet this weekend, and tried one the other night - wow. Wow wow. If this batch turns out half as well, I'll be thrilled.
4. Claire and Cameron are down at Katy's folks for a few nights. Second honeymoon, you ask? Pitching the woo with the little lady? Of course not! We're painting the kid's rooms. Am I smooth or what?
5. I had some funny baseball cartoons to post but I can't remember where I put them. Perhaps I'll find them soon.
