I had a dream last night that I was working on location on the coast in a new office (it felt like I was in Victoria, but Flock HQ in Mt. View is actually moving a way down the road to Redwood City, so this is probably a convergence of my recent trip to the Victoria office, which is just a couple of blocks off the water, and the impending move, neither of which actually affects me very much because I work remotely 95% of the time). We were out on sort of a pier, pretty far out. The office itself was, I mean. I could look out a big window (parallel to the pier) and look to the left to see that our office was easily 50 or 100 yards out from the shore. We began to notice some pretty heavy rolling waves. Oddly enough, they were originating (or more like bouncing back from) the shore. They started getting bigger and bigger. At one point, a heavy wind blasted along the shoreline and did some damage to the buildings (also on a sort of pier) running perpendicular to our pier. The buildings sort of blew over sideways but mostly recovered. It was as if they were made of tin or corrugated plastic or something — a substance that would flap in the wind but would go more or less back to its original position once the wind stopped. Then the rolling waves started getting really big, with both a fairly long period and a high amplitude, to the point that they were nearly at window level. Finally, one of the reverse rollers (remember that these are coming from the shore!) flipped over itself to show a little whitecap, and the next wave broke less than halfway to my window, gathered momentum shockingly quickly, and burst through our building at around chest height. It made a great hollow, roaring, shrieking, exploding sound, and its force was sufficient to physically take my breath away. I literally could not draw breath as the wave was passing through, almost as if the rush of the wave was drawing the oxygen out of my lungs and keeping me from refilling them. Oddly, I don’t think I felt the water or was tossed about by it very much, though it had very definitely burst through our office. And that was it.

The Casatiello bread I made a week or so ago turned out wonderfully. It had a great texture, a nice yellow color inside, a crisp crust, and a very nice flavor. It was yummy on its own and also made great sandwiches. This weekend, I moved on to a brioche, which is very similar to the Casatiello but is often made in weird shapes, as depicted below. I bought a pan for the occasion. Basically, you get this special pan and stick a big ball of dough in it; then you stack a second ball on top of it. I think I made the top ball too large, and I must have distributed its mass unequally, as it shifted substantially during baking. The next time I make it, I may do one ball in the fluted pan but skip the snowman look and use a regular bread pan for the remaining dough. The color of this bread is lovely, and it tastes great. I ate a bunch of it by itself today, but it also made a tasty roast beef sandwich of some leftovers from last night. Pictorial following.

This is the initial batch of flour, milk, and yeast, which ferment for less than an hour to start pulling flavor out of the flour.

Here I’ve added the rest of the ingredients (including a stick of butter, which accounts for the yellow color) and stuck in the fridge overnight.

This is the view from above after forming the shape of the bread. Looks kind of like a flower.

This is a better view of what the bread is likely to look like post-bake if all goes well.

And here’s the final product. The top ball slipped over to the side, so it looks kind of weird. The ball in the picture in my book has slipped a little bit, but not nearly this much. The ball in the book is also much smaller, and I think the weight of the risen dough had something to do with the slipping. The bread is tasty, in any case!

On a connection in Seattle on the way home from Victoria, I dropped by the restroom for a quick pit stop, and I noticed on the wall of the urinal something that looked like a little sticker, sort of a crudely drawn spiral shape roughly the size of a quarter in diameter. It struck me after my initial puzzlement that this was a target designed for gentlemen to aim at, probably in hopes of keeping them from peeing all over the floor (which is really bad for floor finish over time). I’ve read of this trick before, though I think the example I had been exposed to in print was a fly.

Although I was conscious of the intention and had a contrarian urge to break with expectations and pee anywhere but on the target, I found myself unable to resist the temptation. Even while considering things like the possibility that I was part of some filmic sociological experiment the privacy ramifications of which would be hairy to say the least, I trained my stream almost proudly on the little spiral, striving never to miss the mark (quite literally).

Needless to say, the trick was effective and my aim impeccable.

When I visited the urinal in Chicago, I found myself a little disappointed to have no particular target to aim for.

This is the sound me trying to swipe the wrong part of my virgin passport through the bar code reader (to be fair, there were two barcodes).

This is the sound of me negotiating the single-row seat with a couple split across the aisle of my small plane out of Knoxville.

This is the sound of me sprinting a half mile through the Houston airport to try to make a connection I’m sure I’ve missed (luckily, it was delayed by a few minutes so I made it).

I make no sound on the flight from Houston to Seattle because I’m wedged in the middle seat and have to sit upright and still as a statue for 5 hours to keep from bothering my neighboring passengers.

At first, there is no sound at midnight in Seattle. Then there’s a periodic annoying cell phone ring. Then the sound of a janitor unfurling garbage bags. A gaggle of would-be passengers cheers when their tardy plane arrives, and they commiserate good-naturedly when they learn there’s icy fog at their destination and they may have to turn around and come back when they finally get there. Now I’m nearly alone in the airport. Two gate workers talk about a new boyfriend, and then they leave, and then I am alone, the shops long closed, my stomach gurgling. This is the sound of me crinkling open some crackers and trail mix, slitting open a vacuum-sealed spread of little beef sausages, peeling back the foil lid of a tub of parmesan cheese spread. These I got on the first leg of my trip (Continental’s pretzel upgrade, I thought, though I received the bounty only on my trip’s first leg) and thought to save for the long, shopless night in Seattle. This is the sound of my reaction to the cheese. The other things were ok. This is the sound of my finding a bench to lie down on and rolling my jacket up under my neck and looping my leg through my backpack’s straps. This is the sound of me sitting up to read instead. And finally, the sound of the nothingness of a nap.

Interrupted by the pock-pock-pock of sudden herds of flight attendants going staccato to their early gates. This is the sound of an empty airport bathroom, and the quiet of another little nap. This is the sound of more pock-pock-pocking flight attendants, and then some laughter, pairs and trios of people beginning to stream into my terminal. Morning has broken.

This is the sound of the cappuccino machines at Starbucks and of my ordering a chocolate chip muffin. This is the sound of a Mt. Dew I’ve paid to clunk from its machine, another bribe to the caffeine gods so that they may keep my eyes wide and my brainwave somewhere north of flat for the workday that starts in 4 hours.

A few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to try making some sourdough bread. I found a starter online and enthusiastically mixed it up. It immediately started bubbling as it was supposed to, and I was excited at the prospect of having some yummy bread in a few days. The starter I selected required 5 days to ferment before you could make any bread with it. Our weather was frigid at the time, and our house often gets down in the 60s at night; this isn’t exactly optimal for cultivating a yeast colony, and by the second day of my experiment, my starter had clearly died. By the third day, its solids and liquids had separated entirely. Mleeka had the smart idea of putting a starter in our half bath, which stays very warm with the door closed at night, and her starter (a different recipe that actually had no yeast added) flourished. The bread she made with it didn’t turn out so great (it tasted good enough, but it was shaped like a discus). She gave up on making bread altogether, and I decided to give up until warmer weather would prove beneficial to my starter.

But then she got me a nifty bread book for my birthday. Entitled The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, it has some introductory matter, followed by a comfortably detailed tutorial on how bread making works. The author lays out a 12-step process whereby the baker’s mission — “to evoke the fullness of flavor from the wheat” — is best accomplished. And then he offers recipes (he calls them formulas) for a few dozen breads. It’s a very pretty book, with photography of much lovely bread and a pleasant writing style. He gives plenty of details about the fermenting and baking processes (e.g. did you know that crust is actually caramelized sugar?) without being tiresome or over-detailed about it. Once I read the first hundred pages, I was ready to pick a bread formula and get to it.

And I did just that last weekend, starting off with a simple Italian bread recipe (page 172). It has just a few ingredients and an easy pre-ferment (this is basically a simple dough you make in advance to start pulling flavor out of the wheat; you let it ferment overnight and then add it to the rest of your dough ingredients when you’re ready to bake), and it seemed like a familiar enough type of bread that I’d know if I got it more or less right (compared to, say, a marbled rye). The pre-ferment (this bread calls for one called a biga; it’s basically a doughy one rather than a more liquidy one) behaved beautifully, and I was thrilled at how my loaves (batards — basically oblong loaves, but not so thin as a baguette) turned out. Everything rose as it should have, and the dough had a consistency that I think was close to what the formula called for. One thing went a bit wrong, though. This recipe is really a hearth baking recipe, and though the author provides guidelines as to how to emulate hearth baking in a standard oven, I’m not sure his instructions are best suited to a gas oven, which heats intensely from the bottom. I cooked the bread on the back side of a sheet pan and spread corn meal underneath as recommended (presumably to help keep the bread from sticking), but the corn meal began to burn, and the smell was disappointing to say the least. The bread was far enough along by this time that I was able to shift it to another pan sans cornmeal, and that improved matters. The bread came out looking pretty nice, with a pretty even distribution and sizing of holes in the cross section. I don’t know that the loaves’ shapes would have won a blue ribbon at a baking competition, but they looked like real bread, and they tasted more or less like bread as well. Mleeka characterized the outcome aptly enough when she said that she’d be perfectly happy having purchased one of these loaves from the Kroger bakery, if perhaps a little less happy having purchased one from a more respected bakery. The bread was great for little sandwiches because it was soft but not gummy or so soft that it couldn’t bear its meaty freight. As a dinner bread, I’m not sure it would stand up on its own without more practice on my part. One key thing I should note is that for my first effort, I was in a hurry and so didn’t let my pre-ferment go overnight as the author suggests (he admits that you don’t have to but insists that it’s better to). If I try this bread again, I’ll try to be more patient, and I’ll find a way to work around the corn meal incident. We ate the first of two loaves in a couple of days and have another one to unfreeze at our convenience.

Today, I tried my second bread from the book. It’s a Casatiello, and the author describes it as “a rich, dreamy Italian elaboration of brioche, loaded with flavor bursts in the form of cheese and bits of meat.” He also suggests that the bread can be thought of as a Panettone (a particular seasonal bread with things like dried fruit in it) with savory meat and cheese substituted for the sweet bits therein. The dough is an entirely different beast than what I made for the Italian bread, and as it was cooking, it gave off the delectable smell that I expected of the Italian loaves and that pretty much everybody who’s not a baker associates with the baking of bread. This smell I think I can say pretty confidently comes from butter in the dough. This recipe had 1.5 sticks of butter (the Italian had none), along with a cup of whole milk, a tablespoon of sugar, some salt, flour, and the savory and cheesy bits. It was a one-day recipe because it required no lengthy pre-ferment, and though I dirtied a lot of dishes making it, it was really pretty simple to throw together. It has made my house smell as good for the last hour as it’s smelled since I’ve owned the house, and the loaves came out a lovely orangey brown. I’m letting them cool now, but they feel as if they have a very firm, thick crust, and they look just beautiful. If you sniff them from up close, you can smell the salami (which I sauteed to crisp before adding to the dough), and they have little pocks of browned meat and cheese here and there. I think they’re going to be a hit.

I’m not sure what bread I’ll try next (there’s a potato rosemary loaf that looks appealing and would be a great use for our expanding rosemary plants), but I know I won’t stop after the two I’ve done so far. If you’re a novice bread maker, I’d definitely encourage you to try this book out.

March 31 marks opening day for the Cubs, and I can hardly wait. I think this may be the first time in the history of me that I’ve eagerly anticipated the onset of a new sports season. In poking around the web a bit about baseball today, I found a blog Mark DeRosa had kept last season in which he briefly deconstructed his basically post-season-ending at-bat in October. If I recall correctly, he took a swing with a 2-1 count against a pitcher who had just walked two (maybe three) batters and got himself an inning-ending double-play that ultimately kept the Cubs from advancing. I think a walk would have brought in a winning run, though my memory may be off. Unless you’re a real hard-ass, you’ve gotta feel bad for the guy (though I think I probably yelled and literally jumped up and down when he took his swing), who was just trying to take a good cut at a ball and bring in an extra run on a hit. In any case, the Cubbies didn’t get a shot at the series, but the good things they set in motion last season are all set to start up again this season. I’ll keep a particularly close eye on Sam Fuld, who was pulled up from the minors (from my local AA team via a AAA team I forget where) for the playoffs and who had some key time on the field. My local team’s season begins in 53 days (according to the countdown on their site), and I’m thinking very seriously about going to opening day.

In other news, it’ll be interesting to see Torre as a Dodger. I’ve always liked that guy.

And speaking of a former Yankee, how can I help but bring up Clemens? I’m as close as I get to heart-broken over his part in the steroids/HGH fiasco currently unfolding. I’ve been a fan of his since his early days in Boston. When a person achieves as much as Clemens (or Bonds) has, you really hope they achieved it honestly and with their inborn (and cultivated) abilities. The guy who claims to have injected Clemens with illegal drugs seems pretty slimy, but Roger himself comes off as shifty and self-righteous, and that bums me out. I hope he didn’t take the drugs, and I wish there were a way to prove it, but it’s pretty hard to believe him. I sure hope MLB will crack down. Daily drug tests and instant banning from the game on a positive result don’t seem too severe to me.

A few months ago, I ported my site over to Drupal because I was doing a lot of module development in Drupal and wanted to drink the kool-aid I was serving, so to speak. Drupal’s a great CMS for sites that are more than a blog, but it’s not the most elegant for simple blogging. My focus on Drupal has waned a bit, and there are a few pesky little issues with using Drupal for my blog (which I could fix easily enough in a module but lack the motivation to do), so I’m back to Wordpress. Wheeee!.

It’s shocking how little I’ve blogged about Finn. He’s about midway between 10 and 11 months old now, and I don’t know that I’ve written about him more than two or three times, including his quick birth announcement. Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon…

Anyway, this week he has begun to stand up on his own at some length. He’s occasionally accidentally stood up for a few seconds, but now he lets go of whatever he’s holding on to and stands confidently, twisting around to grab other things or even to pick big heavy things (like a hippo walk-behind toy) up. He’s very close to taking his first steps. Sometimes if you reach for him as he’s standing there, you’ll start to see one of his feet twitch a little and you can tell he’s thinking about moving it, but then he lowers himself and crawls to you instead.

He’s not talking yet, but he pretty consistently says “duh” when the dog is around (though that’s his main word for most things, so I’m not sure it counts). He had been signing “more” for food, but he’s left that behind. He waves goodbye and does “stick-em-up,” which is where we put him in his little booster seat and squeal “stick-em-up” at him and fling our hands into the air, whereupon he flings his own hands up, allowing us to snap the dinner tray into place. We did this with Lennie too.

He has eight teeth and has had them for months (I think). He got teeth early just like Lennie (but earlier).

He continues to be an absurdly happy baby, though he’ll now occasionally protest loudly if something gets taken away from him (which happens often when Lennie’s around and feeling territorial about her stuff). (See the picture, which I wish we had in full color but which a stray finger caused to be taken accidentally with some weird color-extraction setting turned on.)

This weekend, I got a football out in anticipation of tossing it around some before the Super Bowl (it rained, so we didn’t), and Finn loved chasing it around on the floor. He also really likes driving cars around on the ground. This isn’t something Lennie ever did, and it’s not something we taught him. He’s just naturally more interested in things with wheels than Lennie ever was.

I haven’t noticed him doing it a lot in the last couple of weeks, but for a while, he would bob his whole body to dance to music. More recently, he’s taken to bouncing his arm up and down conductor-style when he hears a catchy tune.

He’s beginning to get something of a mullet. By the next time I manage to blog about him, he’ll probably be a teen-ager, and we’ll have to see if mullets are back in style then and if he’s one of the cool kids who has one.

Cooking 19 pounds of wings turns out to be overkill, even for a Super Bowl party boasting 20 warm bodies. 11 bags of chips also proved to be excessive (I think we opened four). Last year, my excess was ranch dressing, of which I got probably nearly a gallon. As a gag door prize this year, we gave out a bottle of ranch. I’m thinking of saving some of the wings and chips left over from this year’s party and giving them as a door prize next year.

For probably close to a year now, our dryer has failed to shut off on its own. We discovered this one night in the wee hours when laundry that had been started before bedtime was still going hours later. Ever since then, we’ve just been very careful about shutting the dryer off manually. This has no doubt cost us lots of energy, as if you forget for an hour to turn it off, you continue to consume gas that winds up adding up to a $350 January power bill. Finally, prompted by my friend Dave’s repair of his washing machine, I googled around a bit and diagnosed the problem as a bad timer. If you start a timed drying cycle and the timer dial doesn’t ever move, chances are that your timer is busted.

My dryer is a Whirlpool model LER5620KQ1, and I was able to find schematics and an online distributor whom i ultimately didn’t patronize because I wasn’t confident the transaction would be secure. When I called the number listed on the site, I got the wholesaler that drop ships parts to the distributor, and I wound up buying from them. I placed the order yesterday morning, and the part arrived (with standard shipping) today shortly after lunch (I think they shipped from Alabama, and I gather there must be a direct route from some UPS hub there to one in Knoxville). This evening, I installed the part, and I now have a dryer that stops when it’s supposed to.

The install was easy but would have been much easier with a hex nut screwdriver. First, you take six or sevens small hex screws out of a panel on the back of the dryer (not terribly efficient when you have to use a pair of pliers to do it because you don’t have a wrench small enough) and remove the panel. Then you pull the timer knob off the front and remove a screw that anchors the timer in from the front. Next you remove two screws anchoring the timer in from behind. Then you look at the seven or eight colored wires and start to go look for some paper to draw a diagram on when you notice that conveniently taped to the horizontal surface inside the back of the washer is a little sheet of schematics that includes a diagram of how the timer wires should connect. I had a little trouble pulling the wires off of the timer because I was afraid I’d break them with brute force, but ultimately I just had to be a little less ginger with the connectors. Once I got the wires off, it was a quick matter of attaching them to the new timer and reversing the disassembly process. It took me 20 - 30 minutes  start to finish but would have taken five minutes had I had the hex screwdriver and not been afraid to give the wires a good firm pull to disconnect.

The part costs around $60 (plus shipping) and would have cost about the same (minus shipping but plus 9.25% sales tax) from a local shop that was out of my way and would have required me to miss work to drive to during their business hours.

It’s been a Mr. Fixit kind of week for me, as last weekend I installed a new faucet in our half bath, replaced air filters throughout the house, replaced the water filter in our fridge, and purchased materials to insulate our hot water heater in a continuing battle against the high cost of not living a miserable cold existence. I now hear a smoke detector chirping at me as if to remind me that if I don’t divert some attention its way, my existence may wind up very warm indeed.