I Am Martha Stewart
We're having a barbecue this weekend at our home. We've done this barbecue now for each summer that we've been here, so I guess it makes this the fourth annual version of said barbecue.
Last week, I practiced a bit. We went up to my parents' condo in Cuchara, CO. We had no real plans of things to do, and mostly just hiked around the condo a bit. On one of the days up there, I read about a smoking technique for smaller charcoal grills and put it to work to see how it would do.
By visual inspection, you may guess (correctly!) that it went pretty well. I smoked a pork shoulder rubbed with this. It came out perfect - you can ask Anna and Owen. And possibly some bears that got to smell it.
While I don't intend to do a pork shoulder for our barbecue, the important thing was the smoking technique, since I will likely try it this weekend.
What really makes our family's barbecue is the sauce. People like the sauce - it's a sauce my dad's mom taught him to make, that he taught me to make, and people seem to generally like it. (Side note: I need to make it again at the beach this year and not experiment like I have the last few years, so beach attendees can taste the proper sauce.) It's kind of funny - the thing my neighbors like the most is my sausage and my sauce - and they'll talk about how my "sausage is so good" and how I "have great sauce". You haven't lived until a gaggle of ladies talks about how good your sausage is. It's cool, but not as cool, when one or many of the dudes say the same.
Oddly, Anna never complements my sausage. Huh.
We have some neighbors that moved away to whom I'd like to send a care package of some sauce so that they can still get a fix. The problem there is that the stuff only has a shelf life of a week or so. In past years I've had neighbors ask me to make extra sauce that they can bring home.
We got one of these last summer.
What is that, you might ask? A pressure cooker! I started canning things last summer with all the stuff we got from our farm and from our vegetable garden. It went very well - having cans of vegetables through the winter and spring was very awesome. It was especially more awesomer when the tiny moocher decided he wanted to start feeding himself.
It seems I can do this!
So, last night, I made a giant pot of sauce, and canned it in the pressure cooker. Problem solved! The sauce should (if I canned it properly) last up to a year unopened.
Last year I canned vegetables. I never actually thought about canning sauce - let alone the barbecue sauce my family has always made. This is the first time I've ever done this with the sauce - but I feel like it's kind of a monumental occasion. The sauce is being distributed for the first time!
I need to come up with a clever name to slap on the jars with a label.
The other yellow jars contain an experimental sauce that I'm not sure how I feel about yet. It's a honey-peach-bourbon sauce I kind of followed a recipe for. I say "kind of" because it gave me a vague idea of what to add, and then I went ahead and ignored most of what it said to do.
The problem here, for the neighbors, is that I think they know what they're getting for Christmas each and every year from this point forward.
Xbox Adventure
Owen is completely mobile now, which isn't news.
I have an "entertainment center" in my office that is ripe with things that toddlers crave. It's like a symphony of toys of the size he can swallow, flashing lights, buttons, keyboard, mouse, cables, and exposed power strips. It's also a poster-worthy example of where a kid should not be.
Most days, if unattended, OVL will make a bee-line into my office and start pushing buttons, moving toys, changing all the settings on my audio receiver, hiding my mouse, and pulling books off the shelves. He turns power strips on and off at will, because he likes that when he presses the button, something happens. He also learned that mashing the big button in the center of the Xbox controller will make the Xbox itself light up.
Basically, this is his utopia.
The problem with all this is that when most evenings when he is asleep, after dinner and some "quality time" with the missus, I like to go upstairs into my study and play Xbox.
This is no longer a simple task. It used to be that I'd just sit in my chair, grab a controller, and start to play. Now, any of the following things must be added to the pre-Xbox task list:
- Finding the remote controls to turn on the TV. I actually find myself doing this less and just using the physical buttons on the devices, unless:
- Restore color/audio/channel settings to the TV. He likes to press buttons, as indicated, and every time you press a button on the remote control, it lights up. This is feedback that he loves. Once he gave me a custom picture setting where colors were more or less inverted.
- Locate the xbox controller(s). They exist on a charging cradle that is now within his reach, and while usually they are "somewhere upstairs" relatively close to my study, there have been a few times when I've found the controller somewhere awesome like the (empty) bathtub.
- Turn power back on to the power strips.
- Figure out why nothing works. This can be just because he's changed the input on my receiver, but usually it's because he's pressed every single button reachable on all devices that sit on my shelves.
- I have a headset I wear for audio when playing Xbox. It's a wired 5.1 headset, with a wire that reaches across the floor from the Xbox to my chair. It has buttons on it, and blue lights that flash when they are pressed. Usually this is a matter of reattaching the cables, because he's tripped on the cord. Sometimes, I have to figure out what combinations of buttons he pushed to make it not work.
- Also on the headset is a little volume control where I can change the levels of each 5.1 channel. This is done by using lit buttons that also do something when they are pushed. I often sit down to play Xbox, pull on the headset, and then get hit by the equivalent of an aircraft taking off. I spend the next half-hour deaf.
And all of it? Still extremely entertaining. I suppose at some point it'll get frustrating, but then I can just close the doors, which will work until he learns how to open doors.
Sometimes, Green Sucks
I have a pretty solid morning routine at work.
I mix together yogurt and granola for breakfast. While we have paper plates and bowls available to us, I use my own little Tupperware bowl every day, and I wash it out when I'm done.
I have two or three cups of green tea each morning, in a ridiculous teacup that looks like it was transported here directly from the year 1914. The tea and teacup is also provided by work. There was a coffee machine that has a hot water tap on the side, so that hot water is always available and ready to go for tea drinkers. I have a little honey bear that I use to squeeze some honey into my tea. I stir it with a spoon.
Work provides us with disposable utensils. I have had one plastic spoon that I've been using for a long time for tea stirring and yogurt eating.
Today is the day it all changed.
Our coffee machine has been replaced by one of those Keurig coffee machines, and there's no hot water tap anymore. I panicked, because the only other option is to take water from the water cooler, put it into 1914 teacup, and hope the antique pottery survives the two minutes in the microwave.
So I go to the - zounds! New water cooler too! I pause and briefly consider my path this morning, and am trying to remember whether or not I actually entered the correct office. I'm definitely in the same place I'm supposed to be. Dang. Upon investigation, I find that instead of a little tap like you'd expect on a water cooler, where you push down to open the valve to let water escape, there are buttons. Three buttons. One button is for cold water. The other two, if pressed simultaneously, magically provide hot water. Victory!
Our old water cooler, with the valves, releases a gentle flow of water. Our new water cooler seems to want to deliver the delicious solvent I seek with maximum force, as quickly as possible. It's very near the stream you'd expect from a water cutter.
So, besides the risk of losing fingers from this directed stream of water, I begin to worry about 1914 teacup's ability to absorb the blast. But not for very long. The jet of water is so fierce that it hits the teacup and immediately starts splashing out of the cup all over me. Did I mention the water was very hot?
After checking for third degree burns, and noting that 1914 teacup is still miraculously suited to its task of holding liquid, I had water for tea. Not surprisingly, so did the counter top, the wall, and most of the neutral-colored carpet. I opened and then added the teabag to let the tea steep.
Next, I go to the drawer to see about replacing my spoon. Instead of normal spoons, we now have biodegradable spoons as pictured above. No big deal. Time to walk back to my cube with my tea and new spoon.
I mix together my yogurt and granola, and stir it with the spoon. I add honey to the tea and start to stir it together. The spoon begins to degrade, in the tea, while I'm stirring.
And that's how my new morning has gone so far.
A Thing That Just Occurred to Me
We may completely miss out on the kids saying "are we there yet?" on road trips. The GPS systems we've become reliant on will let them know approximately how close we are to being there, and they won't have to ask!
Or that's my hope, anyway.
Get Learnin’ On Pickin’
We are still members of our farm. Last week we got a bunch of turnips, some garlic, and some peas.
One of the opportunities we've had available to us as members is the ability to go pick fresh asparagus and strawberries. We've never done it, because in our heads it was just too far to drive, and possibly wasn't worth the effort. This year we wanted to do it because we thought it'd be a fun activity for us and the wee man. We weren't wrong - but we weren't entirely right.
Google Maps puts it at roughly an hour and a half a way. I think that those directions are based on the fact that a lot of the roads to the farm weren't paved. Well, now they are - we got there in little over an hour, which required us to take various county roads that traveled in straight cardinal directions.
You see those nice clean rows of veggies behind Owen? Our strawberries weren't there - they were in a weed-filled field. And by weeds I mean undesirable plants that you could smoke if you were really inclined to.
There were tons of berries in there, but the rows were hard to discern, and there was a lot of weeds to fight. We ended up with a pretty good haul, but only made it halfway through our row before Owen decided he was done stumbling over weeds. He was a good sport and made it quite a ways and impressed many of our fellow pickers - but any strawberries he picked did not make it into our box, so he wasn't very helpful - the moocher. They all went directly into the mouth:
I think we're going to keep doing this annually. It's pretty fun, and I think it may be somewhat valuable to teach the kids that strawberries don't actually come from plastic clamshells at the grocery store. We're far away from that lesson, but it probably won't hurt to start early. He wasn't bothered by bugs or weeds or scratchy plants - which was really cool to see.
The farm also takes volunteers to do farm work - this is something else I'd like our family to be a part of in the future. Again, it'd be neat to have the kids associate that food comes from somewhere and is a lot of work.
The whole album from the pickin' experience can be viewed by clicking on our bounty below:
More Stalking
I rode my bike to work. I took this path:
View Bike to work in a larger map
Which is about two miles longer than it needed to be because I wasn't paying attention and missed the bike path that is just north of C-470. Oops.
Click on the red dot denoting the end for some statistics, and look at the elevation graph. The ride home is going to be waaaaay uphill. Hooray!
Radio Silence
It's been a while since I've posted. This is because I tried to upgrade the software that powers the site to a different version.
Usually, upgrading the software is straightforward, and a product of me getting very tired of the nag message every time I log in. I usually read the changelogs to make sure nothing will break. This time I did not.
The latest upgrade requires the database software to be upgraded. I didn't read this before upgrading, and as such, every time I tried to log into the site, it greeted me with a message saying my database wasn't the right version, and that I sucked horribly at reading changelogs.
Since I can't actually control that, I took the "let's wait and see if the provider upgrades" strategy, which hasn't paid off, so I rolled back the upgrade.
Not that I have much to say, anyway.
A Long Post About Television
On or around November of 2009, my father-in-law offered to give me his old TV, a Sony KDS-R60XBR1. It's a 60" 1080p display that has the odd characteristic of not being able to actually accept 1080p inputs - but for the price of free plus shipping, little details like that did not matter to me.
The TV is a DLP, which is short for Digital Light Processing, which is short for - you need to replace the bulb every once in a while. When we got the TV, it hadn't been replaced in some time, so the picture was very dull and the color seemed to be a bit off, most notably tiny bits of yellow staining were occurring in the middle of certain scenes. Eventually, we replaced the bulb - which I purchased new off of ebay, and everything seemed to be hunky-dory.
But wait ... there's more!
Fast-forward to April, during the first round of the NHL playoffs. Traditionally, ice hockey is played on a white sheet of ice, and the Caps wear red, white, and blue - as do les Habitants. With the new bulb, the TV had degraded to a point where, during ice hockey games, both teams appeared to be skating on a lake of pee in pee-soaked jersies. The yellow staining of the picture had gotten worse and worse and worse. Episodes of Lost were ridiculously yellow, as any actor appearing on our TV would seem to have advanced symptoms of jaundice.
Having bought the bulb from ebay, and having done quite a bit of research beforehand, I assumed that we had gotten a counterfeit. Counterfeit bulbs are apparently quite a problem in the DLP aftermarket, and I figured - eh, I've been dinged. I ordered a new bulb from Sony directly at about twice the price, and stopped worrying about jaundice because the problem would soon be over.
Only it wasn't. I put the new bulb in the TV and everything was still very yellow. I took the bulb right back out in order to return it, since the bulb wasn't the problem. I did some very advanced google searching - "KDS-R60XBR1 yellow" and the first link I got hit with was this one. Apparently, this is a common problem much like the Xbox360's Red Ring of Death - Sony installed bad color blocks on the televisions, and they fail. Some people thought about banding together for a class action suit against Sony - and Sony offered to just settle with each owner of the TV individually. Father-in-law had no idea, and I don't blame him - neither did I.
I'd be more upset, but as indicated, Sony is attempting to settle with each owner of the faulty set individually. According to that page, they were offering to replace the faulty color unit for free - that's all I was seeking.
Because the unit was so old, they instead decided to offer us a "significant discount" on another Sony TV. About then was when I figured we'd have to buy a new TV - Sony usually has pricier models, or I figured they'd be trying to get rid of some cruft models they had piling up. Instead, I was surprised, they offered us their top of the line 52" Bravia for $300, a 55" Bravia for $200, or another smaller TV I didn't even consider, for $100. Oh, and we have to promise to not sue.
As far as I can tell, the difference between the 52" and 55" were, well, three inches (giggity) and the fact that the 52" had a bunch of stuff we didn't care about, such as ambient light and network capability. So we're going with the 55".
In conclusion, we're going from a 60" 1080p DLP TV with no actual ability to receive 1080p signal from say, our network-enabled blu-ray player, and looks like this:
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| From 2010-05-14 (by Eye-Fi) |
Which makes Owen and daddy:
By the way, that's just static - Craig commented that it looked like we are showing a picture of grass. Also, those menus are supposed to be gray.
To a 55", 1080p, 120Hz LCD - much better than the faux 1080p TV, and at a very good price.
Our upgrade path is crazy, since the significant portion of TVs in our house are from my father-in-law. He gave us the 50" 4:3 480p capable HDTV built in 1998 first, then jaundice-vision, and is now indirectly responsible for us getting our next TV - again at significant savings. Neat.