Starry Wisdom

I’ve alluded to my messed up ankle in previous posts, such as Athletic Socks and Sneakers. Well, I had surgery to unmess it up yesterday.

Surgery seems to have gone well, and I’ve not really had much pain – credit to that goes to the DonJoy Iceman which the surgeon prescribed. Now, my insurance company wouldn’t pay for it, deeming it not medically necessary, but I think the rental fee for it will be worthwhile (and probably come out of the remains of my FSA account). The amount of pain I’ve had has been quite minimal, and I’ve not had to use much of the pain medicine prescribed.

Oh yeah, the dressing is freaking huge so I can’t wear regular pants:

Soon after I moved in to my flat I arranged to have a particular window replaced. The one that was there went down too far to be useful, and was fairly broken. Within two weeks of moving in I had the job scheduled, but there are delays before these things can actually happen, so it took until two weeks ago for the window to be finally replaced.

While I was waiting for the window to be replaced I had the fridge in front of the window, since it’s original position, near the doorway into the kitchen, made opening the fridge while someone was at the stove a problem. And in a lot of ways, having the fridge in front of the window was optimal, due to the french door design. However, it did block the window.

Well, Mackenzie did a bunch of possible layouts of the kitchen, and due to door clearance issues (particularly if one wants to be able to take the drawers out for cleaning) the ‘in front of the window’ layout was the best. But it wasn’t satisfying at all, especially since I just paid $X for the new fancy window. So she decided I should try putting the fridge in the corner, even with some clearance issues. Earlier this week we arranged it in this layout, and it turns out that it’s pretty good, and I’ll be keeping it like this until I someday remodel the kitchen.

By the way, the title of this post came from a comment when I posted these photos on facebook earlier today.

I posted about athletic socks earlier this year. Now, it’s time for a companion boring post, this time about sneakers.

Throughout my life I’ve been a serial monogamist with sneaker brands. From kangaroos as a young kid, on to Nike in high school, then to Adidas in college (with a short foray into Converse, more on this later), and then to Asics around the turn of the millennium. I can’t prove it, but I think I might be on to a new brand – at least for day to day wear, I’ll probably continue to buy Asics for exercise use.

For a few months I’ve been pondering getting a pair of ‘casual sneakers’ – shoes that are clearly not meant for working out, but are comfortable. I poked around on Zappos a few months ago but nothing really stuck out, and since the brace that I’m still wearing (see the sock post) is likely to deform any shoe I buy, I was hesitant to get something new. But with surgery a scant month out and my current Asics in a sad state, it was really time to buy something new.

I’d seen a few references to Converse Jack Purcells on line. They looked fairly similar to the All-Stars I abandoned after one pari in the 1990s, classic and simple, but perhaps a bit more ‘fancy’. Maybe the fanciness is in my head since they are not the same shoe, which has some associations in my head. Anyway, I bought a pair of black ones and I’m really liking them.

The bonus is that the canvas seems to be more resistant to stretching due to the brace than leather on my other other gym shoes. The question is, however, how long can I keep the rubber toe caps looking presentable?

This weekend my CSA, Eatwell Farm, had a tomato sauce party. They invited members over to the farm (in Dixon, CA) to make and can tomato sauce from tomatoes that were too ripe to send down the road to SF, and to camp out. Mackenzie and I had been to the farm in May for Strawberry picking, but we had never spent the night before (this was the second campout of the year, the first, a garlic party, was on her birthday weekend), so we didn’t know exactly what to expect. Still, it seemed like fun, so I signed us up for it.

Armed with pots, pans, knives, and a borrowed propane stove, we drove out to the farm, arriving fashionably late. Some people, who got there when the event began at 11am, were nearly finished for the day by the time we showed up at 2PM! No matter, it was a race and not a sprint for us, as we were spending the night. We cooked up an initial sauce, which ended up only filling one of my jars, but when that couldn’t fill up all of the canning jars I brought, we used the leftover to create the starting point of a second sauce. We ended up having to make a third, smaller batch, to eat with dinner that night. It was certainly a learning experience as I only ever made sauce from fresh tomatoes once before, when I roasted the heck out of some romas and then ground them in a Moulinex (note to self, bring that next time!).

After we finished up the sauce and got in line for canning (they had several pressure canners set up, but as some people made entire flats of mason jars of sauce, there was quite a wait to actually get on the stove, we ate some pasta and sauce for dinner. Bread would have been nice, as you use the same ingredients to make buschetta as tomato sauce, and there was bountiful garlic, tomatoes and basil. And after dinner we were given a tour of their amazing earthen roofed farmhouse, which is under construction. We even got to climb to the top of the roof!

After the tour, when we were packing the cooking utensils back in the car, a woman came up to us and asked if we lived on Lily St, which happens to be the street I live on. I said I did, and looked at her quizzically, and she told us that she too lives on Lily. She had noticed us packing the car this morning (and I guess I sort of noticed them too, but didn’t make a big memory of it) and Mackenzie’s neon sneakers keyed her in to the fact that we were the same people. So strangely, I drove 100 miles and managed to meet some neighbors! And even crazier, my jars and theirs were combined into one batch for the pressure canner through somewhat random chance!

After a remarkably good nights sleep for lying on the ground, we were treated to a breakfast of the best flour tortillas I’ve ever eaten, and the farm’s delicious, FRESH, eggs from their pastured chickens. These eggs are super delicious, and I highly recommend them (they have them at Rainbow sometimes, for the SF locals). When breakfast was over we went on a farm tour, and were given free reign to pick strawberries, eggplants and zucchini blossom from some over abundant (or soon to be shredded for chicken feed) fields. We snagged some strawberries and eggplants, and head out to Davis to see Mackenzie’s Sister and her family for lunch.

All in all it was a pretty great adventure, and I didn’t even mention the kitchen cart trial that was the reason that we showed up late until the end.

I’m not sure if I posted about this, in fact I’m quite positive I didn’t, but back in September my Windows computer died. It was nearly five years old so this wasn’t completely unexpected. It wasn’t the end of the world either, as I mostly use my laptop. But still, it served a function as my media server, so it needed to be replaced.

Out of laziness, instead of building my own, I ordered a mid tier Dell system, which came with WIndows Vista, but also a free upgrade to Windows 7, which was due to be released within a couple of months. I was loathe to run Vista, but the free upgrade cheered me up somewhat.

I finally got my upgrade DVD in December, but I dragged my feet in installing it. In hindsight, I really should have done it last week while I was off of work, but alas. Instead I just killed two weeknights dealing with the ‘upgrade’ and its fallout.

First of all, because I’m crazy, I decided I might as well see if the actual upgrade functionality would work, as opposed to doing a fresh install of Windows 7. I didn’t really have anything of value on the OS drive, so I could deal with a clean wipe, but I guess I wanted to see how elegant Microsoft could be. The answer is not at all, and I was forced to do a fresh install after wasting 2 hours doing the upgrade process. Pretty sad, since the install only took about 45 minutes. And now things were OK. Except they weren’t.

I alluded above to the fact that I had more than one drive in the computer. The second drive was the hard drive from my old, dead machine, which was filled with various media files (video and audio). Was is the key term here, since that drive perished in the upgrade. Actually, I’m pretty sure I know what happened to it, and it seems it’s half my fault for not keeping my drive’s firmware up to date (hah, clearly everyone needs to do that!). There is a bug on particular Seagate Barracudas, of which my drive is one, where upon bootup the drive can basically become a spinning brick. All your data is there, but since you cannot talk to the disk, you cannot retrieve it. The only solace to me in this is that I am 99% sure I have all the music on my old Ipod, which I can pull back off it. Oh, and that I can get a warranty replacement.

And now we come to the third woe: my wireless router is a piece of crap. I always knew that the Linksys WRT54G that I had was a less desirable version (v6 if you must know) but because it worked pretty well, I didn’t care. But now my new printer (bought to replace my more than nine year old deskjet that barely worked with Vista, and based on an experience at Erin’s with Windows 7, I figured I was best served with spending $100 to enter the modern age. Oh and I would be getting a scanner and a copier at the same time), which is fully wireless, taught me why that router might not be so great.

You see, I configured the printer to use my wireless network, and it seemed to be happy. But when I tried to find it on my laptop, no luck. And please remember, on this first night, I wasn’t done futzing around with the desktop, so I had no other way to test the printer. It just seemed like it wasn’t working. But on the second night, I found I was able to connect to the printer if I plugged it onto the router via wired ethernet. And on the third night, I learned that my wired windows computer could connect to the printer when it was connected wirelessly to the router. A bit more fooling around with devices and I determined:

So everything works except two wireless devices which try to talk to each other. I am mostly certain, but cannot be positive that this used to work. I decided to see what I could do to debug this, but the router’s web interface doesn’t really give you much to see. Then I looked up custom firmware to see if that would help me debug, and it turns out it probably would, but the dd-wrt website told me I should just sell the old router and get a better one. I don’t think I’ll be selling my neutered router, although I might see if someone at work wants it for free, but I did order a WRT54GL. The L stands for linux, and it’s basically Linksys admitting it was evil with the later revisions of the router. The first thing I’ll do is get the custom firmware on the new router, and after I get that working, I’ll unleash the old one on someone at work.

Anyway, there was a lot of rambling here, but I think you can see how this defends my thesis, I HATE COMPUTERS. At least some of the time, when I don’t really like them.

Contrary to what you might think after the last post, this is not a product review blog (well it’s not much of anything, as I am super lazy). However, I wanted to talk about this toothbrush I bought yesterday – the Colgate Max Fresh.

I was spending the night in Sunnyvale, since I had to take my friend Erin to get some surgery done at 6:30 AM this morning, and driving down to Sunnyvale, then up to Palo Alto from San Francisco would have mean leaving home at 5AM. However, I left my tooth brush sitting on my couch at home, so I bought a new one.

I can’t find a good picture of it online and don’t have a good camera ready and available to take a picture, so I’ll just point you to the official site. This is one of the fancy modern toothbrushes, with a rubber contoured handle and bristles that point off at various acute angles. The site lists some fantastic additional features, including a minty fresh handle to invigorate your brushing experience. I am not sure how much this adds to the experience when you already are most likely using mint scented dentifrice, but at least it has some humor value when you hear about it.

The other feature, the tongue freshener, is what I really want to talk about. I guess it’s a not uncommon feature to have these days – a bit of rubber on the back of the head which supposedly cleans off the tongue, but there is more than just a bit on this toothbrush. The rubber ‘stubble’ is also on the sides of the head, so when you brush you are constantly rubbing it against your cheeks. This is not what I call an enjoyable experience, and even a minty fresh handle can’t change it.

To sum it up, as far as fancy new toothbrushes go, the Max Fresh is a dud. I much prefer my current Oral B CrossAction Pro-Health Toothbrush.

I’ve been neglecting the blog this month. I don’t have any good reason besides a lack of much to say. However, now I do have a few things.

1. Rock Band: After naysaying for a year and a half, I bought an Xbox 360 last fall. This turns out to be one of the best electronic purchases I’ve ever made, considering the use I’ve gotten out of it (mostly from watching video on it – either via playon , netflix or hosted on my windows machine (which died and had to be replaced recently, which caused me much angst, but…). However I’ve played a few arcade games, and two games I’ve purchased – Bioshock and Fallout 3. The latter I played the crap out of, but its time had come to get a new game. After spending a weekend playing Rock Band in Lake Tahoe (the first time I’ve played it in a year) I decided it was time to take the plunge. So I’ve been rocking out on Rock Band 2, and will likely get the Beatles version later this year.
2. Where the Wild Things Are: I saw the second public showing of this evar last night – a benefit show for 826 Valencia, where I’ve been volunteering for the past few weeks. I won’t lie – the tickets were not cheap, but it was for a good cause, and for a movie I’d been wanting to see since I first saw a trailer. Spike Jonze, who directed and co-wrote the move with Dave Eggers (founder of 826), decided long ago that he wanted to do benefit shows at all the chapters before the movie was released (in fact the Chicago chapter had the first public showing the night before). The movie is out on 10/16 and I do recommend you see it, especially if you have children or enjoyed the book as a child. Also, I got a cool crown:
   
3. Halloween: It’s coming in a few weeks. I don’t really have any plans yet, but I do have a costume in the making. It’s a costume not quite as obscure as my Zenmai Samurai costume from 2007, but not main stream either. Most of the implementation of it is complete, but I need to buy one more piece of clothing for it to be complete. Here is a hint – if you can figure it out from it, you will get a lot of credit:
   

I wrote a piece about washing bananas. Please note, it is in jest, although there is some truth hidden in my rant..

How to clean a banana

Two weeks ago, on August 22, I had people over for dinner. I made this recipe for the Zuni Cafe roasted chicken with bread salad. The recipe/dinner itself would almost be worthy for a post in and of itself, but as you can see, Deb has already well explained the recipe, and I have something more important to talk about – Pine Mouth. I know, you are probably thinking “what the heck is pine mouth?” I would be saying the exact same thing in your shoes, if I didn’t have the unfortunate experience myself.

I suppose it makes the most sense for me to explain this by way of a timeline, and fill in the information as I learned of it.

Tuesday August 25, 2009 – I woke up for work (I work from home Tuesday mornings), and while I was brewing the coffee, I grabbed a gum drop from a plastic bin as a snack. It tasted a bit strange to me, extra bitter, but I thought maybe it was just a bad gum drop, and didn’t think much of it. The coffee, prepared in a Moka pot, also tasted a bit bitter, but I thought I had burned it some, and just kind of powered through. Neither of these tastes really made me think anything was wrong, but after I got to the office around 11, I noticed that there was a persistent foul taste in my mouth – a acrid, sour taste. I thought maybe I was having some reflux, not completely unheard of for me, so I had a Tums, which also tasted completely awful. When 30 minutes later the taste didn’t go away – in fact it was hanging there like a bitter blanket on the back of my tongue, I started to get concerned. So I did what any sane person would do, and I googled “bitter taste on back of tongue”, and found a bunch of very concerning articles – was my liver failing? Did I actually have a brain tumor? However, thankfully, I noticed, far down on the page, a reference to pine nuts causing a bitter taste. “I had pine nuts Sunday in the bread salad, in fact I had a bunch while cooking dinner too…” was in my mind.

I did some more googling around, and found that wikipedia contains a reference to this outcome, as well as a link to a paper in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine describing this affliction. Interestingly enough, the paper is from 2001, but most of the 13,000 hits for “Pine Mouth” seem to be from the past 9 months or so. So what’s going on here? Well, no one knows, but I will talk about what’s known:

1. Around two days after eating certain pine nuts, certain people develop a lingering, unpleasant taste sensation
2. The pine nuts that have caused the issue appear to be mostly sourced from China, or other places in the East. European and American pine nuts appear to be precluded from causing this, for now
3. The exact methodology of this affliction is not known (but I will discuss a hypothesis of mine shortly
4. The affliction lasts for about one to two weeks for more people

Seeing this all relieved me greatly, and also caused me to realize that the bitter taste was reminiscent of the bitter component to pine nuts’ flavor. I made it through the rest of the day eating food that tasted poorly, and just suffered.

Wednesday August 26, 2009 – This mostly probably the worst day of the experience taste wise, because everything I put in my mouth, save for water, tasted like it was coated in dish soap. I was also a bit concerned by getting affected now (and note that none of the other 3 people at dinner got hit by this, so perhaps my extra snacking before dinner helped this along), since I had plans to go wine tasting in Napa the coming weekend with Mackenzie, and what’s the point in wine tasting if all the wine tastes like soap!?

Thursday August 27, 2009 – The soap taste had receded a bit. It was now more of an aftertaste (and a most foul one at that), and I found that some foods had strong after tastes than others. In particular high carb/high sugar foods were the soapiest, and spicy and savory items were markedly less so. I had some hope that by the coming Saturday I would be “better”.

Saturday August 29, 2009 – Sadly, I wasn’t all the way better by Saturday. The soapy aftertaste was certainly less strong, and it lingered far less, but my taste was still not up to par. I couldn’t trust any aftertaste in any of the wines I tasted (and, alas, port in particular was fouled by the soapy aftertaste, which made my otherwise fun visit to Prager Port imperfect.

Wednesday September 2, 2009 – After brushing my teeth in the morning I thought to myself “hey, was this baking soda tooth paste”, because it had that sort of aftertaste. It was not, just normal minty stuff, but this also the last little whisper of the Pine Mouth distastefulness. I was, after this, free at last!

So it lasted a bit more than 8 days for me, which seems to be right around the average, but the big questions remain – what the heck is this, how does it work? Of course, I can’t answer everything, but I can say that scraping your tongue, eating things like parsley, etc have no impact on this. It’s something inside (or chemically bonded) to your taste buds which causes this. And, I think this is the key to the one to two week duration – the life span to a taste bud is about two weeks. So, I, hypothesize that some chemical in these pine nuts from China or Korea or etc, binds with the taste receptors in some taste buds, and then over the course of 36 or 48 hours, metabolizes into some other chemical that blocks all taste except bitter, and perhaps even generates this taste. Now, as these afflicted taste buds die off over the next two weeks, your taste gradually returns to normal.

That’s my story with Pine Mouth. I’m going to be hesitant to eat pine nuts sourced from Asia again, but I’m not going to completely avoid them. It’s entirely possible I will never face this again (and I hope so), but at least I’ll know what it is next time. Have you ever had pine mouth? What was your experience like? Let me know!

I think I should explain the origin of the name Regibarto, which you may or may not have seen me reference before. Probably not, but it’s worth explaining anyway. My sister-in-law (my brother’s wife), is pregnant, and due any day a few days ago. However, my future nephew is not here yet, so I still can and do refer to him as Regibarto.

“Why Regibarto?” you may ask.

The answer is that I am a cad.

Earlier this year (March or April), my parents were visiting me from Chicago. One afternoon, when we were killing some time at my apartment before dinner, my mom asked me if I had talked to my brother recently about possible names for her upcoming grandson. Now, I had spoken to my brother, but he just said the same thing he had told me before, that they didn’t have a name yet, and I took that as a good answer. But my mom, she would have nothing of this, because I think at the time she wasn’t very happy with the names being bantered about. They were mostly gaelic names, such as Finbar and Brom. Names which my mother was not too pleased.

Anyway, knowing this fact, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to create a name of such immense humor and power that any other name would seem normal. This name, I decided, somehow, was Regibarto. And so I told my mother that I knew of a non Gaelic name they were considering, and that it was on my brother and sister-in-law’s short list. Of course, being me, I could not do this with a straight face, so I was giggling sitting next to my mother on the couch. But somehow, she believed me enough to call my brother up on the spot and try to confirm this insanity! Unfortunately, my brother wasn’t in the proper game playing mood, so he denied that he had ever heard the name Regibarto.

This might have been the end of the name, if it weren’t as awesome as it is. But to this day, my mother has been using it to refer to the still unborn nephew. And, I have to say, even once he is named by his parents, the poor kid is going to have to deal with a crazy uncle who refers to him as Regibarto from time to time!