Cooked because we had new propane, originally uploaded by schahn. Dina took the boys out for the afternoon, so I decided to fire up the grill for dinner. The recipes are from Carroll (1999) and Brennan (2002). (The salad is not pictured; I didn’t broil the goat cheese pucks long enough, so plating was a [...]

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Cooked for Independence Day 2011, originally uploaded by schahn. We served a light meal for Fourth of July this year–we had only a single dinner guest, and Benjamin is still at camp. The gazpacho and steak recipes were based on those in this month’s Cook’s Illustrated, while the taco filling comes from Bayless’s Authentic Mexican. [...]

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Kumquats, originally uploaded by schahn. When Dina and I moved to California, the first plant we bought was a dwarf kumquat. We planted it in an oak half-barrel, which, as an alleged byproduct of the wine industry, was another novelty. It survived years on our apartment’s porch, the move to our small house, and years [...]

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I’ve been waiting for a new electric fan to arrive. I checked in on the shipment today, and the UPS site reports: 07/26/2006 5:30 A.M. THE PACKAGE IS DELAYED DUE TO EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL On the retailer’s site, this state is reported as a “Delay in delivery due to external factors”. Huh. Well, [...]

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Courtesy of bloglines.com: It doesn’t look like I’ll be packing away the downspout extensions or the portable sump anytime soon…

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It’s Sun’s U.S. manufacturing shutdown, so I’m getting caught up on reading and household repairs. In addition to last week’s work reading, I read two other business/investing books: Jeffrey Zygmont’s The VC Way, which was interesting (but didn’t live up to its subtitle). Mostly structured stories about venture capital, and its role in the startup [...]

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Now that the Shuttle system appears unsalvagable—no activity, even with a nice fresh BIOS chip—I suppose I should record the emergency server rebuild from a few weeks ago. On Saturday, Dina noticed she wasn’t getting any email. We had houseguests, so I didn’t slip out to Central Computer until Sunday, with a plan to wrap [...]

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Nathaniel and Benjamin have been trading an ear infection back and forth for the past few weeks, and Nathaniel also looks like he caught the stomach bug that had been prowling through his class at daycare. (But Ben never developed chicken pox, so that’s one positive.) I finally decided that the colds and allergies were [...]

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Every so often we have a summer so bad all we can do is try to ride it out until things start to change. This has been one of those summers. In addition to the death of my father, three days before the birth of our son, we have also had what we thought were [...]

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High winds (20 – 30 mph, gusting to 50+ mph) caused the aristocratic pear tree in our backyard to topple at about 7:30 P.M. tonight. Dina and I heard the walls of the house shudder in response to the deep crack of the trunk yielding. A Swiss Army knife is shown for scale in the [...]

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