Laurabelle’s Blog

Jeff and I went to Article Pract today for a couple of knitting needles, and then we passed by Bakesale Betty. Jeff decided he wanted a chicken pot pie, so I ordered one. We were both tempted by the cookies or lemon bars but abstained.

I was handed a bag containing two boxes. I said, But there are two boxes! The guy said, I know, I put in an apple pie too.

That's some freebie! We figured it may make business sense because it's getting toward the end of the day and maybe they weren't going to sell it anyway. Also, they've gained substantial good will as far as I'm concerned.

The pot pie takes over an hour to cook at home, so we had dessert first. Mmmm, pie.

I tripped, fell, and skinned my knee on the way into work today. I also overstretched a muscle or something in my calf on the same leg. I’m not sure which is worse, the pain (and limping) of the strain or the embarrassment of the skinned knee. I’m twenty-mumble years old, and I thought my skinning days were long over.

A co-worker noted that the day could only go up from there, and he was right.

Yesterday Jeff and I made a rice-and-beans dish called Moors and Christians. I chose it by letting the cookbook (How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman) fall open to a random page; that method seems to have worked out excellently in this case.

Moors and Christians is basically a stew of black beans, bell pepper, onion, and garlic (and optional tomatoes) served with rice pilaf. The recipe doesn't call for any spices, but we added some -- which I now have to write down so I don't forget the next time we make this! We put a bit of saffron in the rice; the beans got cumin, turmeric, and a smidgen of habanero powder for just a little heat. (We actually have measuring spoons labeled smidgen, pinch, and dash, in that order from small to large. The dash is about a quarter of a teaspoon, and the smidgen looks like less than a sixteenth of a teaspoon.) I think next time I will put turmeric and cumin in the rice instead of saffron, and I may cut down on the habanero powder as well. It was not too much this time, but I don't think I would want the beans any hotter.

I created my dæmon on the Golden Compass movie site. Friends, do you think a tiger dæmon is right for me?

Thanksgiving, like most of my fall, was marked by food — as well it should be. It was just Jeff and myself for for our little celebration, since we have no family nearby and friends already had plans. But we put together our own little dinner, with Cornish game hens instead of turkey, because one only needs so much leftovers.

The menu:

• Creamy sweet potato soup
• Glazed, stuffed, roasted rock Cornish hens
• Wild rice and porcini stuffing
• Broccoli gratin
• Bread (store-bought, but from an independent bakery)

Most of the recipes are from the Joy of Cooking, 1990's revision. However, I must recommend the sweet potato soup, which was not from the Joy of Cooking. It's like liquid sweet potato pie.

I am thankful for my husband. I am thankful that we both have good jobs that we enjoy and that let us live comfortably. I am thankful that I have a home to stay and be comfortable in; I am thankful that I am not driving or flying this week.

I didn't take any pictures of our Thanksgiving dinner, unfortunately (the hens did turn out fairly nice-looking), but I do have photos of some of our other gustatory adventures.

At the end of October, I made beef stock and canned it in a new pressure canner. The impetus for the canner was Eatwell Farm's "Tomato Party," an event spurred by a medfly quarantine preventing the farm from distributing its tomatoes and much of their other produce. The tomatoes could not leave the farm while raw, but they were safe if cooked for at least thirty minutes, so they let members come and cook their own tomato sauce on-site. Jeff and I canned ours in boiling water, and it seems to have worked well enough, but our equipment was less than satisfactory.

Then it turned out that the farm's current laying hens are about to stop laying enough to pay for their feed, so the farm is going to get rid of them. Jeff and I are buying five hens, four for stock and one for cooking. We used to freeze chicken stock, but that is inconvenient both because it takes up freezer space and because it has to be melted before use. So I bought a pressure canner, and its first run was with a few jars of beef stock.

If you're wondering what a pressure canner looks like, imagine a big burly aluminum pot with screws to hold the lid down and a pressure gauge on top. It's more or less a very large pressure cooker.

We used the first jar of our very own beef stock earlier this week in French onion soup. Needless to say, it was excellent and much more satisfying than the "beef-flavored stock" I have been buying out of laziness. Honestly, stock isn't very hard. It does take a bit of initial time investment, but it pays off in laziness at the end.

Speaking of Eatwell Farm, I made an amazing omelet a few weeks ago. Well, it probably wasn't as good as a gourmet chef could make, but it was both tasty and beautiful. I generally achieve tastiness to at least some degree, but beauty in my cooking is due more to luck than craft.

All of the major ingredients in this breakfast came from Eatwell Farm (eggs, onion, bell pepper, and potatoes). Technically I think the peppers were grown on another farm due to the quarantine, but they came in our CSA box.

You may have noticed that the menu did not include dessert. This was mostly because we were too tired to make a pie last night, but it was just as well; we got pretty full. Besides, Jeff made me a pumpkin pie for my birthday earlier this month, and we both enjoyed that mightily. Especially Jeff.

Morning: Got up, took a shower. Thought about cooking eggs, but no time. Shuffled groggily out the door to work.

Day: Hacked lots of sticky stuff on a command line, lunch, hacked some more until I ran out of functioning brain cells. Managed to keep myself busy until the end of the day and finish on a high note (promise of a quick-fix problem for a very sweet lady who is effusive with her thank-yous). Am looking forward to the actual thank-yous tomorrow.

Evening: Came home, husband reheated excellent dinner I made yesterday (chili verde and Spanish rice). Didn’t bother heating corn tortillas; they cool off too quickly anyway. Made crust for quiche tomorrow; left mess for husband to clean up with dishes. Compiled 2.6.22 kernel with new nVidia modules; updated software until X started and kdm could actually log me in.

Now, time for bed, maybe a little reading. Norton Critical Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray came today, though I doubt I am much up to reading it tonight.

This weekend Jeff rode in Waves to Wine 2007: 155 miles from San Francisco to Lake Sonoma, biked over two days. I did not ride, but I went along and volunteered.

Jeff left the apartment at 6am in order to get to San Francisco in time for the 6:30am start. I stayed behind and went to work as usual but left at 11am for Sonoma Mountain Village, the overnight stop for Waves to Wine. I had lunch (bean and cheese burrito and an apple) and bummed around waiting for my volunteer shift.

This is where my afternoon started to go downhill. Envious of the people walking around with ice cream sandwiches, I picked one up myself and found that it was unpleasantly cold and hard. (I am used to ice cream sandwiches being nice and soft!) In fact, it was so hard that I broke my lower permanent retainer! I guess it had been going for a while (it was in for ten years), but this was the last straw. Unfortunately, it left a sharp fragment of metal on one tooth, which was pretty painful on my tongue by the time I got home to my dental wax on Sunday.

My volunteer shift in the bike corral started at 3pm. A NMSS staff member was there with me for the first while and then ran off to deal with something else. She came back briefly, then ran off again and never came back. There wasn't really enough work for two people, but I had no one to talk to, it was hot, I was standing around on concrete getting sore, and eventually I really needed to visit a port-o-potty. On the other hand, it was nice to see Jeff right when he rolled in at about 4:30.

Jeff had had a rather more interesting day than I. Back in San Francisco, he turned his head at the wrong time (a co-worker teased him that a really cute biker chick distracted him) and ran straight into a wooden post in the middle of the path. Jeff and his bike went flying (Jeff still attached to the bike thanks to clipless pedals), and he landed upside down on his helmet. Luckily the helmet worked as it was supposed to (yay helmets!), and he escaped with nothing more than a few shallow gashes on the top of his thighs, from the collision with his own bike.

There was a moment when Jeff wondered whether his ride would stop there, but it didn't, and he was fine. $60 poorer for a new bike helmet from a SAG car, he got back on the road.

At the overnight stop, there was much celebrating and beer-drinking from the New Belgium Brewery tent. Jeff and I slunk off to our tent rather early, as we were both tired, and fell asleep in spite of the festivities (which were not actually all that loud).

The next morning, I dutifully got up for my scheduled 5:30am bike corral shift. It was still dark, and only a few bodies were moving. I saw no staff people and no one at all near the bike corral. Still annoyed at my abandonment the previous afternoon, I went back to bed.

Jeff and I got up just after 7am and joined the long line for breakfast. It felt like everyone got breakfast at the same time; then everyone got their bikes and left. By 8:15am, the camp was deserted.

I packed up the gear and stowed it in the car and then waited around for the tent to dry out from the foggy night. I did a few sudoku puzzles and enjoyed my new music player, at least until the batteries ran out. Jeff left at about 8am; the tent was not completely dry until 11am.

Before I left Sonoma Mountain Village, I left a message on Jeff's cell phone to tell him that I would meet him at the finish. There was some doubt on this point, since I had been feeling pretty horrible that morning, and I was thinking of going straight home. I started feeling better after some time in the sun, and I decided that I might as well wait at the finish line instead of at home.

I was scheduled for a volunteer shift loading bikes at 11am, but I didn't arrive until just before noon. That was just as well, since no bikers arrived until noon. I think that if I volunteer again, I will not worry about being late.

Jeff rolled in at about 4:30pm again. We had dinner, and Jeff and his teammates had some of the very last bottles of beer before the tent closed for good. Soon thereafter the wine tent also ran out of wine, and we skedaddled before it got ugly.

Unfortunately, when I tried to put the rack on the car I found that Jeff had carefully forgotten the screws that hold the folding rack at the correct angle. (Oops.) So we ran his bike back to the trucks to be carried back to San Francisco. (Riders who left their cars at the starting point took shuttles back and met their bikes there.) We drove back home, showered and changed, then got back in the car and headed to Giant Stadium to pick up Jeff's bike.

I suppose it is an indicator of our mental state that we actually might have driven directly to San Francisco to get the bike — which would have left us in exactly the same position. It was Jeff who said, twenty miles down the road, Oh, we've got to go home to get the screws! D'oh...

But we got the bike, and it didn't fall off or get hit before we got home, and I remembered not to drive into the garage before Jeff could get it off, so we win.

Next year, if Jeff does this again, we are getting a bigger tent. Our nice little two-man Hubba Hubba is nice for backpacking, but we can afford a little more luxury for car-camping.

At the end of September Jeff and I will be participating in Waves to Wine, a two-day bike tour from San Francisco to the Napa valley to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis society. He will bike; I will volunteer since the idea of my biking ~150 miles is laughable.

Multiple Sclerosis is an important issue for Jeff, since one of his uncles suffered from it for many years and finally died of it last year. I never got to meet this uncle, and I wish I had. It must take amazing strength of character to withstand a disease when you know you will never recover.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to raise money for research and for programs to support people who are currently suffering from MS. I have a personal donation page, and so does Jeff. If you can sponsor us with even a small donation, we would appreciate it.

It is pure coincidence that I decided to write a post about Unix training on the anniversary of a post about Being a geek. It makes a nice bookend, though, since I'm going to be doing this training for work, and I wrote the previous post just before I started my current job.

I work at a very Unix shop; I spend my whole day on Unix machines (Alphas and Suns, mostly). I was fortunate to have Linux experience before I started; it especially helped that I was comfortable with vi. (vi usage is mandatory; everyone has to learn it.) Most of my colleagues are not so lucky and have to figure it all out while they're just trying to get their work done.

Admittedly I have also learned a lot about Unix utilities in the last couple of years. I did not know about cut or sort before I started, and now I use them all the time. I do everything I can on the command line; I find it faster and easier that way. I assumed that my colleagues would also pick up new tools as they went along, but recently a co-worker told me I don't know how to use cut; I just copy from your calls! I was astonished. If she didn't feel she understood cut, maybe others didn't either.

So now I am planning a small Unix training series. To start off, I'll do three sessions: basic utilities, intermediate utilities, and shell scripting. I am thinking about what I want to cover and especially how I am going to cover it. This whole exercise will be entirely pointless if I only succeed in scaring people off. I want to show people tools that can make their lives easier, not make them learn something new and complicated.

I want to give them the hacker mentality of always looking for a better, easier way to accomplish a task. I want them to make the computer work for them.

It will be at least a month before I give the first part of my training, and that's just as well. I will need the time to prepare.

Last week Jeff and I flew to Texas for my great-aunt Treba's hundredth birthday on August 25, 2007. She lives in south Texas, so we were a little afraid that Hurricane Dean would throw a gear in the works, but luckily Dean headed south into Mexico and left Texas well alone. (I feel slightly guilty for benefiting from someone else's misfortune, but I am still grateful that it missed us.)

I forgot my camera, so no pictures, but I'll give you a run-down of events.

Birthday festivities

Thursday the 23rd Jeff and I flew down (uneventfully) and were met at the airport by my parents. We went to dinner at a little Cajun place near Rockport where the menu is yes or no. They serve a spicy crab boil of crab, shrimp, crawfish, sausage, corn, and potatoes, dumped on top of butcher paper on the table and eaten largely with one's bare hands. The delicious seafood made a very strong impression on Jeff. After dinner we still had some time to kill before the plane bearing my brother and his wife arrived, so we headed back to the airport and played bridge until they came.

Friday we visited the King Ranch and took the tour. I wanted Jeff to see a Texas Longhorn, and he did, though from a bit of a distance across the pasture. Friday lunch consisted of excellent sandwiches at a shop that had been in business for over fifty years. On Friday evening the birthday festivities started with more seafood, fried this time. I tasted frog legs but was not terribly impressed.

Saturday was the birthday party proper. I helped by handing out name tags and boggled at the line of people waiting to see my great-aunt. There was lots of family present as well as friends from in and out of town. I saw family I hadn't seen in a long time and met some that I hadn't ever seen before. Friday dinner, after the party, was Mexican; I think I had carne guisada and a cheese enchilada.

Sunday we attended church with Treba and a small lunch as a finale. Then Ralph and Lori headed back to the airport, while my parents, Jeff, and I drove north.

We were not sorry to leave the Quality Inn where we stayed; I was not impressed with the room. The alarm clock and one lamp did not work, even after we complained, and the bathroom door did not shut. We also saw multiple cockroaches. The motel served breakfast, but most of it was so sugary that after the first day we opted to eat at the diner across the street.

The pretty part of Texas

Jeff had only seen west Texas and a bit of Dallas before, so I wanted to show him some of the nicer parts. My parents were not initially enthusiastic, but they agreed to make the long drive. (There is a lot of Texas between Dallas and my great-aunt's town.)

On Sunday evening we reached San Antonio too late to see the Alamo, but we enjoyed dinner on the River Walk. At the motel that evening we played more bridge, and I flatter myself that I improved (though it helped that my cards were better than the previous Thursday).

On Monday we saw the Alamo, ducked back to the motel to retrieve my forgotten hoodie, then visited New Braunfels, where my mother finished high school and where my grandparents had lived for many years. There wasn't very much to see, but we did drive by their old house, visit the ginkgo tree we planted for my grandfather on the golf course, and leave fresh flowers on their headstone at the cemetery. We also ate lunch at the New Braunfels Smokehouse.

To kill time before dinner, we visited the state capitol building in Austin. I had actually never been there (not even in Texas history class in seventh grade; we visited San Antonio instead), and it was fairly interesting to wander around the house and senate chambers and look at the portraits. The center and front of the floor were blocked off, of course, and I couldn't get close enough to read the descriptions on a few paintings. I complained to Jeff that if they were going to block off that area, they should at least make the text big enough to read from a distance. He made fun of me for being a Melton and reading everything.

We ate dinner at the Stagecoach Inn in Saledo. There has been an inn at that location since about 1860, and the wait staff still recite the menu from memory. Most of us had chicken fried steak, which was at least decent (though I think mine is a bit better).

That night we slept at my parents' house, where I grew up.

The house

We slept a lot at my parents' house. My purpose in being there was to give myself a little time to see friends, although I only actually was able to see one. (It did not help that I had forgotten to let people know I would be in town, and of course people have to work during the week.) On Tuesday evening we had dinner with my cousin who lives in the area, and on Wednesday we had dinner at an Indian restaurant with my one available friend. I also spent Wednesday afternoon packing up almost all the books I still had at my parents' house. There were quite a lot of them, since I had stored my books there all through college (and kept adding to my cache!). I asked my father whether he would mail the books if I boxed them up. He said yes, so I did.

On Thursday the 30th we flew back home to California. The flight was blessedly uneventful.