avablog

Our little monkey has an ear infection.  It caught us by surprise, as she’s barely had so much as a sniffle since she got her tubes put in last year.  But a couple days ago Ava started having some serious discomfort when she’d lie down.  She’d cry and stiffen up and grab at her right cheek; it was painful to watch.  We took her to the doctor yesterday, and he confirmed that one of Ava’s tubes had become clogged.

So now we have her on ear drops and an oral antibiotic.  I stayed home with her yesterday afternoon, and Leah’s home with her this morning.  I’ll do another afternoon shift today.  Ava seems much better now.  She had a good sleep last night, and when I left the house this morning, she was deeply involved in her Little Miss Tiny book.  If it warms up at all this afternoon, maybe we can get out for a walk.

You might notice some changes over in the menu on the right. Aside from some shuffling around, I changed the search function a bit to use a Google custom search, which is part of Google Co-op. The custom search is cool because it lets me build a custom search database that contains only the sites I select. For example, I could have it search only nicheplayer.net. The way I have it set up now, entering a search term in the box will kick you to a results page that includes results from the entire Web, with hits from nicheplayer.net having priority.

I’ve added what Google calls a “refinement” on the results page that you can click to get results only from nicheplayer.net.  Here’s what it looks like:

I can add any number of refinements.  Granted, I don’t even have one year’s worth of posts to search, but this sure is a quick way to get a really nice, easy-to-understand search function embedded into my site.  So what if Google gets to track all the searches?  You think they’re going to see something they don’t already know?

Yesterday we carved pumpkins. Well, I carved pumpkins. Leah took pictures, and Ava ran around with a big spoon. This afternoon Ava will come to our office at 4 for the building trick or treating. She’ll be dressed up in her giraffe costume, which is a loaner from one of Leah’s friends. Luckily, Ava likes the costume and doesn’t mind wearing it. I’m hearing that at least one of our friends is not having the same luck with a costume she bought on eBay for her son. Ouch.

As my faithful readers already know, last night Leah and I went to a 9 p.m. showing of Marty Scorcese‘s The Departed.

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I try not to do this too often, but this is just too good to pass up.  I love The Outsiders, Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket, and bad acting, so of course I love this, too.

We just got done with our tailgate party here at work. Someone came up with the idea of having a tailgate party for every home football game, which entails certain departments banding together to bring lots and lots of food. Then we all get together at 10 somewhere in the building and chow down.

I made a crock pot full of white chili, which went fast. There was a ton of good food (another person in my department makes a cornbread with jalapeños and corn that is to die for).

I think the football team has three home games in a row now, so I won’t be needing lunch on a Friday for quite some time.

I’m fairly excited about the weekend. First off, Leah and I are going to see The Departed on Saturday night. If it’s half as good as I’m expecting it to be, I’ll have a good time.

But I’m really looking forward to working a couple “old” computers. One is an Apple iMac 400MHz DV SE, which is a machine I bought in 1999 and sold a couple years ago to a friend. I’ll be reinstalling OS X Panther on that and possibly opening up the case to clean things out a bit (it’s amazing how much less dust gets into computers when there’s no cooling fan to bring it in).

Next, I’ll upgrade the RAM and install Panther on an Apple iBook 366MHz SE. Unfortunately, this is the last of the non-Firewire iBooks. I’m eager to see how this old hardware handles Panther. I’ve already seen OS X on the iMac, and it works amazingly well. Panther on the iBook is going to be a stretch, but as the machine is used only for e-mail and Web browsing, it should carry the load all right.

I wonder if Ava will be into this stuff, or if computing in her world will be so much different that the only thing to get excited about will be the aesthetics. When I read stuff like this, it lights a fire under me; will it pique her interest at all? Maybe she’ll grow up to be a geek.

The guy who did the presentation at our conference yesterday was a younger fellow who works as a consultant. He told us a couple times how much time he spends on the road going from place to place across the country and how much extra work he does before and after “regular” work hours (his firm has 6:30 a.m. conference calls with the partners so they don’t have to take up time during the work day).

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This is the view that greeted us when we got out of the car at Briar Cliff this morning. Really quite pretty. From what I could tell, this is about as good as Sioux City ever looks.

Oh, and here’s our rental car:

This is apparently what Enterprise is handing out for a “standard” model these days. Man, are these things cheaply made.

I’m off to a conference in Sioux City today at noon.  It’s tomorrow, actually, for half the day.  So we’ll drive for five hours this afternoon, eat dinner at Famous Dave’s in Sioux City, then listen to a vendor tell us about data mining tomorrow.  We’ll leave at 3:30 or so tomorrow and drive like the wind to get home.

Five hours.  Whew.  That’s farther than Madison or Chicago by two hours.  On the other hand, I don’t get to that part of the state very often at all, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s going on out there.  I’m taking a camera along, and with any luck I’ll get some interesting(?) shots to share on my return.

I love making this dish this time of year.  Accompanied by mashed sweet potato, it’s a really, really nice meal.  No doubt those of you out there with more culinary imagination than I posses can come up with more exciting sides.

Turkey Meatloaf

5 slices of firm bread
1 TB oil
1 onion chopped
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp fresh chopped basil
1 tsp pepper
1- 10 oz pkg frozen chopped spinach thawed
2 tsp lemon juice
2 lbs ground turkey meat (prefer ground breast if possible)
1/2 cup dark raisins
(optional: 1/2 cup ketchup, 2 TB melted butter)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Heat oil in a fry pan on medium and saute onion until tender. At the same time, break the bread into crumbs with your fingers. After onion is soft, remove from heat and set aside. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs with the milk, salt and pepper and basil.  Then mix in the bread, onion, turkey, spinach and lemon juice. Mix well with your hands. Add in the raisins as well. Turn mixture into a bake dish that has been greased. For color, you may choose to brush the top of the loaf with the ketchup but it has an intriguing look as it is. Bake for 30 minutes, then baste with the butter. Continue to bake for an additional 30-35 minutes, basting occasionally (I’ve always ended up cooking this for closer to two hours, so plan accordingly –ed.). Serves 6-8.

Here’s a link to a photoset with all the pictures we have so far of our addition plans. Meeting with the builder yesterday really made it seem like this is going to happen. I’m not sure how much that feeling will get quashed when we meet with the banker again. In any case, I’ve made a new category here on the blog for the house, so it must be pretty official…right?

I was home this morning to meet with the architect and the builder for the addition we’re talking about for our house. They’re both great guys, and, fortunately, they seemed to get along well. So far, everyone is on the same page, literally and figuratively, when looking at the proposed plans.

We have a preliminary, ballpark figure for what we’ll likely spend on the construction, and it’s a healthy number. Once the builder gets a better look at the design drawings, he’ll be able to give us a more realistic estimate of our final costs. In any case, it’s not inexpensive. But we love our house. And we love our neighborhood. The design the architect has proposed is not in any way ostentatious; it gets us “only” an additional bedroom, bath, and some closet space. It’s a nice design, and I hope to get some pictures of it up for your review in the next 24 hours or so.

You ever have one of those days when everything you see looks like a picture?  Like every scene appears framed, with perfect light?  I don’t know if it’s the flat gray light outside today, or that I just finished reading a review of Canon’s latest DSLR.  Whatever the reason, today has me thinking that I’m not taking enough pictures recently.

Last night I imported all the pictures on my HDD into iPhoto.  There are over 10 thousand of them going back to when I was born, and beyond.  I have to get busy tagging and organizing, pronto.

I miss having time to walk through the world with an eye toward the photographic.  Weekday mornings are pretty hectic, else I’d take the 30 minutes required to walk into work and collect some shots then.  Weekend mornings are more laid back, and I do manage to get some pictures then, but it’d be great to get out on my own for a couple hours and just fill my CF card.

Fall is a great time to take pictures around here, and not because the trees become so brilliant (though that’s a good reason).  I love taking pictures of waning things, things that are spent, used up.  Their lines and wrinkles and bends evoke a consideration of where they’ve been.  From a purely aesthetic view, there’s a lot more for the light to work with on.  Por ejemplo.  It’s not that I don’t like photographing things in bloom; the dead and dying things are just more fulfilling.

We had dinner this past Friday at Simone’s, again. If only I had the money to eat there every weekend. It was fantastic. Here’s the menu:

As Hors d’oeuvres: Zelook – a dip with Eggplant & Tomatoes- and an assortment of little salads.
Served with Moroccan bread

Harbel – a Soup with whole wheat grain

a Tajine of Chicken with Apricots & Pine nuts, served with Seffa – a sweet couscous

Kasksou hamra – a red Couscous with Pumpkin, Carrots, Chickpeas… (For 3 Vegetarians)

an Orange Salad, flavored with rose water

Knaffa – a sweet Bisteeya – a flaky pie

Green Tea with fresh mint, served in the traditional manner

Pictured here is a slice of the knaffa, which was amazingly tasty. Bisteeya traditionally has chicken or pigeon in it, but this version only had nuts, figs, and lots of creamy topping.

We ate inside this time, since it was too chilly and dark for the screen porch. But it was a great group, and there was plenty of wine, so any disappointment we had at being indoors lasted only seconds.

I found out today that a kid I went to high school with, and whom I’d seen now and again since we graduated, killed himself two days ago.

This is actually the second death of a classmate I’ve learned of in as many months.  The first one succumbed to a long bout of alcohol abuse, apparently.  This latest death was a more blatant suicide, which is sad in and of itself.  But it becomes unbearably sad when you learn he leaves four children behind, including seven-month-old twins.

When I was in high school, I had a friend who was suicidal for a while after his girlfriend killed herself by driving her car into a tree (he’d gone to her house to see her and was greeted by the police, who asked him to come identify what was left of the body).  I didn’t have any idea what he was going through, or what he’d been through.  And I couldn’t understand the depth of his despair.  Likewise, I don’t have any clue what was going on in the life of this most recent suicide.  But I do have a very, very faint inkling of just how miserable, or deluded, or sick he would have had to have been to want to never see his children again.  It’s difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which Ava would be better off without me in the world.  More accurately, it’s difficult to imagine never seeing her again, and it’s impossible to understand why I would ever want to put Ava through the forever pain of dealing with the fact that I’d decided to end my life rather than be with her.

Occasions like this remind me how savage and cruel life can be.

Well, you hear rumors about how bathroom-centric your world becomes when you have a kid, but like everything else about having a kid, you don’t really get it until you live it.

Ava’s on a roll with her potty training.  It seems like we’ve rounded a bend in terms of getting her to think about using the potty at certain times (after breakfast, before bed, etc.).  Actually, this has all seemed pretty easy.  Most everything we’d heard and read said not to attach a lot of pressure to this process, so we haven’t.  We figured Ava would take to the potty when she was ready, and it looks like she’s ready.

Whether this trend will last is unknown.  We do make a big deal out of those times when she does successfully go to the bathroom, and she does seem to enjoy all the attention (not to mention the stickers she gets for her “potty sheet” on the fridge).  Still no #2, but I assume that’s coming up….

It snowed yesterday.  SNOWED!  October 11.  Well, I don’t know if a meteorologist would call what fell from the sky snow, but it was white, and it didn’t look like sleet.

And I suppose Iowans, by nature, are always ready for this weather, especially in the fall.  Spring’s the same way.  Cold, windy, and gray one day, sunny and hot the next.  Summers are just full of long, steamy days, and winters are simply short blips of freezing, clear sunlight between long stretches of still, numbing darkness.

Word is we’re in for a mild winter this year.  I hope that’s true.  It would be nice, however, if we got a couple heavy snowfalls, just so Ava gets a good taste of the white stuff.  What’s a childhood without snow?  I’ve never understood these Californians…

when your two-year-old tells you to “shoo” because “I don’t love you anymore,” and that you should “go away.”

Kids.  What’re you gonna do?

Well, here she is:

Different father, different mother, same first and last name as our daughter. I mean, it’s not like we named our little girl Jane Smith, for crying out loud. Oh well.

Hopefully Ava2 won’t grow up to be a serial killer or some other notorious figure (our Ava, of course, will be the shining example of wisdom, beauty, and good, without doubt). Oh, all right. I’m sure Ava2 will be (nearly) as sweet as our Ava.