Mood:

drunk

mfh has been frequenting Trader Vic's with her boss-lady for a good while, and I was finally coaxed into trying one (well, more than one) of their Mai Tais at a recent engagement. I'm not usually a fan of the sweet, but this was a cannonball-sized exception in the hull of my convictions.

Alas, Trader Vic's now says that their recipe is simply a combination of "their rum" and "their mix." How corporate. And if you follow the directions on their mix, you really don't end up with anything that tastes like what they serve at the restaurant.

So, I offer my [slight] variation on their original recipes.

I cheaped out on the orange curacao. Someone else can tell me whether it makes a difference (before I run out of the bottle I bought).

Oh, one potentially-insignificant perk of this recipe: no HFCS (though I don't know what's in the orange curacao).

Mood:

bouncy

I've been grinning all week. Well, at least until this afternoon, when something right at the end of the day pissed me off enough to overcome the joy. But then I got to drive it again :)

We were dressed up to go out to dinner up in the city (Wednesday was our 9th). On that note, I heartily recommend Indigo. They had the best tuna tartare I've ever had. I commented to the waitress that it was easily one of the finest things I had ever tasted.

The Talon will be looking for a new home soon enough, but it's still with us. It does, after all, have much better hauling capabilities.

Mood:

accomplished

Apparently the best smile I can compose when I'm about to pass out makes me look something like Popeye.

That's a bit of mfh's jacket there on the right, but I'll leave it up to her to expose her identity and level of exhaustion.

Save me some embarassment, and don't even ask how I did. It was about making it to the end :)

Mood:

content

Because it's good to share:

Shaken, not stirred. Serve with as many garlic-stuffed olives as you can cram into the glass.

Rather tasty

It's been a while since we decided to go to Redwood City for dinner. We weren't disappointed. Nice decor, tasty tapas, good service, and a knowledgeable barkeep made for a pleasant evening.

I just realized that I've been a Mac user for six months now. How'd that happen?!?

Mood:

cranky

I stuck a thermometer outside; it says it's only 94°. I'll keep it out there until it hits 90° which will be my clue to open the house back up. See, it's 90° in the house...

Mood:

blank

For some reason, I'm inclined to share two of my most recent moments of idiocy.

( go ahead and feel better about yourself at my expense )

Shiny

This is an unpaid political announcment:

Mood:

complacent

For some reason still unclear to me, the company holiday party was this evening. It was a big shindig at the Avalon Night Club. Two things of note:

• A number of people in the company seem to think they have musical talent, or enough that volume will mask their flaws. They might be wrong. The following discourse occurred between mfh under the following circumstances: I'd just returned from the restroom, she'd commented that her sobriety had long since passed, and we're standing in the cone of noise:

  mfh: Where were you?
  mrcozy: In the bathroom.
  mfh: Is there anywhere without speakers?
  mrcozy: (deadpan) The bathroom.
  mrcozy: It'll sound better after you have another drink; you'll have to go to the bathroom.
  

• There was a raffle. As the tickets were being called out, I commented to the guy next to me who's easily the biggest Apple/Mac fan I've ever met: "If you won one of the Nanos, it'd be like me winning a TiVo."

  And the new 140-hour makes four. W00t.

I'm a short guy, and occasionally I walk toward an automatic door that seems to be calibrated for folks a little "higher" up the evolutionary ladder. As such, I tend to give the doors at the supermarket a Jedi wave.

I can only imagine how I'd deal with this:

Super Door of the Future (Beware, video)

I wonder which would be more annoying, having the door tell you how pleased it was to have opened for you, or having it thwack you in the jewels because one of the sensors was sleeping with the sushi.*

* Yes, I know that sushi refers to the rice, not the fish.

Mood:

aggravated

Trouble always comes in threes, or so they say...

1. I was ambitious last Saturday and cleaned our oven. There were many applications of caustic spray-on material, at least one of which resulted in destroying the light bulb in the oven (doh!). After it was all over, the oven wouldn't ignite. There's a reason they make natural gas smell bad. Resolution: Fixed itself, but caused problem #4.
2. I was ambitious Monday night and did some laundry. The utility sink, into which the washer drains, backed up into the garage. It's done this to us before, especially when we leave crap in the sink. This time, however, something lodged deeper in. I ended up tearing out the whole sink and drain pipe at some gawdawful hour and wasn't able to fix it. To make things worse, the kitchen sink started draining out into the garage (read: the blockage affected both drains). Resolution: Plumber fixed. $64 ain't bad for a guy to come out with one of those roto-rooter things, and he did a bang-up job..
3. I was ambitious Thursday night and decided that I should wear a suit for that thing the next morning, which involved washing, starching, and ironing a nice shirt. It turns out that the light, iron, and television sent the living room circuit over the edge (most circuits in our older house are 15A). Alas, that power cycle was one more than the "good" (lifetime subscription) TiVo would tolerate, and its hard drive took the big dirt nap. Suffice it to say that, many hours later, I know a lot more about TiVo hard drives than I really ever wanted to know.
4. This one's a bonus. Remember how I destroyed the light bulb in the oven? Well, I was ambitious Wednesday afternoon and tried to retrieve the remnants of the bulb (i.e., the metal part of the bulb) so that I could replace it with a functioning light source. I tried a trick that I'd heard before—slice a potato in half and shove it over the socket to grab onto the metal bits and twist. This didn't seem to be working. As such, I carefully made sure the light was off and dug in with my needle nose pliers. Apparently hitting the switch wasn't enough, and I felt the joy that is American alternating current. After digging my pliers out of the nether regions of the oven and collecting my dignity, I went out the breaker box and did it the right way. In the end, the potato thing did the trick.

Ambition is overrated.

Where else would you walk home from the train station and hear someone playing pool in their back yard.

No, I ain't talkin' bout no swimmin' pool. A pool game on a pool table.

I guess it's all about taking advantage of the situation. It doesn't rain for 4-5 months of the year here.

Now I need to figure out how to get invited. I bet he's got a keg out there, too...

GROW RPG

For full-screen (if your browser allows):

Don't expect much by the way of instructions, but that just makes it a little more interesting.

Saw on Penny Arcade, but it's been making the rounds.

There's a section of our little plot that probably forms the largest uninterrupted space in the entire plot. You might've seen it here. The problem with the area (as identified by the inspectors when we were buying the house) is that it slopes in toward the house. That's a rather bad thing when you consider the mighty rains we get during the winter. Fortunately, the same folks who arranged for that event hooked me up with a neighbor who owns a mighty rototiller. Last Sunday, I wailed on it, and broke up every bit of usable land in preparation for trying to level it and make something useful of the area.

So, lest ye be confused, I'm a bit of a home improvement idiot. I've never been very good at "level." So, I figured technology would come to my aid. I picked up one of these. It's fairly no-frills. It's just a laser pointer with a lens that spreads the beam into a line. There are two bubble levels and little platform that you can place it on with adjustable feet. As a bonus, the platform can be rotated.

The problem with this thing is that it's absolutely useless during the day—you can't see the damned line (except for maybe the faint center of it). So, I tried a new tactic; I go out at dusk and use it to dig level trenches using a rake. Then I come back during the day and cut out between the trenches with a landscaping shovel. Needless to say, this is going to take a while. And my neighbors probably wonder just how many bodies I have left...

But there was an added perk—laser light. Remember Alien, when they discover the eggs? There's a diffused laser in the mist that illuminates a level layer. Well, earth does the same thing. When you turn on the beam, it spreads out and hits every particle, twig, stone, and uprooted root that falls at the same level. It's quite the sight. Unfortunately, I have virtually no hope of photographing it to share, so you'll just have to try it out yourself. UNIX/Linux users can fire up the "petri" screensaver—there's a similarity.

For those interested, I have the level set up on a flat stepping stone that's placed next to the foundation. I take a rake and effectively "pull" the beam back so that it makes contact with the earth farther and farther away from the emitter. Kicking up dust with the rake makes the job easier, since it reveals the beam in its entirety. It's quite entertaining, but gets progressively more difficult as you pull more and more dirt. Still, I'm looking forward to answering, "yes," one of these days whem someone asks, "You did that by hand?!?"

Since precious few of you have come out to see the new[ish] digs (yes, shame on you), you'll likely fail to appreciate the oddities of the area.

mfh and I live in a relatively-old neighborhood that borders on Palo Alto. It holds an eclectic mix of people who arrived sometime in the last fifty years or so (since the neighborhood was "installed" starting in 1954). The current generation of Silicon Valley residents (of which, I consider myself a member) is often surprised by the previous generations. There are people here who have little or nothing to do with liberal politics and high-tech, but have a tangential relationship due to their children growing up here. Use your imagination. Suffice it to say that the neighborhood is full of surprises.

What brings me to this is that I heard a clatter (in the form of a 2-cycle engine) outside, and I rose to see what was the matter. I fully expected it to be usual "redneck" neighbors performing some oddball activity in their yard at 9:30PM while drunk in house slippers. Hardly. I succumbed to my curiosity and stepped outside to discover that one of my neighbors, a 60ish-year-old man, was wheeling a large rototiller by. As it would happen, this rototiller was destined for my yard, as I'd requested it to help do some grading in our side yard. Why this arrived at 9:30PM is unclear to me, but I was far too appreciative to complain (at least in any obvious way). As for why it needed to be fired up, that's far simpler: it's self-propelled and probably gawd-awful heavy.

Just to be clear, this is blog-worthy since I generally strive to remain unnoticed. It's hard to remain unnoticed at 90 or so decibels at 9:30PM. Go me—I'm the redneck neighbor tonight.

Just to be clear, the "redneck" neighbors really aren't really that bad. They're roughly equivalent to a snag in an otherwise fine quilt; you might notice it since it stands out, but it doesn't really affect the overall quality or functionality of the product.

...is a Jacaranda tree

I first saw these with neshura and walruz when we worked in Sunnyvale. The AMD building has a slew of them out front. Now that I know what I'm looking at, I tend to notice them everywhere now (including down Central Expressway). Here's what they become sometime in May/June each year:

And yeah... it's mfh's and my seventh year with the matching rings. We have a nice evening of fondue decadence planned at The Melting Pot.

I listened to, and enjoyed Beyond Red vs. Blue: Redefining the Political Landscape on All Things Considered this evening. It's all about how we really don't fit into two political leanings (liberal or conservative). The story investigates the leanings within those groups, and confirms some of my own opinions on why vastly-different people are members of the same political party.

At the end, they invite you to classify yourself (as if you didn't already know your political leaning).

No surprise (to anyone): I'm a bleeding-heart liberal. I nearly wept as I paid my taxes this year since I got hit hard by self-employment tax, but I still felt like it was going to important causes. I just wish more of it had gone to the local government instead of paying for gen-Y to get blown up :(

For the few of you who've actually been in our yard, you might recall a rather wide fan palm in the area we affectionately call "the desert" (since it has no irrigation and tends to get dry as a bone in the summer). We've been actively trying to turn the area into useable land. Fortunately, I hinted to our arborist friend one day that the palm tree was annoying and out of place. He and his wife wholeheartedly concurred, and suggested that they might be able to find it a new home. A month or so passes... Then I had a note from him when I came home on Thursday:

Imagine my surprise. I called his wife (who's effectively his business manager) and found out that he'd worked out a deal to have the tree destroyed. I wasn't pleased—I really didn't want the tree outright destroyed, but they talked me into it. After all, I planned on planting one or more trees in its place.

Apparently some wheeling and dealing occurred, and the tree movers (who, by the way, also sell removed trees) decided the tree was worth removing and putting up for sale. The next thing you know, this happens.

Lemme just tell you, this son-of-an-auto-worker who grew up in corn country was quite impressed with the process. It took around 45 minutes (which you can tell from the photo titles). We now have a huge chunk of yard to play with/in.