cumulus

so it goes...

2010-04-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

I think it's safe to say we're not bloggers anymore. Chasing Cashew and the Little One is pretty time consuming, and the little time that we have left for ourselves is taken up by house projects, various bits of craftiness, bicycles, and mindless vegging. We're both on Facebook now, and I think all of you who read this are already connected with us there - if not, and if for some strange reason you don't know our real names, comment here and we'll hook you up.

It was fun while it lasted, and maybe one day we'll be back. For now though, we're busy livin'. L-I-V-I-N.

m: I've been swined.

2009-11-29T14:33:00.000-08:00

We did indeed eat well. At least, until a round of allergies/cold/random virus came around and mama was not feeling like cooking grand new dishes. We tried carrots with shallots, sage, and thyme; creamed spinach and parsnips; brown sugar baked sweet potatoes and acorn squash; and pear cranberry cake. All were delicious, but the cake was by far my favorite. Moist and yummy without being overly sweet (that's without the glaze - didn't have a chance to make that). That said, none made it to the Thanksgiving table. Even with only 5 adults, tastes were still too picky to make things like creamed spinach or braised carrots. (Don't get me started on my sister's crazy food thing. That's a subject for an entire post. Or maybe even an entire blog.) So we stuck with the standards, and everything was absolutely dee-lish. And then the swine flu hit us.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Thanksgiving and the food and whatnot (mostly the food). I'm tired of our traditional family thanksgiving menu. While the food is always good, there's never any bold flavor, and there's never anything new. However I don't want to shake things up at all and make something entirely different, and I wouldn't want to leave anything out. I'm looking for a good middle ground where everyone's happy and the food is memorable. So in two years (I'm totally not cooking next year - after this year I need to take a year off) I'll be shaking it up, but just a little. My thought is that all the basics should be there, but with a twist. Turkey, potatoes (mashed/smashed somehow), sweet potatoes of some sort, cranberry sauce (some addition here would be nice to make it different - but it still needs to be tart and brightly colored), stuffing (new ground for me, but looking forward to it), a couple veggie things (green beans/brussels sprouts/carrots/peas), and pie(s).

In other news, Cashew has started pulling herself up and scoots along the furniture. At 7 months. It makes me proud, but I am so not ready for her to be walking yet.

i like to eat turkey in a big brown shoe

2009-11-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

It's finally been confirmed that I do indeed get to cook Thanksgiving this year. Yay! It won't be in my own kitchen, but I think that's okay since the kitchen I'll be cooking in could fit a small army. In preperation for the big day, I've been pouring through past issues of Gourmet (RIP) to find some new ideas. I've got lots of ideas and will be attempting to try out the recipes on the fam before they make it to the Thanksgiving table. Which means, if all goes according to plan, we will be eating very well for the next few weeks. Yum.

Over the weekend we tried the beet-pickled deviled eggs. Which were really just a sneaky way to make deviled eggs look pretty. But since B and I don't really need too many excuses to make deviled eggs, we were all over it. Dee-lish. Don't think we'll make them for Thanksgiving though - they seemed more suited to the Halloween party table that they were on. I really wish I had remembered to snap a picture. Instead I'll leave you with the picture from the magazine:

B: Three is the new tantrum

2009-11-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

I finally did it...I accepted that the era of the blog boom is mostly dead...likely replaced by this facebook thing people keep talking about, so I finally went through and cleaned out my list of favorites. I always find dead blogs kind of sad. I know ours was (or continues to be)!

Anyways, I did it. No more will I carry around a long list of blogs dead for more than a year.

On another front, why do they always talk about the terrible twos? It must be because it sounds good...it sure as hell doesn't get any better after two! One of the things that I wasn't prepared for was the "silliness". It is like she is holding a contest to see how much time she can possibly waste being silly. I know it sounds wrong, but this is actually waaaaay more frustrating than the tantrums. If she hits her sister, she gets a time-out and tantrum or no, the rule is clear. With the silliness, there is no rule that it shouldn't take 25 minutes to pick out a pair of socks, but that is what happens. You don't want to get mad about a little girl being silly, but it can absolutely test every last ounce of patience you have just trying to get a pair of socks on.

hello rutabaga!

2009-10-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt now that fall is here. We dropped about 30 degrees in two days, and now it's supposed to rain next week. There's snow in the mountains and the down blanket is on the bed. Hurray for fall! Hurray for the fall food!

B and I have been on a kick for the past couple years of trying to cook seasonally. It seems logical, and really when you think about it, of course you would cook with what's in season, but it's harder than you think. Growing up, meals really didn't change with the seasons - sure, there was less barbecuing in the winter, and maybe a few more soups, but why wouldn't you want to use peaches in January? And really, I totally understand - our parents went from growing up with only seasonally available foods to having a giant bounty of freshness, pretty much whenever they wanted. Of course you would want to take advantage of that. But now we're swinging that pendulum back the other direction and attempting to eat "locally," which also means seasonally. Most of the time it's pretty easy, and we're having fun trying new recipes and ingredients (hello rutabaga!). Now that fall is here we're embracing it completely. Last week we busted out our essential fall salad: mixed greens, thinly sliced onions, pears, goat cheese, and a fresh balsamic vinaigrette. I think tonight we may switch out the pears for pomegranate. Yummmm...

Oddly enough though, we had a really tough time with summer. Maybe it was because we were really busy (newborns will do that to you), or maybe it was because our backyard garden didn't come through as well as we'd hoped, or maybe it's because cooking in the summer when its 90-100 degrees just doesn't sound appetizing. Other than our standby tomato bruschetta (and of course pesto), we didn't do much distinctly summer cooking. Anyone have any great summer dishes to share?

updated

2009-09-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

I've had a post rolling around in my head for a while now. It was about babies and how wonderful they are and how amazing Cashew is and how different it is this time around and etc etc. And it was all emotional too about postpartum depression and how I had it with the Little One and it totally sucked and having Cashew has really shown me just how joyful new life can be. But it was taking WAY too long to write and I wasn't posting anything else because I wanted to get this post up. And then Dooce went and wrote it for me and I don't need to say anything more. I didn't have quite the experience that she did, but she sums it up pretty good. So there. Mischief managed. Resume blogging.

And did you know that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Y'arrrr!

seems logical (if you forget about 6)

2009-06-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

So the Little One started asking about some Spanish words the other day. (Yay for Handy Manny!) We were counting to 10 when I realized I couldn't remember what came after cinco, and I paused to think about it... "I don't remember what comes next - do you know?"

The Little One looked up at me and with complete seriousness and said "seven-os"?

2009-06-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Not sure if I've posted about this before, but this commercial cracks me up:

Even better is the one aired in the UK:

Gotta love the Brits.

the new pirate

2009-05-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

We're really embracing the whole "suburban family" thing. Step one was the van. Now we have step 2:

No, we're not wearing silly hats and rampaging lands... Here's another hint:

The Little One loves our new toy. She even likes washing it. Actually, I think washing it was the highlight of her week. Here it is, in all it's glory:

She's a beauty, eh?

Earlier this month we were invited to go camping with some friends, and with an eminent UCSC geo friends camping trip looming later this summer, we decided to give it a shot. We hadn't been camping with kids yet, so we didn't really know what we were getting into. The only tent we had was our old 2-man backpacking tent, which obviously wouldn't work for the 4 of us. We thought about getting a giant family tent, but realized all those years of camping and backpacking had made it so that we're tired of sleeping on the ground. We thought about it for a long time and realized that we really weren't going to be excited about camping unless we had something a little more, well, comfortable. Enter the Viking.

We took it out over Memorial Day weekend with some friends and some friends of friends and it worked great. The whole experience, however, was a little much. Eight adults, seven kids - four of which were under 6 months old. We gave the college kids next to us plenty of reasons to use birth control. I think the Little One had a good time though, and Cashew did surprisingly well. Next stop: the beach?

So organic it stings!

2009-05-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Mandy and I have decided to start producing our own honey. You know...Organic and free range and all of that....

Actually, not so much. No stings yet and I was able to steal a pretty good size chunk of comb. MMMMMMM Fresh honey. The adventure continues....

remembering (and forgetting)

2009-04-30T15:32:00.001-07:00

We're finding that there are a whole slew of things that, due to some sort of gift of evolution, we had forgotten about having a newborn. (If we remembered these things, we'd certainly not be as successful in maintaining the human race, as most people wouldn't have more than one child.)

Lack of sleep? Totally sucks. Going into it, you know that newborns don't sleep good but you don't actually remember how much it sucks until you go through it again.
Babies poop. A LOT. I had totally forgotten how much time I spend at the changing table and washing/drying/folding diapers.
Breastmilk leakage. (Don't think I need to explain that one.)
On the same note, breastmilk smells bad when it comes back up. And babies puke almost as much as they poop.
Family members who want to help but haven't had a baby around for 30 years aren't much help, unfortunately.
Labor and delivery? Hurts.

That said, I had also forgotten the overwhelming emotion that I get when I wake up in the morning and find Cashew wedged in the crook of my arm, sleeping soundly, completely unsure of how she got there but there nonetheless there and asleep and beautiful and perfect in every way. And all those bullet points up there? Forgotten once again.

B: 8 months and counting

2009-04-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

Round about September 2008 we walked down to the Whole Foods and picked up some pints of ice-cream and ate them outside. It was a pleasant evening and cheaper than Baskin Robbins. We ate our ice cream with some nifty spoons that claimed to be bio-degradable....I thought neat! Let's see how fast they degrade, so I tossed one in the compost bin.

It persisted through the last hot days, and there it stayed through the winter. I had forgotten about it until I was turning over the pile the other day and harvesting some nice compost for the garden.....Not only has it not degraded, but if you cleaned it up it would be indistinguishable from what it looked like when it was brand new.

I don't know how it would in a saturated environment, and it would probably prove to be digestible by animals, which plastic isn't, but it sure as hell won't break down in a landfill if it can survive my compost pile. I am a huge fan of plastic alternatives, but I guess I have some alternative expectations for what Biodegradable ought to mean.

B: 10,000 Uninvited Guests

2009-04-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

When you have a new baby, you expect a few house guests. It did however come as a surprise when we got home from the hospital and the baby's room had a few dozen bees in it. Apparently while we were out, a swarm decided to move into the wall cavity through a small hole that I had opened up on Friday....

Dude opened the wall up and vacuumed the bees up. He then tranfered them all to a new hive which is next to the house right now waiting for all of the bees to return for the night. If the queen is in the new hive, all of the bees will go find her and we will be bee free when the guy picks them up tonight. If he missed the queen, then the fun will continue!

2009-04-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

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A little over a year ago I received some wonderful yarn from a good friend, with the specific instructions that I make something for myself with it. I have a hard time doing that, and it was such pretty and soft yarn that I couldn't quite think of the right project. It was the perfect weight for some winter socks, but I just couldn't justify using an alpaca/silk blend on my feet. Finally, after I had finished a sweater for the Little One (who indeed is not so little anymore and uses a lot of yarn for a sweater), a couple Christmas washcloth-flowers for our daycare lady, and quickly snuck in another little mystery project, I found myself ready to use up that yarn. A hat seemed like a good idea, since I don't really have any that I like, and then my head gets cold. An alpaca/silk hat sounds fantastic, doesn't it?

Well it's finally complete:

It's based on theNorwegian Star Earflap hat, changed a bit to accommodate an extremely different gauge, but the chart and idea is all the same. I also included some crochet edging to keep it from rolling up and poofing out, as I found my gauge in the beginning to be noticeably different than the fair-isle gauge. It's a bit silly, and not perfect, but I really like it. And it's so soft and warm I really don't want to take it off. (Yes, it does cool off in the evenings. To like 60 degrees. Brrr. And they say we might get some more rain next week. So I'll need it then for sure.)

Thanks Merce!

PS. I may or may not be in labor right now. Things are moving at a decidedly different pace with this one, and contractions are coming at odd intervals. Soon though... think good thoughts!

B: Fastest and Most Furious

2009-04-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

I made a neat chart today that points out how silly cost savings are for most people as an excuse to buy a new car. At10,000 miles per year with $2.50 gas you will only save about $400 a year if you go from 20 to 30 MPG. If you add $1.50 ($4.00 / gal) to gas prices you only add about $230.

Gas has to get one hell of a lot more expensive before it makes economic sense to replace your car if it's paid for....

B: Spring....it's actually a season

2009-03-27T15:18:00.001-07:00

Not to rub it in for our friends in the Pacific Northwest and other temperate climates, but down here in mediteranean Sacramento : ) it is spring. Right now it is pleasant....78 degrees...low humidity...getting ready to grill some hand ground burgers tonight

Sure it will be 100 soon enough, and nothing can make Sacramento not Sacramento, but right now things are pretty fucking great

B: Transients

2009-03-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

I used to own this truck. I liked it. It died. Several times. I got rid of it.

I used to own this car. I loved it. It was time to have a more grown up car. I sold it.

Things come and go. The trick is learning to let go. People bitch about our culture, but that is a system of well made products. Shit that wears out fast has to be disposable. Before the iron age, everything was pretty much disposable. Plastic has become a way for us to revert to the stone age...In more ways than one probably.

Things have felt so transient lately. It is hard to keep a hold as life fleets by. The Lil one is growing so fast and getting so smart and argumentative and fun and outrageously enraging. It happens so fast.

Number 2 is on the way and we aren't ready yet. We need to paint a room, get a bassinet and get things arranged. It felt like there was so much time.

On another note, I have noticed a sharp drop in the number of transients that I see on a daily basis. Do you think the economy has become so bad that people can't afford to stand at stop lights and beg for money...because it doesn't pay anymore?

B: get digging.....

2009-02-23T20:06:00.001-08:00

I mostly just wanted to do a post about this video of Mark Weir on his pump track...I have never seen a pump track this big or cool! Usually they are just crappy little loops that bore the crap out of you...This actually looks fun!

I wonder how Mandy would feel if I built a track like this in the front yard???

yay for 2009!

2009-01-12T21:48:00.000-08:00

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So we’ve made it through another year. The holidays were busy but quiet, and B and I even got to have a nice, relaxed, Christmas dinner. Even had candles. Imagine that! (We'll forget that I passed out shortly after 10:00 PM on New Year's Eve. Thanks to being sober (pregnant) and sick (two-year-old child), I could barely stay awake that long.)

Even though we’ve been quiet here, things have been moving at casa cumulus. The kitchen is progressing fantastically. We’ve got countertops! And lighting! It’s all pretty amazing and finally starting to really come together. We’ve got a little more painting to do, and then we can post some ‘after’ pictures.

Another thing… It’s January, and the forecast is calling for 68 degrees today. California rocks.

Oh and please go over to our friend Rob’s blog and wish him luck on his back-to-back century runs. He says it’s “just a marathon,” but we know better. No one needs socks like his for “just a marathon.” And Rob – we’re still waiting for our socks. The Little One needs a pair too; she’s been cross training a lot these days.

Protection from what, Tommy? Zee Germans?

2009-01-12T21:45:00.000-08:00

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Way cooler than a minivan.
Our new family vehicle! We sold B’s racecar and bought this 2001 Eurovan. Sweet. Even the Little One loves it – every time we go somewhere its “mommy’s new car!” Good times. It’ll be nice to haul around the kids and the dog and all the associated accoutrements. Go VW!

bow to the LCD god

2009-01-12T21:40:00.000-08:00

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We broke. I’m slightly ashamed. The after Christmas sales along with the eminent sleepless nights that are undoubtedly beginning in April convinced us that we should buy a new TV. Arrgh. We’ve had it for a few weeks now and it’s already sucked us in. We’ve watched Napoleon Dynamite twice, and football has been on more than once. There’s been crazy amounts of Star Wars on, so we’ve been getting our fill of that too.

And seriously – there’s this show on Fox called “Hole in the Wall” where people are dressed in skintight silver jumpsuits and are forced to jump through, you guessed it, holes in walls. And there’s always at least one grossly overweight person that has no chance in hell to be able to fit thought said hole in wall. We’ve been missing out! How come no one told us of this awesomeness? You’ve got to check it out.

(We have still managed to resist all that is 24 and CSI. If we ever start talking about how we love those shows, you will know that our bodies have indeed been taken over by space aliens. You have permission to punch us in the face at that time.)

B: Guiding Lights

2008-12-12T23:50:00.000-08:00

About 6 months ago our Internet friend Rob set your friends here at Cumulus up on a date with some strangers. It was a bit weird and very 21st century for us, but it worked out great! We met some new friends (A and M) and had a new bond with Rob.

Tonight (just now) we finally met out blog friend Rob. He was exactly what we both expected. A very nice and personable guy. A geologist with a familiar reference point and common sense of humor. I know this is virtually a common place thing now, but I am still amazed to have made a virtual friend from Atlanta and to meet them in real life here in Sacramento. It is weird and magical.

Congratulations Rob on your decision to run 2 century ultra marathons, followed by an Iron man race all in a single pair of awesome socks!!!! We will so be there to support you!

B: china house

2008-12-11T20:06:00.000-08:00

Most of you will know by now of my deep loathing for most chain restaurants. When I travel, I always try to find the local places and try interesting things. In my travels I have developed a few rules that have generally served me well.

A fake parrot or painting of a parrot in the entrance of a Mexican joint is generally a good sign
Chinese restaurants that are designed to look like houses are better than average, but Chinese restaurants generally suck.
Noodle places can almost always be counted upon for simple edible asian food.
Clever named Pho places (what the pho, pho king [actual name...], ect) aren't any worse, and sometime are much better than vietnamese places with Saigon in the name
A german restaurant can be judged by it's beer list. If you have never heard of more than half of the beers and they appear to be german, everything else will be ok.
French restaurants are generally too much to take on in a strange city, but if you must...find a place that has simple dishes (french bistro food), unless you are really committed.
In local eateries, always try a dish if it is named after the cook or some local person (Mike's Mess, Jake's Pasta....) More often than not it will be interesting and edible.
In a local pub, especially in Canada, always identify and drink the local beer. It will be much easier to blend and make conversation
Never eat at an empty restaurant
Let your nose be your guide
Learn to eat with the utensils you are provided, or not provided. If you aren't given a spoon for your soup, first check to see if anybody else has one.
If you can find it, try to local style burger at local burger joints. I love the gut buster in portland (beef, cheese, ham, fried egg)
Baking is not the act of heating frozen things taken from a box. Fresh baked only applies if you can see the dough, or the machinery for making and handling whatever product you are looking for. The grocery store should be the last place to find fresh bread.
Bacon + donuts = delicious!

excuse me, is that a violin on your head?

2008-12-04T16:45:00.001-08:00

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Didn't mean for that last post to be such a downer. I was going to post about how thankful I was that B could cook good and that I don't live in Texas and that citrus is a wintertime fruit and fall is awesome and whatnot. And I've got an amazing little girl and another one on the way. And we're all happy and healthy and financially stable (mostly).

So to change the subject, I've got a question for you. In the middle of the night, when you wake up to go to the bathroom (as I have to do at least once per night these days), do you turn on the bathroom light? It's easier to stay halfway alseep if you don't, right? What if, over the past couple months, you've previously found two GIANT brown recluse-ish spiders hanging out in the corners of said bathroom in the morning? (I know everyone says the brown recluse isn't in CA. But still. This was brown, and big, and not hairy, and there was no way I was getting close enough to it to see if it had a damn violin on its head. My trusty can of Raid and a shoe was all the interaction I needed.) Needless to say, I've been turning on the light. There's a part of me though that wonders if it's better not to know. Because now I have to put on my glasses and turn on the light, and by the time I'm back in bed I'm fully awake. And if I were to see a spider in the bathroom in the middle of the night, I'd freak out, turn on all the lights, wake up B, probably wake up the Little One, and not be able to go back to sleep at all. Is it better not to know?

giving thanks

2008-12-04T11:42:00.001-08:00

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Thanksgiving is done. Turkey was cooked, gravy was made, cranberry sauce was eaten, and thanks were given. Normally I love Thanksgiving, because it's a non-religious holiday where the presents are delecious entrees and it's okay to eat as much pie as you want. This year was different. B and I still made an amazing dinner, and my family was there, and new friends too, but it was still plainly apparent that something was missing. We sat at the table in her studio because it was big enough to hold all people. We were surrounded by all her art supplies that my dad still hasn't had the heart to throw away. Her paintings covered the walls. And a giant easel stood at one end of the studio with a penciled flower sketch on a canvas, a piece that will never be finished. It was started years ago, before they even discovered the cancer, before all the chemotherapy and radiation and surgeries and doctors robbed her of the desire to create beatiful things. It's been sitting in the same place, in the same barely started state, through it all. And it's still there, at the end of the studio, a reminder hovering off to the side of our Thanksgiving table.

Needless to say, it wasn't easy. And I'm thankful to be home.

B: My bunny suit

2008-11-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

So, I know we are like a year late on this, but we finally saw Juno a few weeks ago. Liked the movie alot, but liked the sound track even more. It is insanely catchy. Kimya Dawson of Moldy Peaches has such a sweet voice and the lyrics are pretty and stuff. So the Juno soundtrack has been in heavy rotation lately.

The counters are like 90% done, but I haven't dowloaded the pics yet.....Hopefully we will finish some painting and mount the hood this weekend. That would be really awesome! The counter tops are soapstone which is steatite (talk, chorite, magnetite). As I was working the stone, I was totally geeking out on the minerology. Very geo-nerd.

We are approaching 1 year sans TV. It is becoming more difficult to resist the temptation, but not owning one helps...We'll see how long it lasts.

something strange is afoot at the circle K

2008-11-13T20:12:00.000-08:00

It’s been a busy couple of months here at Casa Cumulus. Things have been a-cookin and we haven’t really had a chance to reflect on it all. Here’s a brief rundown.

Halloween
Kitchen
Yard
Pregnancy
Cooking

And oh yeah, somewhere in there was an election, which was pretty cool. (All except for an extremely disheartening and disappointing surprise by my fellow Californians.)

Following are a few posts with some details.

halloween

2008-11-13T20:10:00.000-08:00

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In mid-October I decided that I needed to sew a costume for the Little One for Halloween. She had received some sparkly red Mary Janes for her birthday a couple weeks earlier, so Dorothy (of Wizard of Oz fame) seemed like the logical choice. And with my newfound sewing skills, I could totally whip up a little blue checkered apron dress in no time, right? Right.

HA! The problem with being a new sewer is that I’m pretty fearless. And even with gathering and rick-rack and collars and cuffs and bias and zippers I was pretty sure that the cuteness of it all would make up for it. And really, it couldn’t take that long, because it’s so small, right? Right.

Turned out to be a LOT more work than I expected. Many a nights were spent up late cutting and pressing and sewing and cursing. But in the end, it was totally all worth it. Learned a lot and it turned out ridiculously cute. And she even wore the shoes. (For a few minutes.) But the next two-year-old costume I make will be a ghost.

I think she liked it too.

kitchen

2008-11-13T20:08:00.000-08:00

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On the kitchen front, things have been moving forward at a slightly quicker pace. The cabinets are in, some are painted, the butcher block countertop is in, and the countertops have been decided (and maybe even purchased, but I’m not sure of that yet). We’ve decided to go with soapstone – it’s more expensive than the marble we were looking at but you can do the fabrication yourself (and when I say “you,” I mean “my super cool husband”). So we’re having the major cuts made before delivery, but we’re saving a ton of money on installation and fabrication. Yay!

Now the remaining decisions include whether or not to oil the stone, and what color to paint the walls. We found some super retro-cool wallpaper underneath some painted-over wallpaper/paneling in our dining room, which is kinda attached to the kitchen.. It’s probably the original wallpaper from the 50s and it’s in good enough condition that we’re hoping to keep it up with a little bit of an “antiqued” look. That’s all the rage these days, right?

I know we’ve been talking about how much we’ve (and again by “we” I mean “B”) been working in there and how much has been done, but we haven’t been really good about documenting with pictures. We don’t have an after photo yet, and I couldn’t find a before picture but I took a couple “during,” and I mocked it up a bit with my totally awesome Paint skills.

You can clearly see the wall oven on the left, the super wide electric cooktop in the middle, and the low-hanging mighty ugly broken hood above the cooktop. While this did afford us a good amount of cabinet space, we were left with no countertops. (The area to the right extended a few more feet into a dark corner, so that was pretty much unusable.) And not to mention the cooktop was straight out of the 70s and the oven couldn’t even fit a baking sheet.

So enter B and his mad DIY skills:

Okay, well that’s just a lot of demo, but we’re getting there. And now there are brand new cabinets above the range and to the left, and small cabinets on either side of the range. One is a pull-out spice rack, which is great fun for the Little One. We’ve got a new hood and B’s going to put that in just as soon as we finish painting.

So there we are. I’ll try to get some more pictures of the “during” phase, but really I’m hoping that we get to the “after” pictures pretty quickly. At least now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel!

**Updated! The soapstone was indeed purchased and is in fact in the driveway right now!B is making mad progress on the sink cutout and we hope to be able to install it soon! YAY!

yard

2008-11-13T20:06:00.000-08:00

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Another reason to like Sacramento… Free trees! All you have to do is call up the county and a tree guy will come out to your house and tell you where you have room for more trees. Then you choose from a list and they bring the trees to your house! (Well supposedly they bring the trees. We’re still waiting for them.) Way cool. We’re expecting two lavender crepe myrtles. (I didn't know what crepe myrtles either until we moved here and saw them everywhere, and realized that we totally had to have one.) Here's a picture of one:

Pretty, no?

We’ve also been working doing a bunch of cleanup from the summer season. B got up on the roof last weekend and hacked down a whole bunch of tree while I stayed down on the ground and cleaned up our tomatoes and weeds. I also got to pull out a bunch of little miniature trees that have been sprouting up, which while exhausting, was satisfying too.

pregnancy

2008-11-13T20:04:00.000-08:00

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I'm pregnant!

cooking

2008-11-13T20:02:00.000-08:00

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Since it’s cooled off a bit and some storms have been rolling through I’ve been busting out with the winter-weather foods. Soups, chili, stews, pumpkin bread, all the good stuff. We’ve been trying to make a big fat Sunday night meal every week – you know, one of those meals that simmers on the stove (or in the oven) all afternoon and you’ve been smelling beefy goodness for a few hours before you know it’s ready? And then you have beefy goodness leftovers for the next couple days? B made an awesome chili about a month ago and then a couple weeks after that I busted out my famous meatloaf. Good fun.

Last month I tested a recipe for Cook’s Illustrated – chocolate cake made with mayo. It was surprisingly good, but I’m still not sure how I feel about putting mayo in a cake. There’s something about that just doesn’t feel right.

We’re headed down to the OC for Thanksgiving, and it should be interesting. It’ll be the first one without mom there, and grandma’s getting too old to be unsupervised in the kitchen (the last time we allowed her to make a couple dishes they came out almost inedible), so I’m taking charge and being the head chef. Except it’s in my dad’s kitchen, and he can’t sit still for more than 30 seconds, and he can’t stand not being in charge, and my sister and her husband are crazy picky eaters, and B and I are food snobs. Should be good times, for sure. Wish us luck.

2008-10-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

I went for a ride with Steve on Sunday last. We rode the Foresthill divide connector trail and it was pretty gnar. The trail is packed nicely and had only a moderate level of underweight lycra cross country dweeb traffic (as opposed to overweight freeride poseur traffic). The trail mostly rolls and winds up the hill with only a few big sustained climbs on the way up and a few on the way back. The return trip drops only a couple of hundred or so feet, but this modest drop is achieved in series of rollers that requires that you pedal the whole thing to keep it going.

I manged to pedal through all of the rollers on the drop at top speed for the first time this trip and it was brilliant! All of the key corners are bermed, the trail is butter, and the only trick is remembering which corners can be jumped across without carrying too much speed into the next.

The views were nice and the open fall canopy was really calming under the oak and madrone. I stole all of these pics off of flickr as I rarely remember to take pics of my own. Here's one of me hitting a sick jump.

It may not be northwest riding, but it isn't too bad...

Friday Puppies: Saturday night edition

2008-10-11T21:10:00.001-07:00

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It's been a while since we've had any pictures at all, so here's a puppy for you:Have a great weekend!

I'm just saying...

2008-10-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

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Back in early 2003, we decided to buy a house (okay, a "townhome-style condo"). We sat down, looked at our budget, firgured out how much we could pay in a monthly mortgage payment, and went to the bank. We gave them all our info and they approved us for a number that we couldn't really believe. When we asked what our monthly payment would be, it was way higher than what we knew we could comfortably pay. So we did the math and figured out how much we could actually afford to borrow. It turned out to be over 1/3 less than what the bank had approved us for.

This all seemed like second nature to us. We never had to think about it that hard. Even when the loan officer tried to convince us that we should totally get into the most expensive house that we could get into, even when a loan officer from a different bank tried to convince us to get an intrest-only loan for the 20% down payment so we could get approved for even more money, even when we started getting completely frustrated with housing prices and thought that we wouldn't be able to get anything we liked, we still knew that we shouldn't offer more than what we knew we could afford.

It's just that simple.
Don't get me wrong, I am somewhat sympathetic towards the people who were misled into thinking that interest rates would always be low and housing prices would always increase. And I know that there are a lot of innocent, good people out there that are losing their homes and they're having a really rough time. But it's not all the bank's fault. It takes two. When you're borrowing a lot of money, you SHOULD pay attention to the fine print. You SHOULD know not to believe everything people are telling you. You SHOULD know that those people giving you that loan and selling you that house aren't doing it because they like you, they're doing it to make money.

So this "bailout." Yeah, it's probably not the best solution. Acutally I'm sure it's not the best. These companies were pushing the limits for years and knew that bad things were inevetable but just kept going. That's not really where I want my tax dollars going. But I hear a lot about how we should be "bailing out" the people who are losing their homes - and it makes me ill to think of my tax dollars going there.

Holy crap I'm getting old. Whatever happened to my bleeding heart liberalism?

trente

2008-10-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

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I spent the last two nights of my 20s playing with dollhouses and going to bed by 9:30pm. Sigh.

In other news, the little one's birthday picnic was a resounding success. There were 4 two-year-old girls there, all eating cupcakes and playing on the slides and falling off the picnic tables. Ahhh, good times. We didn't even get any major breakdowns until around 12:30, when the simultaneous sugar crashes started.

I was a little concerned, as on her birthday we gave her a little slice of cake and ice cream, and she ate it so dainty-like with a fork and thought it was so delicious that it all actually got in her mouth, rather than all over her face. Where's the fun in that? Luckliy she got in the spirit during the picnic and once she saw the other girls digging into the cupcakes with their hands, she was alll over it. Or more appropriately, it was all over her... Cupcake photos will follow shortly.

deux

2008-09-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

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Two! Our little one is two! Today! Holy crap! Just two years ago she was just a sleeping and eating baby "lump" and now she's all over the place. It's really amazing to watch her grow into a little person.

Happy Birthday Little One! We love you!!!

ee-tay ee-vay

2008-09-24T20:13:00.001-07:00

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Lets get something straight. We do not own a television. And we're kinda proud.

BUT...

We don't know anyone else that has no televisions. We don't hang with an uber-cool crowd that sits around drinking cheap red wine, circled around a single candle, taking turns reading lines from Howl. In fact, we understand the draw of the television, and use all our available willpower every time we walk into Costco to stop ourselves from picking up one of those nice little 22" LCDs that they have conviently at the front of the store.

And... Up until February of this year, we did own a TV. At times we even had (gasp!) cable. And premium channels. And now, we have computers. And this new-fangled thing called "the internet." Which allows us to watch TV. And we do. Probably more than we ought. We're already up to date on the season premieres of How I Met Your Mother, and Heroes. We watch late-night at 8:00 after the little one goes to sleep. We're really looking forward to the new seasons of Pushing Dasies and Lost. And seriously, I cannot wait for the new Gray's Anatomy to come out. (There. I said it. It's out there - I love that show.) We're just always one day later than everyone else. And we don't have to sit through so many commercials. And we're not tempted by the "what's on next" question, or the inevitable "maybe there's a Law & Order on TNT."

So really, we're not cool - we're just lazy. Why would we go out and buy (and, probably more importantly, install) a new television, when we can totally make do with our internets?

Glad we got that straight.

B: Something there is that doesn't love a wall

2008-09-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

My neighbor and I met one on a side to mend our wall...
or fence as our case is. We had some rotten posts and the fence had managed to stay standing for a while simply by the application of some cross braces and luck. It was time to repair it before winter storms and wind were upon us, so we two men met in a timeless way to replace the posts and rebuild the fence and repair our wall.

But for a time we had torn down the wall and moved freely between our two domains and shared tools, and knowledge and sweat in the sun as we set about working side by side. At the end of the day as we set to mount the final planks in place we shook hands through the gap and it set me to a bit of melancholy as I thought about that old poem and the question of neighbors that maintain walls.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...

who moved my cheese?

2008-09-19T16:41:00.001-07:00

There's a Costco down the street from my work and if there's just one or two things we need, I'll swing by there at lunch. (And it's an excuse to get the Costco lunch - a hot dog and a coke for $1.50!) Last week I went there for diapers and cheese, and got our standard Baby Cheddar Loaf, which is a steal at Costco and we really can't justify buying it anywhere else. Left the diapers in the trunk and put the cheese in the refrigerator at work, as I still had a few hours left in the day.

Totally forgot about the cheese. Kept forgetting every day until about a week later (today), but didn't really stress about it, because, hey, no one would steal my cheese, right?

WRONG! Someone totally stole my cheese! Seriously? Who out there would steal an unopened 2-lb block of cheese? And it's not even the main fridge at work - my fridge only holds stuff for a small suite full of people - maybe 20 or so. I'm seriously pissed. Monday a note requesting said cheese back will be put up. I'll keep you updated.

On a lighter note, isn't this just pretty?

Mmmm... Homemade bread. Definitely not bringing this into work.

cinq

2008-09-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

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Five years ago today we were driving the Interstellar Sphagnum Rocket (AKA the Ranger) from Ashland to Kirkland, keeping the truck alive with sheer will to get back to the Seattle area so we could pack and leave for our honeymoon the next day. Two days prior, we stood in the sunshine in Santa Cruz in some really nice clothes and gave eath other some pretty rings and promised to spend the rest of our lives together. (It was a good day.)

This year, we dropped the Little One off at grandma's house and ran away to San Francisco for the weekend. We had a great time walking and eating our way through the city (and Berkley too). Unfortunately we didn't take pictures of the masterpieces at Chez Panisse (which was slightly disappointing and the subject of future posts, I'm sure), but we did get a couple shots of breakfast the next morning. We found this tiny place a block from the hotel, with about 6 tables and 6 seats at the bar, but it was fantastic. The pictures look a bit unappatizing, but it's not easy shooting eggs. Brian had the chupacabra (eggs, shedded pork, white beans, and an avocado-kiwi-lime salsa):
And I had some of the best eggs benedict in the world. (And that's saying a lot. I love me some eggs bennie. They had a homemade english muffin, and the ham was dee-lish, and the eggs were perfectly cooked, and the sauce wasn't too lemony or runny... I could go on, but deconstructing eggs bendedict wasn't the point of this post, so here's a pic.)
And we ended up at Golden Gate Park and wandered around the outside of the Conservatory of Flowers:Dahlias, as far as you could see...All in all, we ended up walking way more than we had planned, and everything didn't quite fall into place perfectly, but we still had a really good time. Good food, bread, chocolate, sleeping in... Doesn't really get much better than that...

things I learned today...

2008-09-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

Getting really excited about getting free tickets to see David Sedaris makes you feel old.
But not as old as when you realize just how bummed you are that you didn't get the tickets.
Leaving a two-year old alone in the living room with crayons and a coloring book is a good way to buy some time to cook dinner.
When a two-year-old is alone in the living room with crayons and a coloring book and things get very quiet, trouble is afoot.
Thankfully, washable crayons are indeed washable.
When you have a craving for an iceberg lettuce salad with ranch dressing, greenleaf lettuce and Whole Foods ranch dressing doesn't cut it.
Whole Foods ranch dressing is a poor excuse for ranch.
New 90210? Horrible excuse for a show.
Apparently now anytime someone mentions lipstick, it is a direct attack on Sarah Palin. (Except when a republican says it, of course.)
Lance Armstrong is one crazy guy.
I should never have introduced my co-workers to IM.

What did you learn today?

reason #462 why i love b

2008-09-07T20:26:00.001-07:00

It's in.

(Ours is all black, but it's still very pretty.)

And it works. And it's gas.

Did I mention it's pretty? And gas?

B took off work all last week and spent the vast majority of it working on our kitchen. He took out the old cooktop and cabinets underneath, re-routed the gas line, did a bunch of electric stuff, put the new range in, took out the old oven, did some more electric stuff, fixed some walls, re-routed a water line for the refrigerator, and I'm sure there's a bunch of other things that I'm missing.

(I actually think we're writing simultaneous posts, so a comparison of what he did vs. what I think he did could be interesting.)

And oh yeah, he baked and frosted his own birthday cake because I was too sick to get out of bed to make one for him. (The fact that he's not mad about this is reason #481.)

B: A break from work, not a vacation...

2008-09-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

Move gas line.....check
Convert old 240 V circuits to wall oven and cook top to 120 V, add several outlets on new circuits and end up with gross amounts of extra power in kitchen....check
Fix pergo in several places and extend it below future range location...check
Install said bitchin gas range...check
Move water line for ice maker...check
Spend hours under the house in the F'ing crawl space running new copper tubing for the ice maker just to find the saddle valve is probably clogged.....arrrrrgh check
Demolish most of the old cabinets to be removed....check
Build a new span of fence and install a new gate for my mom...check
Crash really hard on my head downhilling....check
Relax and do nothing...not so much

Once again I squandered a perfectly good vacation being productive! Pics to come.

B:Rot Gut

2008-08-31T19:56:00.001-07:00

A wine review...

Newman's Own Wine - Sonoma Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

I bought this because it was on sale. Normally $18, the supermarket had it for $13. I should have known it was too much to hope for it to be a dependable inexpensive Cab. From the pour into the decanter it was thin and watery with a strong nose of alcohol and cedar. I had my first sip after an hour in the decanter.

The first sip was heavily tannic with a leathery feeling on the tongue, strong alcohol on the nose and dirt and tobacco on the pallette with just a little fruit thrown in there, and a touch of vanilla on the finish. Initially I thought that it just needed a little more air and time, and it did open up a bit to some fruit with plums and currant, but it retained the tannins on the front and the dirt / tobacco / wood in the mid pallette. After sipping over several hours, it just didn't get any better.

Lot's of wine in the jug variety are of similar quality. It isn't quite vinegar or corky, but it sure as hell doesn't taste nice either. On doing a bit of research it would appear that Paul has branded wine produced by the three thieves. This is pretty close to their usual level of quality in my opinion and a big fat waste of money. This one goes in the same category as the Newman Newtons as barely passable, and fails to reach the quality established in the dressings and other cookies.

For my $13 I wish I had.....9 Hagen Daz bars, or the Thermals album ironically (or not) titled Fuckin A.

B: Some of these are lies...maybe

2008-08-26T15:31:00.000-07:00

Some observations...

Some babies and kids look stupid. Hopefully they won't look stupid when they are older, but they do now. That is sad but true. Fortunately my baby isn't one of them.

I do not want to hear about your dream, ever. The only people that I will humor with actually listening to dream stories are people that live in my house that are taller than me that are notorious for not wearing pants at momentous times. It is a short list.

If you are a woman that waited to start trying for kids until you are over 35 and are having troubles, I am not very sorry for you. You made an educated choice.

I sometimes feel at work that excuses are made for stupid people to explain why they aren't good at what they do and why that is okay.

I know more attractive, intelligent, well employed single women than I know single men (decent or otherwise). Where the fuck are all of the single dudes hanging out?

I sometimes wish I was Mormon (see above bullet).

I don't think I ever really enjoyed backpacking. I think I liked the romance of the idea, but I can't really remember ever actually having fun on anything but a quick over nite trip. Let's carry heavy shit while we walk slow, eat barely passable food, sleep in the least comfortable way possible, and get bit continuously by huge mosquitoes that you end up eating. YAY!

When I see the same homeless person day after day on the street with their sign I sometimes judge their clothes. Do they really look homeless? What if they are just lazy junkies or maybe even a millionaire in disguise waiting to reward do gooders!

I never had an invisible friend, I don't believe in magic, and I am not willing to consider anything whose proof seems to lie in it's lack of evidence for existence, or some perceived conspiracy to cover it up. Therefore, I am not interested in: big foot, religions/cults, mysterious lake creatures that alude detection, astrology, earthquake weather, super powers, crystals, ghosts, alien abductions, or dietary claims that reflect upon anything other than common sense.

If you brag about consistently winning more than you lose at the Casino, then you are either an idiot or a statistical anomaly. My default assumption is idiot.

I need a......

B: the magember crunch

2008-08-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

Like every summer, I have allowed myself to become so busy at work that I am totally burned out and desperately in need of some time off. To combat this and avoid going all Tyler Durdan on my family and co-workers, I am taking Labor Day week off. I have already planned so much stuff for that week though that there is really no way I will get to do everything that I want. At some point I am going to need to add some scheduled relaxation.....I am an idiot.

We are really coming down to the magember crunch. I am doing absolutely nothing for the big 31. I think that is really the only way to note the occasion...by trying to ignore it. Mandy and I are having our 5 year anniversary this year, Lily is turning 2 and then Mandy is turning 30....holy crap that a lot of stuff for September. If we had another September baby we would have a 4 in 30 chance of hitting an already important date. I like them odds!

Other stuff....I sat next to this guy and his obese body guard/homey in the terminal at LAX cuz they were next to the only free laptop charging station. He looked less crunk in person.

He was just kicking it doing some FORTRAN programming or something on his laptop and listening to what I have to assume was Bach. Nervous teenagers kept coming up to get his autograph. After much debate I had him sign my golden chalice. It isn't as nice as the one that he is pictured with here, but it special to me and now it's a highly valuable collectible.

They weren't on my flight though, so I didn't get to fulfil my plan of befriending him and convincing him to: (a) explain the origin and meaning of crunk, (b) feature me on a future track, and (c) teach me the meaning of love.

Oh well.

PS..

We had a delicious dinner made from scratch my Mandy last night with our new mystery friends mentioned here.......link..... I think it went fabulously and they probably don't hate us yet

PPS

Strapless panties continue to be our most highly hit post ever. Those people ought to be paying us.

blind date

2008-08-07T21:59:00.000-07:00

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Did you guys ever watch that crappy show Blind Date? I loved that show. It was so bad it was good. Total douchebags with slutty chicks and really cheesy commentary. When I had TV and too much time on my hands I could waste hours watching that. (Some people might say that they wish they had those hours back, but not me. I think it made me a better person.)

B and I have a blind date this weekend. Except it's more like a blind friend date*, and to be honest, we're a bit nervous. Our good friend Rob that hangs out where the ocean meets the land has some real-life friends that recently moved out here to Sacatomato. He knew that we had recently moved out here, and nice guy that he is (I assume that he's nice, I mean I suppose he could really be some creepy old man with 17 cats, but I doubt that) he thought to introduce us. Except that we've never actually met Rob. And so not only do we have a blind friend date, it's a blind friend date set up by someone who we never actually met.

Based on his blog, Rob seems to be a pretty cool cat. Sometimes I wonder though what we're portraying ourselves as on our blog. Is it a good representation? If we ever actually hang out with Rob, would he be all, "man those guys are nerds"? (Actually no, I think we're pretty good at asserting our nerdiness here.)

The one thing that's getting us through this all though is that Rob's a fellow geologist, and we geo-nerds tend to gravitate towards each other. And we trust other geo-nerd judgement. So if Rob says they're cool, then they're probably cool.

And they're all probably reading this post. So hi new friends! See you Saturday!

*note this does not actually mean a date with a blind friend, like my grandma's blind friend for instance, which is a topic for a whole other post.

and no, not that kind of piece

2008-08-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

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I've had a crappy Ikea dining room table for years. I think I bought it for less than $100 when I moved up to Seattle and realized I didn't have any furniture to put in my apartment. It's been moving around with me ever since. When we moved into the house here in Sac, we wanted something a little more unique and ended up buying a nice picnic table to have in our dining room. It was fun, but not quite what we were going for and if you sat too close to the edge of the bench you'd fall over when the other person on the bench stood up. Not so good.

About a month ago we stumbled on a very cool furniture store in Sac and were walking around looking for bookshelves/toy storage when I saw it. I immediately turned to B and said "that's our new dining room table." There's something about the dining room table that needs to be big and sturdy and welcoming. We love to eat. Good food and a good place to eat it is important. We need a good table. A table that you can sit around with your family and eat good food for 100 years. A table that our children can grow up on and eat Thanksgiving dinner with grandma and aunt 'chele. A table that looks as good on Christmas day as it does covered with homework papers. But unfortunately they don't make those tables anymore.

Oh but we found that table. Built in the late 1800s out of solid French Oak. Can't you just picture it living in a farmhouse in the french countryside?

We're pretty happy with it. It could probably seat 8, but we got 6 chairs with it. It's definitely got personality, and it could use a little bit of love, but we can handle that.

The only problem with all this is now we've got this beautiful oak "piece" in our dining room and the rest of our furniture is still mostly ikea-ish. I suppose this means we're going to have to start looking for more "pieces"? This sounds expensive.

just call me martha

2008-07-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

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I've been bit. And not by our new friend from last week (I think she may have moved). No, I've been bit by this: It's the Husqvarna Viking 730 (sounds powerful, eh?), more sewing machine than I'll ever need. It was mom's, and since dad never used it, and my sister can't even sew on a button, it was handed down to me. The last time I used a sewing machine I think I was 7 and my grandma helped me make a little stuffed toy. I'd been wanting to figure out the whole sewing thing but never really got around to it. Until now. I couldn't really let this beautiful piece of machinery go to waste, could I? So a couple weeks ago I started. And a couple days later (with a little help from Vogue Sewing and plenty of cursing), out came this:

Cute, no? Hard to belive I actually pulled it off, especially considering that up until a few weeks ago I didn't even know what a flounce was... But now, check out my flounce!
I just love the cute red stitching, if I do say so myself. It's a little big yet for the little one, but we put it on her for a birthday party and it was a hit. Couldn't really get a picture of her in it though, as most of the pictures of her these days tend to look like this:

Ah well. Such is the life of a 22-month old.

M: oh doogie!

2008-07-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

My crush on Doogie Howser MD never died and now it is blossoming anew with the Dr. Horrible Sing-a-long Blog. It is awesome and witty and he is so totally cool and handsome. I would like totally let him get to 2nd base.

OMG, you must totally check it out because it will only be available until 20 July (Sunday).

Editor's note: Post actually written by B. I always knew he had a crush on Doogie.

B: Bikes and stuff

2008-07-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

I am heading to Northstar tomorrow morning for some downhill bicycle riding of the gnar variety (as Scotty informs be the kids say). Because of all of the smoke this year I have spent a lot less time on the bike this year than in years past and my belt is starting to take note. As such I am super stoked to get out and at least ride down a hill.

I am still doing the DH stuff on the Super8. Got hooked up with a loaner 888 and I swapped in the Saint cranks got some decent pedals and bled up the hope M4s. The rest is vintage 2001 which is beyond ancient for downhill gear, but it is still holding strong. I would love to be riding a newer more tunable frame, but I just don't like DH enough yet to spend the money.

The Transition Preston is still holding strong though collecting dust of late. My XC drive train issues continue to be a constant problem and I am limping along with a moderately bent XT Shadow waiting for the Saint Shadow to become available. I swapped the Saint wheels and RD onto the Preston for Downieville (2 months ago) and that was a pretty sick combo. Light XT gear with bomber hubs and wheels. The bike rode and pedaled way better than the DH guys but could definitely benefit from some chain guidance.

Of all of the bikes I have right now, the one that is making me happiest is my road bike. I got it as a great used bike deal from Scotty at uBRDO and it is definitely been the best bike dollar I ever spent. It is an older Lemond (steel), which fits pretty damn good, is nice and light and makes me feel super awesome fast. Before the smoke came in I was riding that thing semi-regular and getting some pretty respectable leg strength. I like to pretend that my commute home is a race and see how many people I can pass.

Hope to post some pics when I get back from N* on Sunday.

new animal friend

2008-07-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

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No, we didn't get another dog. Although I do think a little lab puppy would be good for Luna. But that's for another day.

As I went out to get the mail yesterday, I ran into this cute little girl chillin in a corner of the garage:

I was only about 98% sure what she was upon the inital visual inspection, as I didn't feel the need to get close enough to inspect the belly markings. But the zoom on the camera confirmed the pretty little red hourglass I had suspected. I'd seen her scurrying away a few times before, but yesterday she was apparently comfortable enough to hang out in the open.

Not too smart on her part though, as the half can of Raid I emptied on her and her web probably made it so we won't be friends for long.

3-day tour

2008-07-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

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In early September, me and a couple thousand other folks are going to descend on the streets to San Francisco all dressed up in pink for a long walk (and no, I'm not talking about Pride).

It’s for an event called the Breast Cancer 3-Day, which benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the National Philanthropic Trust Breast Cancer Fund. Every advancement in breast cancer research, treatment, education and prevention in the last 25 years has been touched by a Komen for the Cure grant. They are working hard to build a future without breast cancer, and I plan on raising at least $2,500 to help bring us closer to that goal.

Please consider making a donation. If you can’t give it all at once, you can spread it out over four months, using the payment plan option, if you donate online at http://www.the3day.org/. Please also ask your employer if they will double your donation with a matching gift.

As many of you know, this is an issue that is very close to my heart. Mom would have been proud.

Without a cure, one in eight women in the U.S. will continue to be diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I’m walking in the 3-Day. Because everyone deserves a lifetime.

To make a donation, click on the "donate now" button on that picture on the sidebar, or go to http://www.the3day.org/. Click on Donate Now and search for my personal fundraising page. If you don’t want to donate online, you can call 800.996.3DAY to donate over the phone. I would like to reach my fundraising goal by the end of July, so don’t delay!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and thank you for your support.

did you steal my sunshine?

2008-06-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

Apparently we don't have summer here in CA anymore, we've got Fire Season. Sat afternoon started to smell a little smokey, and by Sunday evening there was a distinct haze in the air - I got on the internets to see what was afoot, and apparently all of northern Cal is on fire. Today smells a bit better but the sun is looking eerie and orange. It'll make for a good sunset, that's for sure.

Reason #576 why I love B:

Sorry for the crappy photo, but it's our new dishwasher! And it's in our kitchen! And it works! I'd oddly enough gotten used to our nice new kitchen appliances hanging out in our garage, not being used. But our old dishwasher kept breaking and not getting things clean and being absurdly loud, so B got fed up last weekend and decided to just install the new one now instead of waiting for the entire kitchen remodel. One afternoon and only minor amounts of cursing later, we have a pretty new Bosch that is crazy quiet. Next step: cabinets.

B: the gift that keeps on..

2008-06-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

Now that we are much closer, I have this problem that my Mom is always offering me things she has. Not nice things like antiques and quality hand made furniture, but mostly worthless junk that nobody would really want or need. Case in point, this chair:

Nice enough I guess. She bought it at a garage sale or something and realized that she doesn't have room for it and has now offered it to me several times. I don't want the damn chair, but she thinks that if she can pawn it off on somebody then she won't have to own the fact that she wasted money on something that she can't get rid of.

I always feel guilty telling her I don't want her junk. She has always been a bit of a pack rat, but it is getting worse with age. She has that disease that older people get where they fill their time searching for bargains on crap they don't need. I wish there was something she could do with her time, but she has no interest in doing anything productive, or contributing to society in any way.

I want to give her some real money, and tell her to spend this wasted time searching antique stores and estate sales for the perfect coffee table that we don't have the time to find, but I know she couldn't be trusted not to buy crap.

I am almost done with Atlas Shrugged. I think that book is fucking with my world view. I don't totally agree with her perspective, but it is interesting if a bit simplistic and naive.

Atlas Shrugged was ranked #2 behind Gatsby for the greatest american fiction of the 20th century. Personally, I think it is better than Gatsby which I have never really cared for that much. I think Gatsby was very much about a time and a place which has degraded appreciation over time. This is happening to Atlas Shrugged as well, but I think it is a bit more timeless.

I think that Atlas Shrugged could be written today in much the same way and still be relevant. The weakness of the book in my mind is the tendency to become excessively preachy. Seriously, John Galt needs to shut the F-up after a while. We get it Ayn...move on with the story. She could have cut 150 pages of preachy dialogue and had a much more subtle but effective story. I believe that she made this book so lengthy and the lead in so slow to discourage the sort of people that she preaches as the evil of the world from being tempted to even read the book.

I highly recommend this read recognizing that quite a few people will dislike it for a wide variety of reasons.

B: N* and LMTFAD

2008-06-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

I had a great day before LMTFAD up at Northstar doing some sick epic totally rad downhill mountain bike riding. The resort doesn't really have it totally figured out yet, the trails are a littel awkward with jumpsa that are too long followed by jumps that are too short. They have 5 foot drops to flat landings that are already dished out, and more loose rock and dust than they know what to do with. It was fun, but they are definitely feeling some growing pains and not quite in the same league as Whistler.

Other than that, I spent the actual LMTFAD sanding the kitchen cabinets. They are coming out pretty good, and I am about half done. I think we may be able to stain these rather than paint them, so I am super stoked.

Hope everybody had a good "fathers day".

PS - Funny thing happened up at Northstar...I ran into Amanda's roomate from freshman year of college. Yes the one that I dated for like 3 months. Totally awkward! I hadn't seen her in almost 8 years, but I have the feeling that I am going to continue to cross paths with her forever. Too many similar interests. She is just as crazy as ever.

B: I am a rotten Mr. Grinch....

2008-06-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

or Why I hate "Days" (mothers, fathers, administrative support personnel)

I hate fathers day. All of these Hallmark holidays should be abolished or at least abstained from by reasonable people. When did we turn the calendar over to women who want to have a special activity once a month that centers around making somebody feel special? I know it's sexist, but I can't imagine that a man came up with Fathers Day.

The major reason I don't like fathers day now that I am a father, is that it is patently clear that Fathers Day isn't really about fathers at all. It is about kids school projects and selling greeting cards, and making people that aren't really grateful express feelings they don't mean, or making people that are grateful express their thanks in a really lame over hyped day wrought with expectation and disappointment.

If Fathers Day was really about fathers, it would be called Leave me the fuck alone day. There would be no LMTFAD cards, tradition would require a simple gift of a sixer or bottle of Dad's favorite booze, or cigs or cigar or bicycle part or BJ and then that he be left the fuck alone for at least part of the day. That is all any man really wants, a simple pleasure and some time to himself. I don't need your coerced guilt or a hallmark expression of your appreciation. It is nice, but entirely uneeded.

So...If it is not too late, let me suggest that when you think about giving Dad something for fathers day, give him the gift he really wants....a new router bit and some time to use it, or free day to go riding at northstar with nobody waiting around at home (thanks Mandy!!!). It will mean so much more than dragging Dad out for some event that is about everybody else feeling good about doing something for Dad and achieves nothing in consideration of what Dad really wants.....to be left the fuck alone.

PS If you want to see the origins of Fathers day in the US please read the wiki entry for proof that I am not a complete sexist pig. Also, if you want an idea for a fathers day present that dad actually wants look at the the german fathers day. A wagon trip with a cask of beer??? Yes please.

it's getting hot in here...

2008-06-08T21:23:00.000-07:00

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I get it. It's hot here.

(This was taken a few weeks ago. In April. Seriously. It was nice for a while but today it started heating up again. I suppose that's what the AC is for.)

We've been watching a bit of Gary Vaynerchuk (and when I say "we," I mean B; he then convinces me to watch it, and I'm slowly coming around to enjoying it). Ever since we moved down here we've been trying to get into California wines, but it's been kinda hard. It seems crazy, with all the wine stuff going on around here and all, but we're still having a tough time. Good Napa wines are expensive, and it's just so easy to go back to something we know is going to be good (Eroica, for example), instead of blowing $30+ on something that may or may not be any good. BevMo is a great store, but there's no wine people for suggestions, and the local wine store with the smart wine folks doesn't have much for under $30. Arrgh. It's also that the good wines here are totally different varietals than the ones in the northwest - here there's a lot more Cabernets and Zinfandels, wines that we never really drank up there.

That's not to say we haven't been trying though. When stress levels go up, I tend to do a pretty good job helping B finish a bottle with dinner, so we've been going through a good amount of wine lately. We got lucky with a Sonoma Zin last night (Seghesio 2006)- we both thought it was quite delicious, and we're really trying to keep an open mind towards CA whites (oddly enough, Chardonnays are totally different than the Rieslings we've been big fans of).

Not sure what the point of this post was, but I thought we needed something...

So 1,287 years ago Monday, Odo of Aquitaine defeated the Moors in the Battle of Toulouse. 74 years ago Donald Duck debuted in The Wise Little Hen. It's also the birthday of Tsar Peter I, Michael J. Fox, and Johnny Depp.

Wikipedia rocks.

B: and there was snow!

2008-05-24T19:33:00.001-07:00

Just got back from the first shuttle of the season at Downieville. It was snowing at the top and there was 4" of new snow with drifts to more than 2 feet. After 3 miles of hike a bike through snow it finally opened up a very wet northwest style blazing fast downhill. The preston with^" on the from and the saint wheels rocked that trail. It was just about perfect for the rock gardens and fast downhills combined with a small amount of climbing and quite a bit of flat pedaling.

Fun but very wet and cold.

B: Tao Knee Ville

2008-05-23T21:54:00.000-07:00

or Downieville.....

I am getting ready to head to Downieville for some riding tomorrow. The riding lately has been pretty weak so I hope it works out. My new 2008 XT Shadow rear deraileur is detsroyed so I have switched back to the Saint rear wheel for tomorrow. If that fucker fails on me I am giving up.

Going against our usual rules, I thought it might be fun to post some old pictures. Check it out...

I can't fricking believe Merc fell in that funny hole 4 years ago!

Drinking beer is fun!

I don't know what is worse the weak beard or the weak hair cut.

how many more times

2008-05-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

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What is this, round 3? 5? 8? How many more times can they say "we've really got it all this time"? When do we stop believing them? It was the best research hospital and the best doctor there. It was money spent and plane trips and uncomfortable hotel stays and so much hope. And confidence. That's what he said after the last surgery - "I'm confident I got it all." Confidence is turning out to be one of those words that when you write it out a few times it looks funny and loses all meaning.

I hate this ad. Every time I see it my stomach churns. Because really, cancer does have you. It has you, and it sucks in your friends, your husband, your kids, your grandaughter. You may fight it for a while, and you may even think you've got it beat, but if for some stupid unlucky reason that we can't quite understand yet it gets you, then you're screwed. Fight and thrive and be a powerful strong woman. Sure. But in the end it all comes down to luck. Bad fucking luck.

Spinal fluid. Fucking spinal fluid.

So go here. Donate. Walk. Run. Scream in the streets to raise awareness. Do something. Something so that one day we all can stop wondering how lucky the rest of our families are going to be.

B: Site tracker stats, coffe, and the single most awesome piece of cookware in the entire fricking world!

2008-05-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

Due to this post about the strapless panties, our blog is getting hits from all over the world. If you search for that brand of panty, we are the first image that comes up. Anyways, it is strange because apparently strapless panties are a world wide phenomenon. Kind of gross really!

Another strange one is that we occasionally title our posts with obscure song lyrics (Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse mostly) and we get a lot of hits by people seaching google for song lyrics. How strange is that? Do you think people are trying to figure the name of a song they heard or are they looking for deeper meaning in their music?

On another note, OMG what is up with the CoffeeGeek and related websites. I am glad they exist cuz we got a lot of great info, but really!!!! These people have spent soooooo much time on home esspresso making it is like they are addicts (hmmm might want to cut back myself). Imagine if we could get the type of free community participation and involvement on forums about crap that actually matters instead of forums and blogs about cars and knitting and coffee ("Ummm hey Pot, it's Kettle. How have you been? Anyways, I have been meaning to mention something to you for a while now....").

Things I learned from coffee geek and related sites:

Not knowing any better, we bought our espresso machine based partially on looks and ended up with the most popular of a long list of mediocre home machines. For the money we could have done a lot better. Whatever.
Our machine is actually desinged to be slightly idiot proof which prevents it from making really awful esspresso and really good espresso. This was actually neat to learn, because now we know that we can replace the basket with the non-idiot proof version and stop the clogging issue we have been having.
Our grinder, while a nice burr grinder for coffee, is not an espresso grinder. Period. It has no adjustability in the esspresso range. Whatever, we didn't buy it for espresso and we knew before these wizards told us that it sucks for espresso so that was no revelation.
I learned, most importantly, that nobody should follow our example and buy our coffee stuff. You have seen it at our house and on our blog, but that doesn't mean it is any good. We didn't research any of it and some of it doesn't work very well at all.

So there! I thought we were due for an equipment review on the new espresso machine so there it is. It makes espresso that is drinkable and a lot cheaper than the daily latte and waaaaaaaaaaay less agravating to me when it comes to actually getting an espresso drink that hasn't been totally f'ed up. Neat. It just isn't great. I might reccomend it over some other equally crappy machines because it is pretty, but it could easily be replaced with a better machine for the same money.

If you want to look to us for a product reccomendation, I think we would both agree on one single product..... Buy a Le'Crueset dutch oven! Just do it. You are dumb if you don't. Feel the peer pressure and just do it! They are awesome, and if you don't think so, then you are a misinformed tard.

PS, you probably shouldn't click that last link. don't judge me, I warned you.

i can't wait for the kenny g

2008-05-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

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My parents were never hip. They didn't have friends, they didn't go to shows, they didn't drink beer. There was no record player and no dancing. There were suits and ties. There were businesses and stability and "the smart thing to do."

I've got to imagine that they were kids at some point. That they weren't always so... adult-ish.

When does the transformation occur? Is it a quick overnight change? Am I going to be wearing indie-rock tee-shirts one day and blouses with brooches the next? Or is it more of a gradual shift, and one day five years from now I'm going to be wondering why I even bothered downloading John in the morning, when it's much easier to listen to the new Kenny G CD?

Or were they secretly hip? Maybe after I went to sleep they'd bust out the vinyl and drink a bottle of red wine on the back patio. Maybe mom really slept in a vintage Doors concert tee but then put on full-length nightgowns when I came into the room.

Now I'm not sayin' that we're crazy cool hipster cats, but we do like to enjoy a beverage or two, and we have been known to go see some live music. Although we are also complaining about our neighbor's loud music, and B started reminiscing about how when he was little, you could get gumballs for a penny. Crap - there's no turning back now. Bring on the Kenny G.

friday puppyblogging!

2008-05-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

Not much going on this week, apparently. Here's a puppy.

As always, Whiskey is up for adoption!!

funny story

2008-05-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

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So a funny thing happened to me this morning...

My flight is scheduled to leave at 7:00AM. B and I figure it out and decide that the latest possible time to wake up is 5:00. Get ready in 15 min, make it to the airport in record time, fly through security, and I'm on the plane, right?

Everything's going as planned. Alarm goes off at 5:00AM, I wake up, get ready in 15 min, walk out to the living room... where it's only 4:15. Apparently when the alarm was set the clock was also set ahead one hour.

Ha ha ha.

FAQs

2008-05-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

So we're sitting here on a perfectly fine Saturday evening, stuck inside our house trying to ignore the crappy band playing at our neighbors house. It wouldn't make us so mad, except that they blast their crappy music every single weekend evening, and it really puts a drag on sitting outside on our porch. This crappy band is pretty much the last straw.

Looking around for the number to call for a noise complaint, we happened upon the Sacramento County FAQ page. Most of the questions were those that one might expect (my car was broken into, who do I call? or my car was towed, how can I get it back?). One caught my eye though: "Someone tried to burn my car last night. Who do I call?"

Seriously? How frequent does that come up such that you put it on your FAQ page? Gotta love this town.

no, she doesn't smell like bananas.

2008-04-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who is turning out to be a bad influence. It started out innocently enough - a comment here, a suggestion there - but recently it's gotten bad. She's become a pusher and gotten inside my head. Case in point:

The preview for the summer issue of Interweave Knits came out last week, and this picture caught my eye. Not because it's a cute skirt, or it might be fun to knit, or because I think knitted skirts can be a little iffy (but if you can pull it off more power to you), or because her butt looks a little odd in a pointy sort of way...

No, my first thought on seeing that picture was I MUST HAVE THOSE SHOES.

Thanks a lot, sneaky buns.

B: A Micro.. Bitch

2008-04-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Just a quick gripe about Microsoft.

Last night I open a file from e-mail (Outlook) hit save as, changed the name and started working on it. I forgot to change the save destination, so when I closed the file, I realized it was gone. It did not show up in my recent documents under Start or in the drop down in Word because I had changed the file name using Save As in Word. Worse still, when I re-opened the original and hit save as to find the default directory, it showed it as being in C:Docs and settings/user/local setting/temporary internet files/olkao/file name, but when I went looking for it, that folder doesn't exist or wasn't visible to me. This means Microsoft has programmed Outlook to default to saving files in a directory that not all users can access. I couldn't even find the file by trying to open it from Word even though I knew exactly where it ought to be because Word couldn't find the folder in the open mode even though word could tell me where the file was when I hit save as. Search couldn't find the file, or even that OLKAO folder. Worse still, when I look in the save as directory, there are a half dozen other files that I have lost over the last 2 years that I also can't get to, if for no other reason than to delete.

I ended up going into the Program files for Word and drilling down through the temp files directory and found a link through the recent documents in there to the saved document. For whatever reason, this list of recent documents was not the same list that was present in the other recent documents directories (start or docs and settings).

Long story short, Outlook ought to know that if people open a word or excel document from e-mail and then change the file name and try to save it, that they intend to re-open it and therefore it ought to be saved in a file directory that can actually be accessed by all users. It ought to differentiate between this action and other temporary internet file type activities. This is a simple problem with a really common occurrence that ought to be super easy for users to fix, but isn't. The default save location in this instance ought to be changeable in tools and should default to someplace logical like an outlook folder in My Documents. In fact why don't they make is so that all auto-recover files, temporary document files and anything opened from an e-mail server that you ever intentionally save is duplicated to a temporary folder in My Documents if another directory isn't specified? Auto-recover files can be just as tough to locate when working over a Network, and so it seems to me that those ought to be saved in a local easy to access directory as well.

People in my office do this same thing all of the time, and quite a few of them don't know enough to know where to look and so they assume the file is just lost. Microsoft, please fix this. If I intentionally save something, please default to saving it someplace where I can actually access it. Hiding my files from me in an inaccessible directory is really bad programming.

Bad Microsoft....Bad!

B: The tastiest of jew wieners

2008-04-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

M and I have come to the conclusion that Hebrew National All Beef Franks crush most other hotdogs on both taste and girth. We have been doing some tastings lately and they are clearly better than Ball Park franks and several others. To me, the Ball Park frank taste like bologna in tube form. Gross. I also don't think they grill up real well, as opposed to the delicious Hebrew dog which has enough fat in it to get wonderfully brown and delicious.

The only thing the Hebrew Dogs are missing is the snap. I really do like that snap that the boutique "Old Fashion" style hotdogs have. Unfortunately, the old fashioned style dogs are so skinny that you end up with significantly less meat than bun in your mouth and they are tough to find.

M and I were making hotdogs the other night when we were feeling lazy and tired and "The hotdog system" came up. I realized in that discussion, that most people aren't anal enough to have a hotdog assembly system. The hotdog system is really both an outline of my hotdog assembly system, and an exercise in a set of beliefs about caring about your food preparation and flavor profiles regardless of how simple or meager.

The hotdog system:

Start with a tasty dog such as a hebrew national all beef frank or some other quality dog and an equally quality bun of your choice. Just beware of overly large buns. I am assuming that you are in this for the dog, not the bread. If I am using a big polish or something else that is so big that it threatens to overwhelm and split the bun, I might consider splitting the sausage and using a sandwich rolls. Unfortunately, a split sausage becomes more of a sandwich, which to me is not truly a hotdog experience.
Second, grill or steam your wiener to perfection. I far and away prefer grilled to steamed or boiled. I think you get way more flavor out a browned piece of meat rather than one that has been been soaking in boiling water. If I am grilling, I like to brown (ie char) the buns a bit for extra flavor (mmmmm pyrene!)
Third, apply your condiments. This is where the system really comes into effect.

Ketchup - Apply in a strip down one side of the bun. Don't apply too much. You want to avoid putting on so much that you get drips and you overwhelm all of the other flavors with sweet cloying tomato. If I have fresh delicious summer tomatoes available, I might skip ketchup entirely and just do very thinly sliced tomato down one side.
Mustard - I like a spicy brown, but any variety will do. Again apply just enough to taste. If you want to eat mustard coated bread, you can do that at costco for $0.99 and feel gross, or you can use good mustard and delicious bread and feel way better for it, but that ain't the point of going to all of the trouble of making a hotdog at home.
Pickle - Always dill, I like Klausens Koshers. Aways buy the whole pickles and slice them your self. Pre-sliced pickles get soggy and overly briny on the inside and lose their snap. I like to cut thin planks of pickle that can be slipped between the dog and the bun. The pickle shouldn't be too thick such that all you taste is pickle. The most important point of the pickle to me is that it should always be placed on the ketchup side to avoid too much vinegar on one side of the dog. The pickle should be used to form a harmony with the ketchup and balance the mustard.
Relish - I never buy the stuff. I will use it at the ball park or costco if that is all there is, but I find sweet relish to be one dimensional and overly sweet. Your call, but I wouldn't.
Onion - Either diced or very thin strips. I like red, but any color will do. I find nice fresh onion to be pretty sweet, therefore onion goes on the mustard side. Again the onion complements the mustard and balances the pickle and ketchup. I feel it is difficult to apply too much onion, but strive for balance.
Peppers - Jalapenos or salad peppers go down the middle if used. I prefer to rinse the salad peppers to cleanse them of the brine and try to make sure they are adjacent to something sweet to balance. Jalapenos should be minced and applied sparingly. Too much of that grassy flavor will muck up you dog.
Kraut - I don't eat the stuff, but if you are going to, I might suggest that it is so strong by itself that you really ought to consider a very strong flavored dog and limited condiments. Maybe just a nice strong stone ground brown mustard like Ploughman's.
Chili - See the kraut discussion. I like a bowl of chili. I have no need to get a wiener involved because you just can't taste it.
The key to assembly is balance. Try to make sure that any bite you get, even if you don't get everything at once will be balanced and complimentary. You don't really want one bit to be all mustard and pickle because that will be really briny and vinegar and then your next bite will be all onion and ketchup and overly sweet. Balance those flavors and make a harmony in your mouth.

For beverages, beer is always traditional and a great pairing. I go light in color and flavor with a hotdog and usually prefer something a little hoppy but not a big IPA. I don't really like porters and stouts with a hotdog unless they are dry and not too smoky. I find a more interesting pairing with hotdogs is white wine or even better, sparkling white. Hotdogs and champagne pair super well as do dry'ish Reislings and other fruity white.

The thing here is that so many people treat hotdogs like they are throw away food just because they are cheap and easy to prepare. I feel that with some care and proper attention to ingredients and details we can fix a hotdog in 15-20 minutes that rivals some of the truly great hand held food experiences. You don't have to be rich to have a great food experience, you just have to put in the work and care. Why would you save 2 minutes and $3 or less on quality hotdogs and fixings just to gulp down something that tastes no better than a bologna sandwich instead of something that tastes like an authentic and desirable food made with care and passion?

B: Death to the puppy music!!!

2008-04-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

Are our reader sick to death of the puppy music yet? I hate autoplay music like that. It is alway embarassing when logging on at work.

What do you guys think?

Maybe we can get Mandy to nix the music or maybe we will just delete the puppies

Thoughts?

The above is our current dining room table. Yes it is a redwood picnic table with benches. We are not too sure about it yet. We have a lot of choices which include:

Leave it alone and enjoy it as is
Move it to the porch and get a "real" dining room table
Paint it, maybe red

Suggestions? What do you all think?

B: P to the D to the X...whaaaat!?

2008-04-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know...

I am in Portland today, and it is like I jumped into a shitty time capsule programmed for winter. The weather today is barely spring in Portland. It is rainy and barely 50 and I got to bust out my overcoat which may never get used again except for trips to places that have weather. It is fun in a way, especially because I get to go home to 70 degrees and sunny. Suckers.

You may have a beautiful city full of culture and interesting people and an urban development plan that is semi-rational and sustainable, and green trees and sufficient water to supply your needs, but we've got sunshine. Score 0 Pacific NW, 1 Sacramento!

I am basically burning time and trying to get out some nervous energy before attending a public meeting for one of my remediation sites. I am not even presenting, so I have no reason to be nervous, but I am. It may all the coffee and apple cider I have consumed today.

Actually, funny thing...Somebody told Amanda and I that apple cider has as much caffeine as a cup of green tea. We exchanged glances, nodded and smiled, and redirected the conversation because it felt totally false and poorly informed but we didn't actually know for sure that it wasn't true. Well I have looked and so far as I can tell, apple juice and cider are caffeine free. Has anybody else actually heard this??? I don't remember who told us this, but in case you are reading, I don't think it is true. If you can find a resource that says it is, please post a comment. Rich in Vitamin C? Yes. Delicious apple goodness? Yes. A terribly inefficient use of our apple resources? Yes. A source of caffeine? I don't think so.

i fought the ivy...

2008-04-23T22:24:00.000-07:00

(not quite sure who won.)

Back when we lived in the northwest, we spent a couple Earth Day weekends pulling ivy from the local state park - it was an invasive species and it was killing the trees and all that other hippie crap. This year, we inadvertently spent the weekend before Earth Day pulling ivy, this time from our backyard. And this was some serious ivy. Serious. Root balls the size of four pregnant watermelons. Bugs and spiders and snails and mold. And the occasional pool toy from the next door neighbors. Needless to say, it was A LOT of work. Above is the before picture - this was actually taken before we even bought the house, and it's kinda hard to tell, but the ivy had pretty much taken over the whole yard. We now have most of the ivy out, but I'm still sore. We'll see how much comes back next year...

After. It's hard to get a perspective, but that pile is less than half of what we got out.

But we did manage to get in a few tomato and basil plants! And we also found the solution to our yard waste problem - after two months of diligently cramming our yard waste bin full every two weeks, we found out that we can just call up the county and they'll come out and pick up our giant pile free! Why didn't any of our neighbors that gave us crap for the giant pile in our driveway mention that? Did they really think we wanted that there? Whatever. At least it'll ALL be gone next week.

be preparded to be overwhelmed with cuteness

2008-04-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

Serious Friday puppy action.

***Puppies removed due to extreme cuteness causing paralysis in some viewers.***

400*

2008-04-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

Things I'm realizing I had forgotten about California, in no particular order...

ants
palm trees
snapdragons
heat
"speed limits"
sprawl
wisteria
wine
flies
oak trees
olive trees
sunglasses

*400th post! woo-hoo!

B: cult on cult action

2008-04-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

I haven't really paid much heed to the Democratic National primary, because my guy was out a long time ago, and I am not overwhelmed by the choices on the table. I am however, getting to the point where the more I learn about both candidates, the more likely I am to vote for Grandpa McCain. There are numerous reasons that I want the Democrats to take the White house this time around, but honestly, I am beginning to feel like always that I don't call and none of the above would be my preference.

My biggest gripe lately, is that I was really hoping that maybe for once, we could get the religious nut jobs out of the White house. Unfortunately, it seems we will just be trading brands. Out with the southern fundamentalists, and in with the militant black church, or this crazy family group of Hillary's. I know I am not representative of the nation, but I find it real hard to believe in the competency of anybody that is deeply entrenched in militant cult like groups. If their spirituality and the teachings of their chosen prophet lead them to be more charitable and giving and respectful of the value of all human life, that is nice and I support it in a cautious way. If however, they believe that they are working for their heavenly reward, then I don't need any of that. These people tend to view their fellow man as pawns in their perceived struggle between good and evil. Enough with the fanaticism!

Can't we just end the primary, pick one of these ugly ducks and get on with the contest of Slightly confused Grandpa versus the inexperienced inter-changeable "change" candidate?

B: programmed for conflict

2008-04-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

I read some nerdy science magazines....And in those magazines it seems that there is a growing body of evidence that regardless of the source of stimulus (TV, video games, books, real life), the brain accepts the things that it processes to be true, even if we know they aren't. It actually takes the brain extra work to perceive something as not true and there appear to be physiological disincentives such as the experience of "distaste" when things are found to be not true. The end result of this that for all intensive purposes, parts of your brain believe everything that you experience, even if it is imaginary. And this imaginary stimulus may actually impart changes on the brain patterns and function.

This has me wondering about the arts such as literature, theater, and plain old TV and movies. We as a society immerse ourselves in dramatic conflict as an "escape" from the stresses of our lives. If we are escaping from our stress by immersing ourselves in fictional conflict, are we ultimately reprogramming ourselves to perceive conflict where there is none? Does drama result in people that feel the need to create conflict where there was none to feel comfortable within their surroundings? Does my escape to Hogwarts from my everyday life ultimately result in my feeling isolated and persecuted (or just pathetic and dorky)?

Are we as a society over stimulated with drama? Is our constant experience of fictional violence, anguish, and aggression resulting in people who expect that this is the immutable state of the world? Is there a narrative that can be told that is not rooted in conflict? Is there a narrative of joy that is not rooted in sorrow?

The more I learn, the more those laughing clubs, lame motivational posters, and fake happy people appear to actually have something going on. It now seems that immersion in fake laughter is no different than real laughter (hence the laugh track) and that eventually the fake laughter becomes real laughter as your brain accepts that is is okay to feel irrational joy. Doesn't that seem nicer than watching another murder on Law and Order?

just some thoughts...guess we need to get a TV cuz I am thinking too much.

oh yeah, this is supposed to be good too.

B: What's new...

2008-04-07T14:55:00.000-07:00

We now have fiber to the home! It is sweet. We got the 3 MB service to start with and I think it is plenty fast. My only worry is that if we don't end up getting a TV, we will blow our data cap streaming Lost and other TV from the web. I did the install for the Cat 5e cables and it worked out pretty well. I still have a couple of phone lines to restore, but everything that I put in is working.

Question: How important is it to run security on your wireless router if you aren't running a network? Shouldn't my firewall protect me? Why not share this with the neighbors if we aren't blowing our data cap?

Like I said, we ain't bought no TV yet and I feel smarterest already! We haven't decided if we are going to buy one yet, but I think we both feel like we aren't really missing anything. Once we get the main computer set-up we will have a decent place to watch DVDs and stuff, so I am not so sure we really have any need. We don't really watch sports. America's test Kitchen isn't really on prime-time, and we have seen most of the Good Eats. Scrubs isn't even back yet. Nor is heroes. What are we missing??? Runway, dancing stars, idol? I am certainly not missing it.

We finished Phase I of the kid room this weekend. It is painted and the furniture has been moved in and L spent her first night in the room last night. She woke up a few times, I think confused about where she was. I hope she'll settle in fast. Before too long we are going to have to think about a real bed for her!

Sacto is flat as F***. I guess that is not really new or news to most, but I am still finding it rough. Almost all of the good retaining walls with run-outs have barriers at the top. I have yet to find any dirt jumps or pump tracks in the random empty lots around the hood. No stair gaps or urban cross country trails like the tapeworm. There must be something already started that I could add to...

I went out for some urban riding with the Preston and found the new wheel up front to be fricking sweet! The overall weight loss on the bike has made it apparent how heavy the fork is though. I am really starting to find the balance point on the bike, but I also kind of wish i had gotten a Bottle Rocket instead of the Preston because of the longer stays on the Preston. Good for NW style cross country, not so good for urban and free-ride. Especially with the heavy front end, it has to be muscled around to get the front wheel up .

Both Downieville and Whistler will be open in May and I am already planning a trip to hit both. If you are thinking about Whistler opening day, take a look at the uBRDO bus trip. It's a right bargain and is looking to be a good time, eh!

We are super looking forward to friends coming down to visit this summer. Yay.

friday puppy blogging

2008-04-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday! Have a good weekend!

PS - Toolie's up for adoption!

up up and away

2008-03-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

My flight leaves in 30 minutes and I'm sitting at the airport already missing them. Already wondering if she misses me (or if she even notices I'm gone), and hoping that B won't lose it while I'm gone. 3 days seemed like a lot less before the little one came along...

Well there's no turning back now. Good luck!

Babies, chum!

2008-03-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

"Everybody was a baby once, Arthur. Oh, sure, maybe not today, or even yesterday. But once. Babies, chum: tiny, dimpled, fleshy mirrors of our us-ness, that we parents hurl into the future, like leathery footballs of hope. And you've got to get a good spiral on that baby, or evil will make an interception. "

The little one is picking up words like crazy - a new one pops up every couple days. Yesterday she started saying "dude." I think that one is going on the calendar.

She's also climbing like crazy, and she's got mad skills and is completely fearless. Today she made it up and into her highchair while I blinked. We need to somehow harness that energy... (HA! harness... I crack me up.)

In other news, it's really nice to have the animals back. I really didn't miss the constant shedding, but they're turing out to be worth it. The little one loves them more then they'd prefer, and much of our day now consists of looking for doggie and kitty.

saturday buttrock!

2008-03-29T15:03:00.001-07:00

B: You been out riding fences

2008-03-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Why does everybody cover Desperado? It's such a lame song! When I am a recording artist of national recognition, and Rick Rubin suggets that I cover Desperado, I am just going to say "Go screw Rick. That song is lame. And for christ sake, can we have less cowbell?".

I am currently leading my NCAA bracket thingy, which is awesome and hilarious to me. I know next to nothing about college hoops. I generally pick teams based upon mascot. You know, if a bulldog can beat a cardinal in a fight, I go with the bulldog (unless I feel bad for the mascot because they are like a disadvantaged race that is being exploited as a mascot). Actually, that is a good question. Are we ever going to get to the point that we can stop using native americans and other races as sports team and school mascots? Vikings were people too!

The dudes and dudettes over at UBrdo bike shop in Kirkland, WA are planning a sick, awesome, rad, gnarly trip to Whistler for opening weekend at the bike park. I think I am going, and you should too cuz it is going to be epic.

I finished Phase 1 of the home network set-up. The Cat 5E and wireless are in and working awesome, and the phone gets configured today. Phase II involves re-running all of the co-ax that currently exterior to the house and drilled through the walls, down into the crawl space and hooked into the Leviton plates that I installed. I didn't do it now, because, we don't currently have a TV so it seemed like a low priority. YAY it works. I invented the internet at my house. Now I am even more like Al Gore.

(fan)tastic, eh?

2008-03-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

So I don't normally post about work, BUT...

I'm having some issues. Recently my mid-sized environmental consulting company was merged with (ie bought by) a much larger company that does all sorts of design, planning, engineering, architecture, surveying, etc. Before, we had about 700 people nation-wide, which was big enough to be able to draw on all sorts of resources, but still small enough that you knew the people to know, and you knew who was working on which projects. Overnight, we've grown 10-fold in employees, let alone money... My new company grossed almost one billion dollars last year. One BILLION! Wow.

This could be really good. Like raises and good management and accounting systems that make sense. But then again, when I started out in consulting, I shyed away from the bigger companies. I didn't want to be pigeon-holed. We've always been wary of them because they can get too big for themselves and collapse under their own weight. This new company doesn't even specialize in environmental - we're now just a division. What happens if we're not profitable enough? They can easily drop a division and no one would even notice...

Crap. So again, I'm a bit conflicted. We'll have to see how things progress. I knew when I started in this industry that these things happen and I'm not too surprised, but it's taking some adjusting.

B: additional compgeek input...

2008-03-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

As some additional info to Mandy's post let me add that this router thingy currently has a fiber optic input and APC battery power back-up source. It has sufficient ports to support 3 LAN and 4 phone lines. The phone lines use traditional 2 wire indoor telecom connectors (ie old school phones). Whoever installed this thing appears to have been sloppy or lazy because they they have tied all of the household phone lines together into a single line on one port. The wiring job is for shit, but that is just my low tolerance for half-assedness.

My big questions are:

The router does not have a co-ax output, but the 426 page incomprehensible instruction manual suggests that it may support digital video. Does that mean that the video feed is through the LAN and there is a converter box to hook up to the TV? How does this typically work?
To get a wireless network from this system would one simply buy a wireless bridge to connect to one of the LAN lines?
How do people feel about the VoIP phone service? Other than extended power outages where you run through your backup, what are the other issues?
Rather than restoring our phone system and DSL service with the unused telecom hardwire, should we switch to this VoIP Broadband service? It looks like it may be cheaper to switch if we can return the POS router that AT&T made us buy.

computer nerd advice please!

2008-03-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

Last week we got the phone and internet service activated at the house, but we couldn’t find any phone jacks that worked. B went hunting around the outside of the house to find the main phone box and found this:

It’s an Allied Telesyn AT-RG656BD. Not quite sure exactly what it does. One website said this:

“The AT-RG656 is a member of the RG600 series new family of residential gateways from Allied Telesyn, an evolution of the successful RG200 series. It adds powerful Layer 3 capabilities as well as enhanced VoIP features set. Moreover, it offers optical connection to the WAN. The RG600 series supports up to 16 IEEE 802.1Q tagged VLAN operation across its 6 x 10/100Mbps switch ports. Hence, it offers a powerful combination of wirespeed Layer 2 switching between VLANs as well as high performance Layer 3 routing between VLANs in one highly cost effective unit.”

Umm… okay. What he said.

One thing we do know is that on the front it says something about VoIP. And a couple websites said something about it being used for Triple Play packages. And we’ve got random cables coming out of the walls in a few of the rooms. All we can think is that the people who lived at the house before us had some sort of phone/internet/cable package and this was installed to handle the system. Somehow the main phone line was diverted and all the phone jacks were attached to this thing for the internet phone service.

What we want to know is if there is an easy way to disconnect the big box router thing and quickly reconnect our home to old-school land lines? Or is this thing super cool and we should totally get a voice/internet package? Does anyone have experience with VoIP?

What do you think, internets?

click and clack!

2008-03-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

(Sorry Susan, not these guys.)

These guys! Car Talk! I got to talk to them! Earlier this week! And chances are pretty good that I'll be on the air next weekend!!! As B said... That is sooooo cool! In a nerdy sort of way.
So I've been having this car "issue" for a while and kept thinking that I should call - that it would be an "issue" that Tom and Ray might be interested in, and I finally did call, a couple weeks ago. Time went by, and I finally heard back from Louie Cronin the Barbarian and then Wednesday I got to actually talk to them! It was super fun. Apparently they usually tape more calls then they have time for, so there's no guarantee that I'll be on, but it's pretty likely. The show airs next weekend, so find your station and listen up! (I think I'm in the third half of the show, right after the puzzler.)

B: Lame Friday post

2008-03-14T15:17:00.000-07:00

I have two blog topics for today. First, I just found this blog again after several years, and it is funnier than I remember. Oakpark Mastermind, Thank you. Here's a quote to give you an idea of how lowbrow and witty she is. Background, she is a making an alphabetical list of things not to be thankful for:

K. ky jelly commercials. have you ever seen one of those commercials? they
are all filled with people who look like they have never had sex in their life.
people that are like 'try a massage with this new ky warming liquid!' UH, THAT
SHIT IS NOT FOR MASSAGES, THAT SHIT IS FOR FUCKING. how come commercials for shampoo are all about fucking and commercials for ky jelly are about wholesome activities such as massage therapy?

A rational critique of the hipocracy of our puritanical policies within media. Certainly well trodden territory but well aimed. I choose to give some possibly undeserved credit and assume that the entire blog is a satire. It is more entertaining and droll that way. Plus it allows me to be in on the joke and feel smart and use the word droll which I totally love.

mishief managed.

Secondly, I am bringing back an old cumulus tradition of a puppy on friday.

So heres a puppy! Let's hope this puppy finds a nice loving home that will change it's name from Elvis to something that doesn't suck. I hate people names for pet's. I think we ought to have a new class of names assigned specifically to animals. I personnally like naming animals after food, but sandwich never really stuck for kitty, and I didn't come up with the idea until after we had Luna for a while. If we were to get a new dog I would call it salsa. There now I got dibs.

B: The real Chunk Shady?

2008-03-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

We are nearing the 3 month mark in Sacto, so I have prepared some observations in comparing Sac to Seattle:

The air is really dry and kind of dusty. Our faces are always a little dirtier and dryer than we are used to.
White people here are a bit more redneck middle america.
It is a way more "diverse" here than we remember. I am totally unaccustomed to seeing so many young people of color all over the place. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any groups of young black men throwing down rhymes on a street corner, so my 8 Mile fantasy has yet to come true.
It is definitely a bit more suburban here and people take casualness a bit further than we are used to. We don't mean the "i'm outdoorsy" casual or the "i'm uber hip" casual, but the "i am a slob wearing sweat pants" casual.
Sacto is flat. You know how Seattle has a fucking hill everywhere you turn, and it makes cycling there a bit more challenging? Not so here. It is flat. I can do the 12 miles from the house to the office in <45
It is way harder to find the pockets of coolness that exist in any city when you have a kid. Amanda and I knew the places that we liked in Seattle from our pre-marriage, pre-baby days. Now with the kid in tow it is harder to try out all of the dessert cafes and thai restaurants to find the ones that are the best.
People drive fast here and it is good. You know my ridiculously overpowered turbo charged neon? Yep, it makes a whole lot of sense here where merging at 90 miles an hour is occasionally the appropriate thing to do, not just the fun thing to do.
It is spring and 70 degrees every day for the last week mofo! When I flew to Seattle this weekend it was 45 and grey. When I got home it was 70 and sunny. I know it will be 90+ soon, but spring is awesome.

While we were in the ghetto apartment waiting to get into our house, Mandy and I started playing some games like, How high can you stack Lily's blocks? (ANSWER = 13). I made up a new game I like to call, How many plastic animals can you stack?, but it didn't really catch on.

when your husband's a superhero...

2008-03-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

you've gotta step up.

When he's working full-time (+) and coming home every night to a new house project (attacks on sewage clean-outs, grounding furnace outlets, taking apart toilets, pulling up tackboard, etc) and a grumpy baby and a wife who's having a hell of a time doing the motherhood/working woman dance...

When he takes the 7AM flight up to Seattle on a Saturday to pack up the rest of the stuff that didn't fit in the POD and turn around and make a retarded long drive with a dog and a cat, only to come home to his in-laws visiting for a week...

I had big plans for stepping it up. These plans included painting a room and moving the little one in it so we'd have space for all the stuff he's bringing. These plans were put into motion first thing Saturday morning. Windows were taped, walls were washed, plates were removed. Ceilings were painted. Wall paint was purchased. The little one went to bed and I was ready. All the painting accessories came out, and I ready to stay up all night to get that damn room painted.

And all of a sudden my plans were thwarted. By the evil that is known only as...

Purple.

FRICK! The lilac that I decided on - the nice, light, subtle lilac - turned purple. Way purple. Like you'd walk into the room and you'd say, "damn, that's purple."

At least the ceiling's painted.

B: A long drive for someone with nothing to think about

2008-03-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

New furnace $4,000
New AC $3,000
Toilets that flush without filling the backyard with sewage $145
Coming home to a warm home and happy family....Priceless

We are finally done with the big furnace/AC replacement. We knew it had to be done going in, but we never expected it would take so long or cost quite so much. Turns out that Heating and AC people are generally crooked lying bastards, and if you can find someone that is willing to tell you the truth and put it in writing, then it is going to cost you more...at least up front.

I am heading up to Seattle tomorrow to retrieve a dog, a cat, and 5 x 10 storage unit full of junk and essentials (such as the hardware for half of our furni , and the burr grinder). 740 miles is a long drive inside a car. Even longer with a dog and a cat that hate car rides. I don't know where we are going to put all of the crap from the storage unit, but we will figure it out.

B: Urrrrrrrgh.......

2008-03-04T11:20:00.000-08:00

When you buy a fixer upper, you expect to do some well......fixing, but some things are just beyond what I expected. As of yesterday we have a puddle of overflow from the sanitary sewer line in the back yard. The system drains really slowly, so it only overflows during heavy usage (ie showers), but it is still nasty having a sewage lagoon in your backyard. It's not enough that it has taken us 2 weeks to get the furnace people in tomorrow (YAY!) so that we can have some heat, but now we can't even shower for fear of overflowing shit in the backyard.

I tried to snake it out myself, but the blockage feels really firm. I am hoping that it is roots, and not a collapsed line. That would be a whole lot more sewer repair work than I had hoped for. This shit (pun slightly intended) is depressing. We are sick of living out of boxes, but between Lily and the sewer, and wiring repairs, and the fact that all of the hardware for our furniture is still in Seattle we haven't been able to get really unpacked at all.

I already hate the people that lived in the house before us. The shoddy repair work is enough to drive me insane.

got to admit it's getting better

2008-02-29T11:43:00.000-08:00

...getting better, all the time.

B: Please comment (maybe anonymously) if you own a pair of these

2008-02-26T09:06:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the folks at Daily Candy, I now know abot the existence of strapless G-string undies! These are apparently meant for those time when barely any undies are just too much, but commando is not quite enough. Just think, if Britney, or Lindsay Lohan, or Cameron Diaz wore these, only a few hundred people would know what there bajingo looks like, instead of several million.

Additionally, I think these are an innovative solution to a couple of problems for the ladies:

No more VPL,
No more thongs that always ride up in back resulting in undies peeking out of your slacks, and
Virtually impossible to be given a wedgie while wearing these (now that's peace of mind).

I am just imagining the instance where the adhesive lets go when wearing a skirt and all of a sudden a stranger is tapping you on the shoulder and saying "Excuse me miss, but you seem to have lost your.....underwear!?" Talk about a faux pas.

it's not just a house, it's an adventure

2008-02-21T19:41:00.000-08:00

That's what I kept telling myself over and over today as I was painting ceilings. All afternoon. We've realized that when you buy a house that's 50 years old, you're also buying 50 years of "updates" and "repairs" that other people have done. And for some reason, it always seems like no one else does things as well as they should. It's no surprise, but we're still a bit shocked when we find a small square of wallpaper left behind the thermostat, or two layers of poorly-installed trim around the sliding doors...

When a house sits empty for 8 months, it gets pretty grimy. The spider that I saw in the tub disappeared, so lately I've been reduced to checking all around the toilet before I sit down.

There's a LOT to be done. We're both pretty motivated though, and we're used to projects with lists of tasks that seem endless, so we're not too overwhelmed. Just be prepared to see a bunch of before and after photos (once we find the camera and cord). It's going to be quite a year! (And if anyone comes to vist, we're going to put you to work. Hope you like pulling ivy!)

pelonis

2008-02-20T14:36:00.000-08:00

We made it! This post is coming to you from hijacked internet at the new house! Woo-hoo!

You'll also notice our newest purchase, a handy-dandy space heater, since we're still without heat... Oh well, you can't have everything...

she loves lasagna

2008-02-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

I think my daughter is has little bit of OCD. Sometimes at dinner she has to take everything out of her plate and then put it back in - like five times - before she eats it.

And her favorite new word today - money. Oh dear.

In other news, if any of you are in the greater Puget Sound area, go check out the best new bike shop in the Pacific Northwest!!! uBDRO Cycle and Mountain Supply. Go! Now! And tell all your friends. And give the owners big giant hugs for me.

B: HURRY UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! now wait and wait and wait...

2008-02-15T15:23:00.000-08:00

We have been doing some cooking in the ghetto-Apartment. Despite working conditions I would not wish on Rachel Ray (the Barney of celebrity chefs), things have been turning out pretty good. Mandy is on a soup kick. It has been good cuz we are both reading In Defense of Food and trying to follow the guidelines.

Eat food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants.

Which means we are trying to remove ourselves from the meat centric A1B2 western plating format. Yay Soup (and salads)! Here's valentines day Split Pea Soup, Salad, and el cheapo sparkling white mimosas.

We have also been finding some pretty yummy wines.

When you are trying to not catch somebody's face in a picture, but want their outfit and the wine glass, what you really end up with is a picture that appears to be focused on their chest. I have lot's these, to the point that is a little ridiculous.

We still don't have the keys to our house despite signing the final papers three days ago. It is absolutely no wonder there are so many foreclosed homes on the market. Banks make them so difficult to buy that nobody wants to deal with it. It is frigging ridiculous! Because of their inability to reacte in a timely manner, we are losing a full weekend to work on the house before we leave the apartment. This is delay is reeking havoc on our schedule. We probably won't have a furnace by the time we have to sleep there, so we may all end up camped in the living room around the fireplace. At least it has been pretty warm lately.

Because we won't be able to paint or do anything else at the house this weekend we might drive down to Santa Cruz. We haven't been there since our wedding, so it should be fun.

B: Preston rides again

2008-02-15T13:25:00.000-08:00

I went for a ride with my brother this weekend on the newly rebuilt Transition Preston FR. We hit a cross country trail on our free-ride bikes because neither one of us is really inclined to ride a true cross country bike. They are too fragile. We rode the Foresthill Divide Loop Trail. It was pretty fun. There are some good downhill stretches, but it is a true XC trail. I am going to need to get back into shape! My bro royally kicked my ass all around this trail.

The bike with a full 08 XT kit (minus front wheel) is sitting around 34 or 35 pounds. That's down from 38 lbs, so that is a great weight loss! It rides awesome, though I do miss the reverse shift rear derailleur. The shifting is super snappy and a big change from older XT. I am probably a bit crusty, but I am not sure that it is an inherently better release system. It is just different and requires modification of your riding style.

As you can see from the crappy cell phone pic, the new design front derailleur sits really low. It is damn near hitting the pivot and I doubt that a chainguide could be used with it where it is. If you look at that pic closely you can see the rear derailleur. Yup, it's there (barely), but the Shadow is designed to sit in so tight in that it is practically hidden. It also almost hits the spokes, but that is another issue altogether.

My only bitch on the new XT is the M-F'ing Enduro front wheel. The new Shimano XT Enduro front hub doesn't use the industry standard 6-bolt pattern, or the standard Shimano centerlock (the lock ring is too small for a 20 mm axle), or the Shimano Saint centerlock (which was designed for use with 20 mm axles), but instead they designed it to use a new and unique lockring specific to this hub. This is just absolutely stupid to me. Why did they need to create yet another new and unique system specifically for this hub when both a market standard, and a Shimano proprietary system exists?

It's just dumb if you ask me...

Anyways, I am looking forward to getting this bike out onto some trails more suited to it's strong points (ie not sharp steep climbs).

conflicted

2008-02-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

Lefty and Lily got to run around barefoot in the grass on Saturday. We found a great restaurant and had a fantastic early Valentine's Day. We're meeting nice people. It was 70 degrees yesterday. I'm working from an local coffee shop that has great coffee and baristas that know how to make a real cappuccino. There's enough local food here to feed entire countries. We get to plan our own kitchen and I finally get a gas cooktop.

I miss our dog. I miss our friends. I can't walk down the street and find two of my best friends overjoyed to play with my daughter. My office is sterile and so big I can't really find people to connect with. There's no one to have lunch with on my days off. It seems like we're never going to get into the house, but then when we do it seems like it's going to be so overwhelming I don't even know where to start.

Lily is as cute as can be. She's having fun at daycare and she's learning new words every day. My mom's brain is cancer free. Luna is ridiculously happy with her foster family. I can wear sunglasses again. We'll get settled soon.

Lily gets overstimulated at daycare and turns into a grump in the few evening hours we get to spend with her. Our real estate agent just called and said that the loan docs aren't in. I'm more stressed than I've been in a really long time. We're not settled yet.