Roasting Something? I'll Consult the Meat Czar

Today is of course Christmas Day. It was wonderful weather in Western Washington this year, as opposed to last year which was... less so. Mom put me in sole charge of an eleven-pound rib roast and then said "good luck."

I just sort of winged it, as per usual with my cooking, and the roast came out perfect. Good meat.

For Christmas this year, I gave everyone something I would not mind getting myself. I extended my interest in comic books to my mom in a hard-bound copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published my Marvel Comics (On that note, the Cowardly Lion is my favorite character). Dad got a new pocket knife. Jim and Brooke got a little kid carrier backpack for hiking or whatever. Michelle got two sets of blocks; the young mad scientist's blocks and the alphabet in Braille and ASL. Gram is getting a new light installed in the bathroom and Gary got a Puget Sound photograph collection.

Mom also received a tutorial on the care and feeding of an iPod Nano.

You should stop what you are doing right now and go see Avatar. It is by far the best looking film I have seen in a number of years.

... Welcome back. Wasn't Avatar a good movie? Anyways, tomorrow being Boxing Day, I'm running errands over here before I have to scoot back to Pullman. This will include a trip to the German deli for some sausage and things.

I realize that running errands has little to do with Boxing Day.

I got a new broom for curling last week. It's sleek and white and shiny, with an orange flame job on the lower half. It took some getting used to, and I did burn one stone with it on its maiden voyage, but it will be a big improvement to our game. Starting in a few weeks, I'll be throwing lead for our team.

Driving in to my dad's the other night, when it was dark and dreary on a lonely road that is seldom traveled in the winter (so it seems), I found great relief to come around the corner and see Dad's house illuminated and the gate open. I said aloud, "There's the light of home."

Dad and I made a pot of clam chowder like we used to when I was very small, and we talked college football. I showed him some of my curling moves and we had a great time.

I think I'll head downstairs and work on assembling my Lego set, as per tradition. The narrative flow of this post has been erratic, but this is how it came out as I typed it. Thank you for your consideration.

Good News, Good Game, and Christmastime

First of all, I'll be an uncle again in May to another little girl I can spoil thoroughly. That's pretty great news. I'm having a good time spoiling the niece I already have.

I spent the weekend trying to recover from so much good food. The first annual Decagon Chili Cook-off was on Wednesday, and I sampled three excellent recipes from my coworkers. I was going to stop at two, but everyone raved about Uncle John's (John is the uncle of a friend of mine, so I refer to him as Uncle as well), so I had a bowl. Thursday was prime rib at the Christmas party, as well as samplings from the dessert contest. Friday had me eating a lot of ice cream leftover from Wednesday. It turns out we had far more than we could fit in our freezers, so we set it out on the back porch and it kept fine in the freezing weather.

I emphasize trying. I felt a mild streak of culinary creativity, so I cooked myself some good dishes involving breakfast sausage.

We also finished the regular season of curling. Next week is the bonspiel, or tournament play. Tomorrow we find out which team we get to play again. As long as it isn't Team Stupid Hat, I'll be happy.

I get to register for the STP on January 4th. I only need a way to train in the snow now. I've got a completely new perspective on training now that I have the experience. A partner would also be great, but that will come later I think. In any case, I hope to perform better this year than last.

My other big achievement this weekend is the taming of the cable mess on the home theater setup. It's not beautiful, but it definitely looks better than it did.

Moving on Through

October was a busy month for me. I spent most weekends either at hurling practice or the ice rink for curling matches, or in Mattawa helping out Dad. We did manage to get the heavy stuff moved over to the new place, and most of it organized as well. After the second trip over, the 1981 Curtis-Mathes television set came back home with me. Using some new experience I've picked up at work along with the brilliant diagnostic abilities of my roommate, we worked on the set for a few minutes and then fired it up, good as the day it was manufactured 28 years ago.

For a brief rundown, Hurling is a field sport traditionally played in Ireland on a soccer pitch. Each player wields a long bat called the hurley or hurl, and teams field a little ball the size of a baseball, called the sliotar. Players are not allowed to simply pick up the ball; one must flip it up with the hurley. There are lots of options for play, and it is a fun sport. I usually get worn out after an hour of drills. We have yet to play a game, due to lack of players.

Curling is the sport on the ice rink which involves throwing stones at houses, with the goal to get the biscuit on the button. This is done under the direction of the skip or, when the skip is throwing, the vice. I compare the exertion, team experience, and camaraderie to a bowling league.

Also, my two best friends and I have a weekly racquetball game, and I am getting noticeably better.

On to the hobbies. I haven't had much other free time this month due to changes at work, but I'll be starting up carving again shortly. I got out my cheap knives around Halloween to carve my pumpkins, and I'm picking it up again. I'm also making a model of a modified toroidal nuclear fusion reactor driven by periodic injections of focused dense plasma for a friend. He's working on some fiction with his brothers and needed a bit of flavor. Normally, toroidal fusion reactors are driven by laser-regulated plasma, as long as you are wondering.

I might have mentioned it before, but I've got this niece who is about the most adorable baby ever.

Hobby Engineering?

I live in a house with four growing boys, which means we drink a lot of milk. I received criticism when I came home midweek with two more gallons of milk only to respond that it is not that absurd; we drank all that milk inside of two days... I suppose you are asking now "but Gary, what are you doing with all those empty milk jugs?"

That is a fair question. Even when we crush the jugs, it still filled our recycling bin fairly quickly, so I came up with the great alternative to use them in a wild project. After running a quick and dirty calculation, I determined we would need 200 milk jugs to form the main buoyant support for a raft. A raft made from recycled materials.

At this very moment hanging from a hook in the kitchen is a string of 15 jugs. Threaded by the handle onto stringers, twenty ranks of ten jugs each will support a deck composed of recycled Styrofoam sheets sandwiched in layers of cardboard. The entire deck area will be sealed with marine grade epoxy, the only part not already used or salvaged. Rigidity will be achieved through skirts made of scrap lumber from the back yard.

This will merely be an exercise in utilizing recycled materials as the finished product will have hydrodynamic drag too high to be fast or maneuverable. It should float just fine though. And it should support a half ton load.

The Fairest Affair: The Fair

A friend of mine hunted me down a couple weeks ago and asked me if I like to cook. I do. He asked if I would enter a dutch oven cookoff at the Palouse Empire Fair. You know my response... Only thing was that I didn't have a recipe or gear to use.

Not a problem for me. Just a trip to Tri-State and a little journey on the internet yielded me an on-the-stove recipe which could be adapted for a new dutch oven.

Got up at 5:00 on Saturday to get everything together. I had the cooler packed with chicken and vegetables and a bin packed with everything else. I was missing a charcoal chimney, which meant a stop at Rosauers in Colfax to buy the cheapest coffee they had and a can opener to cut holes in it. I was a few steps away from making a fancy bellows out of a Schrader valve epoxied into the can and my bike pump.

It was the first ever dutch oven competition at the fair, and it had low PR, so there were only 8 entries. We all had a blast as we talked food and cooking and borrowed each other's supplies. I made some cool friends, made some good food, ate even better food (Paella, brownies, pizza, cake, pirogies, and more).

After standing in the hot sun for hours and hours and hours, the judges finished and awarded prizes. I didn't get anything in the special categories (beef, wheat, or potatoes), but I did take the red ribbon for my orange ginger chicken with potatoes. It was a close match that was decided by only a small point spread. Everyone who tried it said that the oranges and the ginger make it taste "fresh".

Thousands of Friends, Old Men on Street Corners

The thing which impresses me most about the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic is the impressive showing of supporters of the event. I had a lot of time to think about this.

First of all, the body of organizers for an event for ten thousand people must be fairly large. There were an impressive number of officials and support personnel at the start in Seattle. The showing of law enforcement to close down sections of city streets in Seattle and in other places was magnificent. Then there were the volunteers manning the stops along the way; the bicycle repair shops doing minor labor free of charge; the volunteers providing first aid at all locations; the support riders with on-the-spot first aid and communication with other bodies like paramedic crews. REI hosted a pretty cool party at their headquarters in Kent. Carter Subaru fielded a large number of support vehicles, and the Honda Goldwing Touring association was out running cover for us and offering assistance right up to the finish line. Darigold kept me full of chocolate milk, and at an event like this, when a stranger walks up to you and gives you a tablet to put in your water, you take it. (It was fine). They even shut down the bridge at Longview to usher a few hundred cyclists at a time into Oregon. The detailed directions in the map booklet and the tags painted on the ground never failed when we were alone on the route early this morning, without someone with more experience to follow.

Most impressive were the people not directly affiliated with any of these. The people that stood out most were the people who came out to cheer on thousands of identical cyclists as they passed by their homes and parks. There were old men in lawn chairs sitting on street corners who clapped for probably hours as these thousands of strangers came by. A family in Centralia built a misting station for us to ride through at journey's end on Day One. Citizens in Yelm, Washington greeted and applauded riders as though they were heroes.

After an accounting of the last two days and two hundred miles on my bicycle, the phrases I uttered most this weekend were "On your left!", "Car back!", and to me the most important: "Thank you!"

Tauntaun sleeping bag

I just saw this and it looked kind of cool:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/tauntaun.html

It's a kid-sized tauntaun sleeping bag, so kids can stay warm just like Luke Skywalker did in The Empire Strikes Back. It's a neat idea that I wouldn't have thought of.

STP is in three days. Getting everything together is kind of a challenge, especially when we're working out of a house where three guys are moving within a couple of weeks, and we're still trying to lead normal lives on top of it all. My biggest fear was put to rest today; I do, in fact, have a race bib which is to be pinned to my chest for two days. It's secure in the packet marked "Gary Jackson 7002", 7002 being my race number.

I decided to cut a little stress by cleaning my car and foaming the tires so they are unnaturally shiny.

Building a Laboratory and Muscle Mass

I've been allotted some space in laboratory at work to play with our new epoxy rifle. When it's loaded and ready, it looks pretty intimidating. I was told that I am in charge of the project. That's pretty cool I guess.

Drove up into the Idaho Panhandle last weekend. We left Pullman later in the evening due to an Eagle Scout Court of Honor. We ended up at the campsite around 11:30, not before having an adventure first. We nearly got lost, saw a gorgeous sunset, and nearly hit a cougar that crossed the road in front of us. All the while we were hauling five bicycles in a custom rack my team built.

The final leg of the drive was nine miles on a dusty road. This meant that we had to spread out to avoid choking or crashing, and a hundred fifty yards from our destination, I blew a tire. Derek and I took care of it pretty quickly, but the rest of the group was ready to send out a search for us.

The Hiawatha is a fifteen-mile stretch of the old Chicago-Milwaukee railroad, which means that the path is a fairly smooth and not too technical mountain bike path. Also, all the trestles and tunnels are in place. The longest tunnel and the main attraction of the place is over 8800 feet long, with no lighting in place. It's a unique experience riding in pitch black relying on a tiny headlight on the handlebars. It was worth the use fee and the drive up there. Also, thirty miles round trip in the gravel was pretty good.
Wednesday we rode faster for longer than ever before. I guess it was to celebrate having lost twenty pounds over the last six months. We did the Troy ride a half hour faster than ever before, and Derek was struggling to catch up the entire ride to Troy.

Clock is ticking on the STP.

New Fascination

This isn't always about what I'm carving...

I recently saw the video for Linkin Park's "Leave Out All the Rest" video, along with clips from the movie Sunshine. The visual elements are stunning. The closing shot is of the band (or in the film, just one guy) staring at the sun through a polarized screen. After searching for similar images, I found many real-life pictures of solar flares from NASA.Part of me wants to travel faster than light around this body with hopes of traveling back in time to rob an aquarium.

Started my new job last week. I am currently running tests on cyanoacrylate adhesives, printed circuit board water penetration, and am evaluating some parts designs, not to mention designing a new cutting jig for a friend.

We had by far the best D&D session last night that I've had yet. We finally got the idea to work as a team, and it helped out in a situation where we all needed to be in different rooms. After traveling to the roof of a building and discovering a crystal which was cursing the area in an unseasonable, endless winter and so forth, my character was pushed off and was knocked unconscious.

A lot of people know the story... Most important though is that after the session, the group stayed up and we got some butcher paper out and are now making a map of the "Land of Home Depot", where the campaign takes place. We're all pretty good friends.

I've got a pretty cute little niece. For the sake of sharing that fact, I'll redistribute a picture of her here:

There was some bad red-eye, but I was able to shop the photo and take care of that.

A good friend of mine called me today and asked about my cedar log. I have a seven-foot piece of cedar on my porch. Half of it will eventually become a totem pole. The other half is going to be cut into planks for salmon grilling. I think I also want to do some decorative canoe paddles like my uncle's, which means I need more cedar... It's like the delicious cycle again.

"Hey, leftover chips. I could buy some cheese and make nachos... Hey, leftover cheese. I could buy some chips and make nachos."

Except that of course, it's cedar logs and ideas.

Experiments with Photoshop and Other Ventures

I recently started working with Photoshop. Adobe Soundbooth was intuitive for me, so I was able to manufacture a new ringtone for my phone in under ten minutes, but there is a reason a lot of people make a life out of the software. I've been poking around online looking at tutorials now for a while, but still, it's a challenge.

Using one tutorial (HDR Photo-Effect, http://www.nill.cz/index.php?set=tu1) I did manage to dress up one picture.


Also dove back into carving. Finished a tortoise I started and got the paint on it the other night. I'm so used to painting miniatures (~25 mm) that a large area of one color felt foreign to me. My favorite part is his face.







The General is turning out to be harder than I thought.