Silver Case

I bought two fresh roots of horseradish from Whole Foods Pittsburgh.  It’s a noxious weed, so it doesn’t seem to hard to grow.  I planted them this morning in a couple wide pots.  Didn’t make the mistake of giving them too much nitrogen like I spoiled my tomatoes with last time.

Hopefully I’ll have some nice, fierce horseradish roots later this year.

Woke up around 0600 today. Vestiges of jet-lag put me to bed early and wake me up early. It also makes me dinner-hungry at breakfast-time.

But boy, did I have a solution today.

Diced up a 3″ stub of Claypoole Bologna, courtesy of Dear Aunt Mary, browned it in a pan, then scrambled it soft with three fresh eggs. Concurrently I prepared a latte for myself and Matilda made me wheat toast. How absolutely dignified that was. Tasted phenomenol.

If you watch one Alton Brown ever, make it the “Egg” episode where he shows how to make scrambled eggs. (a pinch of salt, a small tbsp of milk, fold the egg over itself while cooking, and take it out when it still looks wet [”eggs that look done in the pan will be overdone on the plate”]) Such simple, accurate instructions.

I have about 80% of my bologna ring left.

Dad, Mom, Megan, and Luke

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

I just uploaded a pile of happy photos from our Summer Vacation.

If you upload your own to Flickr, include the tag “pa07″ so that we can easily find them.

…got in a 5:30am.  24 hours late.  Our Thursday 5:50pm PGH/Newark flight didn’t take off till 10:30pm, meaning I missed my 11:00pm Newark/Singapore nonstop. We were lucky to get out Friday night. Delay could have been two days.

Ended up going to Greenwich Village Friday afternoon, buying some excellent beans from Joe The Art of Coffee,  tried to buy a chess machine from Village Chess Shop. Failed. They say chess machines are basically extinct.    It was nauseatingly hot in NYC.  Had some ok mexican and a gelato at a much-raved about place on either MacDougal or 6th Avenue (cannot remember), which was fine, but mostly unremarkable.

Now I’m hear, sun is coming up, little man is dressed in a bandana and rubber boots playing with his trains with his other grandmother and Matilda.

Was kicking myself for forgetting to try the red-flavored Mountain Dew I saw in a 7-11 there.  I didn’t even taste regular  Mountain Dew while I was there — Mountain Dew doesn’t exist in Singapore. (Not sure why).

I’ll jam a lot of photos up on Flickr later after I’ve downloaded them from my camera.

Vacation moving (too) briskly along.  Spent the weekend in Jefferson county, enjoying a very pleasant family reunion, a visit to Seneca Point and the fire tower at Cook Forest, and pizza at the Pizza Pub in Clarion.

Now we’re back in Murrysville.  Went to the Strip District in Pittsburgh today. Bought $300 worth of dried chillies to take back to Singapore.   I bought several pounds each of several different species, including 1.5 lbs of Habaneros and Anchos.  The Habanero are so hot the staff won’t touch them.  I nearly gassed myself and my dad while sticking handfuls of Anchos into a bag. Just the floating dust left me with eyes/nose pouring and coughing and choking.  I can’t get any of these chillis in Singapore, for any money, and they often come up in my recipes (especially things like chipotles).

Went to 21st Street Coffee.  They boast a Synesso espresso machine and a Clover brewed coffee machine.  Sad to say, but despite being the most expensive machines money can buy, the coffee was disappointing.  Ling’s ‘Cortada’ (a piccolo latte in Sydney or a short-double-latte in Singapore) was bitter, as if over-extracted, and the milk was poorly textured — a stiff foam on top of dead (scalded?) milk.  My ristretto was bitter at first, but the final sips were, admittedly, quite sweet.  The drip coffee ( a single-origin Sumatran) was just weak. Disappointing, I was really hoping for a strong cup after having several days of weak, watery coffee.  I guess theoretically I could have told the woman to: 1) make the temperature hotter  2) make it stronger (45 seconds soaking time only?!), but I just assumed she’d make a good, strong coffee to begin with. Sadly, no.

I fixed the situation by going up the street and buying a 2qt french press, a cuisinart burr grinder (wow, it’s really nice, although loud) and a digital scale.  Now we have properly strong, fresh coffee to enjoy.  I can get bags of Peets here, so that is quite satisfactory.

Later in the afternoon I went bike shopping and got myself last year’s (is 2006 “last year” or “two years ago”?) 2006 Specialized Stumpjumper M4 Disc.  It’s a simple hardtail, but I like the feel of it, and thought it would feel good on both trails and road.  I tried some Cannondales, but felt the lighter, quicker one was a bit lame (really wide handlebars made it felt like a kid’s ike) and the heavier, muscular one was just not appropriate for the riding I want to do. It had HUGE fucking wheels and would be good for extremely high speed fire-road descents, as it would absorb a huge amount of abuse. However, I didn’t like how it seemed to handle.   Although this bike has disc brakes, they’re mechanical, not hydraulic, like those awful things on my Trek Liquid 20.

Made a fresh pasta sauce and meatballs for dinner and enjoyed some burrata for appetizer. Dessert was biscotti from the Strip District and the coffee I mentioned earlier.

This evening we played around on ham radio for a while.  Pretty lame conditions, but I did manage a nice, long CW ragchew with WB9EBS, Lee in Dixon Illinois, on 40m.  When 20, 80, and 40 all went dead, I switched to looking for numbers stations, and found a Mossad E10 station on 6mhz (ECHO ZULU INDIA 6.840mhz). That’s the first number station I’ve ever heard in the wild, and I do confess it was exciting to hear.

Now it’s after midnight and I had better go to bed.

Wild horses will not be able to drag me into a car for a drive back to Pittsburgh.

If the random execution-style slayings didn’t have me excited to waste a night in Newark, then these morning headlines from the Drudge Report sure do.

Fitness Assessment

The remnants of my old PC system continue to decay.  See today that my APC UPS backup has blinking “overload” and “replace battery” red lights  and will no longer even pass current, let alone preserve line voltage.  Piece of shit.

So far, the only complaint I have about my iMac is that the space bar is a bit sticky and jammy.  I think the UI drives Ling a bit nuts. I have the ‘corners’ of the screen set up to do different actions, and I think she keeps bringing her mouse to the lower right-hand which shows and exploded view of the whole computer — sort of like a graphical task manager.  I heard her cursing about it last night, in fact.

New printer I bought has a color scanner in it, which is nice for sucking in documents and mailing them around. Was nice lately for sending house-related stuff to the lawyer.

Would own my house today, except I wrote 2008 instead of 2007 on a $3,140.00 check, so that has pushed things back a day or so.

At any rate, we met up with the guy we’re going to have do the renovations at our house.  He had pretty good design for modifying the kitchen and downstairs. I would prefer a bigger workshop down there, but the guest room and kitchen trumps that to some degree.  He nicely designed a new master bathroom/bedroom.  We’re finalizing the wall lines first, then will bother with the finer details.

The price is about what I expected.  The timing is longer than I’d hoped:  1-2 months to get government planning approval and then 4-6 months after that to have all the renovations completed.  That puts us right at Apr08 for completion.  Thankfully our lease runs till April, so we should be ok.  Had been hoping to move more like December or January, but it seems infeasible.

I’ll try to get the plans scanned and uploaded here, but they’re on strange-size paper which will require scanning and stitching, and I don’t have the time for that right now.

A private equity firm calling itself ‘Cerberus’ (vaguely insinuiating it has a brain) committed ritual seppuku today.

What did they do?  Their  first mistake was buying an American car company, Chrysler.  But by far their worst mistake, guaranteed to be a mortal one, was hiring Robert L. ‘Bob’ Nardelli as the chief executive.

This guy is so laughably appalling it stuns me that he’d ever work again.  I guess I’m stunned that he’d work again not just because he’s so utterly incompetent, but because he was paid $245 million for overseeing Home Depot lose %12 of its value over five years as its closest competitor, Lowes, increased by %178.

If you still doubt what an awful executive he is, read this delightful story from the New York Times from a few years ago after Nardelli ‘hosted’ an infamous shareholder’s meeting for Home Depot. It’s so bad it’s almost funny, except it isn’t.  In fact it’s nauseating.  [If you follow one URL in this article today, make it this NYT article]

I was told that Daimler wanted rid of Chrysler so badly that they essentially paid Cerebrus to take it. But I still don’t understand the point of hiring such a worthless piece of crap to oversee the company.  This guy is a proven loser.  So what he works under a ‘pay for performance’ package…I can’t believe  someone more competent wouldn’t have worked under the same arrangement.

Whatever.  Idiots.

“Beat my friends”

punctuated by furious laughter.

I’m always on the lookout for new art projects to do. Wardian Cases (Travelling Greenhouses) sound cool.

4777 has some old stained glass equipment laying around I’m sure. Maybe during vacation we can make some victorian-era Wardian cases to keep obscure ferns in. I certainly have plenty to harvest from the jungle 50ft from my new house.

On the advice of Boing Boing (Boing Boing: Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s hard-boiled FELL) I picked up Feral City.

I’m not a huge fan.

As BB points out, it’s more a collection of (very) brief short stories. Except they are so short, they’re practically vignettes.   No real chance for big story development.  Yeah, I’m sure over time Fell’s dark secrets from the other side of The Bridge will be revealed, but I’m not so interested to keep paying $20/book to find out.

The artwork is ok.  I often am suprised by how lazy some graphic novel artwork seems (Watchmen, for example).   Feral City’s production is quite modern and detailed.  It makes up for the some of the short-fallings in the story, but still, a graphic novel needs to have a strong story, and this doesn’t.

Fortunately, I bought another graphic novel series, “DMZ,” and it is substantially better.   I devoured the two volumes I bought.  I made a point to go back to Kinokuniya today to get the third volume. It really bummed me out when I realized, “oh, there are only two volumes, and I’ve read them both. Shit.”  I could do with another volume.

I’m sure it’s in the works anyway, though.  Volumes two made a few pointed references to a Halliburton-like company coming to Manhattan for “humanitarian” works.

My prototype messenger bag

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Messenger bags are cool. In fact, very cool. Doubt me? Check out Freitag’s F-Cutter website as an example.

I’ve always liked them, and now since I ride my bike to work frequently, I have an excuse to use one. I have to carry my books, papers, lunch, coffee thermos, clothes, etc.

There are a lot of web articles on making your own. Some in fact go so far to make the material out of melting plastic shopping bags together. (Don’t get any ideas, Mother)

So I made my first bag a few weeks ago. It’s a simple design. The dimensions are related to the Golden Ratio and it fits me reasonably well. It’s made out of canvas and some lightweight seatbelt-like material I found.

My sewing machine is really capable, so I managed to do all the nice finishing stitches like overlocking the edges so they don’t fray, and using very strong triple-stitches on the seams.

I’m going to build a v1.0 bag next. I like the cloth/canvas look, but I want it waterproof, so I’ll have some sort of vinyl underneath/inside. I want it a bit bigger so that it fills up more of my back and I can fit something as large as A3 paper in it. I want designated paper sleeves in it, too, to separate my papers from the heavier stuff. I have other more interesting ideas to add to the bag, but I’ll save those until I’ve finished them.

The paperwork is a day away till I formally own our new house.  I took the dogs, Ling, and Luke over yesterday to check the place out.

I met the neighbor on the other side of the fence and was talking with him.  Mister loves to eat long, sweet grass. He’s like a cow.  The house, deserted, has turned into a weed-a-rarium, and some of the grass species are a foot tall.  So as I am talking to the neighbor, I looked over and see Mister there grazing away.

Look back a minute later, and I see Mister is still there, however Luke is now also there, on hands and knees, trying to eat the grass with his mouth only, as well.

Made a Nigel Slater recipe for dinner today…

Bought a kilogram of pork belly.  This turns out to be a nearly-revoltingly fatty piece of meat. More like bacon, in fact, than a normal cut.  Scored the fatty skin (which still had two nipples on it), rubbed it with salt and pepper, and tossed it in a roasting pan.

Around the pork I laid the critical onions. I thinly sliced four onions, chopped up eight garlic cloves, and softened them in olive oil.  To this I added a few tablespoons of fennel, and a pile of chopped rosemary, thyme, and bay (all friends of pork).  After I made that a nice soffrito, I dissolved the sticky bits with some lemon juice, and tossed it in the roasting pan around the pork.

Roast one hour.

Serve by cutting the pork into very small bits.  I had some very nice soft sandwich rolls which I buttered and grilled till they toasted.  Serve the pork with the onions and some baby arugula (the bitter weed).  They were really tasty little sandwiches.

I have enough for lunch for the rest of the week.

Bay leaf - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mountain laurel leaves are poisonous to certain livestock and are not sold anywhere as a spice (cousin species) (britannica). However this has led to the mistaken belief that bay leaves should be removed from food after cooking because they might poison humans. Bay leaves are safe to eat. However, a person may accidentally swallow a leaf, and the leaves remain stiff even after several hours of cooking. Also, if you grind or crush the bay leaves before adding to your cooking, the leaves will impart more of their desired fragrance than if used whole.

Vladimir Zimakov drawing

I enjoy his sketches more than anything else.  His hatching makes Edward Gorey look light-weight.

4:45pm is the most irritating minute of the day here at 18Robin Close. Boy is cranky, Parents are tired, house is at its torpid hottest. On top of that, I had a migraine arriving.

Went into the kitchen and decided to make a drink.

• fresh lemons (8)
• handful of leftover rosemary from last night’s fish
• old can of half-eaten peaches languishing in the refrigerator
• few trays of ice

Juiced the lemons, pureed the rosemary and three half-peaches, combined it with a few trays of crushed ice. Stole a little bit of “juice” (corn syrup, probably) from the can of peaches. Now I have a civilized glass of lemonade to conclude this hot afternoon. The rosemary does make a difference.

Update:   I made this today, but with pink grapefruit instead of lemons. And I skipped the peaches and sweetner. It was better and not so sour.