I planted some beets this year. This is a bad idea because they don’t do well here but screw that. Nothing does well here so I might as well try to have some beets. I planted them at the end of January which is basically like spring everywhere else and they’re supposed to be “mature” in something like 60-70 days. So as long as it’s not 100 freaking degrees before mid-April there’s a chance it could work. I also have some Brussels sprouts since we’re being optimistic.
It is Sunday and I’ve mostly been poking around the house. I did get a couple of little chores done, leaving the laundry until this evening. Since last we talked I finished the A Memory of Light. It was what I was hoping it would be and I am satisfied. I also read a book Bruce suggested I read years ago called “The Drawing of the Dark” which is a fantasy set in 1529 following an Irish mercenary. He is hired to be a bouncer at an inn in Vienna which has a history longer than most suspect and which brews its own beer; a magical beer. It was good and pretty short. I’ve now lent it out to the grad school folks so it’ll be read by ten people in as many days and maybe make it back to me. I also started “The Wise Man’s Fear”, that being the second in a series by Patrick Rothfuss. I read the first a while back so some of the plot has been slow to come back but the new book is good although quite long.
My little project for today was to take a Live Oak Brewery sticker I picked up and cut out the background to fit over the light up apple in the lid of my work computer. It looks pretty cool but I actually have a presentation to make to some of the executive staff on Thursday so I may end up taking it back off before then. Having a brewery sticker on your work computer is just a wee bit unprofessional I suppose.
That’s about it. I’m going to go help a friend move an old water heater to the curb for bulk collection, come back home, start dinner and laundry, and get my exercise done.
This has apparently been sitting in my unpublished drafts section for eight months. Just going to set it free. The light installation is pretty cool. I like how the low power requirements and small size of LED lighting have allowed for a lot of interesting light based installation art in recent years. The house is cool too.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/04/starry-night-light-installations-by-lee-eunyeol/
http://www.dezeen.com/2012/05/01/villa-roces-by-govaert-vanhoutte/
A little while back the Colossal art blog made a post about a new print a shop called Tugboat was working on. They were taking pre-orders on the print and I decided that the initial art was cool enough that I’d almost certainly be happy with the finished print so I ordered one. They got a bit slammed because of the post and it took them longer than they expected to start getting the prints out but I got mine today. It’s pretty sweet. The sky color doesn’t really match anything in the house but that’s ok. I think it’ll go in the bedroom. There’s a piece of wall that’s about the right size. The print is 30.5″ x 35.5″ (80cm x 90cm) and is printed full bleed to a rough edge. I’ll have to start thinking about framing I guess.
I received a garden tiller for Christmas after mentioning, in passing, that turning over the garden in the spring with a pitchfork was awful. Mom came to visit yesterday and one of the things we did was till the garden. What had previously taken something like 2-4 hours of miserable, dirty work took 20 minutes and is done better than I ever did with the fork. It’s basically magic. Anyway, I’m happy with it and I planted a few brussels sprouts plants so that the cabbage loopers will have something to eat this winter.
I need to decide what I’m going to plant because apparently it’s spring now. It’s January 21st and yesterday it was 75°F outside and it’s going to be like that all week until Friday when we get a cold front and get the high drops down to 60°F (brr). It’s too bad, I was looking forward to winter this year and we only had two weeks of it. Who knows, maybe it will snow on Valentine’s Day again like it did years back. I’m betting no. Anyway, I want green beans and I think I’ll try a climbing variety this time and put up some stuff for them to climb. As much as I would like to have cucumbers, that has never actually worked for me so I think that’s out. Acorn squash hasn’t really worked. Yellow squash has but I really only need like two of those. Tomatoes work. Peppers work. Something to think about.
Sunday last week I went to the Blanton and watch the closing ceremony for the sand mandala that some visiting monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery had been building. I took a few pictures and wanted to get them up here.
I’m sitting here at work about to start and entire day of writing quarterly reviews. Mine, my manager and five peer reviews. This is what is known as procrastination. We had a week and a half to do it, it’s due today and I have created the empty files in the directory I store them in.
I spent the entire day yesterday working on one thing. I got in at 08:30 and left at 19:30. After a little help from Whitney it went more smoothly and I have built a thing that looks at the difference in time between the same messages in two different data streams. It has to use a heuristic match because the people that produce the data streams do not include any of the unique message identifying information from the public stream in the private stream. This is clearly bullshit but I can get pretty close and with about 1.5% of messages being obviously misidentified when you look at the time delta.
I really want to keep working on that but it will be there next week and reviews are due today. Lame.
Hello dear blog,
It has been a long time. Since last we talked I rode the LiveStrong challenge and it was hard because I was out of shape. And then I didn’t exercise really at all until last week and it’s been even harder because I’m even more out of shape. However, I am feeling some motivation and I’ve written up a small schedule of exercise that I’ve been able to stick with for the last eight days. Three more weeks and it should stick well enough to be habit. I still haven’t decided if I’m doing the MS150 again. I’ll have to make the call soon though since I need to register and fund raise and all that. All kinds of things have been going on some of which I don’t really want to talk about out of primitive fear of jinxes and stuff.
I saw Django Unchained with a special friend. I liked it better than Inglourious Basterds which is to say I left the theater without feeling like I had been told I was bad person for watching the movie. The same special friend had also been my guest to the traditional New Years Eve dinner at Asti. However, this year we had a party to attend after dinner so we all went and had sparkling drinks and played Cards Against Humanity and I was victor / worst person in the room. I even got to be the Prepared Gentleman and hold the umbrella I had brought when it was raining on the way to the party.
Saturday I went to San Antonio to see my old friend Bimal’s Indian wedding. He and his wife had been married in Los Angeles earlier this fall but his family wanted to do the Hindu thing as well. It was really nice and was a new experience for me. We apparently got the short version since the ceremony was only an hour and there was a lot of “here is where we would normally do X but we’re going to skip that”. There was no skipping on food though. We had cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and then sorbet and then toasts and speeches and then dinner and then dessert and it was all delicious. They seem happy and are cute together.
Sunday I went to the Blanton Museum to see the sand mandala that had been under construction the previous week and which was to be erased. I have never seen that many people at the museum by half. The line for general admission was down the side of the building out into the parking lot where it ran into a plastic barricade and doubled back on itself. Fortunately I am a member of the museum so I was allowed to stand in the short line and actually got in before they erased it. I have a few pictures I’ll add later.
Things are going ok. I have plenty to do at work but it’s not overwhelming and I was asked to do something a little outside of my normal sphere that will be interesting and potentially good for my reputation should I do it well and in a reasonable amount of time.
I’ve read a few books recently.
Redshirts was entertaining and a quick read. There is definitely a gimmick and it’s fine but when it happens it’s like “oh, so this is about that now” and it was.
South of the Border, West of the Sun was also quick and pretty depressing. It was weird because Hajime, in many ways, leads an appealing life and so his midlife crisis is a little hard to sympathize with but at the same time, I feel like I’m in a better place mentally / emotionally so I must be doing something right. Also, the end is oddly ambivalent. He seems to be able to leave the baggage from his past behind and reconnect with his wife and it seems genuine but the last scene is him sitting at the kitchen table after not being able to sleep with his face in his hands which felt sorrowful and resigned. I’m not sure what to make of it.
The Signal and the Noise was good pop science and though it tends to skip around a bit I liked all of the individual pieces. Some of it has been a topic of conversation around the office and it seems like a lot of the topics touched on things I’ve done in my life either in school, work or just personal interests. He has an accessible writing style, conversational but not distractingly so.
Finally, I read a couple of young adult novels. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There. Being YA they went quickly but they were enjoyable and the world building is imaginative and fun which is really what I wanted from them.
The big book news is that I have been reading the A Memory of Light, the 14th and final book of the Wheel of Time. I started reading the series in 1993. I got the first four books in paperback at Central Park Mall which doesn’t even exist anymore and then I got book five in hardback and have read each as they were released since then. This means that I have been following this series for almost twenty years which is well more than half my life. Mr. Sanderson has done a good job finishing up for the late Mr. Jordan, keeping the same style and tone but moving the plot along, tying up threads that need it and letting go those that are forgivably lost. I’m about a third through it and it’s pretty much what I wanted so far. Provided that work isn’t too bad this week and I can get through dinner and exercise in a timely fashion I suspect I’ll finish it by the end of the next weekend. How odd, to finally be at the end of the journey after all this time.
The last two weeks have seen two beer festivals come and go here in Austin. The Flying Saucer had Beerfeast on Saturday, September 29th, a day which threatened rain but did not deliver until the very end of the event. I had 12 delicious things and only spilled beer on one other person.
(512) Brewing, 2010 Double Pecan Whiskey Porter
Breckenridge Brewery, Autumn Ale, Fall Seasonal
Brooklyn Brewery, Fiat Lux, Wit Beer
Dogfish Head Brewery, Punkin, Spiced Ale
Harpoon Brewery, Octoberfest
Hops & Grain Brewery, Dark IPA
New Belgium Brewing Co., Metric 10.10.10, Belgian Style Pale Ale
Ommegang Brewery, Biere D’Hougomount, Harvest Ale
Ommegang Brewery, Seduction, Belgian Dark Ale
Real Ale Brewing Co., 4-Squared, Double Blonde Ale
Sixpoint Brewery, Sweet Action, Belgian Style Abbey Ale
Stone Brewing Co., 16th Anniversary Ale, Double IPA
Then this weekend was the Texas Craft Brewers Festival where I had more delicious things. I don’t know if this list is complete because I didn’t have note taking technology. Oh well.
Adelbert’s Brewery, Black Rhino, Dark Ale
Hops & Grain Brewing, Bourbon Barrel Aged ALTeration, Altbier
Jester King Craft Brewery, Funk Metal, Barrel-aged Sour Stout
Rahr & Sons Brewing, Stormcloud, English-style IPA
Ranger Creek Brewing & Distilling, OPA, American Pale Ale with Oats
Real Ale Brewing Company, Oktoberfest
Rogness Brewing Company, Beardy Guard, Biere de Garde / Saison
Saint Arnold Brewing Company, Oktoberfest
Southern Star Brewing Company, Pro-Am, Double IPA
Additionally, I’ve been stuffing my face this week! Yays!
Thursday night I ate at Second Bar and Kitchen with a young lady. We shared buffalo fried pickles, I had a beet salad and pork chop with hominy, barbequed escarole and sweet onion, she had the flank steak with chimichurri and potato salad and we shared pumpkin cheesecake in a jar. Also a bottle of Vall Llach Embruix (Priorat, Spain, 2008). Then Friday was the traditional Home Slice Pizza lunch followed by the biggest taco ever from Sao Paulo’s and chocolate pots de creme at Vino Vino. Saturday was Round Rock donuts for breakfast before four hours of yard work and then two Boomerang’s meat pies at the beer festival and then an Old Fashioned and chocolate cookie marshmallow sandwich thing at Contigo. Finally, today after a two hour bike ride, I had brunch at Frank where I got “Pig and Eggs” which is chicken fried pork chop plus eggs and hash brown casserole.
I’m going to have to step up the cycling if this keeps up but it’s awesome to eat all the things.
I also watched Good Night, And Good Luck which was excellent and fits thematically with The Newsroom which I’ve been watching over and over since early September. My book pile is getting a little out of hand though so it’s probably time to start chipping away at that and give the TV a rest. I have been instructed to get some whiskey and ice cream and watch The Godfather. I’ll probably fit that in some time in the next week or two.
And the Austin Paella Lovers United festival and cookoff is coming up at the beginning of November followed by the East Austin Studio Tour. I want to say there’s something towards the end of October also but I can’t remember and there’s nothing on the calendar.
Apparently with a few subtle movements you can look up to 90% less like a cave troll stuffed into a wool sack. Too bad I only saw this today and not, you know, two days ago when I was in a bunch of pictures. Hopefully there will be photoshoopings.