| | Security: | | | Subject: | Ugh... | | Time: | 11:25 am |
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| Not the best weekend. My officemate got back from vacation and brought a cold with her or at least that's my best guess since the symptoms are the same. Except I get everything worse. So I've been down and out since friday. I have mostly done not much other than grinding through a few trashy novels and watching tv.
I also made food. Last night I made some really wonderful spiced mashed potatoes. I used dried chipotle powder that gave them a wonderful smoky quality. Gravy from scratch. And then roasted chicken breasts, which were dismal--not because I didn't cook them right, but just pretty bad chicken. Not spoiled, just meh.
Nora has caught a bit of the cold as well, but is doing ok. Actually she's always doing better than ok these days. Janna went out to a consignment store and came back with some really nice new clothes for her as she's currently about to outgrow a lot of stuff. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| Here in Mass, we get Patriots Day as a holiday so I had a three day weekend that I turned into a four day weekend. It was glorious weather. Warm, sunny, wonderful. I've been extremely burned out on everything and needed it bad.
We had two outtings with The Tiny One(TM). We went to Bone Hill. I think some of you you've visited us have been there. It's an Audubon sanctuary. She ran around the yard of the nature center and got her yayas out and then we went and walked around the little pond. She's getting quite adept at walking on rough ground, though she took a tumble on a root. And she's being very good about holding onto a finger when we're walking together. We saw a few turtles sunning themselves and a few frogs and some ducks. We being Janna and I, we're pretty sure that Nora was oblivious. I'm not even sure she knows what a turtle is. (Gods help us if she'd seen a bunny.)
The second outting was to Taylor Bray farm, which is a 17th century farm that's been preserved. They have a lot of space to run around and chickens, goats, sheep, Scottish Highland cattle, and donkeys. We got to see most of it. Nora, at first, was terrified of the chickens because the rooster was having himself a crow-fest. She was interested in the goats. I'm not sure she realized that the cattle were actually alive because they're so big and were just hanging out. Sadly the sheep and donkeys were too far from the fence to bother.
Note: I am very out of shape and Nora is very in shape and chasing a toddler around is very tiring!
Food was also a highlight of the weekend. Thursday night I made a Thai red curry chicken and for once I think I really nailed the flavors. Then friday we had bruschetta, which is kind of a cop out really. Sunday I made a huge feast of BBQ ribs, kielbasa, and red beans and rice. And then last night I made a nice Israeli couscous with wild mushrooms and grilled pork chops rubbed with lemon zest and spices.
Then there was the frustrating part of the weekend. In an attempt to get rid of the $10 fee for a comcast DVR, I tried to build a media PC with a cablecard tuner. I got everything up and running, installed everything and all was well. Then it wasn't. First I had issues when I installed logmein (so I wouldn't have to hook a keyboard and mouse to a tiny PC under the tv) and then the cablecard got unpaired and when it was repaired, half the channels were missing and comcast refused to do anything to fix it. Eventually having wasted a large part of my weekend on this, I gave up and it's all set up to ship back to Amazon and we're back to the Comcast DVR and it's Windows 2.0 interface. We may look at the TIVO units, especially since they claim they're going to have the ability to watch comcast on demand as well. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| So I continue to exist. This is a good thing. At least for me.
Friday I left work early and Janna's parents babysat The Nora and we saw The Hunger Games. This is the first movie I've seen on premiere day since Captain Kirk saved the whales. No really. I loved the movie. It followed the book pretty closely in both plot and tone and the actors carried it. Lawrence and Kravitz were standouts. More than anything, I am simply thrilled that the number one movie in the country not only passes the Bechdel test, but has a kickass woman as the lead.
The rest of the weekend was good as well. At $180/month not including any pay channels, we are ditching cable in favor of streaming and we are grinding through saved up episodes of Ashes to Ashes which is not available in any form in the US as far as I can tell. We're down to two left and we found that the local PBS station has screwed up the aspect ratio in one and made it unwatchable.
We're just thinking that with a Roku we can just buy what we want to watch on amazon video. I figured out if we paid for every new series we watched a la carte, we would still have paid less in the last three months than a single month of cable. So we have a new faster Roku 2 coming (ours is the original "netflix player" not even the Roku 1). I hope this all works out.
And we are also watching Game of Thrones courtesy of Netflix DVD which we're both enjoying a great deal. I'm finding it a great deal easier to watch than it was to read. It took me four or five tries to get through GoT and I still haven't managed to get more than a few chapters into the second book.
Nora is doing great. She's running around causing trouble. She has a huge understood vocabulary, but doesn't talk much yet. We had a wonderful warm week and she enjoyed being able to run around in the yard. I also enjoyed being able to scoot. I got home one evening while she was outside and the scoot scares her a lot. But when I opened my helmet she knew it was me and smiled. She's been in kind of a fussy mood, but at the same time she understands most of what we say and we can ask her to do things and she'll usually comply. Unless its stop being fussy or stop screaming. Those she seems less interested in complying with.
Carmen is also doing great. For those who aren't on my facebook feed, she had severe renal failure and was in intensive care for a week. She's bounced back and still has at least 40% of her kidney function, which is great considering the shape she was in. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Yes, I'm still alive and I still check LJ. I really haven't had a whole lot to write about and I dropped off of the "weekend update" posts which pretty much were "well I had nothing to do." | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| On Saturday Cape Cod had the absolutely perfect snowstorm. It was absolutely beautiful. First, it was predicted. Second, it was on a weekend. And third, it's already melted.
I had read an article about how to make better home-made pizza. Mine is pretty good, but the article concentrated on a classic margarita and it had been a while since I'd done that style, so I laid in some fresh mozzarella (gotta get around to making that at some point rather than buying it--I gather it's not hard) and basil. And also some nice boar's head pepperoni--make one pure margarita and one pepperoni. I figured it would be a nice meal for a snowy day. The oven would heat up the house and all.
When I got up around 9, the snow was just starting to come down. And it came down all day. Fluffy, thick. It was just beautiful, exactly the kind of snow you'd put on a greeting card. It just kept piling up all day while we were warm inside. The pizza came out great, it's harder to work with the fresh mozzarella because it has a lot of liquid, but I got it balanced out nicely. I'm also really liking the effect of a 1/4th whole wheat flour in the crust.
Sunday there was a bit of shoveling, but our neigbor did the roadside burm with his snowblower, which saved us an enormous effort. There were more tasty treats as we ate the last of Janna's water dumplings and she made scallion pancakes.
I played some Rift since it was free. The game frustrates me. The developers are absolutely fantastic. It has a great new feature called "instant adventure" that transports you into a zone and puts you in a raid size zerg running around doing small quests that culminate in a tank and spank raid boss. It's not high art, but it beats the hell out of pulling crap to grind EQ1 style or solo quest grinding (if you like solo quest grinding, that's there too). It also lets me do a bit of healing along with my DPS. But it's frustrating in that there are aspects that are just incredibly not fun to play. In particular, they allow you to chain all your abilities onto a single macro and it ends up with gameplay being the mashing of a single key, one for single target, the other for DPS. Ugh. Well back to LOTRO I think.
One thing about the weekend. It was entirely too short. You get used to all the short weeks and long weekends in December and January all too quickly. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Security: | | | Subject: | Winter? | | Time: | 02:48 pm |
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| I hear it might snow this weekend. It's been a very odd year. Last weekend it finally got cold, but not before a day it was so warm I did my shopping on Lemon Squeezy. I was inspired by an article I saw online, so I'm going to do nice fresh pizza margherita this weekend and watch the snow, should we actually get any.
We haven't been up to much. The Noramonster(TM) is growing and happy. But she's also on a schedule where just when we're ready to go do something in the afternoon, she conks out for a nap. She shocked me the other night. Janna takes her up and I stay up and game for a little while. It's easier to get her down that way. I'm too much of a distraction. But I waved "bye bye" and she looks up and says "buh buh!" Both Janna and I were like "ok." Her other words include Ga for cat and Ra for rat (she has a stuffed rat).
Other than that we're boring. I'm playing LOTRO, will probably play Rift's free play this weekend even though I'm unlikely to resubscribe.
I'm vaguely trying to diet, which isn't really dieting, but is trying to stop eating a violently unhealthy diet of fatty food and tasty alcoholic drink. I don't know if I'm losing any weight, but I certainly feel more energetic. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| It's time for PBS to join the 21st century. I enjoyed Downton Abbey when we watched it last night and all that, but the entire ongoing debacle between PBS and ITV just grates on me. For those who don't know, the series is not just done running, it's done running, had a cliffhanger, and the cliffhanger was resolved in December with the Christmas special.
Oh yeah, and we're not getting the entire series either. PBS is re-cutting it again. There are removed scenes. And obviously the dramatic flow is being disrupted by not showing the series as it was meant to be shown. And it's not just Downton, it's also Lewis, Sherlock, and a flock of other series.
Here's a head's up to PBS. The world is smaller. You can't take a series and run it at a different time and cut it and have people not get very cross with you. BBC America figured this out a few years ago and now they run the Dr. Who Christmas special at Christmastime, not in the middle of the summer. We are not peons who are desperate for any bit of culture that we might get that goes above the laugh track and idiocy of US network. I'm sick and tired of being six months behind people who are pirating shows. Broadcast them at the same time as your UK partners.
While you're at it. Knock off the idiotic 3 day windows on your programming on demand. Get the rest of your series onto streaming so we can get them through the net.
Get with the current Millenium. Stop living in the 1970s. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| This weekend was only two days long. That was an unpleasant shock after two weeks of 4 and 5 day weekends!
Well, I made the best of it. Ok, I probably didn't make the best of it, but it was a weekend. We were not very adventurous with food. Steak on friday because I had some good ones I got on a deal a few weeks ago. We had some wonderful greens with them. The shops have this nice assortment of young spinach and chard that is exceptionally tasty. Saturday we were feeling kind of gnoshy rather than feasty. I had an eggplant kicking around so we ended up doing a big platter of bruschetta with eggplant and a really great roasted pepper salad with a caper dressing.
We actually got to watch a couple of movies too. There was the good and the bad. The good was In A Lonely Place, a Bogart noir from 1950. It was absolutely incredible. Just a brilliant film that mixes romance and darkness--not exactly a strength of the 50s. I can't recommend it enough. See this film. It also, not known at all to me, was the source of lyrics for the wonderful Smithereens/Suzanne Vega song In A Lonely Place.
The other movie we watched was Red Riding 1974. I was not a fan. We knew it wasn't a normal mystery and were expecting something a lot darker, but we really were expecting a dark crime film, not a sort of meditation on the meaninglessness of life and the powerlessness of humanity. If we were looking for that I suppose it's a very good example for the genre, but just way too dark for my tastes. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| It's been a wonderful two weeks. Really. And I'm back at work and very much missing my regular dosage of Nora.
I took Thursday and Friday off to give myself a Really Long Weekend. Great bang for the buck around the holidays. I feel like I've basically had two full weeks off and I only used 3 vacation days.Thursday and Friday we really didn't get up to a whole lot. We were planning to have our friend Gauge over on New Years eve and had a rather elaborate menu of Chinese foods Saturday night and then some "good luck" foods (fried chicken, Portuguese black eyed peas and rice, and greens) on New Years day, which has become kind of a tradition for us.
That didn't quite work out so well as Saturday I woke up with an extremely severe UTI. Thankfully, I was able to get a Saturday appointment (silly community health centers, Saturday appointments? Do they think this is Canada or England or something?) and got onto antibiotics before I ended up in the ER and I'm feeling fine now. But we cancelled until Sunday with Gauge and swapped our relatively simple chicken dinner with the far more complex Asian one.
It all worked out in the end. Janna made scallion pancakes and water dumplings (that's from scratch btw up to and including the dumpling wrap dough) and I dutifully followed the recipe and made Char Sui pork. It all came out incredibly good and the three of us feasted. Nora wasn't real excited about anything unfortunately, but she'd enjoyed the black eyed peas the evening before. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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