Cook’s Illustrated now has a podcast available from the iTunes store. It’s free, and it’s really great. Five minute video clips at a rapid speed, but oh so illuminating.
Month: January 2008
The good ship Please Please Me
Zombies at Rose City Classic
Reminded me of a zombie infestation.
No Beard
I shaved my beard off again last weekend. Knowing it would probably freak Ella out, I had her in the room and tried to show her what I was doing. She wasn’t too interested until the beard was gone, then she was deeply suspicous. The rest of the day she scowelled at me and seemed generally displeased.
When I gave her a bath that night, she sat in the corner of the tub a safe distance away, furrowing her brow at me in disapproval. I asked her what was wrong so she took her hand and moved it from one ear to the other along her jaw line. Not quite ASL, but I got the point. She should be consulted ahead of time in the future.
She’s probably right, too. Shaving is lame, especially without shaving cream. And we only need one baby-face in the house.
edit:
Alan sent me a link to a recent discussion on metafilter. Aparently the word describing the change is “shavenfreud.”
Waiter, there’s a mouse in my bottle
After Barley and I got home from our rainy walk this morning, we heard the slight sound of bottles clinking together. Sure, it was recycling day so the sounds of shopping carts and bottle collectors was normal, but this was a much more gentle noise, and it seemed to be coming from inside the house. Sure enough, there was a mouse at the bottom of our glass recycling bin. When I opened the cupboard, the mouse (which I’ve decided was male for the simplicity of referring to him as a him) slipped down the neck of a Full Sail LTD bottle and didn’t seem too concerned when I picked up the bottle. I felt a small bit of guilt simply for taunting the mouse, but I had to take pictures of the little dude.
Faced with what to do with the little fellow, I checked with Michelle, knowing she’d want to turn it loose. She did, so I walked him down the street, past the new Chinese lounge (tempting) to the condemned building and turned him loose in the field. I told him not to come back, but he probably will. That’s nature for you.
5 things I probably won’t do this year
New year pomp often requires resolutions. Because of mine, I’ve had to come to terms with some of the things I want to do but probably shouldn’t in the name of time. (damn you, time!) These 5 things I really want to do, but probably won’t:
- Create a blog of the sandwiches I’m eating. Silly, but useful. How else would I remember that roast beef, cream cheese and barbeque sauce on dark rye is good?
- Get Spatialoddity.com going. this bums me quite a bit because it’s a project I’ve been wanting to do for some time. I own the domain, installed drupal, got a logo, now I’m waiting.
- Ride in the Seattle to Portland again. It was fun, I’d love to do it again. We’ll see what happens
- Go to NYC. I’ve been digging Man Made Lake, the blog of a recent transplant from Portland that I occasionally had beers with at FOG events. His photos and posts really make me yearn for exploring urban settings. I should start by doing that here, I suppose, which would also be on this list
- Finish this list. There are plenty of things to add, and somehow I’ll probably manage to work on bits of each of these in frantic “free” moments.
Plumbing, Day 3
New Year’s Day was dedicated to getting the guest bathroom plumbed. Calling the “guest” bathroom is a little misleading since it’s the only bathroom on the ground floor, so it’s a little more important than the name suggests. Still, it required some tricky removal of old steel pipes and retrofitting with pex. We ended up avoiding doing much damage to the walls, though some patching is needed. We did have to take the shower wall down, and that’s now the only remaining plumbing.
As you can see, there’s a bit to do. But, water is now on everywhere in the house except that shower. I imagine we wouldn’t be nearly this far without my parents’ help. They gave up their weekend and new year’s day to help, though I think they are feeling some home improvement withdrawals. I’m still working on the final cost, but after we return the unused bits, we’ll probably have spent around $600 to replumb the house. Take that fat cats!