Month: December 2003

Catching up

We got in last night around 10 pm; Joy and Jefferson are ecstatic to be home. The trip was mostly uneventful, with two exceptions. Note: Dogs can be made to go to the bathroom in airport stalls, but not on their pee pads (no matter how hard you try), so put rubber gloves in your list of doggie carry-on supplies. Now dogs and Lisa are asleep on the sofa in our living room and I’m catching up.

I’ve been reading news feeds over the holiday, but didn’t get much of a chance to post anything about what was going on outside our own vacation. So here goes:

Back in the land of Mad Cows

It’s weird to be back in Washington State, knowing that there may be a sponge-brained mad cow lurking in my grocer’s freezer. Guess I’m crossing the Sunny Dene Ranch off my list of places to visit in Yakima.

Scary to read this article in the New York Times speculating on the probability of additional undiscovered mad cows. And funny to hear that the infected cow has been traced to a Canadian herd. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be the same “blame Canada” phenomenon that sought to put the blame for the August blackout on our Northern neighbors’ shoulders.

Christmas wrap-up

We’re leaving Lakewood in a few hours and driving back to JFK to start our long flight home (fortunately, it’s direct to Seattle. I don’t think I could handle connections with the dogs). My parents and Esta left yesterday for Pennsylvania.

It’s been simultaneously a relaxing and exhausting vacation. Relaxing because it was nice to get away from everything, out of the rain, and to spend time with family and with the dogs. Exhausting primarily because of the dogs. After this week we are finally ready to declare Stage 1 of Jefferson’s housebreaking complete (Stage 2 is getting him to go on command). Unfortunately, we weren’t at Stage 1 at the beginning of the week…

I managed during a Monday trip to Princeton to find time to get to the Princeton bookstore, where in 1990 as an early action admittee I bought a Princeton sweatshirt—and a T-shirt from Moscow University. This time my findings were more modest: remaindered books from Joseph Brodsky and Jerome McGann, and a British Library book about great books of the past 500 years. About which, more in time.

Christmas itself was unexpectedly generous: Esta gifted me with a hardbound Charles Addams collection and the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, both freebies from a professor of hers, as well as the Three Colors trilogy on DVD and a copy of “Have You Fed the Fish?” And my long-suffering wife replaced my broken 1st generation iPod with a brand new slim 10GB model.

And Jim Heaney came down from Mahwah for an afternoon yesterday, with pictures and the long awaited explanation of his Appalachian Trail nickname, “Mothman.” Apparently a week or so into the hike, he was holding a small flashlight in his mouth and washing dishes when a moth flew up his nose. There you have it.

The best present, of course, was the company. It’ll be hard to get back to real life.

Who needs history?

I’ve done my share of bashing the movie Cold Mountain (before it ever came out), but I do have to raise a point (without having seen the movie) with Stephanie Zacharek’s review in Salon. The review turns on the complaint that there are only “about 12 African-Americans” in the movie.

Not to be confused with a reactionary conservative, but I must point out that there weren’t a lot of African Americans in the part of North Carolina’s Appalachian mountains where the book and movie are set. Primarily because there isn’t a lot of anything there. The economic elite owned slaves, to be sure, but the farmers who worked the land weren’t slave owning planters; for the most part, they were poor farmers working poorer land. (My father, who grew up in Madison County, recalls plowing pasture land and watching the clods raised by the plow roll straight down hill—that is, when he wasn’t digging rocks out of the soil.)

I’m not saying that Minghella’s movie isn’t flawed. But there was always more to the South than plantations, and one of the book’s strengths to me was how it illuminated the lives of these farmers and mountain folk, who were drawn into the conflict more by geography than by economics. To argue that the movie should have focused on slavery shows an astonishing ignorance about the history of the Appalachians.

Drowning in pork

My in-laws decided to compensate me for my trip in coach with a special meal, so they purchased some pork tenderloins at Costco. (Because I eat pork chops, which she despises, Lisa thinks my favorite meat is pork.) We dumped them, still mostly frozen, into marinade (hoisin, soy, peanut oil, and sugar) after Monday night’s turkey dinner, and let them sit overnight.

Last night, we started putting them on racks to cook, and discovered the Immutable Law of Costco: things never come in manageable packages. What we had both assumed (and had seemed, when frozen) to be plastic packages containing a single tenderloin each contained two instead. So instead of three tenderloins, which would have fed seven, with enough left over for subsequent meals and dog-bribery besides, we had six.

But roasted for thirty to forty minutes in a 350° oven, with brown rice in broth with scallions and stir-fried broccoli with garlic and hot pepper, they were still excellent. Now we just have to figure out what to do with the leftovers.

Redesign notes

Things definitely to come in the redesign:

  1. Less junk on the page. Somehow.
  2. Less crufty CSS.
  3. More elegant typography.
  4. More elegant design, period.
  5. New site logo and masthead.
  6. New navigational resources, including a greatest hits.

Things I’m thinking about:

  1. Dumping the news item department graphics, in favor of text links. On the plus side, they brighten up the page a bit; on the minus side, they’re not exactly coherent, design wise, and they’re probably a good deal less understandable (unless you’re in the habit of mousing over graphics) than a simple link to the department archives page would be.
  2. The blogroll. Well, not dumping it, exactly, but maybe getting smarter about how I show it, along the lines of Greg’s MORE link. It will definitely disappear from sublevel pages.
  3. The badges, unless required by some sort of reciprocal agreement.

Here are some of the extremely helpful resources I’ve been consulting:

QTN™: Harpoon Winter Warmer

Since I started making tasting notes on beer only after I moved to the west coast, I missed an opportunity to review one of my favorites. Fortunately, my loving wife informed my in-laws of my preference for Harpoon’s Winter Warmer before we got into town, and they had stocked up in anticipation of our arrival.

The beer, a seasonal spiced winter ale from this Boston brewery, is a dark caramel in color with notes of orange. The citrus notes carry on in the nose, which is spicy with orange peel, and the spice notes, predominantly cinnamon and nutmeg, carry through to the finish. The beer, as befits its kinship to the justly celebrated Harpoon IPA, is thoroughly hopped and spiced, but not so much as to overwhelm the well balanced malt which lends a delightful mouthfeel. Always recommended.

Continuing to pick up the pieces

Almost all the static site has rendered now and is once again available at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com. Notable exceptions, all from 2003: the end of September (being rendered now) through October. Also missing until I upload it again: my genealogy records and some miscellaneous pictures from other old parts of the site.

A great dinner tonight, a minestrone with meatballs, with a Chianti Riserva from 2000 that was mellow but lively. As are the dogs, who are taken with the new digs here in New Jersey and, after a day, have settled back into their routines.

Lights slowly coming back on

It looks like the outage that has plagued my site over the last week is slowly clearing up. I have the ability to render pages to the static site on a one by one basis, so the front page has been posted. However, for some reason, I don’t seem to be able to execute Manila’s “render this site” command. Maybe I’ll try another time when traffic is lower. The bottom line is, while the site is coming back, there are still going to be a lot of broken links for a while.

The undeclared war between pant buttons and airline seats

I don’t have a large posterior. In fact, I recently had to punch a new hole in my belt after losing about twenty pounds. So why is it that each time I wear a pair of khakis with a rear pocket button, that the button catches on the arm of an airplane seat, pulls loose, and is lost?

I have two hypotheses. One is that there is a bitter undeclared war between airplane seats and pant buttons. The former, jealous of the latter’s freedom and mobility, scheme impotently for their destruction, and reach out to burst their threads and strike them loose at the first opportunity.

The second hypothesis is that there is an airborne Underground Railroad for pant pocket buttons seeking the quixotic pursuit of independence, and that through long hours of conversation with the airplane seats, they have converted the uncomfortable chairs to their cause. Now they whisper one to another about the fate of their peers, and urge hope to be kept alive. Someday, when the maintenance crew finds them, they will be free, and maybe go to Hawai’i.

Travels with Doggies

I should perhaps have mentioned that, in addition to the outage on my static server, my blogging is being slowed by travel today (originally written Thursday 12/17). Lisa and I are currently (9:20 AM Pacific time) on our way to New Jersey, on a non-stop flight through JFK. With two dogs.

The first few hours of our day have been as uneventful as possible under the circumstances. We awoke an hour later than planned (future note to self: to avoid turning on the wrong alarm, always turn on both the night before taking a cross country trip!), hurriedly showered and took the dogs outside, then tried to convince them to eat, and were just getting them in their travel bag when the airport shuttle arrived. The drive to the airport was uneventful along the HOV lanes.

At the airport, we checked in and tried unsuccessfully to get them to attend to business before boarding. By the time all that was done, Lisa had missed her opportunity for Starbucks, as she was in the first boarding. (First class for these dogs all the way!) As I was back in coach, I had a few minutes to pop off for an espresso and croissant before my row was called. Such is my compensation for the cramped seat in which I am spending the next four and a half hours across the country—alas, no exit row set this time.

We are perhaps half an hour into the flight. Already Lisa has come aft to get the second travel bag; apparently our puppies are growing too restless to share their travel kennel. Meanwhile I can do little, from ten rows and a bulkhead back, but attempt to catch up on my reading in Peterson’s Jefferson, watch the western country unfold below me in great ripples of snowy mountains and vast expanses of arid plains, and write. And maybe catch a nap.