Basketball, drunken debauchery, and food. What else is there, really?

Also, it turns out this website is horrendously ugly. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?

So that’s cool. Thanks for that, interwebs.

Now we’re starting to get green things popping up, but at this point it’s hard to tell weeds from plants.

Before:

After:

Couple more nice after pictures here and here.

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.

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.

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.