Ultranormal

  • 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.

  • Sick and Home

    I’ve got an airline cold… one of those horrible colds you get from breathing recycled air for hours on end. So, no pics yet, but they’re coming. Not only is my hosting provider having database availability problems, iPhoto decided to truncate my photo library again. Why does this happen, Steve Jobs, why? I didn’t do anything to it, half my pictures just disappeared. The files are still there, but they don’t show up in the application. And don’t even think about importing them. That’ll never work. It just sits there with no status messages and churns.

    I don’t think I want to go on any more trips for a while.

  • Ramblin’ And Waitin’

    I’m awake, showered, fed and ready to go. My sole disappointment this morning was the fact that the little Mexican place across the street isn’t open for breakfast. I’ve had a craving for a good breakfast burrito or authentic huevos rancheros since we landed, and I’ve still not satisfied it. I went downstairs and had breakfast in the little hotel restaurant. It wasn’t bad, but was nothing to waste anymore thought on. I did finish a couple articles in the Smithsonian magazine, which is always a good read.

    Today is tourist day!! Tim’s coming to get me in about an hour, and we’re off to do stupid touristy things. Not sure what yet, but we’ll find out. I’m finally taking the camera out and will hopefully have a ton of pictures to show you on Monday (unless Tim has broadband at home… then I’ll get them done sooner). Hopefully, we’ll be able to hook up with Daws and Annie for dinner. Not sure where yet.

    It’s been a good trip, but I hope I’m done travelling for a while. I miss Jen and Max and can’t wait to get home. Today and tomorrow will be fun, and it’ll be great to see Tim and Monica, Daws and Annie, but I really want to see my wife and son. It’s weird. I didn’t feel like this either of the times they went to Arizona to visit Jen’s parents. Plus, I don’t handle jet lag well. This is day three, and I’m still a wreck. I’m relying on frequent Cokes to get me through the day, which is bad. Until this week, I hadn’t had a soda in over six months other than the root beer at Sweetwater. Now, I’m downing them whenever I get the chance (and thanks to Google’s stocked and free breakroom – that was many). I hope my little addiction doesn’t come back and I can kick this as soon as I get home.

    I really want to tell you about the meetings yesterday. They were really cool, and I met some really great (and brilliant) folks. I made some great jokes, and think I may have contributed a little bit to the discussion. Not much, I’m sure, but maybe something.

    In completely unrelated news, I’ve been using Hydra to take notes in meetings. I’ve created a little meeting template html file, and then keep my stream-of-consciousness notes during the meeting. It looks good enough to send out to people afterwards and it bloggable if I need it to be. Plus, Hydra has a really nice HTML preview window that uses Safari’s WebCore to render the page. It refreshes automatically every second or so, does so very smoothly without slowing my already slow machine down, and doesn’t require me to save. Hydra is shaping up to be a great editor – all it needs now is tag completion and I’ll swtich from jEdit.

    I think I’m done not telling you what I’ve been up to the past couple days. There’s nothing secret about the next two, so keep your eyes peeled for new stuff.