Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

An Unusual Day Off

I’m home today on a sick day – even though I’m not sick. No, I’m not abusing the system: Debbi had oral surgery this morning, the second of three she’s having this year. The first was to remove her wisdom teeth and a baby tooth that never came out, the second is a bone graft to build up the jaw under the removed baby tooth, and the third will add an implant to replace the removed baby tooth.

Since she’s being put under for these surgeries, she can’t drive herself to and from the surgeon, so I drive here there and back, and then I stick around for the afternoon to make things easier for her during her first day back, when she’s in the most pain and probably the most exhausted as her body gets over the shock. And taking care of a family member is a legitimate reason to take a sick day.

Debbi really hates going to the dentist, but we have a terrific dentist (who came highly recommended, and to whom we’ve sent many of our friends), and her oral surgeon – she says – is just as good. So she’s been very brave going through all of this. I think the experience has not been as bad as she’s feared; it’s not pleasant, but she’s able to take care of herself after the first day. She’s taking most (maybe all) of the week off anyway. She’ll certainly be out through Thursday, based on how the first surgery went. It’s just a lot to recover from. Plus she has to stick to liquid and then soft foods for several weeks, which might be the worst part of the whole thing. Over the weekend we stocked up on yogurt and fruits to make smoothies.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that those tiny things in our mouths can require so much care and be so expensive to care for, and yet we certainly want to keep them in good working order.

Anyway, Debbi’s on the couch listening to a book-on-CD through the stereo (she’s finishing up the Sue Grafton mysteries). She’ll probably be zonked until the evening. I’ve been puttering around and keeping the cats more-or-less entertained (they’d probably tell you “less”, but they are unreliable witnesses and are not to be trusted).

Couldn’t ask for a nicer day to take it easy, though: It’s sunny and about 70 out right now, with an occasional breeze. I might go read up on the porch this afternoon.

Cucumber Sandwiches

The garden’s going well this year: We’ve harvested our first two dozen tomatoes this weekend, and we picked our second cucumber.

My favorite thing to do with cucumbers is to make cucumber sandwiches, as follows:

  1. Remove crusts from white bread and cut into squares. I’ve been using Orowheat County White bread, which I cut with a large bread knife.
  2. Spread little dollops of mayonnaise on one side of each slice and place the slices on a serving tray.
  3. Peel the cucumber and cut into slices. Put each slice on a piece of bread.
  4. Shake salt and pepper on top of the finished sandwiches.
  5. If making more than one layer, put wax paper between the layers.
  6. Refrigerate for 1 hour.
  7. Consume greedily.

They’re not true “sandwiches” since they have only one square of bread each. But who cares? Also: Eat them the same day you make them, because the bread gets soggy if you leave them overnight. Ick.

But meanwhile, yummmmmm:

Cucumber_Sandwiches.jpg

Workin’ Vacation

Last year we took a long weekend trip to Portland and returned the night of the Fourth of July. This year I suggested we turn it around, flying up on the Fourth so we could catch the fireworks in the evening, and then have a vacation in Portland with our friend Karen.

We flew in Wednesday afternoon. Karen threw a barbecue party in the late afternoon, with us, her mother, sister, and some friends coming by. I was elected grillmaster, and did my best with Karen’s charcoal grill. Well, okay, it wasn’t the grill’s fault, it was fine; I just have a gas grill at home, so when I do use charcoal I always have to remember just how it all works. This time around, I should have left the grill uncovered so the coals could breathe and heat up. Instead they just sort of smouldered for a while. I was actually able to get everything cooked through, it just took about twice as long as it should have. Go me!

But seriously, we all had a good time, and the food was good. Can’t ask any fairer than that.

Thursday we had a quiet day: Karen went to work for a bit, since she had an appointment, and Debbi and I hung around at home. When Karen came back, we worked to get her wi-fi set up.

So here’s the thing: I have this habit of visiting Karen shortly after she moves. I think this is the fourth time in seven years. Go figure. No, I don’t help her unpack, but I do help her with some projects around the house. It’s fun, really: I feel like I get some things done, and leave her house in better shape than when I arrived.

Back to her wi-fi: Last time I set it up she had DSL. This time she has Comcast cable. I figured: It’s a modem, it probably works just the same. And it almost does, except for one thing: The modem apparently records the MAC address (nothing to do with Apple, it’s the built-in identifier for the ethernet card) of the device it’s plugged into, and in order to plug it into a different device you have to power-cycle the modem. Which would be fine (if stupid) if Comcast actually told us this, but in fact it came with no documentation, and their help line wasn’t much help, either. So a 5-minute project turned into a 40-minute project. Sheesh.

Anyway, we did get the wi-fi set up, and I didn’t even have to reset the base station. Woo-hoo!

Friday we hit a couple of my favorite places in Portland: Fat Albert’s breakfast cafe (home of awesome biscuits and gravy), and of course Powell’s books.

In the evening we went to a baseball game, the Portland Beavers hosting the Tacoma Rainiers. Ah, minor league baseball, even of the AAA variety. The Beavers – the Padres’ affiliate – is a pretty weak team these days, staffed with some borderline prospects and some decent backup or former Major Leaguers. The Rainiers features some guys who look like real prospects, like Jeff Clement and this guy, Adam Jones:

Adam_Jones.jpg
(click to view full-sized)

The game was a laffer from early on and the Rainiers won 10-4. We did get to see some nuns watching the game from some good seats, but I’m sure you’re more interested in seeing us enjoying the game:

At_The_Park.jpg

When I say this was a “working vacation”, I mean the projects I undertook around the house, and mostly those were Saturday and Sunday. We picked up some shelves which I installed in the bathroom:

Shelves.jpg

And some flowers which I planted in pots on the front porch:

Front_Porch.jpg

And tomato plants and herbs which went in the back yard:

Garden.jpg

The owner of the house had planted some heirloom tomatoes, some of which self-seeded, so Karen’s got some mystery tomato plants lurking around, and who knows what those will produce! But I caged several of them, so she’ll get a chance to find out.

In between it all I was able to make a run to Excalibur Comics, and Saturday evening we met my friend J.D. and his wife Kris for dinner and dessert. We had a great time, like we did last year. I got to ask J.D. what the size of a medium box is. Less flippantly, we talked comics (I’m scandalized that J.D. is going digital with his comics reading), Magic (he used to play, too – in fact, his period of playing almost exactly covers my time away from the game), and various other things. A nice, relaxing evening.

I even surprised everyone by eating a clam!

I think the vacation was about a day too short, as I would have enjoyed one day of just lying around or going to see some sights. But Sunday afternoon we headed to the airport (okay, after one more trip to Fat Albert’s) and came home. The cats were very happy to see us, although Roulette expressed her unhappiness by avoiding me all evening.

But she forgave me eventually!

Conference’s End

Another WWDC is in the books. I spent three days working hours in the Mac OS X lab, answering a variety of Xcode questions. I went to see one presentation, and saw a few friends in the developer community whom I don’t otherwise see. I took CalTrain to and from the conference, which is fun, and gave me a bunch of bonus exercise. It did get me to wake up a little earlier than usual, which isn’t such a bad thing.

After I wrapped up the conference today I went shopping. I stopped at Borderlands Books where I bought a couple of things and spent some quality time with Ripley, who very cleverly enticed me back to the couch where I could sit down so she could sit in my lap. No dumb cat, that.

I also went by Comix Experience and Gamescape, where I was less successful, although I did help recommend Fables to another customer at the former.

Now I’m ready for a nice quiet weekend. My legs are tired from all the walking.

Insanity Week

The latest semi-irregular round-up of my life since I haven’t been posting regularly lately.

For most of my co-workers, this is insanity week.1 For me, last week was insanity week, and it had nothing to do with work, which has actually been quite reasonable for me lately (read: I’m not actually presenting anything at WWDC).

Last week was nuts for a lot of little reasons, and most of it revolved around gaming:

Last weekend I had wanted to host a Magic booster draft, but I wasn’t able to get enough interest, so it didn’t happen. That bummed me out. So I made plans to host again this past Saturday, since Debbi was going to be busy from late morning to mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, a couple of people couldn’t make it until mid-afternoon, which made the whole thing questionable.

Meanwhile, my new(ish) friend Lee wanted to host poker on Thursday, which I was also into, but for quite a while it looked like we might not have enough for that either. I eventually recruited my friend James for poker, and we jointly twisted my co-worker Daniel’s arm, so we had 7 people on Thursday, which was nice. We played a mini-tournament and I finished 4th (i.e. “just out of the money, again”), mainly because I took a couple of bad beats when I was the big stack which crippled me. (When I call an all-in bet with my A-9 and my short-stacked opponent turns over A-9 too, and then makes a flush on the river, I think that’s a bad beat.) But I mostly think I played very well, never going all-in until my final hand when I was forced to, and playing with the big stack for quite a while, which was fun. I certainly made some mistakes, but I managed to get away from them. No doubt a close assessment of my play would still make me appear as a newbie, but I was pretty happy.

And then on Saturday we played Magic, specifically the Mirrodin block, which is artifact-based, and which was new to all of us. Again, we had 7 people, and it was a lot of fun. A very interesting block to play. I ended up with a better-than-average deck, I think, with a couple of bombs, but a few weaknesses, too. I got very lucky a couple of times while playing, but then, that’s part of what makes it fun!

Unfortunately, Lee ended up getting sick and wasn’t able to make it, so he still hasn’t been over to see my house and meet the kitties. But we might get together with him and his wife sometime outside of gaming time to make that happen.

So all the gaming turned out well, but it took a lot of time and energy to organize it than it seemed like it ought to have taken. I guess that’s life sometimes. It reminds me why I’m less willing to take on ongoing organizational tasks like the fantasy baseball league these days, though.

Meanwhile, the first weekend we ended up going to a little party thrown by my friend Lucy, whom I haven’t seen in quite a while. It was a party with a Tiki theme and revolving around her writerly friends, but Debbi and I had a great time anyway (by which you can infer that my writing has not been going so well lately). I drank more alcohol at it than I have in quite a while, and was glad Debbi was willing to drive home when we packed it in late in the evening.

And then I had to read the book for last night’s book discussion, Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes, which I kept putting off and then had to frantically finish up Sunday afternoon. Review forthcoming. Okay, this hole I dug myself. But still.

My weekend wrapped up with the discussion itself – which ran about 30 minutes long – and then packing up some stuff I sold on eBay so I could mail it today. And then, whew! My crazy week was over. Fun (mostly), but very tiring.

So anyway, yeah. Now it’s WWDC. I’ll be working in the labs a few days this week, answering questions for folks. Not as easy as it sounds: The questions can be difficult, and there’s a lot of working in-depth with folks to figure out how to do what they need to do. So it’s mentally pretty tiring. But it’s nice to see people out there using the code I’ve written. If you happen to be at the conference, feel free to stop by and say “hi”! (Which would be an interesting change of pace, since I’ve never experienced WWDC as a social event, as I know some people do. I’ve always assumed this is because Mac programming is my vocation, not my hobby, but I don’t really know why. Of course, it takes some effort for me to experience science fiction conventions as social events rather than geeking-out-in-my-own-headspace events, so it’s probably just me.)

(1 It’s not really insanity week, it’s just a very busy week, and many of them enjoy it very much. But it is a very different week from the other 51 weeks in the year.)

The Lingering Yuckness

I’ve had this low-grade illness or something for a few weeks now. When it started I had a sore throat and clearly had some sort of illness because I would get wiped out by mid-afternoon and have to go crash. It lasted for about three days and then went away.

Except that it left me with this peculiar post-nasal-drip type of symptom: I constantly feel like I have a little bit of phlegm in the back of my throat, and like I have to swallow a lot. I’m not congested, though. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, but it hasn’t been going away. Drinking tea helps, but only temporarily.

It would just be a little frustration except that I think it’s been causing me to snore a lot when I’m asleep, and needless to say this doesn’t work so well for Debbi.

So I’m at something of a loss. I’ve been rather stressed out lately, and I wonder if I just haven’t been resting enough to knock the last of some bug out of my system. Or if I got through one thing and am now coming down with something else. Or if I need to just go see a doctor.

Blick.

Garden Progress

Some pictures of my garden this spring.

Here’s what my garden looked like a month ago:

Garden_Apr30.jpg
(click for larger image)

And here’s what it looks like now:

Garden_May30.jpg

The snapdragons have finished their first blooms and a couple are getting ready for their second go-round. The marigolds are in full bloom. The three tomato plants are doing great (and two are fruiting already), and the cucumber plant (middle cage) is starting to take off. Only the pepper plant (far left cage) is taking its sweet time.

All the herbs in the pots are doing well, too. The rosemary and thyme are held over from last year, but we picked up some new Italian parsley and sweet basil.

Here’s what my yard around the patio looked like a month ago, too:

Yard.jpg

The stream, incidentally, starts in the little pool on the right, runs behind the red cowbells, and falls into the pond whose edge is on the left. The plants surrounding the head pool on the right got clobbered by our cold winter weather, but they’ve completely recovered by now – rather to my surprise, because they didn’t look good.

I need to clean up the patio, and then we can start having weekend breakfast out there, and I might start doing some writing outside in the evening when it gets a little warmer.

Tea

My damn whatever-this-illness-is is still lingering around. Other than making me really tired on Thursday-to-Sunday, it’s given my throat that thick, kind of clogged feeling. It doesn’t really hurt, but it’s uncomfortable. Fortunately it’s not obstructing my breathing or swallowing, it’s just annoying.

Fortunately, tea seems to help. Even more fortunately, I learned yesterday that tea at the coffee bar at work is free! Pretty nifty. It’s even Numi Tea, which is pretty yummy. So now I can try out all their various flavors for free!

The downside to drinking tea in the afternoon rather than my usual mocha is that I’m that much hungrier come dinnertime. Which I shouldn’t complain about, because I don’t really need the 400 calories (or however many) those mochas come with, anyway.

I’m hoping my throat is all better by tomorrow, though. It’s a little better every day, but I wish it would finish healing up.

My Theoretical Vacation to England

I wrote over in LiveJournal (since that’s where most of my friends relevant to the subject hang out) that I won’t be going to WisCon this year. And in addition to not seeing my Madison friends, I’m bummed that I won’t get to see my British friends, whom I don’t really have much hope of ever seeing aside from at WisCon, until and unless I go on my Theoretical Vacation to England.

Naturally, the TVtE seems like a good topic for a journal entry.

I’ve been to England twice before, once with each of my parents, back in the mid-1980s. I had a terrific time, I loved the Underground, loved the parks in London, loved the comic book stores in London, loved what I saw of the British Museum, and was mostly bored silly at the Tower of London and the couple of castles we went to. This was a peculiar time in my life (my mid-teens) to go travelling, as I was starting to become a little more interested in the world around me on its own terms, but I was still very much wrapped up in my own hobbies (I spent a bunch of time perusing rules books for the Champions role-playing game, for instance). In other words, as much as I enjoyed it, I surely didn’t get nearly as much out of it as I could have.

One of the biggest disappointments for me was Stonehenge, which was roped off so you couldn’t get within, oh, 50 feet (17 meters) of it. Actually I have no idea what the actual distance was, but it was far enough that I just found it an unrewarding experience. Of course, it’s roped off because tourists had been chipping little bits off the stones for years as souvenirs, thus the stones were gradually eroding. It makes sense, but I was still disappointed.

Some years later I learned that there are actually hundreds of stone circles throughout England, and many of them, although local landmarks, don’t have the celebrity of Stonehenge. But many of them are interesting and cool in their individual ways.

So for some years now I’ve had the notion of making a two-week trip to England, and spending the first week (or maybe slightly less) in London, seeing the sights there, and then renting a car and driving around the countryside seeing various stone circles, as well as the towns and landscape of England.

If this sounds like a half-baked plan, well, you’re exactly right: I’ve never done any research as to where the other circles are, which ones I should visit, how easy they are to reach, whether it’s easy to find sleeping space nearby, or for that matter how easy it would be to rent a car in England. Heck, 7 or 8 or 9 days might not be enough time to make such an expedition worthwhile. But I figure until I have even a half-formed idea of when I (and Debbi!) might go on this trip, it doesn’t make sense to spend a whole lot of time working out the details. I’m hoping it’s not a completely infeasible idea, though.

It’d be fun to see my British friends in their native habitat, too!

I’m not much of a traveller, though, so I don’t know when I might try to make this trip a reality. Debbi and I still haven’t gotten back to Hawaii in nearly four years since our first trip. I admit it: I’m a stay-at-home kind of guy. I worry about leaving the cats when we go away, I worry about the flight going wrong, or some government-related stupidity that might leave me (or maybe just my laptop) stranded in a far-away land for some unknown period of time.

But, maybe someday. I’m probably not going to stay here forever. After all, for all my sluggishness, I’ve never stayed anywhere else forever, either…

Paging In

I’ve been very busy lately, and journalling hasn’t been real high on my list. So now I’m coming up for air.

The worst part, actually, is that I’ve been sick for a couple of days. I woke up Thursday morning feeling dehydrated, and thought maybe I was just dehydrated. By lunchtime my throat was getting sore and – more tellingly – I was etting really tired. So I went home early and lay on the couch for a while, and went to bed early. Friday I was feeling better so I went in and put in most of a full day at work, but I was really wiped out when I came home, and fell asleep for a while after dinner. This morning my throat is still a bit sore and I’m starting to get congested, so yeah, still sick.

So we’re going to lay low for the weekend (other than going out to take care of a friend’s cats). Hopefully I’ll be well enough to go to the book discussion tomorrow night, especially since I’ve missed the last three. I’ve been busily reading the book for the group the last few nights, so it’d be annoying if I had to miss it (especially since I’m not enjoying the book very much).

Oh wait, it looks like the discussion is actually next weekend. Well, now I can worry less!

A week ago we had a little celebration for Debbi’s birthday: We went to dinner with Susan and Subrata to Amber India, and then came home to have leftover cake (which Debbi brought from work) and ice cream from Rick’s. I think Debbi enjoyed it all.

With the release of the new Magic expansion set, Future Sight, we also did a couple of booster drafts on Sunday and Tuesday. I did poorly: The drafts were fun, but I ended up with an ugly mishmash of cards that didn’t work together too well. I was able to hold my own against a few opponents, but I’m clearly doing something wrong in assembling my decks. However, since our next two possible drafts have been cancelled due to lack of interest, I’ll have plenty of time to think about how I can improve.

On the bright side, since last week’s heat wave is over, my garden has been blooming and growing, and even a couple of flowers I transplanted into the not-too-friendly soil in the ground are doing quite well. I enjoy just going out and looking at all the growing things, and now that it’s just about summer weather here, I should start spending evenings on the patio or porch again.

So that’s what’s up with me. What’s going on with you?