It's sopping wet outdoors...

It's sopping wet outdoors...  Temperatures are in the 40s, and it's been drizzling all night.  According to our 10-day forecast, we have very little chance of more snow.  Much of our snow cover is gone or turned into translucent slush.  With any luck at all, there will be enough sunshine today to get rid of even that.  Thankfully I have very little that I must do outside today.  I need to take the garbage to the curb, and that's about it.  That's doubly nice, as I've been feeling a bit under the weather the past couple of days – feels like some sort of a cold.  I have a fever, so I'm operating with a less-than-normal number of functioning brain cells.

My new office heating system (the fan that circulates air from my heated first first floor) is working like a charm.  Each morning when I come over to my office, the temperature is right at 64°F, no matter what it is outside.  My preferred working temperature is about 10°F above that, so I am now developing the habit of lighting off a fire in my little woodstove first thing every morning.  The photo at right shows my usual morning “stack”, just after I set the match to it.  The kindling you see is remains of western cedar lumber that I trimmed when installing the ceiling on our deck last fall.  That stuff burns with a match put to it, even the thicker pieces of it (roughly 1/2" square cross-section).  You can see the sawn logs, the result of another morning “ritual”: grabbing two softwood logs from my pile and sawing them up for the day's fuel.  I sawed those logs in the photo about three minutes prior to starting the fire.  In about 30 minutes, my office will be a toast 75°F or so – just right!

Another morning habit, one of long standing, is to take a gander at the major stock market indices, especially the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ-100.  Until the past year or so, when those indices moved in the morning, I had at least a rough idea why, and I understood the logic.  I could usually predict when such movement was likely to be short-lived or long-lived.  Those days are completely gone.  There's so much thrashing on topics of economic importance in the news that I can't possibly keep up with it all.  One of Trump's tweets can move the markets by several percentage points, and damn near on a daily basis.  If you apply, say, a 30 day running average, things look more predictable – but really, no more understandable to me.  I'm delighted that the market is moving positive at a dizzying pace, but I can't claim to have any real understanding of why it is.  The pundits all merrily pontificate, but their track record is so bad that I try very hard to ignore them.  I'm sure the party will end one of these fine days, but I couldn't tell you if that will be later this morning, or in 2054...

Cotyledon tomentosa...

Cotyledon tomentosa...  From BPotD, of course!  As usual, click on the photo to embiggen it. 

In the mid-'90s, my work took me to South Africa for a couple of days.  I didn't have time to do much while I was there, but I did get to take a day hike through the wilderness there.  I saw these or their close relatives (slightly more orange than the photo), growing in profusion on a rock pile that didn't look like it would support a lichen...

Beethoven's piano music...

Beethoven's piano music ... is great music to program by!  Listening to his Appassionata (piano sonata #23) now...

Back in the bad old days before I retired, I worked for a long time in one of the “open” environments.  I often listened to music while working there, usually with headphones.  But early in the day, when I was the only one there, I'd turn on my speakers.  Occasionally someone would wander in while I had them on, and I often got funny looks and comments from people overhearing it.  Once, though - just once! - a fellow early worker (a woman from our technical writing group) came over just to hear what I was playing.  That morning it happened to be Mozart's Requiem, a piece she wasn't familiar with, and she loved it! 

I suspect this is more a reflection of the fact that my co-workers were mostly in their 20s and early 30s, and more into hip-hop and rap than classical music.  Hopefully they will develop a taste for it as they get older, as I did...

Plowing, shoveling, and salting, oh my!

Plowing, shoveling, and salting, oh my!  And a bit more, too...

Friday night until early Saturday morning, we had a dose (about 2") of wet, gloppy snow – and a thin layer of “black ice” all over our driveway.  Saturday morning when I plowed it was quite entertaining – my tractor slipped and slid all over the place.  Steering was a major challenge, and utterly depending on the fact that my tractor has four wheel drive.  If those front tires weren't scrambling and scratching to turn the tractor, I don't think I could have turned it at all!  Whenever I put the blade down, if I had more than a few pounds of pressure on it the tractor would simply stop, all four wheels spinning like mad.  If more than a few inches of snow built up in front of the blade, the tractor would also come to a halt, again with wheels spinning.  To get the snow off the driveway, I had to use inertia: I got a running start behind a snow pile, slammed into it, moved a few feet before the wheels started spinning, then backed up and did it all over again.  Tedious, that was!  But getting the snow off meant that the sunshine later in the day would melt the ice, which it did on the roughly half of our driveway that isn't shaded in the winter.  The remainder is still ice-covered...

Yesterday evening we drove over to our northern neighbors (Tim and Jeannie D.) for a visit.  Tim has been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer (there's a particular type, but I've forgotten what it's called), for which he had surgery last month and is now undergoing intensive (daily) radiation treatments.  Jeannie recently (also last month) had a serious case of pneumonia that required surgical intervention, something I'd never even heard of before.  From that description, you might think theirs would be a gloomy household – and you'd be very wrong.  We had a jolly time with them last night.  Debbie brought over some freshly baked lemon ricotta cookies (yummy, they are!), and we spent a happy hour or so in conversation with Tim and Jeannie, their three dogs, and their regal (and very fluffy) cat.  Jeannie, to all appearances, has completely recovered.  Tim is optimistic about his chances, but also ready for the bad news that he knows is always possible.  There's no doubt that his devout religion helps him with this, but no matter what the reason his acceptance and optimism are inspiring.  If such bad news ever befalls myself or Debbie, I hope we can handle it with such equanimity.

Earlier yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I finished watching (for the umpteenth time) one of our favorite series: the 1995 BBC production of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. If you know me, then you know I'm not much of a movie fan.  There are relatively few movies I can even sit through, and even fewer that don't regret spending the time on.  The list of movies (or shows) that I can stand to watch repeatedly is very short indeed.  This one is near the top of that list.  I love reading Jane Austen's novels; most of them five or six times over now.  Everything about this series is top-notch: it's reasonably faithful to the novel (though of course, of necessity, leaving much out).  The casting is superb.  The acting is uniformly good, and the leads are magnificent.  The costumes and sets are wonderful.  Even the music is beautifully done, quite unusual for a TV series.  If you've never seen this production, carve out a few hours and do so.  It's divided into six episodes, each roughly an hour long.  We watched two episodes a night for three nights...

Sisyphus table progress...

Sisyphus table progress...  I managed to get a bit of time in yesterday on the Sisyphus table.  My latest pattern creation is at right.  That pattern is made entirely of straight lines.

I've learned a lot about how to draw on this table, so now I'm tossing out all the “experimental” code I've written, and starting over in a way that will let me (easily, I hope) make new patterns.  I'm open-sourcing this project under a permissive license, which means that anyone else will be able to use it as well.

A reader emailed me to find out where I got it – it was made by Sisyphus Industries, but they're not selling them yet.  I got it through the Kickstarter project that started the ball rolling (literally!) for them.  I believe they're still manufacturing all the orders they got through the Kickstarter, and then after that they'll be taking new orders.

Splitting logs the easy way...

Splitting logs the easy way...  My office (out in my barn) is kept at 65 degrees by a blower that circulates air from the heated first floor.  If I want it to be warmer (and I do!), I start a fire in my little wood stove.  That stove is really small – perfect for my little office – but there is a drawback: it needs really small little logs, no longer than 16", and ideally under 5" diameter.

For quite a while this made no difference to me.  We have two large stacks of firewood, one of hardwood and one of softwood.  Until this week, I'd been picking the smaller pieces out of those stacks and making out just fine.  I was helped in this process by the fact that my little wood stove doesn't consume very much wood – just three or four logs will last all day long.  But earlier this week, I ran out of the little logs.  Yikes!

My first thought was to take the old-fashioned approach: shorten the logs with a chainsaw, then break out either the axe or the hydraulic log-splitter (I have an attachment for my tractor).  Both of those are more work than I really wanted to put into it, but I like being warm ... so a few days ago I was ready to go to it.

And then I had a brainstorm.

I have a bandsaw with an 18" throat.  That means I could cut up any log under 18" in diameter – that would be all but a very few of the logs I have.  So I tried it – and it worked amazingly well!  In no time at all, with very little work, I had a nice pile of logs perfectly sized for my little stove.

My bandsaw is my new best friend!  :)

Eagles and mooses and elks and deer, oh my!

Eagles and mooses and elks and deer, oh my!  Debbie and I took a sunrise jaunt up Blacksmith Fork Canyon this morning, hoping that it wouldn't be crowded, and that we'd see some wildlife.  We won on both counts! :)  We were nearly all the way to Hardware Ranch before we saw the first car, and we had some terrific wildlife viewing.

First up was the moose: a young bull, sans antlers (they shed them each winter) but we could see the scars.  He was on a little ridge about 75 yards from our car, browsing on some tasty willow, and he paid us no mind at all.  That's the first moose of the season for us, and started our trip off right.  Debbie spotted this guy through a large juniper.  Sometimes I think she has some form of ESP – I couldn't pick it out even with her help until we moved the car so we could see it from another angle.  Debbie spotted it while the car was moving, looking backwards.  I have no idea how she does this!  She probably thinks the same thing about me with birds and flowers – I usually spot those long before she does.  We make a good team! :)

Then on the way to Hardware Ranch we saw several deer, mostly high above us on the sunlit southern slopes where the snow had melted and the sun was warming them up.  When we got to Hardware Ranch itself, there were (as expected) a bazillion elk in the enclosure – but not a single other person.  We had the place completely to ourselves, as opposed to the scene this weekend where there were a hundred or so carloads of people waiting to get horse-drawn wagon rides out to see the elk.

The capper, though, was a great sighting of an almost two-year-old bald eagle.  We had five minutes or so of seeing him, both perched and in flight.  We know its age because of its coloring; the young ones have distinctive brown flecking in their not-quite-white head...

This and that...

This and that...  We've had a very pleasant few days, a bit quieter after the Christmas season that was so busy around here.  The moon this morning was awesomely bright in a totally clear sky – so bright that I was able to take a photo by moonlight on my iPhone (at right, unretouched - click to embiggen it, and you may have to turn your screen's brightness up).

Yesterday Debbie and I went up to Angie's to get our late breakfast.  Debbie had country fried steak and eggs, and I had the special: a 16 ounce ham steak and eggs, with hash browns and rye toast.  Debbie ate nearly all of hers, but I just barely got through half of that enormous (and delicious!) ham steak.  The two girls who served us were both friendly and helpful, a pattern there that is part of the reason we like the place so much.

I've mostly been working on bills and catching up with our health insurance (both of us were forced into new plans this year because of insurance products being dropped, because they lost a lot of money in the Obamacare exchanges).  I have over 300 pages of insurance-related paper that I'm plowing through, trying to figure out what is what, and (especially) what I have to do or pay in order to maintain our insurance.  It's absolutely crazy how complex this is; it's getting to the point where it rivals income tax in complexity - only I have no software to help me with that, as I do with my income tax.  I'm a bit tired of this insurance crapola ... and I'm damned tired of paying the absurd premiums that we do in return for the even more absurdly limited benefits...

In between rounds of attack on the paperwork I've been playing with my Sisyphus table.  At right is a photo of the latest thing I managed to get working: an actual pattern.  That particular pattern is made entirely of straight lines, and the straight lines were the hard part.  The way the table moves the ball isn't what I had expected, and not like any other device I've ever run into.  That doesn't mean it's bad, just that it was surprising to me how it works.  Just for an example, suppose the ball starts out at the top dead center: that's zero degrees, distance of one.  Further suppose that you tell it to move to 90 degrees, distance of 0.5 (that would be to the right of center, halfway to the edge.  It doesn't move the ball in a straight line to get there.  Instead, it moves both the distance and the angle at a steady rate until it reaches the target location.  That produces a segment of a spiral, which is rarely what you actually want - and it certainly isn't a straight line!  To make it move in what appears to be a straight line, I have to send lots of commands to make small movements.  One apparent straight line might be made up of 20 or 30 much smaller movements, each of which is actually a spiral segment, but which is so short it appears to be straight.  That pattern displayed above required 4,854 small movements in order to make it look like I drew it using a bunch of straight lines.  Next I'm going to see if I can make it do arbitrary Bezier curves.  That will be a tad more difficult, I suspect... :)

A beautiful sunset...

A beautiful sunset...  Debbie and I took a drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon last night just before sunset.  We'd been wanting to go for several days, but there was an avalanche watch posted so we refrained.  Anyway, last night we got to Hardware Ranch not long after sunset, and were treated to the view at right.  I took that photo from the high end of the visitor's center parking lot, right where the road enters it.  Glorious, it was!

We also saw several large groups of does and yearlings, plus one doe with two yearlings, all near the road.  We didn't need our binoculars at all!  And of course the entire herd of elk is now in the enclosure at Hardware Ranch.  We didn't see any moose, though.

We love living here...

Genius!

Genius!  If you live in an area with freezing temperatures, chances are that you find yourself spreading salt on icy walkways.  If so, then you need this product!  It makes it trivially easy to spread trhe salt in any density you want – far better than using a scoop or your hands.  It's basically a giant salt-shaker, with holes just the right size for the salt sold as de-icer.  The handle on it fits perfectly even if you're wearing thick mittens.  It holds plenty of salt for all our walkways.  Best of all, it's under $7!

iMac Pro update...

iMac Pro update...  It took me a while, because I screwed up a couple times, but I now have successfully moved my entire working environment over to my new iMac Pro.  I'm using it exclusively when working at my desk (on bills, at the moment).  What's it like?  The short answer: fast!

The only compute-intensive thing I've tried so far is OCR on scanned documents, and (quite predictably) that's very fast indeed, especially when there multiple documents queued up.  But other things are also notably zippy.  For instance, Firefox with 60 or so tabs isn't noticeably slowed down at all.  I'm sure that's basically because of the insane amount of RAM in this machine.  At the moment I'm running with 16 GB of RAM used (out of 128 GB).  The OS isn't even thinking about swapping :)  That's something I do every day (the tons of tabs), and that zippiness is most welcome.

Just playing around, I've loaded up both Chrome and Firefox (simultaneously) with 100 tabs.  Both of them are just as fast as they are with a single tab.  Woo hoo!  My development tools (Jetbrains' suite) have lost any noticeable lag in anything I tried (on the laptop quite a few things have noticeable lags).

Nothing I've done so far has caused the CPU to even break a sweat.  The CPU consumption graph looks like a flat line at zero.  I haven't heard any fans in the iMac, though I know they're present – I'm actually not sure whether they're just really quiet, or I haven't worked the machine hard enough for the fan to be required.  I haven't done anything that's working the GPU hard, either.

The three screens are magnificent to have available.  I'm experimenting with layouts.  Right at the moment I've tiled my right-hand screen with email, messaging, and iTunes; three things I'm constantly using.  My left-hand and center screens are for my work - plenty of screen real estate for anything I do.

My this is nice!

Nikola NZT...

Nikola NZT...  We plunked down a deposit on one of these when we first heard about them, roughly a year ago.  Originally delivery was estimated for early 2018, but that's been pushed out a year.  We're not too fussed by this, however, because this thing looks fantastic for the kinds of things we do in the boonies.  The company just released the marketing video at right, showing off what appears to be the same model (of ATV, not girl) that we ordered.

We're really looking forward to being able to tool around quietly in the remote areas we like to get to – even places with what could only barely be called a road.  We've looked at gas-powered ATVs sporadically for years, and we've always been turned off by the noise and smell.  It will also be interesting to be able to tow the Nikola NZT behind our Tesla Model X, getting us to the areas we want to explore in some comfort and style, while still being able to explore the boonies in the NZT.  Woo hoo!  We're definitely going to have to get a trailer to hold both a generator (for recharging both vehicles) and the NZT.  With that rig, we can go anywhere we want to...

A most pleasant surprise...

A most pleasant surprise...  In yesterday afternoon's UPS delivery, there was a giant, odd-shaped box from Apple: my new iMac Pro, two days early.  Furthermore – unusually for an Apple product, and especially for an expensive one like this – there was no signature required.  Yay!  This morning I unboxed it, which, as always with Apple's products, was a memorable experience all by itself.  The box engineering is superb.  The iMac Pro was swaddled in clear plastic, then wrapped in a cloth-like cover.  That went into a fitted inner box made of formed paper.  The formed paper inner box went into a display box of ordinary cardboard, but very well made with a glossy printed paper outer cover.  That went into an outer box whose insides were covered with shock-absorbing foam.  No tools were required to unpack it; there were little pull tabs that allowed the whole thing to be opened very easily.

Once I had the iMac Pro out of its cocoon, I set it up on a table and lit it off.  As always with an Apple computer, it was ridiculously easy to set up.  I was led by the nose through a series of “do this” screens that got the keyboard and mouse (both Bluetooth) connected and a WiFi connection established.  At that point it slid into the “Migration Assistant”, as I had indicated that I wanted to transfer my stuff from another computer (my Macbook Pro laptop that has been my main computer for ten years now).  Again I was led by the nose through running Migration Assistant on my laptop, getting the Migration Assistant on the laptop talking to the one on the new iMac Pro, then starting the process of moving my stuff over.  At this point I have just over 500 gigabytes of stuff on my laptop, and it's moving over WiFi, so it's going to take something like 7 or 8 hours to do the job.  But – it's completely hands-off for me, and I know from past experiences that when it has finished my new iMac Pro will reboot into an environment that looks exactly like what I've been using on my laptop. 

It's been ten years since I last had my working environment on a workstation-class machine, and of course these machines have become far more powerful over those years.  I can hardly wait to see what it's like to work on this!  My new iMac Pro is quite a machine, with ten 3 GHz cores, 128 GB of ECC RAM, 4 TB of SSD, and a hot Radeon GPU with 16 GB of RAM for itself.   The iMac Pro has a built-in 27" screen, of course, and I'll be using my additional 27" screens as add-ons to it – so I'll have three full-sized screens to work on.  That will be so nice when I'm programming!

This afternoon I'll get to try it out...

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Merry Christmas, everyone!  We've had a lovely few days, filled with friends, a relative, and a painful amount of delicious food.  I was very surprised that I could still squeeze into my pants this morning!  That's my brother Scott at right, as he was yesterday afternoon.  He's having a “snack” – a roughly one pound chicken salad sandwich Debbie made for 2:30pm, so he didn't starve before his dinner at 6 pm.  He also had a half cup or so of a (very rich) chocolate mousse. We played Mexican Train with him for a couple hours, then he took off for an evening with his friends in Newton, including a home-cooked meal with their family.

We've had a string of visitors the past couple days, including by a local family we've become very good friends with.  The matriarch of the family is Michelle, the woman in the yellow shirt to the left.  We see her several times every week, and talk or text nearly every day.  The young woman in the middle is Lizzy, Michelle's daughter and the mother of Michelle's first grandchild, Lily, being held by her dad (McKord) in the back row.  We see Lizzy and Lily often, as they're frequently with Michelle and live nearby (in Hyrum).  The young boy at front left is A.J.; he loves our dogs and now has one of his own (a year old border collie).  The rest of that crew is Michelle's husband Kevin (at right) and her other five kids, plus one daughter-in-law.  They have a quirky family tradition that's lots of fun: Michelle makes matching pajamas every year for the whole clan, and they wear them all day on Christmas Eve.  This was much easier when the clan was just her, Kevin, and one or two babies – it's a tad more challenging now! 

I don't think that families like their realize quite how much they mean to Debbie and I.  We just showed up in their midst less than four years ago, two weird, non-Mormon people from a place (California) most people here see (accurately, I have to say) as a den of iniquity and progressive stupidity.  Instead of burying us on the back 40 (as any sensible community would have done), they welcomed us and made us part of their community.  The same thing is happening with my brother Scott, 20 miles away in Newton, with an entirely different but equally welcoming community.

We love this place!

“Are you dead?”

“Are you dead?”   That's what Tim, our friend and neighbor, asked me when he called last night.  What prompted that?  Well, it seems he drove by our place yesterday evening and noticed that I had not plowed the 2" or so of fresh snow that had fallen the previous night.  It seems, I discovered, that I have a reputation in the area for being the first guy to plow his driveway.  I never thought of it that way before, but it's true that usually I try to get the snow off my driveway as quickly as possible.  My main motivation for that is to prevent it from melting and turning into a sheet of ice.  Yesterday, however, I was so busy with our big meal that I decided just to let it go.

Tim was relieved to hear my voice. :)

Yesterday we had a whole lot of visitors, plus the UPS man.  I'm going to guess that 10 or 11 cars traversed our driveway, when the temperatures were around 30°F (about -1°C).  That had the effect of crushing and melting a lot of snow on our driveway.  This morning the temperature is 3°F (about -17°C), and all that crushed snow has frozen into what might as well be granite.  I just got back in from (belatedly) plowing, all bundled up and with warmers for my hands and feet, and it was a very different experience from the usual.  Mostly what I accomplished was to knock off any bits of ice that were standing up.  The sheet of ice covering my driveway was basically unaffected by the snowplow.  Furthermore, driving the tractor (which is 4WD) on the ice was an exercise in probabilistic steering: when I turned the wheel, the tractor might change direction as intended.  Or it might just keep going straight.  Or it might go sideways.  Or it might turn in circles.  Interesting, it was.

Now I'm back inside with a nice, hot cup of tea.  Shortly I venture forth again to shovel the sidewalk, then salt it, then feed the birds...

Chili, snowy dogs, and bearded brothers...

Chili, snowy dogs, and bearded brothers...  A few days ago, Debbie made a gigantic pot of chili, filling our 25 quart pan to within a few inches of its top.  It's a great batch: meaty, tomatoey, and not too spicy hot for my taste.  After it cooled down, and after we made two meals of it, the leftovers got vacuum-bagged.  This is what it looked like when we finished bagging.  That's a lot of chili!  If you're wondering what the “RTE” means, it's “ready to eat”, meaning no meat needs to be added (though Debbie may want to put more meat in anyway – my girl loves meat!).

A few days ago we let the dogs out into the back yard while it was still snowing heavily.  They went out and played in it without a care, of course.  I took the photos below when they came up on our deck to see me.  Note that many of them are blurred from motion: getting them to stand still was basically impossible!

That's my brother Scott at right.  I got a photo of him when he was (I think) unaware of it, concentrating on his game of Mexican Train in our kitchen.  Debbie is beating the crap out of us, of course.  We'll be finishing this game later today,  and I'm sure in the end Debbie will be victorious again.  She's running about 9::1 wins against me.  We had our big dinner yesterday mainly because the lobsters arrived on Friday.  We'd originally planned to have Scott here for Christmas Day (and his birthday) as well, but his new friends and neighbors near Newton had other plans for him.  He's been invited to spend Christmas Day with a family nearby him, people he's become friends with over the past year or so.  Today he's going caroling with a local group in the morning, and he's got some other activities this evening.  He'll be with us for a few hours this afternoon, for chocolate mousse and to finish letting Debbie whip our butts.  It's wonderful that he's finding so many caring and accepting people near him – he's got a support network already!

We got surprised yesterday ourselves by what seemed like a non-stop series of visits from friends and neighbors.  These ranged from people we see often to one couple we hadn't seen in two years!  What a delight it was to see all these people, unexpectedly!  Many of them brought gifts, too, we caught us completely by surprise.  It's plain these people know us well, as our gifts all fell into two categories: things for the animals, or food for us. :)  Our birds are getting two presents this morning: a beautiful new feeder for black oil sunflower seeds, and some “pears” made out of seeds glued together with a suet/honey mixture that was somehow solidified (not sure how they managed that!).

We love living here, in the postcard that is Cache Valley...

Ah, what a dinner!

Ah, what a dinner!  Debbie and I started cooking around 9 am yesterday morning, and (along with my brother Scott) we sat down to eat at around 2 pm.  The menu had only three items: lobster l'americaine, peas, and creme brulee.  We'd made the creme brulee the day before, which meant it was in the refrigerator and nicely cold by yesterday.  Nearly all the cookery yesterday revolved around that lobster l'americaine: Julia Child's recipe, which we've made twice before with excellent results.

The first step was to boil those three lovely lobsters (photo at right).  We have a gigantic (25 quart) cauldron that Debbie uses for soup and chili; this made a fine boiling pot for our three ocean-going bugs.  Debbie had to leave the kitchen for this part; she's quite squeamish about executing lobsters for culinary purposes.  Generally her squeamishness is directly proportional to the cuteness of the animal involved, but that surely cannot explain her reluctance to off a lobster!  So that was entirely my job. :)  As usual, the lobster's claws were held shut with thick rubber bands.  I'd always removed them in the past, but it occurred to me that I didn't know if I actually needed to risk having a lobster pinch me (they can get you pretty good!).  So, being 2017, I googled it – and discovered that there is quite the debate about this on the intertubes.  One fellow waxed eloquent on how removing the rubber bands connected him with the lobster.  That article didn't help me at all.  Another, from a famous restaurant, revealed their dirty secret: they'd been boiling lobsters with rubber bands for years, and nobody ever noticed any odd flavor.  Another cook said she couldn't detect any rubber band flavor either, but that she just couldn't abide the thought of boiling lobsters with rubber.  I decided she had the right idea, and removed the rubber bands once more.  I escaped with all my fingers, despite the best efforts of the biggest one of the three.

The next step was the most challenging one: disassembling the boiled lobsters into their essential four parts.  Actually, this was less challenging than it was tedious.  It involved some muscles, though, and a few tools (tools - yay!).  The basic idea was to extract the four key components of the lobster for the purposes of lobster l'americaine: the meat, the shell, the coral (roe), and the tomalley.  If you've ever eaten a lobster, you know there's not much left after extracting those four elements: just the “guts”, which we discarded.  Some people use them in the lobster l'americaine sauce, too, but some of the intestinal tract is quite bitter and I prefer the milder flavor without it.  At left you can see the “parts” of our three lobsters after two hours of disassembly.  Starting with the big red bowl and going clockwise: the shells, chopped or torn into small pieces, the coral (roe) from the two female lobsters we had, the tomalley, and the meat.

The next step was very much like making soup stock from a chicken or turkey skeleton.  In our biggest frying pan I sauteed the shell fragments along with some celery, onions, and carrots.  After that I poured some cognac on the shells, and set it on fire.  Julia Child specifies this in her recipe without explanation; I'm not sure what that adds to the end result – but the end result is so good that I'm disinclined to mess with the recipe!  Then I simmered that mixture along with some vermouth, tomatoes and herbs.  The kitchen smelled wonderful during that process!  The frying pan didn't look very tasty, though, with all those shell fragments in there.  After about 45 minutes, we ran all the stuff in that pan through a fine-meshed strainer, squeezing out every drop of the juices that we could  What remained was an almost-clear broth that absolutely reeked of lobster.  We thickened it per Julia's recipe, with butter and flour paste, and colored and flavored it with some tomato paste.

After that, the rest of the recipe was really easy.  We sauteed the lobster meat in butter (a little bit of it accidentally fell into my mouth at that point), added the sauce, the coral, and the tomalley, got it nice and hot, then ladled it over some freshly cooked white rice.  We ate it immediately, and I forgot to take a photo of it.  Fortunately my brother Scott went back for seconds, and I got a photo of his round two.  The green herbs are a mixture of parsley and tarragon, and the white is grated Parmesan.

That was one heavenly main course.

For dessert we waited a couple of hours, then had the creme brulee that we'd made the day before.  We put some brown sugar on top, popped them in the broiler to caramelize the sugar, then sat down to eat them.  The custard was still cold while the sugar was hot, just as it should be.  This creme brulee recipe is one we got years ago from the Gastrognome restaurant in Idyllwild, California.   We'd had their creme brulee for dessert and loved it, and to our surprise they happily shared the recipe with us.  It's still the best we've ever had, even in my travels to Europe.

The lobsters have arrived!

The lobsters have arrived!  Three beautiful, live 2 1/2 pounders from Young's Lobster Pound in Belfast, Maine.  Our Christmas feast (which is actually happening tomorrow) menu: lobster a l'americaine over white rice, scalded fresh green beans, and creme brulee.  You should all be envious!  :)

A bit of this and that...

A bit of this and that...  I took the photo at right (click on it to embiggen) last night, standing on our deck and looking northeast, after the sun had set on the valley but while it was still playing on the Wasatch Mountains to our east.  As we like to say: we live in a postcard...

I've spent a few days basically sitting at the kitchen table.  At first that was because I was feeding the Plex monster (copying BluRays, DVDs, and music CDs).  Later it was because I didn't feel much like doing anything at all, and feeding the Plex monster was about as challenging as I cared to get.  This morning I'm feeling much better, and I wandered out to my office to wrap Debbie's presents and catch up on things a bit.

As I walked into my office, the Sisyphus table was churning away.  I took the photo at left a few days ago, but it was finishing up the same pattern when I walked in this morning.  And speaking of Sisyphus...  The Sisyphus app lets you upload vector graphics (.SVG) files to make your own patterns.  I couldn't make it work with any hand-crafted files, though, and I couldn't figure out why.  I asked the Sisyphus folks for some help, but it turns out this is a feature they haven't explored much themselves!  They couldn't even give me a sample file, and it turns out they use a completely different mechanism to make pattern files themselves.  After a few emails back and forth, their tech Micah felt sorry for me, and made some test files with Adobe Illustrator (which I don't have) and emailed them to me.  They worked!  With an example in front of me, I was able to make my own file that also worked.  And that means I can write software to make arbitrary files to print whatever pattern I want to.  This is gonna be fun!

We had snow a few days ago, and again yesterday (I had to go out and plow for the second time this year).  That put the kibosh on any more rock work getting done.  The good news, though, is that they're largely finished with the rock work.  All three walkways are complete, and all the retaining walls are in place.  All that remains, so far as I know, is gluing the top few runs of rock on the retaining walls, and backfilling the dirt-facing side.  Some photos of the rock work below.  You wouldn't know it from the photos, but the rock is actually quite colorful and full of sparkly material.  At the moment it's all covered with frozen mud and rock dust, so it will probably be spring before we can pressure-wash it and get the nice stuff showing again.  The rock is heavy and non-porous, with the general look and feel of amorphous quartz with colored impurities.  It's the perfect sort of rock for a walkway that will suffer the abuse of grinding boots and winter salts...

A bit under the weather, am I...

A bit under the weather, am I...  Yesterday I felt kind of blech all day long, and unfortunately I'm not feeling any better this morning.  Despite the blechs, we managed to get some errands done (mainly grocery shopping) and mostly I spent the day at the kitchen table loading content into our new Plex server.  That was a nice, easy job that felt within my limited capabilities for the day. :)

Below is a sample page (click to embiggen) from our new Plex server, with the movie Casablanca.  We can now see this on every device we own: Macbooks, iMacs, iPads, and iPhones.  We can see it anywhere our WiFi reaches, which includes the entire house, barn, and about three acres of our yard.  I've got movies, TV shows (like Pride and Prejudice), music, and (soon) videos and photos.  All of this content is being backed up into the cloud, using my favorite service (Backblaze).  If I choose to, I can make this Plex server available to the Internet, which means we could access all of it even when on the road.  It's very easy to operate if you want to browse and watch (or listen to) any of the content.  Putting the content up there isn't terribly difficult, but it does help if you have a bit of technical knowledge, are comfortable using a variety of ripping software, and understand file system organization.  Setting up the server in the first place is likewise not terrifyingly hard, but does require a bit of ability with program installation, configuration, and even router configuration.

One very pleasant surprise for me is the quality of the user interface.  It's superb, which is all the more remarkable because this program is free open source software.  Well-crafted, polished user interfaces like this take an amazing amount of work to get right.  They are generally the kind of thing only funded by large companies.  Plex is built entirely by unpaid volunteers, and in this case, some darned good ones!