The Mandelbear's Musings

Recipe: Apple pancakes for Newtonmas

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 23:37:58 GMT

Since today is Newtonmas, it seemed like a perfect excuse to make apple pancakes. These are a lot like the ones I remember my Dad making on Sunday mornings when blueberries were out of season, except that S has a dairy allergy so I made them with olive oil rather than butter.

Ingredients:

1 C. Flour
1 Tbsp. Sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
1 beaten egg
½ tsp. vanilla extract
1 C. apple juice
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 - 1 chopped apple
1 Tbsp. of peanut oil for greasing the pan

Method:

Mix the dry ingredients; I usually use a glass measuring cup.

Beat the egg, then mix it with the other liquid ingredients.

Chop the apple; this is easiest to do by first running it through a peeler/corer like this one, which turns the apple into a helix, which makes it easy to cut up.

Dump the liquid ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients and stir just enough to break up the more obvious lumps. Fold in the chopped apple.

Grease a non-stick or cast-iron skillet (preferably with peanut oil, which has a high smoke point). Pre-heat it while looking for a gravy ladle.

Pour or ladle the batter into the skillet; cook on medium. Flip when you see the edge getting dry and bubbles staying open.

This made 12 roughly four-inch pancakes, cooked three at a time in a 10" pan. Your mileage may vary. My ladle appears to hold about an eighth of a cup, but the batter's viscosity makes it more like 3/16.

Obvious variations include using water, almond milk, or any other kind of milk for the liquid; replacing all or some of the apple pieces with blueberries, dark chocolate chips, or chopped walnuts; and using butter or any other fat for either of the oils.

From the kitchens of the Rainbow Caravan.

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Mom's cranberry relish

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 04:29:52 GMT

My mother was an excellent cook. I have no idea where she found her recipe for cranberry relish, but today is the day to make it if you wanted it to be at its best on Thanksgiving. So I did. It's trivial.

Ingredients: one apple, one orange, one pound of cranberries. Cut the apple into quarters and cut the core out. Cut the orange in half, scrape out the seeds, then cut each half into between two and four pieces; whatever will fit in the chute of your food processor. Don't peel either of them. It might help if the berries had been previously frozen -- we had some that were left over from last year.

Chop them all up in the food processor or, better, run them through a meat grinder with a coarse plate, which is the way Mom did it. I find that with a food processor it helps to put the cranberries in first.

That's it. It's okay the day you make it, but it's better after a couple of days in the fridge. Taste it the next day to see whether it needs sugar; it usually doesn't.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  10372 words in 25 posts this month (average 414/post)
    191 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

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Done Since 2020-02-23

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 23:09:33 GMT

Well, it's the first of March. Where the fsck did February go? I was going to do FAWM, but I didn't. Foo. I had a little less work to do this morning; usually I have to split the week's log entries between the old month (in a file called, for example 2020/02.done) and the new one. I can put off starting 2020/03.done to next week, not that it's terribly difficult; just one extra cut and paste. And a git add, which I should automate. Hmm. *hack, hack* Did automate.

Tuesday I posted about The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, which I finished reading Wednesday. Turns out there's an associated website: Global Optimism -- the subtitle, or what would be the subtitle if they hadn't crammed it all into the page title, is "From pessimism to optimism - Global Optimism exists to precipitate a transformation from pessimism to optimism as a method of creating social and environmental change." I just found that today, so I'll probably have more for you in a couple of days. Meanwhile, just go read the book.

In the shorter term, we have a incipient pandemic to worry about. Recently @siderea has been running a series of posts under the coronavirus2020 tag. Like The Future We Choose, this is absolutely a must-read-now. Start with Preparing for the Pandemic: Stage 0. It connects at its downwhen terminus with an earlier series, influenza1918.

For the foodies reading this list, I offer you a list of Antidepressant foods -- 44 foods that boost mental health (you'll find the raw table under the cut, on Wednesday). The top meat and vegetable, oysters and watercress respectively, are among Colleen's favorites. I'd also like to point you at "So Much Cooking" by Naomi Kritzer, linked from @siderea's most recent post. (Content warning: it's in the form of a fictional food blog set during a pandemic. But recipes.)

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Yesterday's recipes

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 01:52:12 GMT

Yesterday involved a lot of food, so here are a menu and some recipes! These are in the order we prepared them.

First, my Mom's cranberry relish.

Start a day or two before -- it needs to sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours.
Use a food processor, or an old-fashoned meat grinder with a coarse plate, to chop up a pound of cranberries, one apple (cored and peeled), and one orange (not peeled).
Let it sit in the fridge until dinner time.

Next, the turkey. We got a 13-lb organic, fresh turkey -- the local Payless told us not to bother reserving one: they had plenty. I used the recipe on the wrapper with one slight mod from an earlier recipe.

Preheat oven to 400F. That's my mod -- the recipe said to use 325.
Coat the turkey with olive oil.
Rub with a mix of 2tsp each of ground black pepper, rubbed sage, and salt.
Put the turkey in the oven and turn it down to 325.

The skin came out wonderfully crisp and tasty.

Somewhere in there, the mashed potatoes.

Wash potatoes. Small Yukon Gold potatoes are best.
Cut them up if they're large.
Boil until soft.
Mash -- we used a hand mixer.
Optionally, add some broth.

Let people add butter, margerine, or whatever themselves -- everyone's taste is different.

Next, the dressing. This is Colleen's recipe. Measurements? What measurements?

Tear up a few pieces of bread. Sourdough that's almost but not quite stale is best; we used oat-nut, which was what we had.
Chop up an onion, a shallot, and some mushrooms. Saute in olive oil. (You can of course use butter, but one of us is allergic to dairy.)
Add some chopped roasted hazelnuts or walnuts, and a 1-pound bag of cranberries.
Pour in chicken, turkey, or vegetable stock and stir. Add the stock gradually so as not to make it too soggy.
Bake for about half an hour in an oiled glass baking pan.

Make the gravy.

While the dressing is cooking, chop up the neck and giblets, throw them into a small saucepan and boil.
After the turkey comes out, deglaze the roasting pan with a little white wine,
Combine with the giblets. It's simplest to dump the entire saucepan into the roasting pan rather than the other way around.
Thicken with flour, cornstarch, or arrowroot if desired.

That's my recipe; S actually made it yesterday, and cut lots of corners.

No prep needed for... Carrot sticks and pitted kalamata olives. We had jellied cranberry sauce, pickles, salad greens, fresh bread, and eggnog, but for one reason or another didn't use them.

We used almost exactly half the turkey, so the stuff we forgot wasn't missed. The YD made dinner for her family.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  14989 words in 29 posts this month (average 516/post)
    512 words in 1 post today

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River: Thanksgiving Eve

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 06:14:10 GMT

N and the three teenagers arrived late afternoon; G followed after work -- I met him when the 5:40 ferry arrived. (That's the ferry that leaves at 5:40; I occasionally get confused and get to the dock by then. Would have done that tonight except that N gave me a sanity check. Useful, because my sanity account is somewhat overdrawn.)

It's good to have everyone here. Even without my kids -- the YD will be having her own Thanksgiving feast tomorrow -- it's a good showing. It did get a little loud between multiple conversations and music on the CD player. I occasionally retreated to The Ultimate Rain Sound Generator, with the "speech blocker" setting and my personal calibration applied.

The home-made donuts (made by the two oldest teens) were spectacular, so of course I had too many of them. I'll ~~probably~~ eat too much tomorrow, too.

I initially had trouble figuring out what to write about today; this is a lot like the frequent day-to-day posts I was writing before I started making the "done last week" summary posts. Anyone miss them?

Anyway, it's pretty close to bed-time. The problem with these stream-of-consciousness posts is that you actually have to be conscious while you're making them.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  14212 words in 27 posts this month (average 526/post)
    236 words in 1 post today

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Mom's Cranberry Relish

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 06:08:21 GMT

Because I'm thinking about it, and am too tired about what to post, I thought I'd post my Mom's recipe for cranberry relish.

Ingredients:

A bag or two of raw, whole cranberries.
Apples. One or two per bag of berries, depending on size.
Oranges. Maybe one per two bags.

Chop everything up coarsely in a food processor. Even better, if you can find it, is an old-fashioned hand-cranked meat grinder, because that mashes the ingredients rather than simply cutting them.

Put it in the fridge overnight. The next day, add sugar if it seems to be necessary -- don't do it before then because the flavors won't have blended.

I have no idea where Mom found the recipe, and I don't think I've ever seen an "official" printed version -- it's all seat-of-the-pants. Colleen and I have been making it for the last forty-odd years.

Enjoy.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  12751 words in 22 posts this month (average 579/post)
    169 words in 1 post today
>

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Fast Food

Mon, 14 May 2018 15:06:22 GMT

(From a comment elsejournal:)

When I have left-over rice I make fried rice, usually for breakfast (egg, grain; it works). Cook garlic and any other non-rice ingredients in oil, add rice and stir until coated with oil, shove to one side and scramble two eggs in the pan, mix, garnish with green onions if you have them. Total time about 10 minutes.

I don't know how you feel about tofu, but half a block of tofu, cubed, drizzled with soy sauce and sesame oil, and some wasabi or horseradish on the side is a great high-protein lunch.

Melt some butter in a frying pan, grind some pepper onto it, add fish (I used red snapper yesterday). Squeeze half a small lemon on top, add more pepper, flip. Squeeze the other half of the lemon onto the top.

Brush chicken parts (I like skinless, boneless thighs; YMMV) with mustard or barbecue sauce; bake. This is the only recipe in this batch that takes more than 10 minutes, but it's under five minutes of prep.

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Done last week (20171015Su - 21Sa)

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 19:13:37 GMT

Not a bad week, I guess. Right now I'm feeling pretty down and hopeless, partly because of this article about Trump plus the fact that my family's economic future depends largely on Social Security and Medicare, which Trump's government seems hell-bent on destroying; and partly... I don't know what. I don't think depression and anxiety need a reason.

I did manage to figure out approximately what I should have been withholding for taxes; I also found out that the deadline for the second quarter's estimated tax payment was last month, so I'm slightly more screwed than I thought I was. Only slightly. That adds to the anxiety, of course.

N. and the kids have been away since Wednesday morning, with N and g at OVFF. It's been a bit lonely. I have, however, been getting things done, including putting up shelves and a little artwork, and setting up my desk with what amounts to a dual-monitor setup with the external monitor above Cygnus. I'm using the traditional makeshift monitor stand: a ream of printer paper. I actually did find my other Thinkpad keyboards, but with Cygnus on the desk I don't need them.

Our second week of prepared menus has worked out pretty well, though I did end up going out shopping Tuesday for some things that I'd missed on Sunday, and a little bit on Friday. It does seem as though we're spending less. I've also determined that I have to go grocery shopping alone -- it's impossible for me to stick to a list if there's someone else along. I really have difficulty saying "no" to anybody, and it's stressful.

Yesterday Colleen and I went to the Bayview farmer's market after picking up the bike helmet we'd ordered. Bought lunch (samosas) and some jam. See above about saying "no".

I did manage to say "no" to the life insurance agent. Yes, it's great that I was able to qualify for the lowest possible rate, which means I'm a lot healthier than most septuagenarians. But my financial advisor, who I consulted last Friday, pointed out that since my social security, IRA, and pension between them are enough to keep us going; unlike the situation in Seattle, we're not relying on my salary to pay the mortgage. (Colleen's SS payment is half of mine and will go away after I die; it does make a difference but the family would still get by without it.)

The thing that still scares the hell out of me is what would happen if I don't die, but simply get incapacitated, or if either Colleen or I end up needing more expensive care. Then we're hosed.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Done last week (20160717Su - 23Sa)

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 16:25:24 GMT

After last week on call, almost anything was bound to be an improvement. But my oncall ended at 11am Monday; Sunday night and Monday morning managed to cram in nearly as many pages as any two-day period the preceeding week. By Monday at 11 I was a total wreck. (While I was deep in work on one or two other tickets, the two daytime SEV2's timed out and paged me at 10:30. At which point $BOSS came by. I was almost totally nonverbal at that point - it was all I could do to get out a couple of words to indicate that I was working on it.)

Monday afternoon was predictably unproductive. Since I had two medical appointments on Tuesday I had already planned on taking the day as vacation. I needed it. I was still pretty stressed on Wednesday; almost anything could trigger an immediate adrenaline reaction, and I was snappish and probably no fun at all to be around.

Thank the gods for gin, hot baths, and cats.

It took me all day Wednesday and most of Thursday to get my commits from the week before rebased on top of the stuff S had pushed in the mean time. I finally did make some actual forward progress on Friday, and finally got the workflow to go through the final stage that it had been hanging up on before. (Intentionally vague and generic, I know.)

Even with (and to some extent because of) ten workspaces and who knows how many browser tabs, I still wasn't able to keep things organized. I kept forgetting which tickets went where and what I had done on them, and found several of them open in multiple places. No surprise there.

Have I mentioned dishes? We have dishes. Yesterday around dinner time the kids (Kat and Alex, not g and j) brought down roughly a full dishwasher load from their room. I did one load last night, put one in this morning, and there will be at least another by nightfall.

I finally brought up the rack that I'd had the dishes stacked on in the Starport, and rearranged the shelving to put the corelle conveniently on the lower shelf. I'm tempted to put most of the blue dishes away where they won't get used; one of the problems seems to be that nobody (else) notices that dishes have to be done until they can't find a clean one.

I think I cooked three or four meals this week.

Writing and music. Um... (Posted by accident before I could fill in this part. TL;DR no music to speak of -- ripping CDs doesn't count. Broke 1000 words of writing, so technically met the 500-words-twice-a-week goal, but spread over three days. I'll take it anyway.)

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Done last week (20160710Su - 16Sa)

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 21:34:10 GMT

The only writing I did last week was last Sunday's weekly post. I'll try to do better; hopefully I won't be feeling as harried this week. I did get in some music time -- last Sunday, and yesterday. And some walking with Colleen and Kat, also on Sunday.

Quite a bit of back pain. It's been mostly ok in the morning, but tends to get worse on the way home. Probably something to do with being tired, but also possibly stress. Have I mentioned having trouble identifying my mental state? It's called alexithymia.

The alexithymia also bleeds into problems identifying physical state, because of course they're related. I have trouble distinguishing the physical symptoms of anxiety and hunger, for example. Not to mention distinguishing between wanting food, and needing food. The latter barely registers, and certainly not as hunger, until I suddenly start feeling the symptoms of low blood sugar. Which I have learned to recognize. Or until Colleen notices that I'm starting to snap at people.

Stress is, apparently, another of those states that I don't start noticing until it's been going on too long. And then it bleeds into burnout and depression. (And, no, depression doesn't register as sadness. At all. It's best described as a combination of apathy and despair.) I think I'm noticing a trend here.

I'm getting better at noticing. Look in the notes for an exclamation mark in column 3 -- that means I've actually noticed an emotion while it was happening. They're rare -- the only instance this last week was Sunday.

Speaking of stress, I'm oncall this week. With pages including 6am Tuesday morning -- Prime Day -- and midnight last night. This morning. Whatever. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have enough mental bandwidth. I can't multitask. At all. Period. Things get lost track of.

If a page comes in, I completely lose track of whatever I was doing, including dealing with another page, and it takes me a while to get my context back. Which leads to things like having something like 10 different browser windows open in 8 workspaces, with multiple tabs in each, many of which refer to the same tickets. Because context. And, of course, re-investigating the same thing multiple times because I've forgotten what I was doing an hour ago.

I'm getting a little better at going up to people I don't know and asking for help. But, of course, I'm even worse at remembering names than I am at multitasking, which leads to things like waking the wrong person up at six in the morning. (And forgetting that I had an email in my inbox telling me who the right person would have been. See multitasking.)

(Brief pause -- my desk is being catted on. The absolute best thing I've done for my mental health in years was putting a cardboard box on my desk, attaching it with a couple of screws, and lining it with a towel.)

Back to reaching out and talking to people. I don't think my reluctance to do that has anything to do with what I afraid people will think of me. So, this doesn't seem to have the characteristcs of social anxiety. No, it has more to do with what I think of me, and in particular feeling stupid and at a loss for what to do. Plus total lack of self-confidence, which leads to (or somehow relates to) an unwillingness to "disturb" people.

It's not just at work. Even at home, I take a closed door as a "do not disturb" sign even when I'm pretty certain that the person on the other side (usually N) would be happy to see me. It's hard enough when I know they're expecting me, though I'm getting a little better about that.

In a slightly different direction, some links from ysabetwordsmith about emotional self-care (see Monday, below) proved unexpectedly triggery and anxiety-provoking. So we're talking low self-esteem here, maybe. (Maybe?! Let's get real here.)

It's been a long month this week.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Done last month/week (20160627Su - 0701)

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 03:22:33 GMT

I am actually breaking at Friday evening, one day over the month boundary, so as to group all the practicing together here, and the con and concert in the next entry.

So, yeah; this week's big surprise was finding out Thursday morning that I had a concert coming up Saturday evening. I hadn't asked for one, but apparently Colleen did. Um... thanks, I think. (Spoiler -- it actually went surprisingly well, though not quite as well as the run-throughs. Nervous.)

I hadn't asked for a concert or answered my participant questionaire because up until two weeks before the con I was still waffling about whether or not to go. I knew it would be stressful, and I knew it would be fairly expensive (though driving, skipping Friday, and coming back Monday instead of Tuesday helped a great deal). I also knew I'd regret it if I didn't go. On the whole I'm glad I went (especially since I got to meet alatefeline). But I'm exhausted. I must be more introverted than I was even a few years ago.

Made Boeuf Bourguignon on Sunday -- came out quite well, though I think not quite as well as the Stroganoff the night before. I made a stupid mistake with the pepper, but managed to skim off most of it and didn't get anyt complaints. I have not, unfortunately, been keeping up very well with the dishes.

While on the subject of food; Monday around 12:30 I noticed that my blood sugar was getting low. It didn't feel like what I usually label as hunger, i.e. wanting food. Something is definitely miswired there. If there's food around and I'm not deeply engrossed in something, I'll want to eat it. If I'm in a flow state, which I was a couple of times this week (Yay!), I won't notice food, and will eventually run out of energy. The situation is probably not helped by the amount of coffee I drink.

Friday some idiot came within inches of getting herself killed when she started ambling across the street against the light, with her nose in her phone, and in front of the bus I was riding to work in. (It's not exactly a street -- it's a bypass lane on the left-hand side of 4th Avenue. To get to the island where one can board the bus, one has to cross that lane. But, still...) That's one of the reasons I don't try to read -- or text -- while I'm walking.

Only a little writing -- just one day with over 500 words. But two solid practice sessions, so that's good. Put up shelves in N's closet -- that was good, too. I have to keep reminding myself to feel accomplished after that sort of thing. (Like last week, the only emotion I actually noticed while I was feeling it was despair. I'm altogether too good at that one.)

Close enough to 500 words -- I'm going to stick a fork in it.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Done this year (20150101 Th - 03 Sa)

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 16:57:14 GMT

Well, our anniversary weekend passed without a party -- somehow I'd had the impression that we were having one, but everyone else had the impression that the one the Saturday after Christmas counted for both. So... ok. I went out and got salads, cheese, sausage, scallops, and bacon. Bacon-wrapped scallops, and cheese boards for two. Yum.

Thursday we ordered Chinese from Yen Wor Village -- not as good as Yu Shan, but better than any of the other local places that deliver.

Lots and lots of decluttering, both in my to-do lists and, to a lesser extent, in the house.

I finally found a canned cat food that Curio likes! I've been worried about him. It's made by Natural Balance, and the same duck and green pea combination that's in the dry food he likes (but that we're trying to get him off of, because apparently dry food isn't all that good for cats).

And we finally have a static IP address again -- it's only $5/month from CenturyLink. The tech support person who set it up was completely clueless; I had to go to her supervisor to find someone who knew what reverse DNS was (and how to find it on their damned website, which is slow, poorly laid out, and doesn't trim spaces in input fields).

Finished reading Lauren Ipsum, which will get a separate post later. You'll also find an entry in the notes tagged "ursine", which will get expanded into the start of a planned post series if I can finally get off my tail and write it.

Links in the notes, as usual.

( raw notes, with links )

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Steve's Famous Borscht

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 06:20:16 GMT

Or at least well-known borscht. It was a feature of Christmas dinner at Grand Central Starport since the earliest days.

I first encountered a recipe for Ukrainian hot borscht in, of all places, a flier that came with my electricity bill from Pacific Gas and Electric, back when I was still in grad school. Somewhere along the line I lost it, and started using a recipe iPlease to the Table: The Russian Cookbook by Anya Von Bremzen, an excellent cookbook which is now lamentably out of print. This year I just winged it.

This is more of what ysabetwordsmith calls an "algorithm" than a recipe.

You will need:

A Very Large Pot. It is difficult to use too large a pot. When our older daughter was two years old, she used to play in ours. We could have gotten the lid on. A wooden spoon long enough to reach the bottom of the pot while you still have a good grip on the handle -- you're going to need it.
A large lump of meat. 3-4 lbs of beef chuck roast is a good place to start. At various times we have also added a ham shank, marrow bones, and ribs. Yesterday I used about 5 lbs of chuck roast and the ribs left over from the Christmas roast beef.
Root vegetables. Beets, of course, but also parsnips, rutabagas, and turnips. Sometimes we add potatoes, but not this year. We had 9 rather large beets, 3 rutabagas, 3 turnips, and 2 parsnips this year. We have sometimes used as many as 6 bunches of small beets.
Onions, garlic, and carrots, which of course are also root vegetables.
A head of cabbage.
Seasoning: 6 peppercorns and 3 bay leaves. (I couldn't find the bay leaves this year.) Sour salt, optional.
Sour cream and fresh dill, for garnishing.

Start by cutting up the onions, chopping the garic, and sauteeing them in olive oil. Meanwhile, brown the meat in a little more olive oil, in the bottom of your Very Large Pot.

Combine the onion/garlic mix with the meat, and add water to cover. If desired, throw in a whole onion and a couple of whole carrots. Put in the peppercorns and bay leaves.

Cut the tops and tails off the beets, and put them on a baking sheet. Turn your oven to 350 and put the beets in to roast.

Take a 45-60 minute break.

Take the beets out of the oven. Cut the rest of the roots into 1-inch cubes. Toss the parsnips and carrots into the pot -- they take the longest to cook.

After you've cubed the raw roots, the beets will be cool enough to handle. Peel them (with a paring knife) and cut them into julienne strips.

Fish the meat, bones, and whole vegetables out of the pot and put in the rutabagas and beets.

Take another break -- about an hour. Put in the turnips (and potatoes if you want them). Cut the meat into 1-inch cubes.

Put the meat back in the pot. Shred the cabbage and add that. Stir, if you can. You may need to add water, too; it depends on whether there's any room left in the pot and whether you want your borscht to be more like a thick soup or a stew.

Let it cook for another hour or so. Drink some vodka (or gin -- I prefer gin). If you're anything like me, your back will be hurting at this point even if you had sense enough to sit down while chopping the roots.

About an hour after you added the cabbage, it's done. If it's too sweet, add sour salt to taste. Add ordinary salt to taste, if you like.

Top with a glop of sour cream and a sprinkle of chopped, fresh dill. Enjoy.

Serves a dozen or so. For a smaller family, it provides enough leftovers to last all week.

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Done last week (20141221 Su - 27 Sa)

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:23:45 GMT

It's been a nice, relaxing week - I took Friday off as well as Thursday. Won't be able to do that again for a long while, sadly.

Glenn made roast beef and proper Yorkshire pudding for dinner on Christmas; I made borscht yesterday. We had a few guests over; not many. But the borscht came out well. Next time we'll have to make a much smaller batch, though. Recipe to follow, though you can deduce much of it from the timeline in Saturday's notes.

Despite feeling relaxed, I also feel as though I should have been doing more. I am, as usual, going to have to scramble to get all the charities paid by year's end, and there are probably still some lingering bills and other items. GAAK!

On the other hand, my web resources are in pretty good shape. The whole thing is amost completely deployed with git, the rest with rsync, and "make deploy" works on both. I'm pretty happy about that -- it feels good to get back into toolmaking again.

On the gripping hand -- or is that the griping hand -- I still don't feel particularly happy about myself. This is mainly because, even when I know what needs to be done, I still prefer to waste time reading or puttering rather than do it. Not even the prospect of giving myself a little star in my notes -- which is what that file is for -- is enough to get me off my arse when it comes to writing checks or sorting through envelopes.

( raw notes, with links )

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Done last week (20141116 Su - 22 Sa)

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 19:21:29 GMT

A bit of a rough week, but with several high spots. The first of which was brunch with Colleen and Emmy at Salty's -- a local seafood place with a fantastic buffet on weekends. Turns out I get a senior discount. :P

I am cautiously optimistic about my mood, between selling the house and starting on l-tryptophan. I think it's generally better, but it's also more volatile -- I run out of cope and go into overload. Not good. Especially because it upsets Colleen, which sets up a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the feedback sense -- it has negative consequences, of course.)

Another high point was music night, Thursday after dinner. The original plan had been for a new friend of N's to come join us, but she ended up canceling. We had fun anyway -- playlist in the notes. We've decided to do it more often, and N is setting things up to spend more time in the Great Room. Which means I have to fix the control on the broken lift chair that we parked there.

To which end I tracked down a soldering iron. The one I bought because I couldn't find my good one, which is still in a box somewhere.

Looking at the notes, I seem to have been pretty productive this week. So... ok.

( raw notes, with links )

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Breakfast

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 15:56:50 GMT

2 slices of bacon, 2 eggs, some cooked grain...

OK, fried rice for breakfast.

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Done this week (20140810 Su - 16 Sa)

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 17:40:12 GMT

We got a little rain this last week -- nice. I also Got Stuff Done, for certain values of stuff -- put up some 1x2 battens to hold up the bamboo screen around the deck, and paid some long-overdue bills. And made dinner on Monday. But as usual not nearly enough.

We have an(other) offer on the Starport; we'll see whether this one sticks.

On the down side, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall died. The former set off the predictable post-celebrity-suicide followup; both good and bad. Mostly good, as in advice for both the survivors (no, it's not selfish) and the depressed (see particularly Boggle-the-owl's post, I don't like the phrase "a cry for help"...). Here, have a stick.

The Shooting of Michael Brown by a cop last Saturday also had the predictable fallout, and triggered an acute case of deja vu. I've seen it before, in the '60s (civil rights protests) and '70s (Vietnam War protests). Back then we called them "Police riots". I am not feeling very optimistic right now.

Links in the notes.

( raw notes, with links )

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Done this week (20140316 Su - 22 Sa)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 00:22:59 GMT

Mostly a good week, though you may note that I have little report on work-days. Friday noon was the kick-off for a recruitment drive at work -- my team is hiring in Seattle, and I'll be happy to give you a referral if you find an interesting-looking posting for a different location. We're looking for all sorts of people, not just developers.

Yesterday I sort of fell apart. My alexithymia means that I don't know exactly how I fell apart -- the morning bit definitely felt like depression, while the afternoon (possibly triggered by working on taxes) felt more like anxiety. Naomi and Glenn said that I appeared to be having an anxiety attack when they saw me around bedtime. Can one have a depression attack? It was fairly brief.

I don't think my current antidepressant is getting me anything but the weight gain listed as a side effect.

Links, as usual, in the notes.

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Done last week (20140216 Su - 22 Sa)

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 21:32:02 GMT

Not a lot going on. I've been mildly depressed, so basically not wanting to do anything but sleep, eat, work, and read. You will observe that making phone calls, paying bills, and getting ready to do my taxes are not on that list, which adds anxiety to the depression.

All is not entirely bleak -- I did get the mac mini fired up so I can run the tax software on it, and I got a few boxes emptied in the garage. And Colleen and I went out to lunch (Mexican) on Wednesday on the way back from the dentist, and to dinner last night (Salty's, a seafood place on Alki Beach that we'd been wanting to try). Salty's was pricey, but good, and they had oysters.

On the gripping hand, I managed to destroy another of our non-stick pans, by leaving the burner on after serving myself. Unlike a gas stove, where leaving the burner on is immediately obvious, it isn't on this one. So that sucks.

Our van got a "move it or else" ticket Friday, so most of yesterday afternoon was spent jump-starting it, driving over to the dealer in Issaquah, and taking the bus home. Our usual dealer, in Lake City, doesn't have a service department that's open Saturdays. So... Anyway, I'm not going to count that as either a positive or a negative -- it was a hassle, and it's going to come out somewhere north of a grand to do all the work, but it needed doing.

The usual collection of links.

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Done last week (20131215 Su - 22 Sa)

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 20:14:48 GMT

Lots of puttering around the house -- the holiday season is always good for encouraging that kind of thing. Especially since we're *still* missing a couple of boxes of Christmas lights and ornaments. Gaak!

Some good links; this time I'm going to talk about a couple of them.

I bought a poem from The Wordsmith's Forge - 2013 Holiday Poetry Sale. Today is the last day, so act fast if you want to buy a poem at half price. The poem in question is "The Last Rose of Winter", a rather unconventional love poem. Somehow I knew it would be something I wanted to read.

The other interesting link was to an article with the somewhat less than informative title The boy whose brain could unlock autism It's actually about the "intense world" theory: that autism is a defense mechanism against sensory and social overload, caused by too much empathy rather too little. Oh. Right, then.

Indeed, research on typical children and adults finds that too much distress can dampen ordinary empathy as well. When someone else’s pain becomes too unbearable to witness, even typical people withdraw and try to soothe themselves first rather than helping—exactly like autistic people. It’s just that autistic people become distressed more easily, and so their reactions appear atypical.

Many of the other symptoms are due to withdrawal during the time when children are usually learning things like reading body language and other social cues. So, yeah -- my self-diagnosis of mild Asperger's may have been correct after all.

Done last month (20131124 Su - 1130 Sa)

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 02:52:49 GMT

All in all a pretty eventful week. Not clear whether the big event was Thanksgiving -- which the YD did much of the work for, thankfully -- or Colleen moving upstairs. And I did a huge amount of puttering around the latter, including (in no particular order) a lot of laundry, installing grab bars, moving the support pole, folding up the couch and putting the carpet back down, and no doubt a lot of thngs I've forgotten.

Some of our king-sized sheets appear to have gone missing. Grump. But it's really nice to be back in our own bed, in our own bedroom. Wow.

Hmm. More visits with Uncle Ken, Susan, and company, including dinner at a local pizza joint called Talarico, where we met Susan's daughters. She hasn't met Chaos yet.

Some good links in the notes.

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Done last week (20131109 Sa - 16 Sa)

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 20:13:16 GMT

The big news: Friday Colleen went upstairs (supervised by two PTs -- they'd originally been planning to do car transfers but it was raining). They marked out where I should put grab bars; I got one of them in yesterday.

Lots of puttering, last weekend and this. Finally got new showerheads installed. The new hand shower has a vertical bar that can be used as a grab bar; it turns out that drilling tile is a bitch, so it's only held on by two screws at the moment. I'll work on that some more this afternoon. Brought up a box of cookbooks. Etc.

Friday came over yesterday (yes, Friday was here on Saturday) and made curried chicken. There are leftovers; not entirely sure what we're having for dinner tonight. We also had pizza (last Saturday) and Chinese (Friday).

I got some work done on the Steve.Savitzky.net and Rainbow's End Massage websites, though not all that much.

I had some notion last week of dropping the "Done" posts back to one per week, and doing occasional posts with real content in between. Well, I got halfway there...

Lots of links in the notes; you can read about the Autism Speaks kerfuffle, perfect forward secrecy and other security matters (Hi there, NSA), and Avengers AU fanfic with cats, among many others.

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Done last week (20121221 Fr - 1228 Fr)

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 01:39:39 GMT

We had a good Christmas weekend. And week, for that matter, though it had its major low points as well. Monday -- Christmas Eve -- was the worst, between Colleen's temporary crown coming off, her scooter battery not charging, the fact that I hadn't bought any stocking stufers... Add back pain, sleep dep from a long night Friday (don't ask), and general grumpiness.

At least I actually noticed that I was depressed, angry, disappointed, and anxious. (And that the anger and disappointment were largely directed at myself, as usual.) Things improved from that point, thankfully. The evening and Christmas were lovely, with Naomi and her kids, Chaos and Rabbit, and Chip and Eli on Christmas.

We had roast beef on Monday, and borscht on Tuesday. I think the borscht was my best ever.

Boil about 3 lbs of beef roast, an onion, two carrots, four peppercorns, and two bay leaves in water to cover for about two hours, until the meat is cooked and the veggies are nearly falling apart.

Meanwhile, cut the tops and tails off three or four bunches of beets, and roast them at 350 degrees until you can push a fork through a beet. This takes an hour or so.

While the beets are cooling and the beef is boiling, cut three parsnips, four turnips, and four carrots into julienne strips.

Set the meat aside, and toss the veggies.

Put the cut-up veggies into the broth, and start peeling and cutting up the beets. Expect to be caught red-handed.

Add the beets to the broth. Shred half a red cabbage and toss that in,

Cut up the beef and toss that in. Add a little more water if it looks like it needs it.

Serve with sour cream and dill.

Tasty. We have, of course, been eating left-over roast beef and borscht all week. Only the YD is complaining; Colleen and I are not.

Naomi gave me a lovely REI Quantum Shoulder Bag for Christmas; it seems to want to be called "Red". I think her real name is Veronica, but she won't admit to it.

Red is about half an inch too short for my 15" work laptop -- the two corners stick out like little silver ears. Terribly cute. It can be forced into the main compartment, but my plan is simply to put a waterproof flap over it in bad weather. Other than that it's perfect; I really like having a bag that zips on top instead of having a flap, stays vertical when I swing it around to the front, and holds 9x12 envelopes without crumpling them.

A reasonably productive, if short, week at work. I made several stupid mistakes, but was able to recover fairly quickly thanks to git.

The usual collection of good links. Cringely has a post on Reagan and Newtown, about how Reagan destroyed the country's mental health system. There weren't nearly as many homeless people before Reagan, either -- there were places where crazy people could go to be taken care of. I read that Monday morning; it added to my depression.

Every once in a while I want to take a vacation -- just me, and nobody I had to be responsible for. *sigh*

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Done recently (20121120 Tu - 23 Fr)

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 20:24:50 GMT

We had eight people for Thanksgiving -- the three residents, Naomi and her kids, and Chaos and her BF. I made the turkey; the kids and Chaos peeled the potatoes, the YD cut them up, I mashed them, and Colleen made the dressing. The YD had made pumpkin pie the night before. Yum. We have a fridge full of leftovers; a 20-lb bird, a huge bowl of dressing, and a 10-lb bag of potatoes will do that. That's ok.

We do have to remember that the turkey takes more like 10 minutes/lb when it's not stuffed. I used the meat thermometer and cooked it to 165; there were a cuple of spots that were just barely not umdercooked, but it was all tender and juicy.

Gratitude in the next post.

Having to squeeze 8 people into the living room made for a good excuse for cleaning. I put several boxes of books onto shelves, and stacked the remaining boxes (mostly not books) along the walls, with only a smallish tower left standing at the end near the desk. We set up our folding chairs, and it worked.

I worked 3 hours from home yesterday, which was enough to compensate for the time I took off Monday for a dentist appointment, but not for the two days' worth of unpaid vacation. :(

Working from home will get easier, now that I have the RSA software token working for VPN access. It uses Wine, but the app works, so I'm not complaining. VPN isn't working yet, because I neglected to bring home the how-to documents. but I'm hopeful.

I've been sleeping altogether more than I'd like, and not all that well. Thursday night especially -- I crashed a little before 10pm, woke up at 1:30 with my left knee painfully locked up and covered with sweat; went back to sleep and didn't get up until 9. Apparently I needed the sleep.

My Nexus 7 arrived Wednesday, and was waiting for me when I got home. Cool. A little heavy, and I'm not certain it's going to be readable enough to serve as a phone book, but definitely a slick piece of gear. I'm loving the soft keyboard, which combines click and swipe action; I'm going to install the backport on my phone.

That reminds me; I still have to upgrade the phone to Android 4.0 (ICS).

I really should spend the rest of the day sorting stacks of paper, some of which is important. Donwanna.

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Done this week/month (20120901 Sa - 0907 Fr)

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 18:32:53 GMT

On the job search, the week was pretty much a waiting game. $COMPANY hasn't contacted me yet, probably because the HR person was out of town last week, and the hiring manager was on vacation this week. I did meet with the headhunter on Thursday, and had a good conversation. So that's pretty good. I had phone screens Thursday (with Amazon) and Friday (with WhitePages).

The one on Friday was interesting -- the person I was originally scheduled to talk to was unavailable, so the call was from the CTO. Which was great, because we were actually able to talk about why I didn't seem to be a good fit. This probably applies to many of my other recent rejections: PopCap, Zillow, Google, and Facebook. And my apparent success with $COMPANY.

There are two factors: seen from their side, I simply don't have any experience with huge web "properties" or the technologies they use. I'm not familiar with Ruby on Rails (which WhitePages is using), have comparatively little PHP, no database experience to speak of... I'm a fast learner, but that's not the same.

... and on my side, I'm just not all that interested in that kind of work. I like building websites -- small ones. I like building infrastructure that developers can use to build the big ones. I like having my software out in the wild where I can point to it, but apparently that really means I want to work on stuff that developers can use. I want to get into working inside open-source software, not just on top of it. Or on part of some proprietary software product like a game, or the stuff Intuitive or Tableau is doing.

I want to work on cool stuff that's appreciated by my peers, not invisible behind the scenes at a website, no matter how popular and cool that website may be. And, perhaps most importantly, I want to work on stuff that I believe is making the world a better place.

... change of subject ---

Yesterday I drove down to Longview (the closest Kaiser facility) with Colleen -- two and a half hours each way -- to see if we could get our prescriptions renewed and Colleen could get her disability forms filled out for DMV and ORCA. Partial success. Colleen only got 6 months of disability, and one month of her prescriptions. Mine haven't been transfered at all, so I'll have to go down again in a week or so.

It would never have occurred to me that Kaiser wouldn't have a nationwide, unified computer system for medical records and prescriptions. But they don't. GAAAK! If I'd known how much of a nightmare health care was going to be, I might not have moved. I call it "the health don't care system" for a reason. And I have yet to get two consecutive identical answers about what I can do next.

Anyone have suggestions for Seattle-area HMOs? I know GroupHealth works with Kaiser, which might be a plus, but don't know whether they have good in-network specialists for Colleen's Crohn's disease and other problems.

We stopped in Olympia for dinner at the Oyster House. I think the last time we were there was 20-odd years ago on the way to or from a Westercon. It's gotten better.

Last Monday -- Labor Day -- we drove out to Leavenworth. Lovely drive.

I read the Hugo-winning novella The Man Who Bridged the Mist -- marvelous! And re-read "The Dead Lady of Clown Town".

... And I had a couple of bouts of depression. Not really surprising considering the health care and job situations.

Links and details below in the notes.

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