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Menu: grilled salmon, anise, tomato, scallion, plus broiled goat cheese salad

Stephen — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:45:19 +0000

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 challenge.)

Vinum California Rose for preparation and dinner.

References

Brennan, Georgeanne. Salad: William Sonoma Collection. (Free Press, 2002).

Carroll, John Phillip. Grilling. Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library. (Time Life Medical, 1992).

Menu: Gazpacho, Grilled Steak with Chimichurri, Taco with Potato-Egg-Chevre-Salse Verde

Stephen — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 06:17:02 +0000

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. (The filling is becoming a regular offering at our house.)

Red Stripe and Pacifico served during the preparation phase; a Malbec with dinner. Sorbet for dessert.

First ‘quats

Stephen — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:30:25 +0000

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 more on the driveway. I couldn’t, however, resuscitate it from a summer of neglect caused by a renovation project.

So, at the end of the past summer, we bought and planted a new dwarf kumquat. And waited.

This morning, Benjamin and I went for a walk downtown. (7.36 km total, according to the phone.) On our way out, we noticed these two fruits on a limb of the tree. It’s a small first crop, but it won’t be long before I’m making kumquat-lemon marmalade again.

Weird UPS package state

Stephen — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 05:33:35 +0000

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, I hope it shows up soon: it’s still taking a while for the house to cool down in the evening.

Indefinite drizzle to continue

Stephen — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 19:12:33 +0000

Courtesy of bloglines.com:

It doesn’t look like I’ll be packing away the downspout extensions or the portable sump anytime soon…

Manufacturing week reading

Stephen — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 17:00:19 +0000

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 process. Ok.
Jeremy J. Siegel’s The Future for Investors, which was simply an excellent book for investors. (Particularly those with a 30 – 50 year window ahead.) Recommended.

Since I also installed all the new doorknobs, perhaps I’ll spend today writing some code for fun.

Unexpected new server

Stephen — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 06:41:21 +0000

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 a new system around the old disks. I ultimately ended up with

Asus A8V Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1 GB
Intel PRO/1000 GT [32-bit drivers from Intel for now]
ATI PCI graphics card
2 × Western Digital 120GB drives

all in a CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case, and which is now running Solaris 10. The motherboard works well, although I’m only using the IDE controllers and none of the SATA or RAID functionality. (I also couldn’t match a driver to the onboard Gigabit Marvell Ethernet.)

Like any project at our place now, willing helpers materialize, tools in hand, even for a no-tools case:

I’ve built enough systems now that we shortly were ready for action, and blueslugs.com and highmaintenancemom.com were back:

cooler lives in the office closet, which it shares with the UPS which selflessly filters PG&E’s rot gut, leaving only nicely distilled power:

(Without the Shuttle as a new desktop, I’m deciding between building another A8V-based system in a CoolerMaster Cavalier 4, or buying an Ultra 20.)

[T: Solaris]

Busy few weeks

Stephen — Fri, 27 May 2005 18:05:46 +0000

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 systematic, rather than uncorrelated, and went under a part of the house to cover an open-to-ground crawlspace with 6 mil polyethelene sheeting. Air quality in the house is already better—I haven’t taken Claritin in a couple of days, and Dina mentioned her nose has been clear in the mornings. It took a little net research to figure out how to do this and, since I can write the Home Depot-based recipe, I’ll go under again and take some pictures for a longer “how to” posting.

I also did the second “clean out the hot tub when the baby turns one” chore. Icky: dead slugs (and live ones). It’s actually turning out to be a useful water experience for the boys, although Ben doesn’t like the bubbles and waves from the “air” mode. There’s a leak somewhere near the top—likely by one of the filter inlets—so I’m going to try a dynamic leak sealing system, but that will be another posting as well.

Homes are fun.

The secret lives of yellow jackets

Dina — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 05:07:05 +0000

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 bees in the house. Stephen’s plan was to spray insecticide and consider the situation fixed. I went along with the plan for over a month watching the bees bounce off the walls and die hitting the light fixtures while I fed Nathaniel and tried to watch (bad) television. After a month of two to four bees a day, I had had enough. Stephen caulked the “hole” from the outside and, as I expected, there were more bees… It turns out they weren’t actually coming from all the way outside. The bees appeared more angry than injured and when one flew into Nathaniel’s car seat I thought I might go insane. So in a fit of rage, over the lack of a true solution, I called an exterminator. Little did I know that I was far from a solution… The first exterminator told me they didn’t handle bees and gave me the number for a bee person. I called and they returned my call as Stephen arrived at home. I could overhear parts of the conversation, “I have one here…let me count again…are you sure…” It turns out that the bees were actually yellow jackets, they were in the wall, and we had a few options – find the hive (2,000 – 3,000) by putting holes in the walls or do nothing and wait for them to die in the walls and the ants to eat them. Oh, we were also told that there would be 10,000 of them by October. As a side note, I am very allergic to yellow jackets. I had an allergy test done last year and was told that I needed to start shots. I didn’t because I wanted to get pregnant but I was given an epi pen, which Benjamin quickly threw away in his “the trash can is a nice place to put things” phase (in case you were wondering – Stephen and I did have the “how can you be so allergic and not be doing anything about it argument”). Here was part of our conversation after Stephen spoke with the exterminator.

D: When can they get rid of the yellow jackets? S: They are going to try to come tomorrow or Friday. D: Did you mention I’m highly allergic and we have two small kids? S: No. D: I’m calling them back.

I dropped Benjamin off at day care the next day while Stephen met with the bee guy. Here is one of my calls home (as you might imagine, I called a few times to see how things were going).

D: Did they find them? S: Bad news. He says they are behind the brick of the fireplace so we just sprayed some stuff in one of the holes. D: What! Don’t let him leave until he’s found the yellow jackets. S: You want him to take out the brick? D: I want an end to this. Get rid of the yellow jackets. I don’t care if you have to take out the whole #!@# fireplace.

So, the exterminator had to come back later to remove the bricks, he couldn’t find them, his boss came at the end of the day, he suggested somewhere else. Then the first guy came back on Friday and cut bigger holes in the wall – this time cutting through to the outside – and we spent the weekend listening to yellow jackets hitting the aluminum foil that covered the holes (they can’t chew through the foil). Meanwhile, I called mosquito abatement and talked with their lab person and another exterminator. Oh, I also scheduled an appointment with my allergist who wouldn’t give me another epi pen without seeing me.

It turns out that you have to remove the hive with bees because the honey will rot. With yellow jackets you spray a substance called drion (a neurotoxin and dessicant) at the entrance and the worker bees take it into the hive to kill the queen and larvae. So we had another exterminator spray on Tuesday and we left for Chicago on Thursday with a cupboard full of three epi pens, bendryl (for the kids and me), and steroids for all. On the way to the airport (as we rush to make our flight) I call the woman who cleans our house (every other week – I dream of more help) to tell her not to clean if she sees anything flying around the house, our neighbor who is checking on the cat requesting a call if she sees anything, and our contractor to beg him to caulk before we get home.

Aristocratic pear fails under load

Stephen — Fri, 08 Nov 2002 06:49:03 +0000

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 photos below:

For the record, here’s the NWS advisory:

SONOMA AND MARIN COUNTIES-NAPA COUNTY-SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY-
SAN MATEO COUNTY-SANTA CRUZ COUNTY-ALAMEDA AND CONTRA COSTA COUNTIES-
SANTA CLARA COUNTY-COASTAL MONTEREY COUNTY-
SALINAS VALLEY/INTERIOR MONTEREY COUNTY/SAN BENITO COUNTY-
300 PM PST THU NOV 7 2002

...WIND ADVISORY THROUGH THIS EVENING...

SOUTH WINDS OF 20 TO 30 MPH WITH FREQUENT GUSTS OF 40 TO 50 MPH ARE
EXPECTED THROUGH THIS EVENING ACROSS THE SAN FRANCISCO AND MONTEREY
BAY AREAS. THE STRONGEST WINDS WILL OCCUR NEAR THE OCEAN AND IN THE
HILLS.

A POWERFUL PACIFIC STORM WAS APPROACHING THE CALIFORNIA COAST LATE
THURSDAY AFTERNOON. STRONG AND GUSTY SOUTH WINDS WILL PRECEDE THE
THE SURFACE FRONT. WINDS WILL SWITCH TO THE SOUTHWEST AND
DIMINISH AFTER FRONTAL PASSAGE AROUND MIDNIGHT. WINDS WILL INCREASE
ONCE AGAIN ON FRIDAY AHEAD OF ANOTHER FRONT...ALTHOUGH THEY ARE NOT
EXPECTED TO BE QUITE AS STRONG AS THIS EVENING.

PERSONS IN THE ADVISORY AREA ARE URGED TO TAKE ACTION TO SECURE LOOSE
OR LIGHTWEIGHT OUTDOOR OBJECTS. HIGH WINDS CAN TOPPLE TREES...BLOW
DEBRIS ONTO ROADWAYS...AND DOWN POWER LINES.