Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Live in the DC Area? Whatcha Doin’ Saturday?

    What are you doing on the 23rd? Not doing anything? Good! Come see Howard Dean in Falls Church at 4pm. I mean it. Even if you’re a Republican. Even if you hate the idea of ever voting for a Democrat or if you’ve never voted and don’t plan to start in 2004. Please, just come out and see what it’s all about.

    I love that Howard Dean is running with a crazy grassroots, web-based campaign. I love that he’s out there doing things a little differently than everyone else, and it’s working for him. He seems like an honest guy, a capable and intelligent leader and when I compare him to our current president, I get depressed. Why am I depressed? I’m depressed that I see none of those qualities in our current president. I’m depressed that not enough people can see that. I’m afraid that Bush will win in 2004, and we’ll have four more years of criminal incompetance and corporate government. I don’t think I could stand that.

    So please, do me a big favor and look at the alternative. You might be impressed. You might not be, but at least you looked.

  • A New Week

    Yes, the roast was fantastic. It was pretty much perfect: fall off the bone, rich, meaty, a flavor to die for and enough leftovers to make either pulled pork barbecue sandwiches or carnitas tacos for dinner tonight. I served it up with roasted garlic taters and zucchini sauted with diced green peppers. It was tasty. To finish up the recipe, I ended up crockpotting it for almost five hours by the time I was all done with the other stuff. I let the roast rest after cooking for about ten minutes and then cut off enough for Jen and I for dinner (it was more a delicate prodding – the meat came off real easily). I realized that the roast tastes almost exactly like the pork used in good carnitas tacos (my one true Arizona addiction), so next time I make it, a more Mexican spice job: cook with some chilis some ground chili power, and cumin and a couple more onions and I may have the perfect carnitas.

    In other news, today is Low Impact Monday. The last month or so has sucked. I’ve been sick. Work’s been crazy and rushed, and I’ve been stressed out. Today, the big last-minute project I was scrambling to get done is in QA (on time, a-thank-yew-very-much), and I’m going to take it easy and experiment on some new features for some thing I’m working on. I ready another hundred pages in the orange book this weekend, and am going to play with some of the concepts in the book. I feel the need to decontruct something and put it back together. I haven’t picked my victim yet, but it’ll probably be big… Hell, it might be one of the most highly trafficed sites on the web. If I succeed, I’ll let you know and show you the fruits of de labor.

    Also, in stress-related news, I’ve been listening to a lot of downtempo stuff lately. It helped me handle the stress and concentrate through the pain of a sinus infection to get stuff done. Peace Orchestra has been a godsend. I got it because the song Who Am I is on the Memento soundtrack and just grabbed me. I had to hear the rest of the album, and it doesn’t disappoint. Massive Attack’s 110th Window was also in heavy rotation along with Jazzmusique. Now that I’m feeling mostly better and ready to play, it’s A3, A Picture of Nectar and maybe some Soul Coughing. Welcome to a brand new week.

  • Porky’s Roasters

    I’m making a pork shoulder roast. Yes, I know it’s almost 11pm on a Saturday night. Max and I went out to breakfast this morning and then to the grocery store, where pork shoulder roasts were on sale! So, being the mad food scientist and Molto Mario fan that I am, I figured I would try braising. Mario loves him some pork roasts. The problem is, I don’t have a dutch oven. But, I figured I could brown the roast in a skillet, remove it, brown the veggies and mix in the broth in the skillet. Then, I put everything in the fridge (veggies in broth and roast on a plate). Tomorrow, before we go to church, I’ll throw it all in the crock pot, turn it on high and hope the house smells like Heaven when we get home.

    The roast already looks amazing. Oh, you wanna know what I did? Ok, here’s my “suit myself” version of Mario’s braising method:

    1. Turn the burner on medium high heat and throw your biggest skillet on it.

    2. After the skillet’s good and hot (you know, flick water on it – if it dances, it’s ready), put three or four tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet. If it starts smoking, it’s a little too hot, turn the heat down just enough to stop the smoking – no one wants a fire.

    3. Take the pork roast out of the lovely grocery store packaging, wash it off, and then liberally cover it in salt and pepper and plop it in the skillet. Be careful, the oil might splatter, so plop and run.

    4. Brown the roast on all sides… it should be a deep dark golden brown (Mario’s favorite phrase).

    5. While the roast is browning, chop up one onion, one red pepper, three celery stalks and one big tomato into pretty large pieces (these are all crockpotting tomorrow, so they shouldn’t be dainty little things).

    6. Once the roast is done browning, move it to a plate or pan.

    7. Now, add all those veggies to the pan and cook until the onions start to caramelize.

    8. If you don’t have vegetable broth handy, boil two cups of water, and drop two vegetable boullion cubes into the water. Once the broth is ready, pour it into the cooked vegetables.

    9. Scrape the bottom of the skillet to get up all the yummy stuck bits that didn’t come up with the veggies, and then pour the broth and veggies into a bowl.

    10. Put everything in the fridge until tomorrow.

    That’s pretty much what I did tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll get out the crockpot, dump in the veggies and the broth and then the roast and cook it on high for three to four hours. I expect much yumminess. I, of course, will let you know how it turns out.

  • Crying Over Muppet Songs

    Now for something completely different. I found out quite a while ago that the classic Muppets song ‘Rainbow Connection’ tends to make one of my brothers cry. — Heather’s Blog

    I admit it. I cry whenever I hear The Rainbow Connection. I have since I first saw the movie at the age of four (in 1979) when it came to the little base theater in Germany (I thought it was Iceland, but since I was four, it must have been Germany).

    It makes me cry for many of the same reasons my little sister is inspired by it. It’s a hopeful song about finding our perfect selves, that place we know we’re supposed to be. Of course, I didn’t think this at 4, but the song still made me cry. It’s inspirational lyrics are countered by an almost melancholy tune. It feels like Kermit knows what he’s supposed to be, but he’s stuck in a swamp, on a log with a banjo. It’s a confusing mix of hope and pessimism that captures exactly my feelings about my perfect self. There are things I know I should be and do that I’m not doing – for a multitude of reasons. I will never be my perfect self. I will always be a frog plucking a banjo on a log looking for rainbows.

  • Happy in Many Languages

    Hey look, I may be sick, but I can make people happy in many different languages. I think I comprehended most of it, and Beto’s very happy to have Movable Type installed on his iMac… and so am I.

    Yes, I’m still sick. Not sick enough to stay home (that’s a pretty high threshold for me), but sick enough that I can’t do much else besides work. I’m not keeping up with my blog reading, e-mail or anything else outside of work and home. I don’t have anything to say except my freakin’ head hurts. Why won’t this snot leave? Get out of my sinuses!!

  • We’ve Been Hoodwinked!!

    The argument outran the facts. I had a big long post here about how angry I am about this whole thing. I couldn’t bring myself to post it. You know, I have a couple of subtle but important distinctions in my head. One is the separation of our Government with the current Administration. The Government is all those folks in all the government’s many agencies who’ve made a career out of it. The Government handles the day to day stuff and actually changes very little over the course of any four year administration. The Administration is the group of people who are politically appointed during a President’s term.

    It’s pretty clear that the Administration ignored our Government in the build-up to the war. They cherry-picked evidence and used debunked, suspect and out of date information in making their case to the American people for the need to go to war with Iraq. I’m not sure how to react to all this other than anger. We were intentionally misled. The Administration knew their goal and knew they didn’t have the case to back it up. They massaged, manufactured and created out of thin air, evidence used to convince Congress and the American people that we needed to spend billions of dollars, sacrifice American troops, remove thousands of Iraqis from the face of the Earth and spend untold amounts of money and time rebuilding Iraq. That’s unforgivable to me. They played on our fears and anger about September 11th and sold us a lie. They said Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th when the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been thoroughly debunked. They said that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon “in the very near future” when it’s been shown that there was no formal nuclear program in Iraq. They said that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack in forty-five minutes when we still haven’t found any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. They told us they knew where the weapons are, and again, none have been found. They lied to us.

    This is now longer than the “angry post” I deleted. You know, I am angry. But, I’m also resigned to the fact that not enough people in this country care that they were lied to, or think they weren’t. I know that no one in the Bush Administration will ever be held responsible for lying to the American people, and for lying to Congress. I know that the only way I can do anything is to do my best to make sure that George W. Bush doesn’t with the election next year. It doesn’t feel like that’s enough, but it’ll have to do.

  • Painted Photos

    Thanks to Dawn’s great post on photographic paintings, I’ve had an hour’s worth of fun tweaking some of the pics from today’s farmer’s market outing. Here’s one of them. I like the photo, the peppers in the photo, and this thing:

  • Organic Infections

    We went to the Reston Farmers Market this morning: Max, my mom and dad and Max. With being sick, and the trip, Jen needed some “alone time”. We had a great time, bought all kinds of faboo organic veggies, a little basil plant, and some flowers for Jen. I’m going to try to make something with the lovely eggplant for Jen, and I don’t even like eggplant. But, I like Jen, so it’s worth it.

    I’m still not 100%. I’m congested, tired, and wheezy. Going out today sapped me good. Trailing Max and providing that parental safety thing takes a lot of energy. I’m not taking it easy before trying to make dinner. We may even postpone the faboo dinner until tomorrow. I need a nap.

  • I’m On Board! You Can Now Call Me Esquire

    Would you look at that, Heather went and announced that I’m on the board! I’m in the fourth paragraph. I agreed to do this a while ago, and well, I wasn’t sure when she would announce it to the world.

    My little sister, 9 years and 11 months my junior, is a busy girl. I’m hoping I can help her take this hand-published goliath of her’s and turn it into an easy-to-manage, self-maintaining, interactive, secure and geee-orgeous site with a bodacious content management system. I’m not sure how I’m going to find the time, but I will. Now, the decision is do I build my own CMS, or find one out there that does everything I need? Does such a thing exist? Would building it myself be easier than manhandling a square CMS peg into the round hole that is Daily Prophet?

    We could probably use OpenACS. I’ve installed it before and it looks like it might work. It’s AOLserver and I like that. As much as I like JSP’s at work, I still think in Tcl and translate. It’s too hard to do simple things in Java on the webserver, and that bothers me. Simple things like finding out what page you’re on, or the name of the servlet that’s running are next to impossible to get at, and that’s just wrong.

    Yes, I’m still sick. It’s yet another sinus infection, so I’m coughing up lovely goblins and blowing my nose frequently. I have a ton of work to do and no time to do it in. I’m hung over from the California trip (but the pictures are up). I realized that all this Journals stuff has distracted me from my real job, and that’s not a good thing. I should be able to do everything and handle it…

  • When Will It End?

    I am really tired of feeling like crap. Since Saturday, I’ve had the world’s most outrageous cold. Here I am at work trying to get things done with a head dulled by snot and a brain unwilling to function at normal speed. It’s taking three times as long to get anything done, and twice as long to answer questions I normally can answer right away. I wish it would go away, or maybe I wish I could go away. Go away and take a nap, a bath, anything to get rid of this feeling.

    I’m working on getting the pics up… when they’re done, you should see them on the righthand side. I may not have time or the energy to post a link.