Category: Personal

I’ve been trying to take better care of the yard this year. You know, mowing regularly, watering, spraying anti-fungal stuff on the roses. It’s looking better than it did last year certainly. I have completely failed to eradicate the Bermuda grass infestation in the rose bed and the bed under the front windows. It is terrible. I dig down as far as I can and pull out the stupid little root runners and three days later there are new shoots sticking up above the four inches of mulch. I wish the non-terrible plants grew that fast. Hell, the actual grass in the yard has nothing on that. Anyway, there are some new pictures in the gallery.

Yeah, so, apparently my stone tablet is not here yet. I guess people traditionally call you when your stuff is ready and I would have known this if I’d paid attention in school instead of smoking all that crack. I will now wait patiently for the call to come and collect the piece.

I have, for the third and hopefully final time, quit WoW. I’ve removed myself from the raiding guild that I had joined and have requested Blizzard deactivate my account. The last month has been a strange and difficult one. Raiding is much like having a job. There are twenty hours a week that are raid time and there is a significant portion of time necessary to prepare for the raid time. A common way to afford the expense of raiding is to do daily quests which reward you money when you complete them. The job parallel is even less subtle there. It has become increasingly hard to balance work, social life and the video game. It was consuming all of my personal time at home most of the week. I am looking forward to being able to row again and to pursue the new hobby (lord help me, more on that later). Plus someone has to take down the Christmas tree. Hopefully my friends in the game will not think too badly of me.

I mentioned the new hobby. After New Year’s I had a dinner party at my house. This marks the first major non-family gathering in over four years, the prior being the actual house warming party. I cooked dinner for everyone and was able to get some use out of the new dining table I’d purchased. All in all it worked out well. I was a little disappointed in the okra and the bread I’d made. The okra I’m willing to chalk up to weird food, don’t care, won’t fix. The bread is another issue entirely though. Bread is deceptively simple. A baguette has only four ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt. That’s it. The rest is chemistry. I managed to make a dry, dense, pale loaf which everyone said tasted fine but I thought was weak. I don’t know why but the bread falls into the same weird little niche in my brain that the woodworking does. I may not have to make everything myself but I ought to be able to demonstrate the ability. So, I bought a few books and I’ve started trying to get better.

The first book is The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I’ve enjoyed reading the introductory part due to the discussion of the science involved. The author, Peter Reinhart, mentions several times in this section a bread he calls “pain à l’ancienne” and talks about how awesome it is. I tried making it and it worked and I only ruined half of it. Yay me. I took two of the three baguettes that were not burned halfway through to games night at Dan’s house and everyone seemed to think it was good. I ate the third one myself. I did forget to take pictures though.

Saturday night I started the dough for a beer bread out of the second book, The Bread Bible by Rose Beranbaum. It has a few more ingredients in it and I ended up needing to add more beer to it than the recipe called for in order to get the consistency in the dough I wanted but after I baked it today it was wonderful. I took some pictures which are in the “House and Yard” gallery in the images section of this place. There’s a link to one here. I’m sure I’ll have more to write about as I try more of the recipes in the books but I’ve had a pretty good start and it has been taking up much less time than the WoWs. Amazing.

I haven’t posted here in too long. My birthday has come and gone and now I am older than I was. It’s somewhat underwhelming. What has happened since the last time I came here? I started playing WoW again. That probably has something to do with the giant lack of progress in the rest of my life. But hey, we went to Karazhan and killed a few things so bully for us. Warren and Josh came to visit in early September and I succumbed to temptation and purchased a new computer.

I’ve been slowly finishing the table. I’m currently working on the drawer pieces after which the top will need to be done. That will be challenging. I got some spray cans of the waterbased poly but I’ll have to test that out on some scrap before I commit to using it on the top. If it looks acceptable it’ll make that part a lot easier.

My sister’s wedding forges boldly ahead. I need to go get measured for my outfit this week. Of course I’m filling in for my boss at work this week and it’s disaster central so all I want to do when I leave is go home and vegetate. I also need to collect my invitation from the mailbox but I hate the mailbox so much. So much. I’ll need to buy a gift as well. I guess I’ll have to be responsible this week. Bleh.

The spring 2007 anime season is coming to a close and Gurren Lagann finished up this weekend. It was superb. I’m not a big giant-fighting-robots fan but the show was a lot of fun and the ending was acceptable if not the perfect happy ending everyone was hoping for. I’ve been taking over Aaron’s house to show episodes to my peoples and so far they seem to like it as well. We’re nearing the end of the second plot arc which is pretty good. Episode 15 in particular is excellent. It’ll probably be Sunday or next week before we get to see those though because Mr. Bill is out of town for the weekend. I really should write more about GL but I don’t have any big philosophical view point about it. They kick reason to the curb. It’s great.

Really the thing that has suffered the most is the rowing. Exercise has never been a favorite of mine so it takes a lot of will power to keep up with it and I find myself in short supply of that recently. I need to get back on it for the wedding. It would be nice to look nice for the pictures.

We also went to the Flugtag. The Flugtag was great fun. Even with the nice weather and the schedule shift to the evening it was still blastin’ hot out there and there were a ton of people. I have to say that the bulk of the entries were pretty weak. No one even managed a decent glide. The kids who won were from a local skateboard shop and they did a good job. They deserved to win so it’s good they did. Their pilot managed to ride the giant winged skateboard all the way down standing up. He kinda fell over when it hit the water but didn’t fall off and turned the falling over into a sort of cocky lounge which the crowd loved. Ms. K says that she will be disappointed if I don’t do something for next time so I guess I need to get on that. Can’t go around disappointing people. More. I think that the human body mass catapult combined with a decent glider design plus bicycle crank power for a prop has a good chance of at least long distance gliding if not actual powered flight. The rolling launch platform isn’t a bad idea either. 4 extra feet never hurt no one, ‘cept maybe the pilot.

I had a monster storm come through my neighborhood last night. When I got home the sky was dark and threatening but nothing you would think would be apocalyptic or anything so I sat down and fired up the ol’ Gamecube. Over the weekend I decided that I wanted to finally open up the gamecube port of the Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and give that a shot. I’ve been working through the first set of quests to collect the three spiritual stones which allow access to the Sacred Realm via the Cathedral of Time. It’s been pretty enjoyable. So, I’m on my way over to the Zora town to rescue someone who got eaten by a fish when all of a sudden *BOOM*. Power goes out, flickers several times and then comes back on again. TV comes back on, receiver comes back on, gamecube is dead. Completely inert. So, no more Zelda for me. I hear the Wii plays gamecube games so maybe that’ll be an excuse to pick one up.

So, at this point I decide to turn my attentions to the computer which is on a UPS. Lightning starts striking more frequently and is close enough that I can hear the EM interference coming out of the computer speakers. So I’m thinking how this is probably a bad thing when *BOOM*. Power goes out again and stays out for 20 – 30 sec. I start shutting down the computer because if it’s going to keep doing this at some point the UPS won’t be able to soak up one of these spikes and then that’ll be it for the computer. I get the computer turned off and I’m going around back to start unplugging everything from the wall and *KA-BOOM*. As best as I can tell, lightning struck the two story house across the street.

The power doesn’t go out but the fluorescent light in the kitchen is not shining even though the switch is on and the GFCI outlets in the kitchen are in safe mode with the little red light on. Bad times. A fleet of fire trucks show up to the house across the street about five minutes later but there doesn’t seem to be any actual fire fighting going on. This morning there was an ADT truck in front of the house so maybe they got hit and their security system called the fire department.

Anyway, after all the rain passes I plug the computer and whatnot back in and now the internet is broken. The DSL modem claims that it is connected to the DSL but that it is not connected to the LAN. The router says that it is connected to the LAN but not to the modem. I ended up calling tech support to confirm my suspicion that the ethernet port on the modem was dead. Off to Compusa to procure a new modem and finally at 11:00 in the evening the house was back to normal. I tell you what though, Gurren Lagann 17 was worth the wait. Superb.

!Addendum! The Gamecube powered back up the next evening when I got home from work!