Personal

K and I don’t eat much meat - no red meat, no poultry, etc. Theoretically, we still eat fish, but since I won’t cook it… This weekend, we experimented with a couple of new recipes that, in hindsight, were even vegan: Vegetarian Mac and Cheese. Like a lot of people (I suppose), I love macaroni and cheese. Not the Kraft, out of the box, kind, but one made with onion, garlic, mustard powder in a homemade cheese sauce. Unfortunately, K (okay, me too) isn’t supposed to eat that much high-fat cheese. I’ve been making it with low-fat cheese, but well, that’s a little lame. Last week, a guy at my office gave me a recipe that eliminated the cheese sauce and turned out to be (possibly) tastier than the original. Start by sautéing an onion in a little olive oil. Add a drained, rinsed can of cannellini (other beans work, but cannellini are wonderfully creamy), 1.75 cups of water (or vege broth), 1 tbsp of miso paste (I used soy sauce), a little dry mustard and a half cup of raw cashews. Puree, then add a package of cooked spinach and use as the cheese sauce. It’s wonderful. We also made seitan which, as near as I can figure, is pronounced satan. It’s wheat meat - wheat gluten (which means it’s also pronounced “death to etselec and hlf”) and water (or broth) which is cooked and then used as if it was regular meat. We made ours with water, soy sauce and some Italian seasonings. Once it was cooked, we sliced it up, braised it and served it with a wine/mushroom sauce. It was great and a *lot* easier than I thought it would be.

One of the phrases that bothered me the most during last year’s election (indeed, during all elections), is “small town values.” That elevation of the mores of small communities that make them better than the rest of us who, by virtue of living in larger metro areas, apparently don’t have any values. I’ve never lived in a small town. Currently, we live in a rural-ish area on the outskirts of a medium sized metropolitan area. Prior to that, I’ve lived in medium sized cities (maybe 150-300,000 people). That said, I’ve known people who lived in small towns and overall, I wasn’t too impressed by the values of those small towns. On an individual level, the people in small towns don’t really seem all that different from anyone else, they certainly aren’t bastions of moral virtue. That said, there is one thing that is different about small towns, and which is that they are small [ tautology for the win!]. ...

So K just asks me if it’s raining. My response was to go online instead of going outside. I’m such a

Last week (on Inauguration Day no less), we got about 7" of snow out at the house. I just uploaded the pictures this morning. Some of my favorites are below, the rest are in the gallery. If nothing else, the dogs sure did seem to enjoy the snow. :-)

It’s noon - congratulations to President Obama!!

It looks like we’re going to get our first real snowfall in about five years. “Real” if you count 2-4 inches, which I do since K and I are from Louisiana. Unfortunately, while I was grocery shopping this weekend, I forgot a few things and needed to go pick ’em up on my way home from work. Even more unfortunately, among the things I forgot were a quart of milk for tea at the office and a dozen eggs. So there I am, the evening before the snow falls buying milk and eggs. Hell, if I had forgotten bread this weekend I would have hit the Southern snowfall French Toast

I’m not certain if I’ve joked about it here or not, but recently I’ve taken to commenting that if academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small, then what does that say about non-profit politics. The implication is that non-profit politics are even more petty because the stakes are even smaller. Well, after a rough couple of weeks with the non-profit I work with, I can confirm that the politics are definitely petty, I’m just no longer certain that the stakes are small. In one sense, sure - the budget for the non-profit I work with is smaller than any other budget I’ve dealt with in a work situation. But at the same time, the politics most often affects people’s livelihoods. It’s one thing to have a layoff due to lack of funds. It’s another thing for poor management and personal vendettas leading to a firing. ...

Some recent (somewhat) technical notes: A while back, I swapped the dead harddrive from my ipod with a compact flash card. Unfortunately, at the time, the biggest (affordable) compact flash was 16 GB, so I lost about half the capacity from my ipod. Not a huge problem, but it became more of one as I added more music. Yesterday, a shiny new 32 GB compact flash arrived and now I’m back to the nominal amount of space on my ipod, except that it’s all solid state and cool. From the technical standpoint, this was something of a PITA, since I didn’t have a windows or mac machine around to reinstall the firmware. My ultimate solution: 1) back up /dev/sdb (boot record and partition table) and /dev/sdb1 (firmware) from the ipod using dd; 2) put the CF in my laptop and format it (a camera would work just as well), this just normalizes the card; 3) put the CF in the ipod (or in the laptop); 4) write the patition table using dd; 5) edit the partition table using fdisk, set the size of sdb2 to be 32 rather than 16 GB; 6) write out the firmware to sdb1; 7) format sdb2 using mkfs.vfat. Voila - a 32 GB ipod CF If you haven’t seen it already, check out projecteuler.net. They’ve got a bunch of mathematically oriented programming problems online of varying difficulty. Good solutions should all run in 1 minute or less and generally take 100 lines of code or so. It’s a good way to get familiar with a new programming language and to exercise your brain. So far, I’ve done the first 70 or so problems - they don’t take too long, maybe a half hour each on average. Finally, I got the clutch in my car replaced yesterday. The mechanic said that it was in pretty bad shape and that the (plastic?) bearing the clutch uses had worn completely away. This probably explains why I’ve had no acceleration for the past year (or more?). I had forgotten what it was like to drive a decent car :-)

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about getting a new guitar. I’ve been heading up to High Strung in Durham and have played with maybe a dozen different models, but the one I kept coming back to was a Blueridge BR-243. It’s got a beautiful sound and it’s very comfortable for me to play. The body size is “000” as opposed to the more common dreadnought size (like my first guitar) which means it’s easier to get my arms around and the shorter neck makes it easier to reach all of the chords. The back and sides of the guitar are mahogany ...

My mother tells a story about my first day in first grade (and sadly, I’m more likely to remember stories of my childhood than the actual childhood). I go off to school, probably all 70s style - plaid pants, mop haircut, etc., and when I come home she asks me about school. In particular, how did I like my new teacher (Mrs. Smith?)? I told my mom that she would like the teacher, that Mrs. Smith was just like her. ...