January 2004 Archives

Kathy mentioned the other day that we bought our tickets for next baseball season. We decided that full season tickets would probably be too much for us, so we chose to go with the "16 game plan." Last weekend was the Mariners Fanfest, a big shindig at Safeco field. Henry got to run around the bases, we toured the Mariners' clubhouse, saw the control room for the retractable roof, heard some players and coaches speak, and had some stadium food. We weren't sure beforehand, but it turns out hot dogs taste better at the ball park even without a game to watch. Best of all, though, we got to go sit in our seats.

They're great: row 28 on the field level, first-base side. We'll be close to Ichiro (Henry's favorite Mariner) and just steps from a view of the train tracks. They're also in prime foul ball territory. We can hardly wait. Just 70 days until opening day!

I've got nothing. There's stuff going on, but what to write, I don't know. Henry's got soccer class, music class, and preschool, plus the daily challenge of handling the frustrations that come along with being three: having a plan in mind for a huge cityscape (complete with monorail) and not being able to build it without help; wondering if having a dream about flying alone on the Concorde while mom chases after it but can't catch it means that this sort of thing can truly happen in waking life; getting angry at Mom and Dad. (How can you be angry with people who love you and care for you? Is that okay? How does it work? Do you throw stuff at them? Hit them? Scream? Run away?)

Baseball season approaches. I know it's only January, but spring training is just around the corner (26 days until pitchers and catchers report), and we're goin'! Sunny Arizona. We got our seats for the season the other day, pretty good ones along the first base line, out towards right field. Good foul ball catching territory. Not too far to view the trains. It's weird to suddenly find myself caring about all this stuff. I'm looking forward to hearing Henry sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch.

Brad's bread is great. He baked some honey oatmeal sandwich loaf last week, which was good (especially toasted with peanut butter) and just today made a whole wheat sandwich bread that is one of the best I've had. Really. Delicious.

Henry, parenting, baseball, bread... what else? We had a little sleet this morning. Most of our plants are surviving the winter. I cooked dinner earlier, broiled chicken breasts with a honey-cumin sauce, butternut squash with a hint of nutmeg, couscous. It was pretty good. (Sounds mundane, but I almost never cook! Brad's the cook... I'm the clean-up crew.) Working out at the gym. Listening to Styx's "Mr. Roboto." Brad will have to tell you about GarageBand, though I can vouch for its total coolness. Devolving into list form. Just a bunch of stuff happening. No analysis.

Today Macintosh turns 20. On January 24, 1984, the world saw "why 1984 won't be like 1984." I was already hopelessly addicted to computers by then. My family didn't own one (despite my impassioned pleas), but I spent many after-school hours in my high school's brand new computer lab, a veritable playground packed with Apple IIe's. In January, I had just finished the "advanced" computer course "Computer Programming for Problem Solving" and was pretty proficient with Apple Basic and Apple's version of UCSD Pascal (thanks Mr. Balliet!). I had heard about Macintosh (maybe even saw the ad on the Super Bowl) and thought it sounded pretty cool.

I've always been intimidated by bread. Well, no. I've always been intimidated by the task of baking bread; bread itself I can handle. Oh, sure, I've made my share of quick breads. Our kitchen would be overrun with rotting bananas if not for the easy miracle of banana bread. But real yeast breads are another story. The closest I've come with much success is pizza dough and even then I've been dissatisfied with the results. Yeast are such mysterious little critters.

So it's in this state of mind that I found myself browsing a great cookbook I gave Kathy for Christmas: The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion. It's the sort of cookbooks that makes you want to try every recipe. The next day, I watched an episode of America's Test Kitchen on which they made a beautiful loaf of rustic country bread. That was that: I had to bake some bread.

I started out last weekend with the country bread. The crust was way too hard, even for a hearth bread, but the bread inside was great: hearty, yeasty, soft & chewy. Spurred on my my semi-success, mid-week I made ciabatta using a recipe in the King Arthur book. Another success! Not perfect, but I've had much worse. Then yesterday, I made the plain white bread from the cookbook. Perfection. I'm sure I'll settle down to an occasional loaf, but for now I'm on a tear. I'm really hooked. Next up will be an oatmeal maple sandwich loaf. Yum.

The snow came just as predicted. When I went to bed at about 1:00, there wasn't a flake to be seen. By the time I got up at 7:45, a good 3 inches had fallen and it was coming down hard. True Mac geek that I am, I had planned to go down to the U Village Apple store to watch Steve Job's MacWorld Expo keynote. Despite the words of near terror of the local news people, we braved the storm and had no problem getting down there. Starbucks was even open!

I joined a hearty band of Mac folk to watch the keynote (biggest news: iPod mini and GarageBand) while Kathy and Henry wandered off to enjoy the snow and kill some time in U Village. By the time we left around 11:30, there was about 5 inches of snow on the ground and a few of the stores were starting to close.

We didn't have any difficulty getting home, but we did have to take a circuitous route to avoid cars stuck on each big hill. Seattle drivers aren't exactly the best in the snow. You think that being so close to the snowfall capital of the US would have some positive effect, but no.

After a little lunch, we went out to play...

The snow tapered off in the afternoon and the expected freezing rain didn't come until evening. I'd guess we had about 6 inches total here at our house. In Maine, we would shrug it off and go about our business, but here it's a Big Thing.

A few months ago, I built myself a new PC using a Shuttle XPC case and motherboard. It was an interesting experience. I've done a lot of upgrading and swapping of components, but never started from scratch. The whole thing went pretty well, with only a couple bumps. I had to fiddle with the BIOS settings to get Windows XP to recognize the serial ATA hard drive and I never could get Red Hat Linux to install. A little Googling revealed that I would have to compile my own kernel to get Linux to recognize the SATA drive. I decided to set Linux aside and live with XP for the time being.

They say we're supposed to get a bunch of snow tonight, maybe 4 inches, the most snow we've had in 8 years. Of course, by the end of the day, it's supposed to be raining and in the 40's, so we'll have flooding! Yay. How Seattle. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to play in the snow before it turns to slush. I think Henry really wants to build a snowman.

The last few days, we've had daytime temperatures in the 20s. When we lived in Maine, we'd have considered this normal winter weather. After over 8 years here, we consider it horribly frigid! (Of course, when we lived in Maine, I had a real winter coat, long underwear, a scarf, and so on. Now, I have a thin gore-tex shell. Works great when it's 42 and raining; not so great when it's 25 and windy.)

Actually, I like it, this visit from winter. We've actually seen the sun and blue sky for a few days. Henry and I caught snow flakes when we had a little snow shower a couple days ago. It's exciting to dream about a foot or more of snow; it could happen, you never know!

Kathy is trying to impose a midnight bedtime on me, too. It's not working out so well.

I've imposed a new 11 o'clock bedtime on myself. Each morning for the last month or so, I've felt (and sometimes acted) like a reluctantly awakened hibernating bear every morning when Henry wakes me up. (Lucky Brad just sleeps and sleeps, so Henry doesn't even try to get him up...) So, for Henry's sake, I'm trying to get more sleep. However, this really cuts into my catalog reading/web noodling/television time. How will I survive? (I'm mocking myself here.) Well, gotta go catch some z's.

Today we went to the Nordic Heritage Museum over in Ballard. Despite having heard good things about it, I had low expectations. "Nordic Heritage" is an interesting enough topic, but it just didn't seem to me to provide much material for a good museum. I'm happy to say I was wrong. The main exhibit area on the first floor traces an immigrant's journey from a farming village in Denmark, to Copenhagen, onto a ship across the Atlantic, through Ellis Island, and across the continent to Ballard. Each room is a full-size diorama, with additional photos, artifacts, and text on the walls. It doesn't exactly break new ground in museum design, but it was surprisingly effective.

It was an interesting contrast to the heavily promoted touring exhibit now at the Pacific Science Center. Henry and I saw SPACE: A Journey To Our Future the week before Christmas. This big-budget extravaganza costs adults $9.00 on top of the normal museum admission. As a member of the museum, I got in for $5.00 and still felt thoroughly cheated.

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions. I figure if you want to make a change, why wait until January? Nonetheless, I have a couple little ones this year: drink more tea and post to this weblog more often. Before I started drinking coffee a few years ago, I drank tea. Lots of tea. Recently, it's been unusual for me to have more than a cup or two a month and I miss it. So, more tea! I've just finished a cup of Kusmi Troika and it was a great start for 2004.

What's new, besides the year? Here, we had snow on the last day of 2003 and again on the first day of 2004. Henry made snow angels yesterday; he'd seen the characters on Oswald doing this and had to try it himself!

We took down the Christmas tree, a fine New Year's Day tradition. We've been enjoying Christmas gifts received, especially playing with Henry and his new toys.

We've been mulling over the future, the state of the world, and changes we want to make in our lives. (For me, the usual: spend more time with family and friends, travel more, lose weight, ride my bike.) I'll turn 36 this year, and somehow that seems more shocking than turning 35 was. I haven't lived enough in those 36 years. I've gotta do more.