avablog

Leah and I have been doing a lot of talking lately about Christmas and tradition as we’ve ironed out the details of our holiday travel plans. My family really doesn’t have any well-established holiday plans right now, though I’m working to change that.

My parents and brother and I used to travel down to Burlington, IA every Christmas to visit my two sets of grandparents. Those trips were always filled with classic holiday memories: Huge family meals; attending the candlelight service at the Congregational Church; and of course opening presents.

It’s interesting to try to understand why the mind retains what it does from those times. One of my most vivid memories — perhaps really a generalized memory — is of the candy my father’s father used to keep in the bowls near his recliner in their family room. Grandpa was a fixture in that chair at Thanksgiving and Christmas, with his brown cardigan and brown slacks. He was funny, and affectionate, and his sweater always smelled of pipe smoke and anis. He’d sit in his chair and smile while my brother and I dashed around the house, reaching into the white glass bowl next to his chair now and then to pop another black licorice button into his mouth.

The other confection that always seemed to be around were these small pieces of hard candy that had colorful ribbons running through them. I never saw this candy anywhere but my grandparents’ house (in fact, I haven’t seen it for years now), which lent it a mysterious quality beyond its exotic appearance. This wasn’t the type of sweet we’d find sitting alongside the Baby Ruth, Bubble Yum, or Jolly Ranchers at 7-11. It seemed like candy for adults. And because I only saw it once a year at Christmas, it became forever tied with celebration and grandparents and white glass bowls and warm hugs from funny old men wearing scratchy brown sweaters. One of my jobs now is to see that my daughter creates memories like these for herself.

Got up late because little Ava was tossing and turning most of the night with what Leah thinks is croup. Looked out the window to discover three to four inches of snow on the ground, so I threw on some clothes and stumbled outside.

I gave the electric starter on the snowblower a shot, but either it’d been sitting idle too long over the summer or was out of gas, ’cause it wasn’t going anywhere. So I grabbed the nearest shovel and started digging. Ava and Leah sat in the window and watched me work for 30 minutes, which is as long as it took me to dig us out.

As I type this, the sun is shining, which I hope means what little snow I didn’t have time to move this morning will melt by noon. The snow’s a bit of a pain, but it sure is pretty.

One of my favorite things to cook is bolognese sauce. I was turned on to it by my friend Marcia, who passed me a copy of Marcella Hazan’s recipe.

The recipe is very simple. And like so many things in life, the more time you put into it, the better it turns out.

The first step is to to finely chop one stalk of celery, one carrot, and one half onion (I used a whole small one in this latest batch). Then cook the veggies in three tablespoons of melted butter and one tablespoon of olive oil until they’re soft.

Once that’s done, add a pound of ground beef with a healthy pinch of kosher salt and cook the meat until the pink is gone. This latest batch featured a pound of my spiced pork sausage at this stage in place of the ground beef. I was a little worried that the spice in the sausage would throw off the other flavors in the sauce, but it actually turned out quite well.

Once the meat is cooked down, it’s time to throw in a cup of whole milk. Marcia notes here that she often uses skim, as it’s generally what she has on hand. With the baby in the house, we always have whole milk around, so I used that. Bring the sauce to a good simmer and cook until the milk is gone.

As soon as the milk is cooked off, add a grating of fresh nutmeg (a pinch of dry) and one cup of dry white wine. I used extra dry vermouth this time. Just like the previous step, simmer the sauce now until the alcohol is burned off.

If you’re like me, you may wonder to yourself, “but just how long does it take for the alcohol to burn off? Turns out we’re not the first people to ask ourselves that question, and the answer isn’t as apparent as you might think. I just simmered the sauce until the liquid was cooked off almost completely, about 20 to 25 minutes.

Now for the patient part. Open up a 28 oz. can of diced or crushed tomatoes (or even whole, peeled plum tomatoes and crush them up with your hands) and empty it into the pan. Turn the heat down about as low as it’ll go and let the sauce simmer very gently for as long as possible. You could eat it at this stage, but the longer you simmer it, the fuller the flavor becomes. I was able to get a full three hours of simmering in, which makes the sauce incredibly rich.

When you’re ready to eat serve up the sauce over some al dente whole wheat pasta and grate some reggiano on top.

The rest of our meal was made up of a spinach salad with chopped ripe olives, a simple oil and raspberry vinegar dressing, and croutons I made with some old light rye bread baked to a crisp with some olive oil, sea salt, pepper, and celery salt. They turned out really well (I love croutons), and I’ve got some left over to serve with the homemade chicken noodle soup I’m going to cook tomorrow. That recipe is even easier than the bolognese, so I doubt I’ll get any pictures of that prep.

The meals are stacking up fast and furious heading into the holidays. It’s a bit daunting to think of all the things I’ll be cooking between now and January 1, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun.

Recently I made my first batch of chicken stock using the remains of a chicken I baked to have around for meat. It turned out pretty well. I turned around and used the stock (technically, I guess, it was a broth) for a batch of sausage barley soup with cabbage. Now that’s comfort food. I also have a couple pork chops w/ sauerkraut that I need to finish up ASAP.

It’s difficult to imagine getting any of this done without a crockpot. My SmartPot has got to be one of the best investments I’ve made in the last five years. For example, the barley soup I made would’ve taken a lot more of my attention had I not been able to throw all the ingredients into the SmartPot and let it cook while I was at work. If you have information that crockpots cause cancer, I don’t want to hear about it. And I doubt I’d stop cooking with it even if I knew. It’s just too handy.

Next up for my trusty crock is a batch of squash bisque with bourbon. Also on deck is another go at Marcella Hazan’s bolognese, which is not only delicious but very comforting to make. Play Le nozze di Figaro real loud and just spend a couple hours knocking around the kitchen.

You may have noticed the small block of ad links over there on the right side of the page. The idea is that the thousands of people who visit this blog will click on links to ads for potato casserole, and I’ll subsequently become rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Here’s how it works. Every time you click on one of those links and follow it through to an ad, I get something like $.0005. It’s silly, really, on a site like this, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway. The webcrawlers from Google will run over this site every day and look for terms like “iPod” or “DVR” or “Chirstmas gift” or “Canon S2 IS.” For example. Google then matches the links on the right to match the terms contained in the blog.

I chose the least-intrusive ad format I could, and Google even had a color scheme that matches nicheplayer pretty closely (I could modify it further if I wanted to, but I’m just too lazy).

With as much traffic as I have here, I expect to receive my first $100 check from Google about the time I retire in 30 years.

Well, it’s not sticking to the ground. In fact there are hardly any flakes at all; the sky is filled mostly with rain. But every now and then you can see a small streak of white go by.

I wonder how Ava’s going to like the snow this year. She was a bit small to appreciate it last year, but she should be walking strongly enough by the time there’s real snow on the ground to get the full effect. Maybe we can even go sledding somewhere. She loves to read her book about Corduroy having a snow day, especially the page where he goes sledding.

Fall in Iowa is hard to beat. Actually, the entire upper Midwest is a visual wonderland in October. Even on those occasional gray, soggy days when the clouds seem 10 feet off the ground, the dull browns and golds of the farm fields spread out for miles like richly hued wool rugs.

Bright, sunny days with baby blue skies, and the high cirrus clouds are chalky smears among the contrails. Orange, yellow, and red bursts of Maple punctuate that backdrop like great leafy fireworks set off too close to the ground. Rays of sunlight penetrate these translucent canopies and become trapped, endlessly reflecting and ricocheting until every single leaf glows.

The chill morning air fills each last pore in your lungs and spreads out through your body to the tips of your fingers and toes. From the top of even a modest hill you can see almost to the end of the world.

Spring, summer, and winter each hold their own delights. But fall seems that much more grand because it’s a last gasp before the cold, barren months of December, January, and February. Midwesterners walk about on those rare warm November days with a little less purpose than they might otherwise. There’s a feeling that this day of clarity and warmth and light may be the last one we see for a while. Fill your lungs with that air. Let the sun hit your skin and soak into your bones. Feast your eyes on the failing shrouds of sienna and ochre before the Oaks let go their cover for another year.

It doesn’t seem possible we’re coming up on another Thanksgiving already. Why should the presence of a baby suddenly make time accelerate so drastically? Anyway.

The schedule for this year is going to be the same as last. Wednesday I’ll roast a turkey and make a sweet potato dish with a streusel topping that was featured in the latest Cook’s Illustrated. Dad’ll bring a potato dish and green bean casserole. Mom’s going to bring a pie. Dunno what Scott’s going to bring. Wine, maybe. I’ll also pick up some dressing from Hy Vee, unless I get really crazy and try to make my own. It promises to be a nice dinner.

On Thursday morning we’ll trek to Leah’s hometown and have our second Thanksgiving meal. I’m going to take along a squash bisque with bourbon. I’ve never tried that, but the recipe sounds great.

I anticipate that after Thursday I won’t have to eat again until sometime in early 2006.

Halloween just ain’t what it used to be. It’d be great to have the kind of time I used to have to put together a nice elaborate costume, but that just isn’t going to happen these days.

The good news is that we only live a couple blocks from one of the greatest stores ever: Walgreens. That place has everything. For about $8 I walked out of there yesterday with a hat with fake hair attached and a rubber mask depicting some dead biker. The ensemble was a big hit with Ava, who didn’t appear to be scared of it at all. There were a couple kids at the trick-or-treat function at our office yesterday, however, who were downright terrified of it. Must be the cigarette. We’ll see how the kids who come to the door on Monday take to it, if we get any kids at the door.

I’ve always enjoyed Webcams. No, no, not THOSE Webcams. Just regular ol’ Webcams pointed at stuff like cubicles or busy intersections or someone’s Halloween decorations. They’re a great combination of technology and voyeurism.

I bought an iSight camera not too long after they were introduced. At the time, I wasn’t sure of much more than that the iSight was a really sweet piece of kit, but I figured that I’d find a use for it sooner or later. I had visions of Ava’s far-flung relatives tuning in online to watch her first steps or hear her first words.

Well, even though it’s 2005, some of Ava’s relatives aren’t quite up to speed enough to be able to enjoy full-frame streaming video and audio — hell, my Internet connection would probably choke trying to serve the stream anyway. Not wanting to just let the iSight sit on my desk unused, I decided to set up a Webcam. I picked up a nice little app called EvoCam that does all the camera control and even includes its own Web server.

Right now I have the camera pointing out into the back yard and taking a snapshot every 15 seconds. EvoCam gives me the option of archiving all these images and even making a time-lapse movie out of the files. I’ve not gone that far yet, but it’s tempting. As it stands, EvoCam uploads its snapshots (up to 100) into my Web server’s document root, where I can then grab them to link from the Webcam page.

Another option is to install EvoCam on the iBook and connect the iSight to that computer somewhere in the front of the house while I’m at work. It would be fun to watch the comings and goings in the ‘hood, maybe even keep track of the construction progress (or lack thereof) across the street. I could easily set the iBook to upload the snapshots to the same directory on the server via its wireless connection. Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow, if I’m permitted to work on the computer at all this evening.

I’m not the most popular guy in the world (couldn’t guess from all the comments on the blog, eh?). It’s one thing to know that and to have fully internalized every aspect of that reality.

But it’s another thing to have my Gmail account constantly slapping me in the face with these 100 invites. “Send Invite” (100 left)

I know! I know, already! After I sent out invites to every single person I could think of who might want one, I started dumping them at the Gmail invite spooler, which seemed a great way to share the love with strangers. But now Google’s come along and shut that down, so I’m stuck with 1oo invites and the constant reminder that my group of friends does, indeed, have boundaries after all.

From today’s news:

A woman who said she heard voices in her head tossed her three young children off a pier into the San Francisco Bay, authorities said. Rescuers had found one body, and the other two children were feared dead.

The mother, Lashaun Harris, 23, of Oakland, was booked on three counts of murder, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in Thursday’s editions. Her children were identified as Trayshaun Harris, 6, Travante Greely, 3, and Joshua Harris, 1.

All the violent, bloody video games I’ve played and the hundreds of hours of brutal, sickening movies I’ve watched, and I sit here at 35 years old and am shaken to my gut by this story. Is it because the story involves children? Is it because their mother has done this to them? Where’s all the indifference I’m supposed to be feeling by now? Where is that blessed unemotional reaction I wish I could have?

The lesser tragedy in all this is that civilized law has no satisfactory way to deal with the actions of a broken human being. A lifetime in jail or a death sentence are meaningless in this situation; the mother is unable to comprehend either punishment.

Of course I assume she’s insane. It’s easier. I don’t want to think about a woman who would knowingly and willfully strip the clothes from and then drown her three young children in broad daylight. That’s just too monstrous. I know people do worse things to children every day, but that knowledge doesn’t make dealing with news like this any easier.

The Seagate HD I ordered for the ministack arrived yesterday, so I was able to get that installed and running last evening. I moved my g2data directory again, so it now resides on the new drive. Speed seems OK this morning. Tonight I plan to connect my keyboard to the mini so I can restart it in single user mode and run AppleJack on it. I don’t know that that’ll give me any big performance boost, but it’ll be nice to have things cleaned up. The mini, ministack, and another external FW drive are sitting on top of my PC enclosure right now, and I’m thinking that’s a fine place for them.

Two nights ago there was a gorgeous full moon. Leah and I were just getting Ava ready for bed when I happened to catch a glimpse of this big bright orb hanging outside the window. I grabbed my camera and ran up to the campus of the high school where I could get an open shot. Alas, the A70 — for all its great features — really isn’t equipped with a zoom that will get a good picture of even a really, really big moon. I didn’t want to waste the run I’d made in my GAP flip flops, so I decided to try out an idea I’d seen in a flickr photo set.

The idea is to set a long exposure and then throw your camera up in the air. “Camera toss.” Inventive name, no? Anyway, the HS campus was a perfect place for a toss, as there are lots of lights, but not a lot of ambient light. You end up with a lot of nice distinct light streaks of different colors, lengths, and thicknesses. For the shot shown here, I set the A70 for a two-second exposure and gave it a good throw, spinning it as it left my hand.

On the first couple tosses, the camera landed back in my hands hard enough that it powered off with the lens extended. For a couple seconds I thought I’d finally reached the point where I’d need a new camera, but a power cycle brought everything back to normal (except for the image I tried to get, which never made it to the CF card). This relationship with the A70 is really becoming a battle of wills. I had been thinking of replacing it before it gave out, but now I’m more inclined to see just how many images I can squeeze out of the thing before it simply dies, huffing and wheezing, in my hands.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to serve images to the blog now that I’m running Gallery2, which stores its sized images in .dat files rather than as scaled jpegs. I think I’ve figured out a method. So, here goes.

The downside is that the images aren’t stored locally, although I do have copies of them on my server. This shouldn’t end up being much of a problem.

This is a picture of the trail at Squire Point from this past weekend. Leah and I took Ava out there for a stroll, and clearly it was a gorgeous day. I think the trees are going to be closer to peaking this weekend, but I don’t think the weather’s supposed to be as nice. This was one of those days when you could point the camera in any direction and fire off great shot after great shot. Ava really seemed to love being out there, and it helped that there were a couple people walking dogs around.

At the end of the walk Ava was eager to get out of her backpack and walk around a bit herself, so we got some nice video of her staggering about. She should be ready to toddle off on her own here before long.

Leah’s been beefing about the performance of the gallery since nicheplayer was moved over to the mini. From what I can determine, the slowdown is probably twofold. First, Gallery2 is a bit of a pig. It’s just slower than the 1.x versions. Second, the mini has a notebook drive in it, which runs at 5400RPM. That’s compared to the 7200RPM, 8MB buffer drive in the Cube. I’m going to try moving my g2data directory over to an external FW drive and see if that speeds things up at all. According to this /. story, people are seeing performance increases upwards of 75%. That would be nice.

Update: Well, I moved the g2data folder onto my external drive, and it doesn’t seem to have improved things much. In fact it may have even made things worse. Even the blog is loading more slowly today than it has in the past. Dare I find a 7200RPM notebook drive and install that in the mini? I hope it doesn’t have to come to that.

Marcia made these this past weekend; they sound great.

Time: 30 minutes

1¾ cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup sugar
½ cup (packed) plus 2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2/3 cup sour cream
½ cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon honey
2 large eggs
1½ cups peeled, cored and finely diced (about ¼-inch) pears.

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with muffin papers. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, white sugar, ½ cup brown sugar and the ground ginger.

2. In a large measuring pitcher or bowl, whisk together the sour cream, oil, honey and eggs. Pour into the dry ingredients and fold together just until mixed. Add pears and fold again to mix.

3. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups. Sprinkle each with ½ teaspoon brown sugar. Bake until risen and firm, about 20 minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool. Serve while still a little warm.

Yield: 12 muffins.

These would no doubt go really well with the crockpot pork chops I’m going to try.

I finally let my .Mac membership expire. Really, I never used my .mac e-mail address anymore, which was the only real benefit to the service for me. Now that I’m hosting all my sites and calendars from the mini, there’s no point in shelling out $100/yr for .Mac.

Letting go, however, hasn’t been as easy as I’d hoped. The day before my account expired, I downloaded the contents of my iDisk to the mini. There are a lot of files, so I let the copy job run overnight. The next day my account expired, but I was still connected to my iDisk. And now I can’t seem to disconnect from it. It doesn’t show up in the Finder, but it does appear in Volumes/ on the command line. sudo umount iDisk/ gives me a “Resource busy” error, and I can’t kill the mirroragent process. I suppose a restart might fix it, but I hate to do that for something that should be easily resolved in some other way.

Update: Kevin got me through it, as usual. Turns out I needed to add the -f option to my umount command, which forced the disk to unmount. TTYL, iDisk! Or not!

I just sold my Cube last night on eBay. The auction price jumped $90 in the last 30 seconds, which is always a welcome turn of events when you’re a seller.

As I was getting the Cube backed up and ready for sale, I was looking for information on how to give a buyer that “first-time-out-of-the-box” experience when starting the Cube. Well, the computer is all packed up and ready to ship now, which means of course that I would find just the information I was looking for. It goes a little something like this:

1. Set up the Mac as you want it (install apps, etc.)
2. Reboot into single-user mode (reboot the machine and hold down the command +s keys as soon as you hear the startup sound.)
3. You’ll get dumped into the terminal. Wait for the command prompt to appear and type: mount -uw /
— This mounts the boot volume so you can edit it.
** Be very careful from this point forward.**
4. Type: cd /Users
— Moves into the Users directory
5. Type: rm -rf *
— Deletes all of the User folders (Shared, etc.) in the Users directory. BE VERY CAREFUL with this command – make sure you’re in the Users folder. If you’re not positive, type: pwd – the output should be “/Users”
6. Type: cd /var/db/netinfo
— moves into the directory that contains the account information
7. Type: rm local.nidb
— Clears the netinfo database and all of the existing accounts on the system
8. Type: cd ../
— Moves up one level
9. Type: rm .AppleSetupDone
— Remove the file that tells the OS that setup has already been run – note the period in front of the filename.
10. Type shutdown -h now
— Shuts down the Mac

Now the system will basically be back at its “virgin” state with no existing user accounts or user files. The OS looks for the existence of “.AppleSetupDone,” and if it doesn’t find it, it reruns the entire startup sequence (movie, create user, etc.).

Marcia sent this along today; it sure does look tasty. She suggests I up the onion a little to make up for eliminating the garlic. Maybe “eliminating” isn’t the best word to use in this context….

SQUASH BISQUE WITH MAPLE AND BOURBON
Kurt Friese

Here’s a simple soup that can be made using any winter squash, though I have most commonly used butternut. A Cinderella pumpkin is mighty good too.
Makes about 8 servings

* 2 1/2 pounds butternut (or other) squash, peeled, seeded and diced
* 2 carrots, diced
* 1 onion, peeled and diced
* 1/2 pound red potatoes, washed
* 5 cloves garlic, peeled
* 1 stalk celery, sliced
* 1 bay leaf
* 1 cup bourbon
* 1/2 cup real maple syrup
* Water, to cover
* Salt and cracked black pepper, to taste

1. Simmer all ingredients except bourbon and maple syrup until very tender.
2. Remove bay leaf. Puree and pass through a fine strainer.
3. Return to heat, bring to simmer, and add the bourbon and maple syrup.
4. Season to taste with salt and fresh cracked black pepper.
5. Serve immediately, or cool and store up to 3 days. Freezes well.

I try to get in at least one long-ish bike ride every year. Last summer I rode a 100-mile loop down to Wapello and back. It was fun, but I ran into some bad weather on the way home and got pretty soaked. It was sunny and warm by the time I got home, though.

This year I decided to get some friends together and ride to the Amana Colonies for Oktoberfest. Round trip is 60 miles, and the route goes through some really pretty countryside. The best part, of course, is the artisanal beer waiting once you get to the Millstream Brewery in Amana.

The ride started out looking pretty bleak. Lots of clouds and a little rain just as we departed Iowa City, but by the time we got a couple miles outside of town, the rain stopped and held off for the rest of the ride. Fittingly enough, the clouds even broke just as we got to Amana, so we were able to sit outside under the hops trellis and enjoy a couple pitchers of the brewery’s fantastic Dopplebock. In fact our small group got the last couple pitchers from the last Dopplebock keg, which made it even sweeter. By the time we left, Millstream had also run out of their Oktoberfest brew; that was our sign that it was probably time to leave.

While we drank and ate the wind picked up strongly out of the southwest. Fortunately, our route home was predominantly to the southeast, but there’s an uphill stretch leaving Amana that was straight into the wind, and it was miserable. I pulled the group for the first seven miles on the way home, and it pretty much wiped me out. My legs are still a bit sore today, although the ride to work wasn’t so bad this morning.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get in another ride like that before the snow falls, but it would be nice. This weekend we’re off to Madison to visit Rachel and Kevin, which is a trip I’ve really been looking forward to. Among other things, I need to replenish my New Glarus supply.