Skiing

Rachel went skiing in the power at SF on Friday while I had to work ... and wish I was with her in the beautiful soft fluffy powder.

But as it turns out it wasn't so fluffy, really pretty heavy snow and she wore herself out. This meant I went skiing Saturday (at SF) without her, for like the first time ever. The snow was all skied out and/or groomed but still a lot of fun.

But nothing like the fun that was Taos on Sunday. Lots of truly soft fluffy powder. We rode up Kachina lift over and over. SO Much Fun. Even little flat greens where a complete ball. And of course the Black diamond moguls where o so forgiving. Fun Fun Fun.

Fun! Fun! Fun!

So Much Fun!

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Bagels

So over the last month or so I've taken to making bagels a couple of times a week. Pretty much every Saturday so we can have bagels for our traditional Sunday ski lunch of Bagels and Tomato Soup - the bestest lunch ever. And often on other day a week.

I've been making them in the bread machine so I don't have to kneed as much. Pretty much white or wheat dough, but I sometimes make salt bagels. I've been thinking of putting together a Rasin & Cinimon batch or perhaps some pumpernickel but have yet to get to it anyhow

Here's the recipe with a high altitude adjustment.

First drop into the bread machine in this order :

 1 c water
 1.5 tsp salt
 2 tbsp sugar
 2 c white flour
 1 c wheat flour
 2.24 tsp yeast

And set the cycle for dough

When that is done

• Let rise 10 min
• Cut in to 8 pieces
• Shape into balls, then punch wholes into them and shape in to rings -- with LARGE wholes in the middle

• Let rise 10 min

• Drop in to a boiling 4 qt of water with 3 tbsp of sugar for maybe 2 minutes per - side. Basically they will poof up -- pull them out when they are as large as you want the final bagel to be.

• Let dry

• Add and optional egg wash, or salt, or whatever.
• Bake from 20 min at 375 degrees.

Enjoy!

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Linux

So the new job comes with a new box, in this case a linux box - redhat enterprise WS-3 to be precise. And while all the core configuration stuff -- my .emacs, .bash_profile came across fine, there has been a lot of configuring to do, and I've been becoming familiar again with modern linux.

Basically my impression is that in the last 2 years little has changed. It's not quite as bad as it used to be but still not good. The gnome windows manager and redhat's bluecurve theme seem to have improved slightly, but it is still no where near as smooth as windows. It should not even be compared with the mac UI. As for management - I've been using debian on my server, and that is brill - but rpm is stuck -- I've installed a redhat port of apt-get to make this thing work. In addition the GUI tools for management are just as painful as ever - the only improvement seems to be that nautilus(the Finder/Windows Explorer equive) works, so at least files can be dragged and dropped. And it's not just management tools - its as far as I can tell the state of GUI apps - broken and not moving.

The high points in the app world are Firefox, Thunderbird, and emacs - all cross platform application that will run on my mac, or a generic windows box.

On the whole not a good show. But at least I can drop down to a unix term :)

To conclude: I WANT A MAC!

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Productive

This weekend we have swept and mopped and acryliced the brick floors throughout the house. Installed the keyboard tray that was sitting in the corner for months, washed Rachel's car, cleaned the kitchen, set up the new iMac so that our accounts share iPhoto, and iTunes libraries, bought an iron and surge protector -- both on the list of to-do items for months as well, and still had time to have some fun. Very Very productive indeed.

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A pod coffee maker

For Xmas this year my Dad and Nancy got me a pod coffee maker, a Senseo. Basically this is a coffee maker that takes in "pods", preground coffee packed in a sealed filter. The main selling point is that is is super-easy to clean up. Actually I had no idea that making coffee could be this easy.

The other thing of note is that it puts the water through the pod at pressure. Not espresso pressure, more like Moka pressure, or even a bit less, but still pressure. It makes coffee that tastes different for this reason.

The downside is that you have to buy your coffee preground and sealed. This of course means the quality is a bit lower, as coffee starts to loose flavor after grinding. It also ups the cost as beans are widely distributed but the pods are only distributed by a few major brands -- and a very tiny number of specialty coffee companies.

Thats how it works, but how's it taste? On the whole different. Even when packing 2 pods in and pushing only one cup of water through it's not strong enough for my taste -- but I'm not using the dark roast which would help. And the flavor of my pods is not as complex as I would like. So I've been using my French press in the mornings.

But a week ago or so Rachel suggested that I have a senseo over vanilla ice cream for dessert. Espresso over ice cream is one of my favorites things ever -- and this worked out perfectly. The flavour of the coffee was strong enough -- but the ice cream masked whatever flaws the coffee had when drunk straight. And it was a 10 minute process from Idea to Eating including cleanup. Pretty amazing -- I've done it 2 more times in the last week. It's perfect.

This machine may not replace my French press but it has certainly found a place in the kitchen :)

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Small Dishes and Eating where you are ...

I was recently chatting with a friend about small dishes, buying food frequently, generally eating low volume high quality food. It reminded me of an entry I wrote when I was back in Seattle, about how you eat where you are . In Seattle I was in the international district, and eating japanese. Lots of fish, seaweed etc. Also living above a groc store -- shoped every night. Definetly the mode of eating she was discussing.

But now I live in New Mexico, not particularly close to a grocery store -- certainly not close to a gourmet one with lots of fresh ingrediants. I cook a lot more starch - rice, potatos, oatmeal. And cook more out of the pantry -- rice, potatos, oatmeal. Things that keep. Things that start frozen -- also things that end up frozen, so we can lay them away and eat them at a later date. That means we cook a lot more food so that it can feed us for multiple days - and days in the future.

It's a very different style of eating but I still eat well, and like what I eat.

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Adobe Casita

So ....

• Over XMAS we stayed at Brooke and Jamie's cabin in Seward, and talk a bit about cabins in general -- buying some land and building.

• Rachel's co-worker David is building an adobe extension to his house this spring, and Rachel volunteered us to help out.

• Having our own place to mess with might not be so bad. We've been thinking that since I moved to NM in oct.

So Monday Rachel got us a book on alternative construction, and last night we started looking at adobe building in New Mexico online.

The good thing is that if you should want to build an adobe casita New Mexico is definitely the place to do it, it seems to be the only state with state-wide building codes for adobe, rammed-earth, straw bale.

The flip side is what a pain - not only do you need land, and walls. But water sewage and electricity -- all of which look painful. And then there are building inspections. And Adobe is not adobe, you must decide to make our buy, emulsified or not, and what kind of finish to put on top.

Still the investigation looks to be fun and we'll certainly learn something even if we don't do any thing :)

My new link blog on the right has some of the interesting stuff that turned up. And has an rss feed in the RSS section.

Updated Sun Jan 16, to fix many egregious typos -- most notably misspelling my sister's name.

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Work

So LANL won, and I started immediately -- as in today.

I reported to the badge office at 7:30. There I got a head shot picked up my new security badge, to be worn at all times. The badge doubles as an access control device lets me into the Library outside of the open to the public hours of 9-4:30.

I turned up at 8, and found no one quite knew what to do with me -- but quickly they found the training list and that is what I did all day. Computer training, security training, etc, etc. Tomorrow I report to offsite training, then I have more training scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday.

On the upside the job looks like it will be fun, the facilities are nice and on the whole I'm looking forward to actually getting down to work.

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Wally

Wally is still missing. The people on the property last saw him new years eve -- it's possible he got freaked by the Fireworks. In any case he disappeared, and no one has seen him. We've walked the neighborhood, put up signs, and contacted the shelter repeatedly but still no Wally. Hopefully he's just wandered on and found himself another home, just like he found us . . .

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Layed Off

I wrote this on Dec 15th but it was never published due to logistical problems.

Got layed off today (Dec 15th), which rather sucks. We had a clue things were going poorly for a while, and it was likely that the board would take out a percentage of the company sooner or later. My bet was on Jan. And with the sounds of impending doom I revised the date to Jan 2 and added myself, my whole department to the list. But we didn't make it that far - so now I join the statistics of holiday layoffs. And that is pretty much the worst of it. There where more survivors than I thought there'd be. And life goes on. Plus this was a good bit longer than the 6mo I figured for the job when I got it. I lasted longer than a year, which is impressive.

In related news - Friday I go to an interview with the Digital Library Research & Prototyping team at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Research Library. A very long name but a very cool job - I've already talked with the team lead a bit and I'm excited. Anyhow wish me luck.

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The Lay of the Land

So the interview went ok. The follow up went well. The job looked very cool indeed. The offer was low, the negotiations -- Mother says you don't negotiate with the gov -- went very very poorly and put me off the job a good bit. But in the end they arrived at an acceptable place. And Rachel claims you don't have to deal with that kind of stuff on a daily basis, so . . .

In the mean time I've had some good interest from other quarters, including some contract work stuff that looks quite promising. Also an interview with Deep Web Tech that went very well. On the whole the local market seems to be doing much better than I expected, and there is cool work to be had.

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Rain and Snow

So since we've been back in Espanola, the weather has been very bad. Raining pretty much 24x7. Very Seattle-esque. Unfortunately the high desert isn't used to this much rain, and handles it poorly. It is very mucky outside, with lots of standing water.

On the upside it only rains above 32 degrees or below say 8,000ft. around here. So head up and you find snow. Lots of snow, new snow. So head up is exactly what we did today. Skinned Pajarito. Which was much much much fun. Well for me - Rachel seems to be suffering from caffeine withdrawal already, and had a harder time of it. Still I think she had fun. Plus put in another skin before long those skins will have an per day used cost of basically nothing :)

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Home - Sorta

After a red-eye to Denver and a short hop to ABQ, we took a brief beakfast at Busters Coffeehouse which as usual was excellent as usual. Rachel enjoyed it as well and this was her first time there. Then we drove the 2 ish hours to Espanola, and our place, which had been crippled by flooding when we were away.

I was pretty apprehensive about it all since the details where sketchy over the phone from AK. As it turns out it was bad but not awful. The house was intact, the flooding hadn't left the kitchen. So our stuff was fine, but the kitchen floor had been torn up a bit, and the kitchen itself was unusable. That coupled with the fact that the heating was still out from our pre-departure heating crisis means we took our landlord up on a temporary move to other open unit. This is where we are now nice and warm with 2 of our kittens. Unfortunately Wally still hasn't shown. We're a bit disturbed by this, but since we haven't gotten hold of the cat sitter it's possible he's with her. Or he could just be being cat like and fending for himself. Hopefully he'll turn up soon !

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