Postpourri

The project is still in full swing, though foundering like Exxon Valdez, so I'm going to do a quick brain dump about the weekend as a way to help my brain shake off the ichorous tendrils this project is using to cling to my brain.

On Saturday Jen and I went to a birthday party for Elizabeth. She and her husband Nathan made us an amazing German dinner of pork rouladen, spaetzle, and steamed carrots and fennel. It was fantastic, but what was even better was that we got to make dessert. Elizabeth's family has a proud tradition of strudel, and she taught us how to make this confection. The dough for it has amazing properties. I'll have to post some pictures once I get some time.

On Sunday we went to church and then met with a financial advisor from my church to talk about getting ready to buy a home. That evening we went to a taping of the radio show eTown in Boulder and saw Beau Soleil and Ben Kweller perform. It was really good, and in particular Ben Kweller rocked the house. It was great.

Today was more work. And more work. And then some more. The blizzard that had me driving to work had completely vanished with most of its snow by the afternoon. When I got back to park, I spent about as long driving around trying to find a spot as I did coming home from work. Everyone had parked about 6 feet apart as to maximize the amount of space they took up. After a long day of work, that is not something I want to deal with. Grrr.

Exiting the Tower

Ok. That's it. I've handed in my notice to the Tower of Odd Smells. At the end of June, I will out of this building and free of foaming sinks, leaking walls, and puke in the stairwells. Meanwhile, I'm here on my couch trying to get myself to focus on coding. The current project is in such a jumble, I'm not sure if I should be working, but this morning was quite productive, so I'm going to try to stretch that streak into the afternoon. Let's see if I can make that happen after this burst of procrastiblogging. 

Recap

So, I'm cranking on a project at work. So busy, so little time, and I'm straining towards the end. This project is more than I bargained for. But I did want to mention a few things:

• Jen and I saw Duplicity last night. It was quite clever and rather good. It involves a fantastic opening sequence with Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson as two CEOs engaged in a slo-mo fist fight in the rain.
  
• Through Brightkite, I learned that the collection of cop cars and officers I saw on my commute into work was due to a dead body in a parking lot a block from my house. Microblogging certainly is informative, especially when geolocation is thrown into the mix.
  
• It snowed so much today! It is awesome. I just wish I could stay home and play video games all day. That's how a day like today should be spent.
• Over the weekend, Jen and I met with florists, found a rehearsal dinner site, picked out music for the wedding, and had a birthday dinner with some of Jen's friends. It was a great day. We got out for a walk and tried out some nearby playground equipment. It's gotten better since I was a kid.
• My parents will be parking their fifth wheel in town for an extended time starting soon. I am stoked! It will be great to have them around for a while. They'll be campground hosts, so I see some excuses to get and use new camping gear in the works.

Procrastination

This post is about procrastinating; in fact, it is procrastination itself. I have all sorts of work I could do, that I should do, but most of me just wants to go play, relax, read, etc. So I'm in this halfway state where I'm still on the laptop, but not writing any code. I'm just stalling for the next distraction so I don't return to server-side ActionScript and gnashing my teeth over SharedObject bindings. Wait for it ... wait for it...

Carrots for Dessert

Today I reminded myself of a pleasure I have been neglecting: cooking while listening to NPR. It's so cathartic and relaxing. I made a staple of my repertoire (cream tuna fish on rice) and paired that with some more adventures in carrots. I've posted on the carrot puree idea before, but I thought I would build on what Isaac and I had done before.

Here's what I did:
Dessert Carrot Puree

2 C. pureed steamed carrots

1 pureed large banana

1/2 C. half-n-half

2 T. lemon juice

2 T. honey

2 tsp. ground ginger

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. finely grated lemon peel

Steam the carrots until very soft. Puree the heck out of those carrots. Puree the banana. Stir it all together with the other ingredients. Oh, and try not to grate your finger along with the lemon peel like I did. This is why I need a zester.

So I sat down with these carrots and started eating them. They are good enough to have as dessert, and yet, they are relatively healthy (other than that half-n-half). But then the thought came to me: I ... I'm eating baby food aren't I. I think I am. It's dressed up really tasty baby food. Well, that doesn't stop me from eating more. This is good stuff. I think it could use more lemon peel, but otherwise, I think this recipe is a keeper.

The Water in the Walls

There are some sounds that you may not identify at first, but as soon as you have recognized them, they come into sharp, immediate focus. Growing up on the Oregon coast as I did, we lived under the seasonal roll of furious winter storms that blew rain under the shingles of our roof and down into our living room. Many November and December nights saw drops of water plopping down into tupperware in strategic locations around our house. Drip, drip, drip.

On Friday, I was struggling to get myself up to go to the gym. I lost out on that battle. I went back to bed for a half hour. Well, that was my intent. Halfway through, I heard a noise that quickly came into focus as water dropping on carpet. I looked outside for rain. Nope. I leapt out of bed. I tracked the drops to the end of my blinds. Hmm. I don't remember running water through my blinds. I tracked it back along the top of the blind to where it was running down the wall from a bulge the size of a tangerine. 

Now, if it is that way in my apartment, it can't be good in the one above me. I quickly called the emergency maintenance folks and they shortly showed up in the form of a man with a handful of tools. I mean a literal handful. No toolbox, no toolbelt; just a handful of tools. I showed him the bulge and he said, "Well, I can't do anything here." and went upstairs to fix it at its source. 

I didn't see him again. I heard hammering from upstairs, but he didn't come back before I left. Just in case, I left a tarp over my bed and along the wall. The bulge had grown to the size of an orange. By the time I came back, later that day, the bulge was gone and all I had to show for the morning was a bucket of nasty water, a musty smell in the air and a ripple in the paint on the wall. Hmm. That ripple pretty much mirrors a pattern in the paint on the adjoining wall. Hmm. I think this has happened before...

The interesting thing is that if I hadn't stayed in bed, I wouldn't have found this until Saturday night. After work on Friday, I went down to Jill and Dean's for Quelf with the gang. Following that I went up to Boulder with Jen and had a great day with her talking to florists, investigating restaurants, and having dinner with friends. So I would have returned Saturday night to an unpleasantly damp bedroom. Thank you, God!

I went down to the office in the Tower of Odd Smells today. I wanted to find out what had happened. The girl in the office didn't know, but she said the problem started in the apartment on the 7 floors above me. Uh ... that's 7 floors this water had to come down. What the heck? She promised to have the maintenance guy call me with the full story, but the office's promise to call me in the past have meant about as much as a dry fart on a windy day.

The other thing I did today while I was down at the office was let them know I'd be moving out. It's still 3 months off, but I though this was an opportune moment to do. So I picked up the form for exiting the Tower of Odd Smells. It's going to be so good to get out. No more water coming out of the walls (either the bedroom or kitchen), no more foul foam bubbling out of my sink, no more graffiti on the walls. I am counting the days. 

Y: The Last Man

I just finished reading through the Y: The Last Man graphic novel. My feelings on it are mixed. Though it was good, it was not nearly as good as I had been lead to believe. It was a victim of positive buzz and my expectations. I guess I was thinking it would be more of a inner journey than a series of "this is another fine mess you've gotten me into" escapades. I guess that lends itself to the medium more. That way you can have cliffhangers and comics that someone can pick up and read by themselves rather than having to be read in the context of the others.

The ending left me feeling odd. It wasn't depressing, but it was certainly bittersweet and an odd capper to the story. I'm not sure what to make of it. Someone will be making a movie of it. I'm pretty sure I heard that rumor. At least it won't be as grisly and depressing as the Alan Moore and Frank Miller adaptations have been. I hope.

For a nice palate cleanser, you might check out Rice Boy. It is a surreal, but rather nice quest saga. The atmosphere in it is lovely, even though the art isn't exactly polished. It is being followed up by The Order of Tales, which is looking promising. If you're looking for a new webcomic to pick up, try these.

Post Pi Day Pie Post

Hmmm, that title is almost a palindrome, sort of ... anyway ... So, I messed up. Yesterday was Pi Day (3/14). I totally missed the opportunity to have a pie party on Pi Day. Last year it was blocked by Mike and Tirzah's wedding, which is an okay reason to not have a pie party, I suppose ;). But this year, I have no excuse. It was even on a Saturday, for crying out loud.
The irony here, is that I had planned in my ignorance to bake a couple pies today. So close! Today I made a hamburger pie, augmented with cheese, olives and green onions. After that I made a pear ginger pie to take into work. The crust on that one went mysteriously wonky, probably due to the dough being in the fridge too long in an exceedingly dry Denver environment.
With the extra dough, I also made what I call a baker's purse. I usually take the dough I trim from around the pie and scrunch it around something tasty, saving it for myself as a reward for my baking endeavors. From the two pies, I had a copious amount of dough left over, so I actually lined a small casserole dish and filled it with apricot jam laced with ginger, cinnamon, powdered sugar, honey and a dash of cayenne pepper. It is currently cooling in my windowsill as jam gets ridiculously hot and quickly sears the palate of unwary consumers. I'm waiting, waiting, waiting. Mmm.
Okay, now it is time to watch Battlestar Galactica. Only two more episodes! (I'm behind.)

Big Brother

When I signed up for twitter, I was presented with some famous people that I could follow, such as NPR's Scott Simon. One twitter feed that caught my eye was 10 Downing Street. Yes! I can follow the tweets of England's office of the Prime Minister! So I picked up Scott Simon and the UK's head of state.

Then this morning I checked my e-mail. I was informed that now, Downing Street is now following me. I dunno if I should be paranoid or proud. Maybe me and Gordon Brown should get together for coffee ... or tea, I guess would be more apropos. Tea with a dollop of surveillance, that is!

Inadvisable?

So, I'm going into this microblogging stuff, maybe not whole hog, but I am putting some of my hog into it. Going quarter-hog into microblogging? I dunno. Anyway, enough people I know have joined up with twitter for me to consider that. But what about plurk and Brightkite? Those are some other microblogging sites I've signed up for and let trickle away. And let's not even talk about the years between my Facebook status updates.

What has prompted me to get on the twitter wagon? It's twofold. One is my phone. I can finally do things like IM and run apps on my phone. The other is an aggregator site, namely hellotxt. It allows me to update all my microblogs with one update. That way I don't have to worry about my karma going down on plurk because I'm using geolocation on BrightKite. We'll see how this goes.

For those who want to follow me on any or all of these for hellotxt, twitter, plurk, Brightkite, and Facebook I am listed on those services as, respectively, turbidity, turbidwater, turbidity, turbidity, and my own name. Tweet on!

Unseemly

Crud. I'm back to my once a week pattern. That didn't take long. Well, so, um ... seagulls in Denver. What the heck is up with that? It blows my mind to see seagulls hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. They were along the Platte and Cherry Creek this morning and yesterday. It was nostalgic for me to hear their cries that were so commonplace growing up on the Oregon coast.

But, c'mon. You're SEAgulls. Not river gulls, not creek gulls, not puddle gulls; SEAgulls. Quit messing with my conception of the natural world, you STUPID BIRDS!

Super Productive Man

You can have your extreme sports, sir. I know how to be really wild. Take, for instance, today. I totally could have kicked some butt if I was still doing Chore Wars. I started off with a healthy breakfast of bacon and eggs. Mmm, bacon. I followed that with laundry. While everything was in the wash, I cleaned my bathroom. While everything was in the dryer, I returned a book to the library, got some groceries, and had one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had. It was an Americano with a finger of half-n-half from Daz Bog. Seriously, that was some ecstasy-inducing java. Who knew Russians knew anything about coffee?

Laundry was followed by lunch while watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Seriously, people, you need to watch this show. There are only two episodes left, and they are shaping up to be doozies, though not in the normal way a series might end with a huge climactic battle. We'll see...

Next came the organizing of my desk and the weeding out of my dresser and closet. Drawers were getting awfully difficult to close and open, so some of my excess t-shirts, some of which have been hanging around since my Linfield days and showed it, are packaged up for another life in the thrift store. I made my bed, too.

Then came taxes. I got those sent off with help from H&R Block's Tax Cut web app. It's quite good at what it does, and I'll be getting a nice refund here soon. I chatted on the phone with Jen and Gavin around this time and got the dishes done on top of that. Once the taxes were printed out and squirreled away, I made myself some dinner by throwing some bacon and other good stuff in with some alfredo sauce and slopping that over some noodles.

After dinner I delved into the dreaded realm of ironing. I hate ironing. It seems so pointless, but several of my shirts were looking like last year's crepe paper so I popped Iron Man into the DVD player and ironed away. The iron-y does not escape me. That task took the whole length of the movie, but I wasn't done yet, because I'm extreme! I followed that up with doing some research on where to have the rehearsal dinner in Boulder. Every place I had looked so far wanted $25 plus per person, which wasn't going to fly. Now my phone is flush with leads I'll follow up on when it's not a busy Saturday night.

And now I'm blogging, out of dedication to you, my faithful reader. And also I'm downloading an XBox update, so, you know, whatever's clever. Okay, that's it. I'm doing being productive today and I have an hour to spend before hitting the hay to get up for church tomorrow ... which is in Daylight Savings Time, so I lose an hour ... which means, ugh. It's actually about time to go to bed. Extreme, I tell you! I'm wild!

Engagement Pictures

It's been nearly a month, but I finally got the pictures from our engagement day posted. There were more than what I originally posted. What? You think I could go to a botanical garden without taking hundreds of shots? As if! I've got a large compliment of pictures waiting for you in my gallery. There are plants, more plants, and perhaps a few pictures of people. Enjoy!

Hatch

Man, have a couple of days over 70 degrees and Denverites explode out of their Winter hidey holes. Everywhere on my ride home, there were runners, cyclists, rollerbladers, and all their ilk. Riding in the Winter can be painful, but it has its benefits, and currently I am suffering from shock of having my paths crowded again. 

People aren't the only things emerging from hibernation. There were tons of gnats along the path, and one went straight down my throat. I barely had to swallow. Thankfully it opted for esophagus rather than trachea, and I didn't have to cough myself up.

Another 70 Degree Day in March

I don't mean to rub this in (well, maybe a bit), but it's going to be another 70 degree day. I'm riding my bike to work in shorts. Of course, we'll be getting snow in May, but, hey, it's 70 degrees in March!

White Lasagna

I see I have lapsed into the one-post-per-week habit. This should change I think. So anyway, here's what's up. It is 70 degrees in Denver today. It is March. Don't be fooled. Much snow is still on the way, but I thought I should mention this to the folks in the midst of a blizzard on the East Coast.

Jen and I did some registering over the weekend. We still have a lot of clearing out of duplicate items to do and to decide on the all important plates and silverware. Also there are some items we need to research before we add them on to the registry. 

Later that night we went to a birthday party for one of Jen's friends. It was 80's themed, but I had nothing 80's themed to wear. I don't think I even did in the 80's themselves. Unfortunately, I had to leave early to work on a deadly deadline. Blech.

On Sunday, I finally resolved to say that the problems with the deadly deadline were somebody else's problem. I then took time to do some reading, take a bath, watch Battlestar Galactica, and cook a white lasagna. This dish was inspired by a lasagna cooked for us by the caterer we selected. I used leftover ingredients from the last lasagna and improvised all over the place. Here's the loose recipe:

White Lasagna 

half a pack of lasagna noodles

2 T. olive oil

1 onion, cut smallish

8 oz sliced portabello mushrooms

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 T. Montreal steak seasoning

1/2 tsp. pepper

1 lb. chicken (or so

shredded mozarrella cheese (as much as you need, I guess. I lost track)

8 oz. Monterey Jack cheese, sliced

1/3 C. shredded Parmesan cheese

2 small jars of alfredo sauce, prolly 16 oz., or make your own if you're more dedicated than me

a pack of fresh basil, shredded

paprika

Saute the onion, mushrooms, garlic, and chicken until the chicken won't kill you. Season with the steak seasoning and pepper. That's what it's there for. Once it's cooked well, add in the alfredo sauce and heat that up a bit. 

You've been boiling the lasagna noodles, right? I hope so. You're going to need them soon. If not, get on it! Okay, so take those properly-boiled lasagna noodles and line the bottom of a rectangular casserole dish (13 inches long, I'd recommend). Cover that up with half of your shredded mozarella. Top that with half of your sauce. Top that with the Monterey Jack. Top that with half your basil.

Apply another layer of noodles. Slap down the rest of the mozarella, basil, and sauce in that order. Top with the Parmesan. Sprinkle on paprika to do whatever it is paprika does. I cooked this in a 425 degree oven for about 30 minutes till the top was browned a bit and bubbling nicely. I let it set for a few minutes before digging in.

Honestly, I think this has a bit too much sauce in it. I bet we could cut that down. I accidentally made this in too small of a dish and ended up making a smaller second one that went into the freezer. I think a 10 x 13 dish would work, but I can't remember my dish's dimensions. 

Okay, you can enjoy that now.