avablog

Leah and I went to dinner with some friends last night at Cafe Dodici. As always, it was delicious. Aunt Rachel is in town for the weekend, so she offered to babysit for us. In appreciation, I wanted to make her a meal.

She likes (among other things) pasta with mushrooms, so I dug up a recipe from the latest “Joy” for porcini and red wine sauce. I think it turned out OK; I didn’t really get a chance to try it, as we were running out the door just as I was finishing the meal.

I also made a recipe from the latest issue of “Cook’s Illustrated” for roasted cauliflower. I love cauliflower, and this recipe looked simple, quick, and delicious all at the same time. Fortunately, it turned out to be all those things. Here it is:

• 1 medium head cauliflower (~2 lbs.)

• 1/r C. extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

• Kosher salt and ground black pepper

Adjust the oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 475 degrees. Trim outer leaves of cauliflower and cut stem flush with bottom. Cut head into eight equal wedges so that the core and florets remain intact (see photo). Place the wedges cut side down on foil- or parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle with 2 T. oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper; gently rub to evenly distribute oil and seasonings. Gently flip cauliflower and season other cut side with remaining 2 tablespoons oil, salt, and pepper.

Cover baking sheet tightly with foil and cook for 10 minutes. Remove foil and continue to roast until bottoms of cauliflower pieces are golden, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove sheet from oven, and, using spatula carefully flip wedges. Return sheet to oven and continue to roast until cauliflower is golden all over, 8 to 12 minutes longer. Season with salt and pepper to taste, drizzle with oil, and serve immediately.

I figure I owe it to Ava to include on this blog at least one shot of myself in the tub as a tot. Lord knows she endures enough poking and prodding in front of the lens from me.

As you may be able to see there on the right edge of the photo, this was taken May of ’73. I was a couple months older than Ava is now. That’s my brother Scott behind me.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like looking in a mirror, but I can certainly see some similiarities between the young me and the present Ava. Both pretty skinny, and as Leah likes to point out, Ava has my nose.

I’ven’t* yet ceased to be amazed (and often disturbed) by the search habits of the general WWW-using public. One example is the perennial placement of the search term “philly cheesesteak burger” among the top five terms in my httpd log.

Look, I love Hardee’s as much as the next person, and I might’ve even searched for a burger online now and then, but there must be an awful lot of burger searching going on out there to account for the hits on my site. Are people looking for nutrition information (I wouldn’t recommend seeking this info out, were I you–best left unknown)?  Doing this search on Google doesn’t even return my site in the first 10 pages of results.  I smell a bot.  A burger bot.

* This is part of my effort to combine contractions in order to further abbreviate and streamline written and spoken English.  Join me.

Leah surprised me this morning with a new Italian wool sweater and a nice dress coat.  Wonderful gifts, particularly for this ongoing cold snap.

I certainly do feel sorry for Leah sometimes.  She takes a lot of pride in — and puts a lot of effort into — her own appearance, but she’s married to a guy who, well…doesn’t.  So I understand that her gifts to me of clothing are often as much for her as they are for me.  To her credit, she did a great job with these latest garments.  Maybe I can get her to take a picture later for your viewing pleasure.

I sent Leah an iCard this morning.  Romantic, eh?  In my defense, I’ve grand plans for a super-secret birthday adventure for her birthday, which comes on the 23rd.  And we’re taking the afternoon off today for a nice lunch and family time with our little bun.  Anyhow, commercial cut flowers are bad for the environment.

Here’s what it looks like in my back yard right now:

The snow is supposed to get heavier here this afternoon before it lets up.  I already shoveled a couple inches off the walks this morning, and I suppose I’ll have more to do when I get home.  Man, that’s a good workout.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Leah when she was carrying Ava:

Aside from always being a bit envious of photogenic people, I just love how Leah glows here. Since I’ve never figured out exactly how the whole month-counting thing works, I’ll simply say that this picture was taken April 2004 (Ava was born in September ’04).

When I look at this picture now, I imagine Ava 13 years from now, lying on her bed with her friends and looking at old pictures on a laptop (or whatever kids are using a decade from now to view pictures). They’ll come to this picture, and all Ava’s friends will say, “Wow, your mother was so beautiful!” As beautiful as Leah remains, it’s a bit sad that Ava didn’t know her mother then. I only hope she understands that all that beauty she sees on her mother’s outside was due to all the beauty her mother felt inside.

Finally, a reason to not delete my Yahoo! ID.  Pipes.

For people who browse, this is huge.  FYI:  That’s you.

Ava’s home sick today with a virus that’s seemingly everywhere right now.  So she’d been in our bed since about midnight last night, which isn’t great, but it’s not the worst thing in the world.

But it throws things off a bit.  I’d just hopped out of bed this morning when the carbon monoxide alarm in our room started going off.  Great.  Last time this happened, the fire department showed up, lights blazing, and five firemen strolled into the house to tell us to open our windows and not cook on the stove for five hours at a time.  I envisioned a similar scenario unfolding this morning, and I needed to get to work to get a couple things done before I came home to do my afternoon shift with Ava.  It turned out OK.  A couple guys showed up and said they didn’t get a bad reading, and that our detector was probably going bad.  I can deal with that.

Leah took Ava to the doctor’s office this morning to learn that she doesn’t have a red throat (she’s coughing a lot), but she does have a bit of a fever and is a tad out of sorts.  I’m hoping I can get her down for a nap this afternoon.

We’re in the market for a new database at work, so we’ve had vendors coming in to give three-day demos of their software. I won’t name any names, but the first group was really top notch. All of the presenters really knew their stuff, and they were polished and professional, but not aloof. Their product looked good, and they made it fairly easy to understand.
The latest group, well, they’re another story. I was really getting into watching the first group present, and I was looking forward to seeing what they were going to show us next. I’m dreading going into the next presention from the current group. They don’t appear to know their product as well, and frankly, their software doesn’t seem as good a fit for us as the first vendor’s did. I feel kind of bad for these latest folks, not knowing what they’re up against.

Today seemed like a good day for this particular blast from the past:

Thing is, I can’t tell for sure if that’s me or my brother my mom’s holding there. I’m fairly certain it’s me, but the face looks a litte more round than mine.

Anyway, it looks even snowier in that picture than it does here today. We’ve had a couple inches already this morning, and “they” say we might get as many as six inches by this evening. Ava helped me shovel the porch this morning, and I left her at daycare with the promise that she could help me shovel when we get home. I wonder how well she’d take to a snowblower….

EDIT:  Mom confirms it is indeed me.  Scott’s percolating away under that big coat of hers.

We enrolled Ava in Kindermusik when she was barely old enough to hold a rattle. She really loved it. Once she figured out how to walk, she got even more enjoyment from running around the classroom, jumping and clapping and twirling. It was interesting to watch her interact with music.

Ava’s become more physical now, and while she still loves to dance (this morning she took great pleasure in showing us a new dance she’d come up with after she’d practiced it for a while in front of the mirror in the living room…no musical accompaniment other than whatever she was hearing in her head). And she loves to salsa dance with her Aunt Rachel. So we decided this winter to get her involved in something a little more strenuous. Enter gymnastics. Now, Saturday mornings, we go meet Ava’s friend Nora at a local gym for 30 minutes of romping around on pads, trampolines, and big chunks of foam in a pit. Ava always tells us the trampolines are her favorite, but gosh it’s hard to get her out of the foam pit; the bigger you are, the more difficult it is to move around in there.

Nora is clearly ahead of Ava in coordination and physicality. She’s very adventurous when it comes to jumping off things, and she’ll just hop right up and run off without a peep if she happens to fall down. Ava’s a bit more…reserved. I’d like to see her become more confident in her abilities, and I’m hoping gymnastics will give her that. It could be that sport turns out not to be her thing, which is fine. The world doesn’t need another Mary Lou Retton (though ML does have a million-watt smile).

Welcome to the 21st Century’s equivalent of the shoebox full of photos:

This is an image of the widget that shows me the status of my RAID, which is where I’ve stored digital copies of every single movie and picture I’ve taken in the last three years (and some pictures from long before that). It’s smaller than a shoebox, but it weighs more. And it has a fan, which shoeboxes don’t typically have. And it holds thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures, which is another thing it has over its pressed-paper predecessor.

I love to look at the Moon with Ava.

Some months ago, when the weather was warm and the light stayed in the evening sky past bed time, I was out in the front yard with Ava, she in my arms, looking at the full Moon as it crawled up over the treetops. I told her it was important to stop and look at a full Moon whenever she saw one, because they don’t come along every day. She said it was beautiful (because she’d heard me call it beautiful), and I looked over at her face, which was bathed in that gentle white light that only comes from the Moon. She was beautiful. Ava didn’t look at me, she only kept gazing up into the sky.

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Today would be a good day to be included among my family and friends at flickr. Night before last I uploaded a passel of maternity shots of Leah. Some are professional shots; some are from the baby showers she had. Others are just casual shots taken day to day as we watched her belly grow.

I can’t recall who took this shot. Obviously, it’s from one of the professional photographers Leah engaged to record this moment in her life.  Here’s a link to the set.

A maven is someone who is experienced or knowledgeable.  Given the title of this post, I suppose it goes without saying that the contents of this flickr set exhibit the telltale signs of a Photoshop maven at work.  Some quick background…

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Anyone unfamiliar with the quote in the subject line of this post really, really needs to go check out The Young Ones (now on DVD!).  But I digress.

I’ve been backing up all the video I have sitting around on MiniDV tapes to my NAS.  It’s been great going back over all the stuff I’ve captured the last couple years, and it’ll be handy to have it all in one place, especially when the fabled HTPC is up and running and we can pull the videos right up off the server anytime we want to view them on the TV.

Ava’s been having fun looking at the video, too.  She loves to watch movies of herself as a baby.  And also of her dancing.  I think it’ll be nice for her to have this documentation to look back on when she’s older.  Seems to me there’s something very informative — grounding, I guess — about looking at yourself as a child and trying to understand how you got from there to here.

grouse about how long Leah spends in front of the mirror, so long as she keeps her legs.

Just weird.

With all this talk lately of possibly moving to a new house, I’ve been thinking occasionally of the house in which I grew up. It’d be great if Leah and I could give Ava the kind of experience I had, but, then, maybe Ava wouldn’t have any interest in playing in the mud every day.

I’m pretty sure that’s me there in the red shirt. My brother Scott is in the yellow and brown shirt just behind me. I guess this picture was probably taken in the summer of 1976. This horse and rider are standing at the fence that separated our back yard (and, in fact, the eastern limits of Iowa City) from the farm land beyond.

I wish I had video from those days, if only of my shoes kicking through the long sweet grass as I walked down to the creek.

And speaking of dogs (trust me, non-registered users, I was just speaking of dogs), here’s a shot of me, my mom, my brother, and our first dog, Zipper, taken sometime around…oh boy…uh, ’77?

Zipper got her name from being really fast. She’d zip all over our back yard and hop the short fence between our property and the creekside behind our house. Even in this picture it appears we’re trying to restrain her from taking off, as if she’d blast away from us if we were to loosen our grip even for a second.

So, I have this thing I do with Ava once in a while where I hold her really close and whisper, “Do you want to hear a secret?”  Then she whispers back, “Yes.”  And I say, “I love you.  Don’t tell!”

So, this morning we’re all lying in bed together, just starting to wake up.  Ava’s in the middle of the bed.  She rolls over, drapes her arm across my neck, and says, “Wanna hear a secret?”  “Yes,” I reply.  “I love you,” she whispers.  It was super sweet.

Then she rolled over to Leah and said, “Wanna hear a secret?”  “Yes,” Leah said, eagerly, impatient to get herself some of that first-of-the-a.m. sugar.  “I like doggies and kitties,” Ava whispered.