Below is a screenshot of my outbox over the last week. Apparently I only want to talk about three things during the summer.
Basketball, drunken debauchery, and food. What else is there, really?
Took this in the garden today. The plant belongs to someone else, but I was pretty happy with the picture.
Also, it turns out this website is horrendously ugly. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?
While flipping through the referrals for my flickr images, I noticed that this picture of Settlers of Catan board had (relative to my other images) a lot of views. The reason, as best as I can tell, is that it was used as a stock image of Settlers in this guy’s adaptation of a game based on Iron Council, a book that 1) few enough people have read, and 2) I really enjoyed.
So that’s cool. Thanks for that, interwebs.
After approximately a year on the waiting list, we finally got a plot in our housing development’s community garden. Two weeks ago we cleared out a bunch of debris, laid down manure, and planted seeds. We planted basil, onions, potatoes, beets, lettuce, and a bunch of other things I forget. Then we laid down bricks to make nice walkways between the sections, and mulch in the unused areas.
Now we’re starting to get green things popping up, but at this point it’s hard to tell weeds from plants.
Ruth got an awesome new haircut. Happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’m slow about getting things off of our camera. Then Adrianne went and did this, and I was all, “Psssh. You think that’s a haircut? I got your haircut.”
Before:
After:
We’ve been short on day-to-day updates recently. Here are some pictures taken in the last couple of months, with some of the things we’ve been up to.
Ruth took a bread class, and has been baking a ton of delicious bread:
We’ve had lovely warm-but-not-hot weather … well, pretty much since we got here. But the last few weeks have been great grilling weather:
(That’s before. During picture here. The food didn’t last long enough after for a picture.)
Ruth advanced to candidacy a couple of weeks ago. Afterward, we went to Santa Barbara for a relaxing weekend away. We didn’t get many pictures, except for while we toured the botanical gardens there. These are particularly cool gardens, because they’ve made an effort to showcase the types of plants that occur naturally in central and southern California. Because Irvine is both very dry and very aggressively landscaped, it was easy for us to live here for almost two years and have very little exposure to native wildlife. Outside of trips to comparatively barren places like Anza-Borrego and Chino Hills, we haven’t seen very much native plantlife. So, it was really cool to see the redwoods, cacti, orchids, and so on.
Last weekend we went with friends to Anza-Borrego state park. We came home with a lot of nice pictures, which you can find on the Flickr right here.
This one is my favorite, with Lauren and Adam in the background:
Here is the requisite shot of me squinting:
No news, really. I’m just playing around with the idea of moving our images from locally-hosted to flickr-hosted. Thoughts?
Ruth and I have been making a yule log or two every December for three years now, and this year we made by far the best yet. I just want to get down links to the recipes we used, along with a few thoughts.
For this yule log, I used:
- This jelly roll cake
- This whipped cream recipe
- The buttercream recipe on page 348 of this book
- These assembly directions
I probably won’t use the same buttercream recipe again. It came out kind of weird — sort of dry and brittle. It still tasted great, and the texture actually resembled the bark on a log in a nice way, but it was a real pain to spread and it had a tendency to fall off of slices of the cake in chunks. Fortunately, I got a copy of The Professional Chef for Christmas, and it’s got very detailed directions for making a better buttercream.
Also, I’ve done several different things with the filling of different yule logs, but this whipped cream is everyone’s favorite. The fact that it’s so fluffy makes the log look great, and makes rolling it less stressful. It also tastes delicious.
How does this work? Is it awesome? Let’s hope so.
It appears that one has two options. One can either link to the file directly, as so: Predicting Winners of NBA Games using FOPLs, or to a “page,” which includes a description, as so: Predicting Winners of NBA Games using FOPL.