Oh, the shame

For the last year or so, I've had an on-and-off online pen-pal. He's exotic and German. I can tell you're all jealous. Well you should be, because of that exotic German business.

I like this international pen-pal thing. I get to learn. I get to learn about Germany, about Europe, about the rest of the world across the pond. I'm learning about the German education system, and how everyone must go through job training before starting work, whether they're a computer scientist or a baker. I'm learning that German college is a real bargain at 500 Euros a semester, but you have to go to a specific type of high school to get in, and if you don't finish your last year, you have to repeat the final three to be eligible for college.

One of the most valuable part of this is getting a sense of what some of the rest of the world thinks of Americans and this country. Granted, my source is a bit too rational, and concedes that while many Germans protest the U.S. and everything it stands for, a lot of these same people leave protests and go home and listen to Eminem and other fine, upstanding pillars of our society. Regardless...

It turns out that we can't keep too many secrets from our German friends. I found out one other disturbing disturbing fact today: Germany knows about Fox News. Our national dirty underwear is a bastion of neo conservative alarmists with only a passing acquaintance with fact and the world knows about it. I'm getting hit with hard questions like, "It's so obviously false. None of this is true. I can't believe anyone would ever believe any of this. They don't, do they?"

It's time to step it up. The world is watching, people.

Find the Humans!

No great thoughts today... just an AMAZING website that gives you the phone codes you need to get to an actual human being without navigating the automated menus. Here it is!

LiveJournal, You Suck

A few days ago, completely by accident, I found out that this blog is being syndicated on LiveJournal, and people over there are leaving comments on the syndication. This is great. Pretty much anything can be syndicated through LJ and I know it makes many people's lives easier if they only have to worry about one RSS collection rather than paging through 12 different sites. Fine.

However. There is a problem with LJ's syndication. Only LJ members can leave comments on the syndicated posts. No one can log in anonymously, or with OpenID (which blogger doesn't support anyway). Fine, whatever, I'll create an account and log in so I can post comments. But wait, what's this? UserID meleemistress has been taken?! By whom?

Can you guess?

My userID here, 'meleemistress', was used as the owner of the LJ syndication. So now, I can't create that user because technically I already have it, but I can't log in using that name because it's a syndication account and therefore has no password. I honestly don't care how cool LJ is, or how many features it has. If they can't figure out that, regardless of where it's being printed, I might want control over my own damn content, they need to start over. This is just basic respect for the author of the blog. I know it would be hard to prove that I'm me, and I don't really care. That's their problem.

I sucked it up and made a different LJ account, so here's the pertinent info:

syndicated LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/meleemistress/
my new userID: AttackTheGazebo *

I will not be actually posting entries with this account, just comments. So if you see anything under that name, it's me.

*And for those who don't get the reference, or who just want to reread for amusement value, I give you, straight from the annals of gamer legend, Eric and the Gazebo.

The Sofa Saga

I've lived quite a few places since I started college. I had 3 different incarnations of college housing, as well as 2 places in Sri Lanka, and now I'm here in San Francisco. Every time I move, I have to spend time figuring out all the little intricacies of the new place, or I risk stumbling upon them by accident. The second place in Sri Lanka, for example, possessed the quaint little feature of a water tank on top of the building which had to be filled by pump every night. It also had a toilet that would, if not supervised, run indefinitely. The combination of these two factors caused me to run out of water in the middle of a shower, producing an explosion of profanity and incoherent yelling rivaled only when I stepped on a colony of fire ants a few days later.

Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.

The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.

If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.

As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.

Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!

This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.

I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.

Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.

(not) Driving in San Francisco

My first draft of the Inquirer article included a segment regarding the standard Sri Lankan driving practices, which seemed to me to be mostly a motley collection of lawless vagaries committed in the spirit of artificially advancing entropy. The editor rejected that version on the basis of the fact that driving styles are inherently regional, and complaints on the matter make for uninteresting copy. It is therefore with some trepidation that I attempt to tackle the same subject matter a second time, albeit for different reasons.

I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday night. It is now Monday afternoon, and I have resolved never to own a car here. There are the expected differences in automotive piloting tradition, such as a disturbing tendency of the locals to double park anyone, anywhere, anytime, but those can be learned. The reasoning behind this decision comes from a condition that I have never before seen in any city, which is that private transportation is the lowest priority of the the local government.

Inklings of such a state appeared the moment my mom and I started driving. The parking fees, in particular, we felt to be particularly egregious. 25 cents buys 10 minutes on a good day. Various sidewalk colors indicated loading zones, drop off/pick up areas, and others, all of which equal no parking. Of course, this is all still just a system and therefore can be learned with a large investment of small change. My rebellion against the San Francisco driving institution was not cemented until two days ago, when I read an article in the local paper.

Driving discontent is not at all limited to out-of-towners. Not in the least. San Francisco locals are completely fed up with the lack of parking, the meter rates, and the high fines for breaking the rules. And it gets better. Discussions are in the works for meter rates and fees to be raised *again* for the purposes of....wait for it....subsidizing the public transit system here. Now, for all I know, it's the practice of every city to use parking money to support public transportation infrastructure. But here, I definitely get the feeling that drivers are being punished for driving.

The sentiment expressed in this newspaper article regarding subsidized public transit was mostly negative. Those interviewed felt that public transit should be self-sustaining, and if money is a problem, raise the ticket rates. Now that I've found out that a monthly MUNI pass is $45, I can understand the sentiment. That being said, I'm glad MUNI rates are cheap, and I'm glad I'm not driving.

A Divergence

I swear, I promise, I make an oath that I will write about Europe soon. I am, however, in the middle of moving to San Francisco (I fly out tomorrow) and the blog posts are not high priorities at the moment.

The more immediate news is that finally, after years of trying, I feel like I can really talk shop with my guy friends. Before Wednesday, I hadn't felt that I was particularly weak in the skill of being "one of the guys" but I see now that I was completely misinformed and that certain areas of manhood were closed to me.

Wednesday, it all changed. The catalyst was a rather drastic hair cut resulting in a 14 inch donation to Locks of Love, a funky new hair style, and a morning routine that now requires a hair dryer and 2 styling products.

...It turns out that a lot of my male friends spend some of their morning preening in front of the mirror with wax or gel or some other sinister sculpting product. And now I do too, so we can talk about the benefits of a certain type of wax, or what alcohol-free products will still stand up to the "driving with the window open" test. This is all sorts of fun, and I can't talk to my girlfriends about it, because none of them use the sheer volume of junk required to make my hair look the way I want.

I have returned!

I flew into Dulles on Saturday night and my dad picked me up from Chris' house Sunday morning. Over the next few posts, I'll recount various elements of the trip, because it was fun and it might even make interesting reading.

In Europe!

Expect updates here after June 18th.

I'm Back!

It's been a while, but this blog is back in business. For those just tuning in, I graduated on Sunday (whee!) and I got a job as a software developer in San Francisco. I start July 9th. Before that gets rolling, Chris and I are headed to Europe for about 3 weeks to kick around the U.K., France, and Italy.

We leave Monday, and right now I'm still in Pittsburgh, moving out. So I'm packing. I hate packing. Still. I think the most depressing thing about packing is seeing the bags of garbage and Good Will material and thinking, "Why on earth was I living with all of this stuff?" Most of it could have been trashed six months ago.

Actually, that's a lie. The most depressing part is knowing that I sent a full SUV of stuff home with my parents yesterday and not seeing any real difference in the way the house looks. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that it's a house, four people live here, and two of them aren't moving for another few weeks. Also, I'm not anywhere close to done packing.

And tonight is trash night so I'm trying to get the bulk of the trash dealt with, which means doing with the rest of the packing. It's going to be a long night.

Shopping! Continued

You may or may not remember that I went on a shopping expedition last fall. There's more to the story.

It turns out that the phrase "40 dollar suit" strikes terror in the hearts of people who are older and wiser than me. I know this, because they read this blog. And because they are my parents, and they have a fairly direct manner when they think I'm making mistake.

If it was just them, I might argue back a bit. I find that the "machine washable" trait of the clothes I bought is priceless and therefore should boost the overall value of my clothes. Armed with this rebuttal, I came home for Thanksgiving, fully intending to be quite satisfied with my decisions.

My mom saw it coming a mile away.

And then she enlisted the neighbors. She fights dirty.

I don't actually know how this all went down. The version I got was that one of our neighbors offered to come on a shopping trip with me to help me pick out additional wardrobe elements. So this is how I found myself, the day before Thanksgiving, in Syms with my mom, my neighbor, and my neighbor's daughter.

In my last post on the subject, I impressed the importance of having a forthright, decisive, honest, and frank shopping companion. It turns out I didn't know the meaning of any of those words. We spent 3 hours in the store. My mother and my neighbor were handing me jackets at an alarming rate. I tried them on right on the sales floor, and I'd be able to wear one for all of 3 seconds before a verdict was reached. Most of the time it was "no."

We found a few suits that met with approval, and then we headed over to the separates section. Of particular note was a bright red wool blazer. I wasn't too certain about it. It had a weird 3 pocket thing going on. I was assured, however, that it fit perfectly and looked fabulous and that I should get it. So I did.

And I didn't get a chance to wear it until today, when I had a job fair. I was going to go with a suit, but I decided the blazer looked better, and it was warmer. After I got assurances from Chris that a blazer was plenty formal for the job fair, I headed out the door.

I won't go into details here, but it was the right decision. I've never had a job fair go as well as today's did. And I credit it at least partially to the red blazer, because everyone else was wearing black suits and I stood out really well.

New Blog

I have some pretty serious kitchen plans coming up. Serious enough to warrant a new blog. And conveniently enough, there is, in fact, a new blog to handle it. From now on, all food related posts will be at Kitchen War. I'll still keep this one around for the more mundane stuff.

And the winners are...

For those playing the home game, I ended up making the Pumpkin Mousse for the party. The recipe from Frog is really easy, and it turned out spectacularly. I substituted Buttershots for half of the rum.

I was getting sick of making chocolate, hence the mousse. Chris, however, has not gotten anywhere close to being sick of eating chocolate, so he felt compelled to make the flourless mocha fudge cake. He did it. Yes really. All on his own. We had an icing piping lesson, and then he decorated the cake, pastry bag and all. I think he has more fun in the kitchen than he lets on.

Now he wants a chef's hat. I think he's serious. He said he was willing to sacrifice his hair to wear one.

Baking Fairies

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a group of friends who mostly liked to do stage crew and take apart computers. But sometimes, when we didn't have a show and computers got boring, they'd bake. And they called themselves the Baking Fairies.

Just so we are all agreed on the image, "fairy" is not the first thing one would think of upon meeting any of this group. Not the second, or the fifth, or the last. So I really don't know where the name came from. But they earned it, in my eyes, with their Bomb Cake.

My freshman year, we had a few bomb threats at our school. Not many, and nowhere near the numbers to which we would climb by my senior year, but a few. This was also pre-9/11 so the bomb threat procedure involved sending out a note to the parents explaining that a threat had been made, but police were fairly certain that there was nothing to worry about. Parents had the choice of keeping their kids home.

This was back in the days when we had snow, as well. And there was one February morning when we all trudged to school looking like lawn gnomes with our snow gear. It was snowing hard by the time I got to school. And I had gotten up at something like 6 am to wait for a bus in the snow and the cold, and it was never on time, and I was probably a little bit grumpy. I think this was before I drank coffee.

When I got to school, I had some time before homeroom, and I found some of the Baking Fairy contingent huddled around some sort of package in the lobby (not all of the Fairy folk were still in school). They were looking triumphant, and when I elbowed my way into the crowd, I was confronted with a chocolate sheet cake. It had bright green icing, and, carefully spelled out in multicolored sprinkles, the word "BOMB" on the top.

Right about then, the assistant principal noticed our small gathering and decided to investigate, so we invited him to cut the cake. Pieces were passed around, we had cake before homeroom, and then there was enough snow that we all got to go home early.

Superbowl Dessert Survey!

I'm headed to a Superbowl party and I told people I'd bring a dessert. I don't know what to bring. Please send suggestions.

Possibilities include:

• Killer Brownies
• Carrot cake brownies with buttercream icing
• Flourless Mocha Fudge Cake
• Pumpkin Mousse (or vanilla sweet potato mousse)
• Russian Cream and various toppings
• Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Other suggestions will also be considered. Leave comments!

Living Dangerously: Butternut Squash Soup with Roasted Garlic, Cinnamon, and Coriander

It's snowing here, finally. In fact, it has been snowing for the past few days. This is great news for me. My bedroom is in the very poorly insulated attic, and the snow helps keep the heat in. Cold weather is usually closely followed by soup, bread, or cookies. Tonight I made soup.

I've included the recipe, because I think it's pretty great stuff. But I feel that recipes are often lacking. They don't include any information about the thought process of the person who developed the recipe. There's no reasoning behind the ingredients or cooking times or anything else. I feel I would be remiss if I didn't include a full account of the development of this recipe. What follows is an exhaustive set of directions, should you feel that the recipe by itself is insufficient.

1. Go to a used book store. Browse the cooking section, and allow a garlic cookbook to catch your eye. Scan the book and immediately become suspicious when none of the recipes are more than 10 lines long.
2. Go back to the Garlic Roasted Butternut Squash and Pasta recipe. Decide that the recipe is boring, but the general garlic-and-squash concept has merit. Buy the book.
3. Arm yourself with the necessary ingredients.
   
4. Scoop out the icky bits of the squash. Chase the seeds around the kitchen floor. Briefly consider various uses for squash guts and despair when there's no one around to be victimized.
5. Cut up the rest of the squash and roast until fork tender. Throw in some unpeeled garlic cloves for good measure.
6. Unearth the blender.
   
7. As you wash years of greasy scuzz off the blender and your hands, mutter obscenities at whoever designed a kitchen without a ventilation system.
   
8. Peel the roasted squash. Start asking yourself if you really believe your mother when she told you that it's easier to peel a cooked squash than a raw one. Put the peeled squash in the blender.
   
9. Contemplate the fleeting nature of life and the inexorable march of entropy. Use your garlic cinders as a starting point. Extra credit: Recall bits and pieces of sophomore science class, specifically those bits concerning relative densities and heat transfer. Consider that maybe the fragile little garlics don't need to be roasted for quite as long as the squash slabs next time.
10. Set about salvaging the garlic. It turns out that there are squishy bits in the centers of the cloves. Painstakingly scrape out the soft stuff, and throw it in the blender with the squash.
    
11. Painstaking was never your style. Throw the last clove in whole, burnt bits and all. You've never minded burnt garlic before.
12. Add some olive oil, half and half, and chicken broth.
13. Blend.
14. Add more chicken broth.
15. Taste the soup.
16. Discover that burnt garlic is not nearly as palatable as you remember. Despair, and continue messing with the chicken broth to get the consistency right. Become somewhat optimistic. Everyone makes mistakes, and you were just about due for one. Decide that you'll do what you can for the soup, but if it doesn't work out, life will go on. Who's really going to care about one bad soup experience 5 years from now, anyway?
    
17. Recall the way that, 35 years after the fact, your parents still occasionally bring up "The Ketchup Incident." Plunge into a state of abject terror.
18. Rifle through your spice collection. Come up with cinnamon and coriander.
    
19. Pray.
20. Wait in quiet panic for your boyfriend to try the soup.
21. Celebrate a disaster narrowly averted.

The Recipe

• 2 butternut squashes, cleaned and cut into inch thick rings
• 5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• approximately 1/3 cup half and half
• approx 1/4 cup olive oil
• 14 oz low sodium chicken broth
• 1/2 stick Sri Lankan or Ceylon cinnamon (Do not use the standard American stuff. It's too strong. If you can't find Ceylon cinnamon, ask me or my mom. If you must use American, use extremely sparingly.)
• 1 tsp coriander

Roast the butternut squash until fork tender. Find someone else's directions on how to do this, because I'm bad at it. Same goes for the garlic. Roast it until... roasted. Peel the squash and garlic and put in a blender with about half of the half and half, the olive oil, and half of the chicken broth. Blend. Grind together the coriander and cinnamon, and add to the soup. Adjust half and half and chicken broth until desired consistency is achieved. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with croutons.

Party +1

This weekend marks the end of the first week of the school semester, and our house has a tradition of holding parties to celebrate. I'm just now waking up from last night's fete, and I feel that new ground has been forged.

This year, we decided for many reasons to stray from the typical food and (mostly) drink gathering. We added games. Lots of them. Board games, card games, video games, party games. We gamed for 8 hours. I went to bed at 5 am. And when I woke up this afternoon, I discovered something that my parents, former bridge club members, have probably figured out a long time ago. People playing games don't eat or drink all that much, and they don't make messes. We spent a grand total of 30 minutes cleaning up today, and that's without a dishwasher. And most importantly, I think people had more fun than normal. There will be more of these in the future.

More school

My posting got a bit sparse over the last month because of winter break. I'm back though, and I found a bunch of things that I meant to post about but never did.

No one really talks about the cultural value of Pittsburgh. Mostly, there just isn't much to talk about, especially if you don't care much for Andy Warhol. People generally don't travel from distant parts to visit the museums here. And I'm not suggesting you should. However, if you're already stuck here for some reason, you should really be getting your money's worth from the local cultural stuff. This goes double for all the CMU students, because most of the good stuff is within walking distance of campus and it's largely free (with your ID).

I'm only bringing this up at all because I found some old photos that I took at the local garden conservatory, back when they had their mythological creatures exhibit. The one you're looking at now is a hydra. They also had a two headed dragon, Argus (with all the eyes), Cerberus, and a few others. The exhibit has changed now, but it was great fun while it lasted. They don't have anything up now, but in May, they're doing a Dale Chihuly exhibit.

Just in, from Fark

Merry Christmas to all of you. To celebrate, I'm linking you to this year's fark thread of Holiday Traditions. Here are two of my favorites:

"heres a great one that started back in the 60's with my dads side of the family.

nobody likes doing dishes after a big christmas dinner with 25 people, so the way my family decides is by a little game we call "throwing the sock."

after dinner we all draw numbers from a hat for however many people there are over the age of 13 (thats when you are considered part of the grown ups). depending on what number you get thats your place in line to throw. we then start with an empty pot and a pair of socks. no paticular style, just whatever the host has in their sock drawer. the pot is placed on the floor about 15ft from a line on the floor.

starting with number one we take turns throwing the pair of socks at the pot. if you get the socks in the pot you are eliminated from the game and free to go back to drinking and relaxing. heres where it gets interesting...

the last three people left are guaranteed doing the dishes. they then proceed to throw for different tasks. the third place person has to clear the table, the second place has to dry the dishes and you guessed it..first place has to wash.

this whole process usually takes longer to do than it did to eat dinner. and the whole time everyone talks about past "throwing the sock" games and what tasks they have had to do in the past. the year my sister turned 13 she had to wash and pretty much cried the whole time. nobody is sparred. if you are a new bf or gf or a guest of someone you are included in the game. which generally means a guy like me is for sure not gonna make the bottom three...."

And this one:

"

A couple years ago at Christmas dinner, my dad out of the blue says, "well, I've got a new name for my penis."

We all tried to just not make eye contact and keep eating our dinner, to no avail.

He continued.. "I used to call him Gregory - Like Gregory Peck-er. Get it? Get it?"

yes dad, we get it.

"Well, I was watching a movie the other night about the Civil War, and decided his new name is General Cocksworth, Pride of South Carolina."

So now we get a yearly update on the nickname of my dad's junk.

Merry Christmas."

Ooooh burn!

I'd always thought that Chris and I had gotten pretty good at bickering. We don't have too much experience but clearly we possess a gift for it. However, until I came home I hadn't fully appreciated that bickering occurs on many scales. The most ambitious I've ever gotten involved scribbling a purpose on a few 1 dollar bills. I had no idea what I had to look forward to. We'll start with exhibit A:

I got home a few days ago, stumbled downstairs, and found a rather sizable flatscreen LCD. This was something of a change from the CRT I'd helped install a year or two ago. This had "my dad" written all over it. He wasn't around though, so I sought out my mom for an explanation.

She said that Dad had given it to her as a birthday present. Riiiiiggghhhhhtttt. I'm sure that my mom asked for this. Uh-huh. I dug a bit deeper:

"He gave you a TV?!"
"Well yeah, I brought this up with the neighbors. They said they'd asked your dad about this and he pointed out that I'd gotten him a dishwasher for his birthday."

ZING!

aHA!

I haven't had this stuff
in years. My mom gave away our last starter. It's really good though. I highly recommend it.