September 27, 2005
We’ve been in a Residence Inn for the past 6 days. It was supposed to be 5 days, but our stay got unceremoniously extended. The floor guys have been in our house, furiously sanding and polishing our wood floors. My in-laws are coming into town tomorrow; I wanted the floors finished, and the house tidied up before they got here.
Well, one out of two ain’t bad.
Actually, make that zero out of two: the living room floor hasn’t been done yet at all, because that’s where all the furniture in the house has been stored for the past week. Since we are late getting back into the house, I’m not going to have a chance to really clean it before my in-laws arrive. Yay.
(Note to self: when getting floors done again, either get prefinished wood or pay movers to move all the furniture out of the house so the floor guys have enough room to maneuver.)
The Residence Inn wasn’t bad — we had the “penthouse suite,” which had a loft bedroom upstairs for us, a murphy bed out of the wall for the kids (and if they were older, there was a sofa bed as well), plus two bathrooms. Free breakfast buffet every day; evening “light meal” buffet Mondays through Thursdays. Plus a pool and a hot tub that we visited every day, without fail. It’s a pretty good deal.
But I wanted to be home. We packed up this morning and I drove directly to the house to deposit all of the cold food from the hotel into our refrigerator. I opened the back door and went, “Ugh.” Deep smell of chemicals throughout the house. I don’t know what I’m going to have to do to get rid of it. I hope it’s safe to have the kids in the house tonight, because that’s where they’re going to be.
Once we’re back in the house, I have non-stop laundry to do for a few days, plus trying to clean at least the kitchen, the guest room, and the guest bathroom. (I’ll get to the other rooms later.) And there are 20 or 30 boxes just of ephemera that we’ve picked up here and there around the house, not including the boxes of books from the living room shelves. It’s going to take quite a while to get to a point of stasis.
I think it’s worth it. At the moment, however, it feels like a gigantic mess and mistake.
I’ll post pictures once the furniture is all back where it belongs.
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The street in front of our house is blocked off due to repaving! So somehow I have to get all of our bags and assorted detritus into the house from a block or so away!
Well, I guess that will keep down the amount of extraneous material in the house.
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There’s a guy smoking right by the entrance to the cafe. The wind outside is blowing in. The guy might as well be sitting right next to me.
Aha! This is why they have designated outdoor smoking zones in some cities, like Palo Alto. It all becomes clear.
September 26, 2005
My running bud Rob is currently doing a liquid diet and has lost 45 pounds (give or take) over the past couple of months. He’s winding it up for the end of September, but he’s not quite done with it yet.
He IM’d me about a week ago.
Rob: Do me a favor?
Diane: Mais oui.
Rob: Go to this for me.
Diane: Throw caution to the wind.
Rob: I’d get sick eating so much rich food right away.
You go and tell me everything.
Diane: Well. Okay. If I have to.
“This†was the Vinography dinner at Manresa. Manresa, for the non-foodies amongst us, is one of the top restaurants in the world and it’s not too far from us.
When the maitre d’ escorted me to the back patio, I saw a whole bunch of people dressed in fabulous black. I really, really have to invest in a little black dress at some point. A tall well-dressed man came over to me and introduced himself as “Alder.†I am distinctly uncomfortable joining groups of people I don’t know, and Alder immediately put me at ease as we chatted and drank Cava (a sparkling wine from Spain, much like Prosecco and as tasty). The man is the perfect host. In fact, if I ever have a large party at my house, I’m going to ask Alder if he’ll come down and host it.
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The dinner was fabulous.
Alder told us he worked with Manresa Chef David Kinch to pair the perfect dish with each of the wines Alder had selected. Apparently, Chef Kinch knows what he’s doing, ’cause these dishes were good.
We started with the Auberge egg, which is a soft poached egg in its shell with herbs, butter, sherry vinegar, and maple syrup. I’ve had it both times I’ve eaten at Manresa before, but you can’t have too many Arpege eggs. You wouldn’t think a combination of egg, sherry vinegar, and maple syrup would be good, but honey, if you knew the proper recipe, you would be making this puppy at home all the time.
And then we got started with the dinner:
Steelhead roe, smoked and freshly cured, in a light gelee of jasmine tea and myrtle leaves, with 2003 CrauforD Sauvignon Blanc
This was my least favorite dish, because the combination of “fishy†and “smoked†is not my thing. I was the only one at the table who left any on the plate, so it was, in fact, just me. I did try two bites, because I promised myself that I would try everything during the dinner. (For that price, I’d better.)
The wine was excellent. Very fruity without being sweet. I haven’t drunk a lot of white wines recently, but this would definitely be one I’d be on the lookout for.
Gulf shrimp and clams on the plancha, with 2000 Miura Chardonnay.
Yes, Gulf of Mexico shrimp, flown in that morning. Certainly my first thought was, Who in the hell were the idiot fishermen who went out there with Rita bearing down? Well, I was glad they did, because that really was some of the best damn shrimp I’ve ever had: large and nicely grilled, and the clams had a small pork gelee on top of them were excellent.
The wine: definitely the best Chardonnay I’ve ever had. Alder mentioned the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) crowd and everyone laughed. My first thought when I tasted the wine was, “This is what wine ice cream would taste like.” When Alder talked about the wine, he mentioned that it was very much like a “creamy pastry,” and I thought: Whoo hoo! I’m in the general vicinity of the appropriate wine metaphor! Excellent wine.
Milk-fed capon breast, poached then roasted, with risotto “biodynamic,†cippolini onions, and foie gras cream, with 2001 Campion “Firebreak†Pinot Noir
Oh good lord, this was some fine eatin’. The capon was as soft as veal, the risotto firm and creamy, and the foie gras cream not too hard on the foie gras (not my favorite taste).
The wine: this tasted very light, not with the heavy, dark tannic taste I associate with a red wine.
Roast marcassin with spices, pine mushrooms, and roasted escarole, with 2003 Casa Nuestra “Tinto St. Helena†Red Field Blend
Who knew roast young boar was so tasty? It was rubbed with a mix of 12 or 16 spices (can’t remember) and rare and soft. The mushrooms: yum. The only down element for me was the roasted escarole, because it was very bitter. Darin said it was perfect, which means I’m not going to be searching out a lot of escarole in my future.
The Tinto was my least favorite wine, because it was so dark and heavy and tannic. It was still a great wine, though, and more than that it was a great pairing with the red meat of the boar, though.
Braised black mission figs in exotic honey and mascarpone sorbet, with 1996 Stony Hill Semillion de Soleil dessert wine
The dessert was very tasty, even though I didn’t eat all of it. The mascarpone sorbet? Man, if Haagen Dazs started making that flavor… The exotic honey was a honey brought back from Costa Rica by one of the Manresa kitchen workers, and it was infused with orchids and other tropical blossoms. The figs were perfectly cooked, which I found out because Darin told me (he ate my helping).
Generally I like sweeter dessert wines than Alder does, but the Semillion was wonderful. Every time I sipped or sniffed the Semillion de Soleil, I kept thinking of musical chords — three, or maybe more, flavors seemed to be playing at the same time.
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One thing I noticed about all the wines was that they had a bouquet. Generally when I sniff a glass of wine I get, well, a wine-y type smell. You know, a hint of alcohol. But these wines had bouquets of fragrances, whether fruity or dark or sweet and complex.
The best thing about this dinner was that there were people who knew a lot about wine and those who, like me, know what they like, even if they don’t always know what it is. Okay, maybe I was the only one there who doesn’t know a Cabernet from a Zinfandel without checking the label. But they let me stay anyhow.
The other great thing was that few people there knew one another, but they all felt very comfortable with chatting easily. I felt incredibly at ease the whole time.
I would totally do this dinner again!
And here are Alder’s thoughts about the meal.
September 25, 2005
Rob and I have been trying to do an organized race/run every month, to encourage us to keep up with the running. Rob discovered Pacific Coast Trail Runs and, when possible, that’s what we do.
Today was my second one. Ow. I can feel it.
We did the 8km (5mi) up Mt. Diablo. The run started out going straight up and didn’t let up for about the first 3 miles. Here’s the elevation map for our run. It was tough going from the start (went straight up for what felt like forever, but I see was about a quarter of a mile). I lost my ability to control my breathing — that is, I was panting like a little pup — right at the start. Mile 2 to 3 was a fire road that went straight up. I felt like it was never going to end.
From there it was all down hill, and the views were pretty spectacular when we had an opportunity to take our focus off the gravel-laden path or the roots creating an obstacle course.
The weather was fantastic: from a very nippy morning in the parking lot, waiting for the start, the temperature warmed up until it was warm but not too warm for a good run.
After we left Mt. Diablo, Rob and I wanted to get some coffee. We didn’t see one coffee place the whole way back to the freeway. Walnut Creek: no reason to live. We stopped in Danville and got some pretty good coffee at a bagel place.
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I know I’d find these hill runs a lot easier if I lost some weight. Sigh.
September 23, 2005
Using some of 21st Century America’s worst cooking equipment (the standard appliances installed in a Residence Inn include a stove where the controls are behind the burners — whoever thought that up needs to be slapped), I managed to cook not only a decent but indeed fairly tasty dinner of seared pork chops, sauteed asparagus, and spaetzle with parmesan cheese.
The kids even ate it. Sophia turned me and said, “Mom, you make great dinners.” And let me tell, that made my entire week.
September 21, 2005
Apparently the H5N1 virus — commonly called the “bird flu” or the “avian flu” — is at Stage 5. You can read about the various stages at the CDC site, but here are the definitions of Stage 5 and Stage 6:
Phase 5: Larger cluster(s) but human-to-human spread still localized, suggesting that the virus is becoming increasingly better adapted to humans, but may not yet be fully transmissible (substantial pandemic risk).
Phase 6: Pandemic: increased and sustained transmission in general population.
You can read lots about the impact H5N1 pandemic is going to have and the lack of preparation we’ve done at Just A Bump In The Beltway and the H5N1 Blog. And then go out and buy lots and lots and lots of emergency supplies.
Between this and seeing what the response was to Katrina, all I can say is: Buckle up, ’cause there ain’t no one coming to help us.
September 20, 2005
I woke up at 5:30 this morning. On iChat, Rob said: “Twilight isn’t until 6:30, dawn isn’t until 6:50.” Then he asked if we could go running later in the day.
Well, okay. But just this once.
Generally, I like to get my exercise out of the way early in the day, so that I will be sure to do it. Also, I am terribly selfish and want to use my kids-in-school time for something like writing. But the writing has really sucked recently, and I hoped that, as has been promised by so many people extolling the benefits of exercise, a mid-day run might spur me on to great thoughts.
(I actually deserve a prize for the amount of exercise I do, given that I get few to none of the benefits claimed by it. Weight loss? Ha, I’m doing 15-20 hard miles a week, up and down hill trails, and my weight hasn’t budged. Energy? Exercise makes me tired. Very, very tired. So tired, in fact, that a doctor made me go get blood work, because he said, “No, it’s supposed to invigorate you.” I’m now on thyroid medication. I still get tired during runs though.)
We met at Rancho San Antonio, a simply gorgeous nature preserve. We have our “usual” run there, which is about 4.5 miles and involves running up a hill. (You can use the Rancho Runner and plug in “1aef3upstu3fea1″ to check out our run.) Usually when I exercise in the middle of the day it’s in a nice indoor gym, cooled by fans at the very least. But this was outside at 11:30, sunny, warm but not too warm. I warned Rob to expect a not-great run: “We’re not going to be able to do this in our usual hour and two minutes. Just so you know.” My other excuse, at the ready, was that I had just walked a mile and a half taking Sophia to school.
We started off and my legs felt like they were made of lead. I thought, I’m going to have to ask him to do the short 3 mile run. (Yes, I’m actually at the point where five miles is the default and three miles is light. Woot.) I didn’t get any peppier on the way up, although I was able to wait for our walking breaks (going up the hill we do four minutes running, one walking) and not make my own, the way I have, er, once or twice in the past. I did apologize to Rob for going slower than your average garden snail on the way up and he said, “Enh. I’m not in this for the speed record.”* Rob has been having an easier and easier time with our runs, because over the past couple of months he’s dropped 43 pounds, mostly due to the liquid diet he’s on, but also because he’s become Exercise Boy — he does these three runs a week, plus takes a three day-a-week exercise class at the Fitness Center.
We got up to the top and then began the long run down. We don’t take walking breaks on the way down because, well, gravity’s doing its part and we feel obligated to take advantage of it. I thought I’d need a walk when we reached the bottom, but instead we kept going. Several times during the mile back to the parking lot I found myself thinking, “I can’t do this. I need to walk. In just a second, I’m going to ask for a walking break.” But I didn’t, and soon we were back at the bridge to the parking lot.
Rob looked at his watch. “You were right. We didn’t make a hour two.”
“What was it?” I expect
“An hour one.”
Wow.
I mean, I felt like hell after that run, but evidently we’d done even faster than we ever had before.
And even if I don’t get anything else done today — and, to be honest, it’s kind of looking like I won’t — at least I’ve done that.
* - Not a direct quote. Where other people are concerned, they rarely are, to be honest.
Today’s the day for Sophia to return the library book she took out of the school library, and in our rush to pack up the house (the floors are finally getting finished! yay!) I think we must have packed it somewhere.
Great: in school three weeks, I’ve already marked her as “The kid who loses school library books.”
September 19, 2005
Now that I’ve, you know, told it that I’m using MovableType. (Duh.)
Really fast feedback on the ME mailing list too…
(Convert Line Breaks?)
This is a test of MarsEdit, the weblog entry editor from Ranchero. They also do NetNewsWire, which is my new favorite app, as I’ve just discovered RSS feeds. (Yes. I am behind the curve on everything. I am still trying to figure out ringtones. I am an old fogey.)
I don’t know if I really need an automatic entry writer/uploader — isn’t that what BBEdit is for? — but maybe it’ll be the coolest thing since sliced bread.
Update: Hmmm. Needed to do some editing of the posted entry, because there’s no “Title” on the MarsEdit menu. (Same problem I had with MacJournal.) Off to see if there’s a fix somewhere…
First I’m a year behind with “blogs” and “blogging software,” and now this: at long last I’ve discovered the joy of RSS feeds. I have been using Blogrolling to maintain my list of blogs, and you can see I still have a gigantic list of blogs over to the right. But if you’re wondering why your blog was on there and is no longer, I’ve probably moved it to my RSS and Atom newsreader, NetNewsWire.
And if you don’t have an RSS feed on your blog. Make one. ‘Cause I’m gonna stop reading your blog, and so are a bunch of other people.
For those of you as ignorant of RSS as I was a week ago, RSS (who cares what the acronym stands for? but if you must know, it stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a way to distribute the headlines and content of…well, just about anything. Blogs, news sites, updates to the Wikipedia.
I was refreshing my Blogroll 20 times a day, to see if the little “updated” icon showed up next to a blog. And sometimes I’d already seen the post, but the updated icon stayed there for the requisite number of hours, during which time the blog might have updated again. Then for a couple of weeks (it seemed), Blogrolling was down, so there were a whole bunch of blogs I never visited, not realizing they had been updated. And I kept visiting other blogs over and over again, hoping to see if they’d been updated.
I don’t need to do this any more. Now I click the “Refresh All” button in NetNewsWire and it shows me the headlines of new articles in my favorite blogs. And if the blog is syndicating using RSS 2.0, I get the whole entry. If it’s using RSS 1.0, I get the first paragraph or so, at which point I click the link and new tab with the blog opens up.
I’m slowly trying to delete the blogs I have a feed for off my Blogroll. I’m frustrated by how many blogs don’t use RSS: if your host doesn’t provide RSS/Atom support, I think you can sign up with Feedburner to make a feed. And if you don’t have any good RSS reading software, like NetNewsWire or Safari, you can use Bloglines.
I guess the downside of all this is that now there’s instant notification of new posts, which means my desire for even more new stuff grows. But it’s way cool and I’ll be very annoyed with you if you don’t syndicate.
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I told Darin I was using NetNewsWire instead of Safari to read blogs using RSS. He sighed and said, “Well, at least they’re using WebKit.” (A project Darin also works on.)
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Update: Apparently my RSS feed looks wonky. Waaah. And how come certain headlines keep showing up as new, even after I’ve read them? Do they show up as new if they get edited or something? (Corrente is an especial offender: its headlines are always renewing themselves.)
And I was going to attempt to explain the differences between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom — but why should I, when there are better-informed people out there to do it for me?
Not sure what this is but just stumbled upon it and assumed that it was some kind of forum for...