This year, Jen and I finally joined a CSA, an idea we’ve been talking about for a couple of years now. Harvey is a vegetable vacuum, and we figured the third mouth might help us prevent the fridge from being a brief stop on the vegetables’ way to the compost.
Today Jen picked up our first shipment, which due to the moderate temperatures and it being summer consists primarily of spinach, bok choy and young turnips. I’ve had bok choy in chinese food of course, and thanksgiving style turnip preparations but at present I don’t really know what I’m going to do with them.
We also received garlic scapes, which are the big tall above-the-ground part of a garlic bulb. I had never heard of them before a couple of weeks ago when an internet friend in Cleveland mentioned finding some at her local market and preparing them in some fashion or another I’ve since forgotten (but will have to look up).
The spinach in this shipment is not only copious, but fucking delicious. I have in the past frequently enjoyed claiming that baby spinach and mushrooms with generic ranch dressing comprise a spinach salad, so I’m appreciative of the maligned vegetable to begin with, but this stuff is (I may have said) fucking delicious.
Tonight Jen is feeling moderately unwell and Harvey and I were mom-less for supper. I staved his appetite with a plate of vegetables (the usual suspects, which for him are: cucumber, celery, broccoli and cauliflower. He also usually has some baby carrots, but we’re out) and a bowl of berries (straw, rasp and blue).
For me though, I couldn’t get the spinach out of my head (or off my tongue, I guess?) so I made something quite simple but will absolutely be prepared again soon… like, tomorrow:
I took a bit of red onion, coarsely chopped and chopped up a scape pretty roughly. I sauted the two of them together in some olive oil and after a couple of minutes piled on the spinach. I left the spinach only for two or three minutes maybe, just enough to get hot (very hot, as I discovered) but not down to mush. I added pepper and salt and after transferring to a plate, dove in.
Man it was good.
I should have either chopped the scapes more finely or cooked them longer (and before the onion), probably the former although it was nice to have the chunkiness of them.
If I had some goat cheese it would have blown my god damn mind. Goat cheese isn’t something I keep around very much, but if we get another big batch of spinach like this next week I will absolutely treat myself because, well: Blown mind.
So let’s see, what’s happened in the past few months. Lots of things and very little.
One day I went to start the blue car to go to work, it refused. We took it to the shop and the immediately-necessary and soon-to-be-necessary repairs to keep it on the road amounted to a value much higher than we felt the car was worth.
After a little bit of financial rejiggering and test driving we swapped it and a moderately large sum of currency for a new-to-us minivan. We like it, it is a nice vehicle that we paid a fair price for which seems an odd feeling to come away from a used car dealership with.
Harvey is fucking awesome, which is not a new thing, but which I feel it is necessary to restate on occasion. You’ll forgive me for repeating the obvious, I hope. He’s, jeez, well past two-and-a-half now and is getting quite deep into little boy territory (as opposed to toddler-land). He has mattered the intricacies of the iPod Touch, would much rather spend all day outside, and recently had his second haircut ever which went over swimmingly well and resulted in possibly my favorite-ever picture of him (though there are absolutely some rivals).
Really, favoritest (and even top x favorites) is not a quantification I’m able to readily assign to much of anything. There is no way I could identify my five top anything at all, despite my love for the desert island game. I make no claims of consistency.
I have released my first iPod Touch/iPhone game, called EeeAhOh” in honour of Harvey’s earliest demands to play it. I have sold over 3x as many copies as I expected to, which means the beer I can notionally purchase would be a rather nice import in a very nice bar, or almost a case of Laker.
I have several other game ideas that are burbling about, and am actively poking and prodding at two ideas. One a primarily combat focused RPG that I’ve been thinking about for a while (earlier discussions here of Fracas are relevant) the other being something like a light-gun type carnival style shooter.
When discussing the latest trip to Costco, I asked Jen to pick me up some ramen noodles.
I’ve avoided them for a long time, not ever out of distaste but always out of the knowledge that frankly they aren’t that good for me. And for a while I was working at a job and had the disposable income available to me to go to a really good (now closed, unfortunately) viet-thai restaurant and get all the soupy noodles I could take (which was quite a lot).
It’s been several years since I was regularly getting a pho lunch and several months since I last managed to sneak one into our budget and I’ve been keeping an eye out for cheap noodle soups to try. I realized recently that of course none of the instant soups is going to actually taste fantastic, and of course none of them are going to be even a little bit nutritious so if I’m going to dabble in salty soupy starchy noodle fun it might as well be the sort of salty soupy starchy noodle fun that I have an existing connection and memory of.
So just now, a couple of minutes ago, I filled a cup of Mr. Noodle (which is probably about as terrible a brand of ramen that exists, but I don’t know better and in this instance I prefer to maintain my ignorant bliss) with hot water and now I am waiting the requisite three minutes.
It has been several years since my last bowl of ramen, but it will be a while before it drops out of regular rotation again.
I’m fucking tired of demands for authenticity.
This is an ill-formed and poorly considered rant, triggered by the comments and regular recurrence of such demands for authentic ethnic food and you know what? I just don’t give a fuck any more if this is the same sort of food that I would get if I sat down in a restaurant in Mexico I’m concerned about whether or not it actually tastes good.
It’s possible for ethnic food to not be authentic yet still be fucking tasty. Lets take the ethnic out of the picture for a minute and just talk about hamburgers. I fucking love hamburgers, and I fucking love talking about hamburgers.
In a general sense, my favorite sort of food is sandwiches, which I describe basically as anything I can eat with my hands that contains two or more types of food – it is a nice, inclusive definition that includes things like layered cakes, pizza, and open-faced turkey sandwiches, the prince of the sandwich family.
The lord-high might fucking emperor of the sandwich family is the hamburger, and hamburgers themselves are an entire sub-family of the sandwich. There are a million kinds of hamburgers including McDonald’s (which is arguably the canonical hamburger, the hamburger by which all others are measured) and its fast-food brethren, cheap-ass frozen patties that disintegrate in ash and haunted souls if you cook them for too long and the upper echelon of finely-crafted homemade freshly ground cow-and-pig miracles-on-a-bun that I strive towards.
Hamburgers are fucking great.
Now, from that family of hamburgers, which one is the authentic hamburger? I posed the McDonald’s hamburger as the canonical hamburger (which is not to say it is the best, far from it) but I don’t think that detracts from the authenticity of the rest, even the cheapest of the cheap more-wood-than-meat kind you get at things like college activity group fundraisers. Those are authentic hamburgers and they serve a very specific purpose and when combined with a hot sunny day and enough mustard even they are desirable.
So. A hamburger is a hamburger. General Tso’s Chicken as Jennifer Lee so expertly explains in the linked video, is about as unauthentic a chinese food as you can get. Chinese food, as we know it in North American (and indeed any region outside of China), is about as unauthentic a foodstuff as exists. But it’s good fucking food, whether or not it’s the same thing I would eat in Beijing (which it isn’t).
Authenticity, used a metric of quality, is bullshit. Authenticity is a completely separate property from tastiness and worth and I’m sick and fucking tired of it being used as anything other than an elitist and exclusionary device.
And here I was thinking I didn’t have anything to say today.
Only a week or so ago, Harvey gained an important and significant understanding of a vocabulary word I never though I would love so dearly: “Yes”
Much of the discussion of Terrible Twos that I have seen in popular culture revolves around the insistent and repetitive use of the word “no” but the reality (in our case at least, perhaps we are unknowingly lucky… so far) isn’t so much that every request is met with a no, but that the first deep understanding of behavioural direction kids have is about what not to do.
I don’t know, I am no child psychologist and I don’t even play on one TV. Maybe we are terrible parents raising our child in a world of negativity but the simple fact of the matter is that as soon as kids start gaining some amount of motor control parents start teaching them what sorts of things are not okay to do. I can’t see the opposite method making sense – the possible number of prohibited activities is vastly inferior to the possible number of allowable and even encouraged activities.
So kids learn very quickly that it is not okay to do certain things, and that the word “no” is how that is indicated. Very early in life they have a deep understanding that rejection is performed by saying no, which means that very quickly in life they are able to start expressing their self by identifying that which they do not want – by saying no.
Parents, or at least Jen and I, take advantage of a child’s knowledge of this concept of refusal by presenting a variety of options to children, or at least Harvey, who in turn responds with either “no” or, in Harvey’s case for a long time, no response at all. Lack of rejection was a positive response.
Harvey has learned that there is an explicit positive response, the opposite of rejection, and has started using it. He nods his head, he says “yes!” when asked certain things, and as far as I am concerned life is markedly better as a result. That positive (and frequently enthusiastic) response is so absolutely charming and endearing that I want to offer him things I know he’ll like just so he can be excited and positive about them.
I am absolutely open to the fact that, rather than me learning something about Harvey’s development, he has learned something about causing me to engage in the actions he prefers.
Harvey has officially entered the stage of food consumption that I call Bread, Glorious Bread. He hasn’t yet started denying other foods in favour of buns and loaves but that is only a matter of time.
Last night during supper he ate a sandwich bun that is probably the size of my fist which is fairly impressive for a child his size if you discount the fact that he is basically a bottomless pit when he so chooses.
I’m pretty happy he’s at this stage, as it makes feeding him ridiculously simple. The task has never really been hard, the boy loves fruit of all types (especially blueberries) and when he’s interested in eating it generally isn’t terribly difficult to find something he’ll go for, but this makes it even easier and I am all for easier.
I have no doubt that we’ll continue to offer whatever it is we’re eating for supper (or other meals) and I have no doubt that much of the time he’ll partake in our meals (especially when they feature rice or peas, or as mentioned, blueberries) but it does free us up a little bit to eat things that he has never encountered before or is avoiding without having to have long conversations wherein we offer several food choices only to have him reject each one.
Overall he is generally open to almost any sort of food, though he has yet to actually consume any amount of lettuce (it is usually iceberg though, so perhaps he is just repulsed by his parent’s poor taste in leafy vegetables). He frequently tries foods that are new to him or that he knows he doesn’t like, which leads to one of the greatest joys in a father’s life: offering your child foods you know he’ll despise and getting a chuckle at the resultant looks of disgust. He’s long since stopped just spitting things out though, and is actually becoming quite tactful at running to one parent or another to tastefully spit out the mouthful of displeasure.
Now we can shortcut the cascade of options and, if he doesn’t like what’s on his plate, we can just stuff him with dinner buns for while man may not be able to live on bread and water alone, children sure as heck can, often for years.
Now that he is a great fan of breadstuffs, and long has he been a member of the choir of Hot Dogs Are Great, I anticipate the inevitable introduction of Hot Dog on a Bun. Today I think he probably won’t be able to get his mouth around the entire beast and it would just confuse him, but in a few months new vistas of handheld foodstuffs will absolutely blow his mind, and the best part is I’ll be able to feed him after investing 30 seconds at the microwave.
So, I have this cup that I use all the time. A travel mug, if one wants to be specific (which generally, I don’t). In the mornings I fill it with coffee, and refill it once or twice from its companion thermos. Then I switch to water for a while, and occasionally have some more coffee in the afternoon.
With all this drinking, the cup gets filled probably six times daily, you’d think I would be able to consume beverages from it without risking a damp shirt but as it turns out (and really, knowing me you wouldn’t think that) I can’t.
The problem is that I start drinking from it when it is not properly aligned. Maybe I am typing something at the time, or talking with someone, or maybe I am just not that smart, but quite frequently non-trivial amounts of beverage soak my sweaters. And soaked sweaters are not fun, spring break notwithstanding.
What I need, I have just decided, is some form of glow-in-the-dark material that I can use to clearly mark the opening of the mug’s lid. I keep my cubicle area fairly dim. I have detached the fluorescent bulbs immediately above my head, and while I have one of those bendy arm lamps that is often on, the part of the room immediately in front of my mouth is generally poorly lit, especially in the winter.
So, this is something I thought of this morning.
It’s an iPhone app, and it doesn’t exist and probably never will. I give it to the universe freely and will claim that it is “practice” and an “exercise in design” or some such, instead of just me being a lazy fuck who doesn’t do anything.
Except blog, but that’s the same thing.
So, there you are holding your iPhone (or iPod Touch of course but that’s just more to type, unlike this entirely unnecessary parenthetical) but you’re holding it horizontally because that’s important for this game.
On the screen are some number of entities, moving at varying speeds from the left side to the right. They are competitors in a race, and I think they are blobular but I am not bound to that. Animation and art style are important here though, they are amusing and probably cute.
There is one in particular that you are a fan of, but you do not have direct control over any of them. You want the one that you are a fan of to win, because that is the purpose of this thing: to help your blobular thing win the race.
I haven’t yet decided what constitutes a win, maybe it is just making it all the way across the screen or maybe the racecourse is longer than the screen and there is some amount of side scrolling afoot. There is a start point and an end point to this course however, and in the base concept there is very little in terms of geographical obstacles between the two, just distance.
You can interact with the environment. You have these big pudgy fingers you see, and one or more of them can touch the screen to make things happen. If one of the other blobs is ahead of your blob you can touch the screen and pin it to the wall. If you time it right you can pin multiple other blobs to the wall (since they can overlap each other in position) but if you keep holding your finger there the other blobs need to get over your finger.
Once you remove your finger, the blobs you have pinned against the wall will become unpinned, but that takes a bit of time (perhaps in proportion to how long they were pinned!) and of course those who were climbing over your finger maybe suddenly fall.
You can touch your finger to the screen and quickly drag it in one direction or another to fling the blobs, they might bounce off the ceiling and after they land they will be dazed for some amount of time.
The goal is to run interference in such a way that your blob wins.
The challenge is that the rest of the blobs have someone doing the same for them.
First, a definition since perhaps I am making this up out of whole cloth. A ‘scrubber’, to me, is the part of a media player that indicates one’s location in the media. An appropriate turn of phrase may be ‘seek bar’.
Typically speaking, it is a horizontal scroll bar jobby, where the left-most position indicates 0 seconds into the loaded media and the right-most position is fully complete.
I hate these fucking things.
Or rather, I hate the limited level of control for timestop accuracy most offer. See, most of the media I consume these days is longer-form stuff. iTunes in specific was certainly developed with 3-minute media chunks in mind, and for that the scrubber works great but I mostly listen to podcasts which run 1 or 2 minutes in length. At that point, accuracy breaks down.
The iPod wheel was a tremendous interface element for this, since the degree of accuracy could be related to the speed with which one spun their finger around it, but my iPod battery died a little while ago so now I am listening mostly in iTunes. And iTunes doesn’t offer a convenient little wheel to spin, it offers a horizontal scroll bar jobby that doesn’t allow for to-the-second accuracy.
Even more frustrating to me, I spent a bit of time last week poking around at my office’s iPod Touch (as that is the logical, if currently out-of-reach-financially option, for replacement) and the scrubber on them is even worse. The smallest little finger movement jumps around in erratic and unpredictable increments of 3 to 5 minute chunks. That is no good!
I’ve also noticed it on YouTube’s scrubber, if I want to jump back to a specific point in time, no go. There is some kind of chunking going on that seems to offer only discrete stopping points along the timeline, not a high enough degree of resolution to get to a specific second in something that is a lecture-length piece of video.
So according to the calendar reminder I set myself, on Wednesdays I’m supposed to talk about my ongoing attempts at self-education. I thought that maybe it would be fun to talk about that sort of thing, but it turns out it really isn’t.
So now I need to muster up another topic for Wednesdays, and I’m having some difficulties deciding what to do, or whether I even do want to blog daily. I like the idea of it but there’s no real topic that I care about enough to bother with.
What I need in a calendar application is a way to schedule a randomly recurring event with some finely tunable frequency. Daily blogging, it turns out, kind of isn’t my thing in part because it requires quite a bit of mental mustering to come up with something to say.
Of course, now that I’m actually typing, it’s quite easy to babble for a little while.
On the Stackoverflow podcast Jeff has been encouraging Joel to try shorter form blog posting, and to a certain degree that is something I am going to try too although arguably I am already doing short-form blog posts, especially when compared to Joel’s average content length.
Anyway, one of the primary factors of this particular reboot is to dissuade myself of the opinion that I actually need to present or support any kind of significant thesis in a blog post. As it turns out, I am not an essayist I am a babbler and so shall I babble.
I am going to try to continue doing daily posts, and I am going to leave my current topic-based reminders intact but I am not going to be rigid with the topics because being prompted to blog is good but being constrained to specific topic matter is not.
