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santa maria style


Hey Monday night folks, or Tuesday morning folks – whatever the case may be. Pulled two tomatoes, one strawberry, and eight green beans from my garden yesterday. Ate the tomato and the strawberry, both were awesome, and am saving the beans until I can pick enough to make two tiny portions for Sharaun and I. There are plenty still on the bush, so I think by the end of the week we should have enough. More of the tomatoes are coloring-up though, and I just hope the things keep producing. Onward we go.

Anthony and I finished the Santa Maria style barbecue on Sunday, welding the final critical bits into place, giving it a once-over in high-temp black paint, and transporting it from his garage to my backyard. I still want to add on a few accouterments, like some hooks for fire-pokin’ tools, a raised grate for the wood/coals, some custom-fit cutting boards, and a “lid” kinda thing to place over the coals once I’m done cooking – but, it’s ready to cook on now.

Anxious to see it in action, Monday I picked up some oak at a local wood-gettin’-place. Santa Maria purists maintain that only Southern California native “red oak” produces the trademark Santa Maria barbecue flavor – but it’s just too hard to get up here. So, I instead went with a close relative, the so-called “interior” red oak of the Northern California foothills. It’s hard to judge exactly what you’re getting sometimes, as some folks refer to “mountain oak” as black oak, while some mean interior red. Things get more complicated because both the black and red interior oaks are all hybridized together in some cases. Either way, I stomped the woodyard until I found a sweet smelling reddish-colored wood called “mountain live oak,” which I think is about as close to Santa Maria Coastal Red as I’m gonna get easily here. Wow, a wood lesson.

Anyway, I set an inaugural two-log fire in the barbecue Tuesday afternoon to see how it burned, judge the heat and ventilation, and just get an idea of the smell of the particular wood I bought. Oh man, smelling that pungent smoke rise from the grill immediately took me back to my Grandfather’s back porch in Southern California. The barbecue seemed to function perfectly, and now I just have to break it in with a nice tri-tip. A

Here’s a couple pictures of the finished product. We did end up engineering a spring-tension mechanism on the crank so that the grilling surface stays put when you let go at a certain level (we even did an engineer-style nerd-test to see how much weight the springs could support before the crank was pulled into unwinding: ~30lbs). Check her out:



Sitting in the backyard.



Fired up as a test run.

That’s really all I had today. Wednesday I’m off to San Francisco for a day-long visit to a work-type conference – probably be back too late too blog.

Goodnight.

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you see the balls on that thing?


Oh man it’s great having a blog that works. Or, I should rather say, it’s great having a host that works. I can write with ease, I can preview with ease, and, hopefully, you can enjoy the end result with ease (or, at least you could not-enjoy the end result… but still with ease).

A long, long time ago, I wrote a blog wondering about how penguins “do it.” This was a genuine question on my part, albeit passed off for laughs for the blog. The question had stemmed from a curiosity that I’ve had since I was younger: Where are birds’ naughty bits? I just took it to the extreme form of bird in an extreme environment for the sake of the blog because I thought it’d be funnier. Actually, I looked it up, and it’s a pretty decent entry – you can read it too, if you want. Anyway, this is a relevant opener for my blog today – because I finally figured it out.

Today, folks – today I saw a bird with huge balls.

I got home from work around five. Stopped on the way home to see the Saigon Turtle (I love this guy now, every time he cuts my hair I just sit there and marvel silently at his backstory). And, of course, my slight OCD requires that I must take a shower post-haircutting, lest those little unseen bits of shorn mane find a way to burrow into my skin and sprout more of the evil stuff I’m cursed with (which I clearly do not need). Anyway, my dome’s tightened-up, I’m home, and I’m showered – that’s where we were.

Fresh from the shower, I step into the living room to Keaton smiling as she toddles towards me chanting, “Dada!, Dada!” My heart melts, and I scoop her up and whirl her around a bit. Then, I ask her, “Wanna go outside and check on Daddy’s garden?” Not really giving her much time to answer, I assume she does, and crook her in my arm to head outside.

And now, I’d like to switch the narrative voice here to Sharaun, and write the next sentence as I like to imagine she would recount the tale:

Then I heard, “Oh my God! Quick, get the camera!”

There. Done. Now back to me.

As I turned the corner to inspect my garden, I could hardly believe my eyes. There, inside my less-than-twenty-four-hours-old “Fort Knox for Strawberries,” was my arch-enemy: the dang bird. One ripe strawberry, folks… one dang berry. I had intended to pick it today, and was happy that the dang bird hadn’t even touched it yesterday (must have been full from eating the one that prompted Fort Knox or something). And here, flapping madly, I had my quarry penned. Keaton “oohed” and “ahhed” as we approached the increasingly frantic berry whore. I still couldn’t quite believe it, it was almost too good to be true – and my mind immediately went to how fun it would be to write this very entry. “But, it’ll be nothing without pictures,” I thought as I once again hollered to Sharaun for the camera.

A full thirty seconds went by while Keaton and I examined the trapped beastie… fruitlessly (well, depending on the definition) flapping around looking for a way out. I laughed. Sharaun finally arrived with the camera, and I edged in to get a good shot. As I did, Mr. Berrybeaks became even more agitated – obviously sensing his impending doom. He threw his winged body wildly against the confines of For Knox for Strawberries. I snapped one picture:

As I reviewed the image, I was unhappy with it, and moved closer for a better shot. Then, out of luck, Berrbeaks found a weak seam in Fort Knox and was free. You’d think, harried from such a terrifying experience, he would immediately fly fast and far away. Oh no, not that bastard Berrybeaks – that bastard has an image to maintain.

He instead flew to the fence, alighted there, glanced down at me, shat, and then casually took wing.

OK, so I made up the part about him crapping – but I bet he tried and just couldn’t make, knowing him. Alas, I only have the one picture. But, I’ve gone to the trouble to go extreme-closeup for you:

I don’t really know what I was going to do had he really been trapped and at my mercy. I’d like to think I would’ve wrung his little bird neck. But, then again, I am the guy growing delicious berries outside in full view. So, feeling incredibly defeated, I set about fortifying Fort Knox for Strawberries. I think I found my flaw, a weak front-flap opening I designed specifically for picking access. After being so handily beaten though, I doubt it will work. I guess I’m just not meant to have strawberries… dang bird.

Moving on.

Sharaun lost her keys again today, she called me as I was sitting down for lunch at home. Called while performing a CSI-style grid-search of the local grocery store where she and Keaton were now stranded. I asked her if she checked with the counter to see if someone may have turned them in – she had, and no one did. I asked if she’d checked the parking lot between her car and the store – she had, and they weren’t there. “OK,” I said, “I’ll be right there.” I hastily finished my food and jumped in the car. As I pulled into the parking lot I spotted her and Keaton standing around. I parked, used my key to open her trunk and loaded her bags, then lifted Keaton from her buggy-seat for a hug. Eventually, when I got to opening her driver’s side door, I ended up finding her keys there on the floorboard.

Something wrong with that girl… but man do I love her.

Wow, I’m quite proud of all the linking I did in today’s blog – I have back-references galore, huh? To me, if I was a reader, that’d be key. It’d be like getting several more paragraphs than there actually are (y’know, by virtue of the old stuff you can go back and read?). Yeah, well, I liked it.

Goodnight.

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the fort knox of berries


Is it really Thursday already? That’s awesome. Work this week has been up and down, but mostly by virtue of my masochistic slack/work/slack/work cycle – which is self-inflicted, so a guy can’t really complain. But, I’m glad it’s Thursday – because that’s almost Friday and we actually don’t have that much booked this weekend, only one mandatory engagement… and that means a lot of time to mow the lawn and whatnot. Moving on.

The other day, I noticed that I had two red-red strawberries on the vine, both large and nearly ripe. What’s more, the birds hadn’t got to them yet – they were pristine. I tried my best to tuck them under a particularly leafy part of the plant to try and hide them from keen avian eyes – but those bastards must be able to smell the perfectly ripened fruit or something. When I got home, a bird had yanked and tugged the berry as close to my mesh coverings as possible, and had pecked a large hole in the thing.

Frustrated, I yanked the ripe fruit off and took it inside. I carefully cut around the bird-eaten bits, washed it – and enjoyed the very first edible item from my very first garden. And it was good, sweet and yummy. Now, with the sweetness of my toils still fresh in my mouth, my anger at the berry-thieving birds was running high. So, I went gathered together some material and set to work. Fifteen or so minutes later, I had this built:

An impenetrable strawberry fortress, the Fort Knox of berries. Extending a full eight inches above the berry bushes, and enclosing them all the way to the dirt, I’m hoping this will finally stop my pesky winged enemies. I’ll report back here if my “surge” strategy pays off.

Goodnight.

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all seasonally-displaced


Funny weather today in Northern California – all cold and cloudy and breezy, made me feel all seasonally-displaced. The ashen sky and blustery gusts made me think of Halloween, and that made me think about how I think, for the first time since being here, I’m considering not dolling up the house for the holidays. Not the end of an era, I think, more just a respite. Maybe I’ll change my mind come August, who knows. Right now, though, I’m not too hot on the idea this year.

I actually left work around noon to come “work from home” (the quotes owed to the fact that, at my sawmill, “working from home” is common parlance, so much so that it’s often acronym’d as “WFH”). I did, however, work – despite the reputation that WFH may have. I will admit though, that it was nice… sitting on my couch typing instead of in my dreary grey cubicle at work – for that, the office-disconnect is worth it.

Anyway… tonight I had some champagne, shared a couple glasses in celebration of “the hell of it.” So, champagne-buzzed and carried by the chorus-driven pop melodies of my most recent one-man-show musical discovery, BC Camplight, I’m gonna write. (But, for real, check out BC Camplight. With the excepted couple of oddball tracks, that album is goood).

Oh, and, if you’re reading this – whomever your pipe to the internet is has updated their DNS records, and you’re now viewing sounds familiar on it’s brand new shiny host. I don’t know where the new server lives, but it sure seems peppier than the old one to me. I’m surprised how quickly and efficiently I was able to migrate my content – and glad it’s up and running. With any luck, you’re now zipping around the blog viewing pages and leaving comments with ease. Let’s now move on from the timeout Hell of the past few weeks, OK? Good then.

Y’all been watching the presidential debates on CNN? Hope so. Even though it still seems early to me, there’s some good discussion happening. Nobody, on either side of the fence, looked standout-amazing to me, but I suppose the machine is still lurching into motion and there’s a lot of spit and rag left to be applied before the top few contenders shine like political polished chrome. For what it’s worth though, I am getting excited at the prospect of change – as I think lots of Americans are.

I suppose I don’t have much more to write… I’m still celebrating a working blog. Goodnight.

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sea of white


The Arcade Fire show Saturday night in Berkeley was just awesome. The bad was on-point, the sound was crisp and the mix was perfect. It was a sea of elated white people bouncing around and clapping and singing along to the Fire’s hooky hooks. I was entirely surprised that the band was able to maintain the energy levels they had when we saw them the 1st time in that little 200-person club. Sure, it’s harder to communicate that kind of energy to an audience of ~8,000 – but they had everyone on their feet by the end. Check out some video of them doing an oldie-but-goodie over here at YouTube.

I didn’t post Sunday night because I spent most of the evening working to backup all the files and databases on my server. That’s right folks, I did it: I signed up for a new hosting provider in an attempt to escape the sinking ship that is my current host. I made the call around 11pm Sunday night, mostly out of frustration, but also after sitting down and writing the following in a text file because I couldn’t access my blog. The background:

Over the past week my uptime has simply disintegrated to abysmal levels. Now, the downtime which used to be a fairly rare exception has unfortunately become the norm, and, more often than not, I can’t even get onto my own pages. Sunday night I spent a good chunk of time trying to gauge what effort would be involved in actually pulling up stakes and moving all my pages to a new host. The outlook was grim: moving all my database-reliant pages (the blog, the galleries, my personal server-stored bookmarking app) is going to be a bear, and there’s a real risk things won’t come over perfectly and will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. The whole migration process is iffy, and the prospect was almost enough to make me keep trying to get StartLogic to help me out – but I’ve just had such poor luck.

But, in the end, I the effort seemed worth it – and I bit the bullet. The switch will hopefully be transparent to you, dear reader. The only noticeable change should be the site speeding up and not crapping out all the time. I hope for things to be up and running and swapped to the new host by the end of the week. We’ll see. Just bear with us here at sounds familiar for a week or so, OK? Thanks.

Hey, wanna see some pictures of my garden? OK. From top to bottom: 1) I put up a mini-scarecrow to keep the dang birds from my strawberries, 2) It seems to be working, but one of the berry plants has aphids, 3) Flush with ripening tomatoes.

And finally, a web roundup of other pictures from our Memorial Day weekend spent camping (welcome to the digital age, folks, where everyone who you go camping with has digital cameras and websites): Bill & Susie post some pictures, and so does Megan. I particularly enjoyed the series near the bottom of of Keaton in the dog-cage while Jake pokes her with a stick.

Other than that, I don’t have much to write.

Hopefully my stupid webpage was up long enough to let me post this, and likewise let you read it. Stupid webpage.

Goodnight.

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home alone


Today Sharaun and I reached a parenting milestone, although, we admittedly reached it long before I thought we would. See, today, we left Keaton at home alone for the first time. Now, before you go calling up CPS, let me elaborate. Sharaun usually heads to the gym early in the morning for an early morning “spin” class (not being a gym kinda guy myself, I imagine this is a Grateful Dead concert style dance class for women in long flowy bohemian skirts). Also important to let you know: Sharaun locks her keys in the car all the time.

Now, with those two pieces of knowledge, you can better appreciate my story. So, Sharaun leaves the house around 5:30am or something for spin class, I’m merrily sleeping – dreaming Natalie Portman is feeding me Pizza Rolls in her underwear (a.k.a. foreplay). ‘Round about quarter-to-seven, my foggy brain thinks it’s hearing a knock-knock-knock at the front door – I groggily dismiss as an auditory hallucination. Couple seconds later and the knocking is back, now loud and unmistakable. I climb out of bed and peer through the peephole: Sharaun. I open the door and retreat behind it so as to hide my unbridled magnificence from the world at large.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey,” she says. “What happened,” I ask. “I’m screwed,” she replies, “I locked my keys in my car.” “Mmm… and you’ve been using your spare key, so you really are screwed,” I concur. “Yeah,” she says, “I’m totally screwed.” “How’d you get here,” I ask. “Susie dropped me off.” “Huh, that was nice,” I say. I then head off to the shower, while Sharaun makes an audible vow to redouble her key-finding efforts. Over the past couple weeks, she’s dumped out and sorted, archaeologist style, through Keaton’s toy bin multiple times. She’s pulled off all the couch cushions twice, poked around under couches and even ruled out odd locations like the garage, bathrooms, and the fridge – all with no results. At this point I’m not too worried. Worst case, I figure as I shower, she puts Keaton in the stroller and walks several miles to the gym to call AAA (on a payphone, because her cellphone is also locked in her car.. with her keys) to come open the door.

But, it never got to worst case – Sharaun walked into the bathroom before I could even hit the showers proudly holding out her found keys in front of her, beaming. “Where were they?,” I asked. “In the couch, where I’ve looked a hundred times,” she replied, “But deep in the crack, way up in there.” “That’s good,” I say. All’s right with the world, right?

“How am I going to get to my car?,” she asks. “We’ll have to leave Keaton here,” I say. At the time, Keaton is still sound asleep in her bed – probably dreaming about Job feeding her Cheerios, or something. “Can we do that?,” she asked. “Well, what else can we do, she’s still asleep,” I say.

And so, I threw on some shorts and a t-shirt and grabbed my wallet and keys and we took off. And, for about five minutes, Keaton ruled the roost – manned the castle. Now, I don’t know if this makes us bad parents… or if I could get in trouble for writing it here, but she seemed to survive OK without us.

And, in the end Sharaun found her lost keys.

Oh hey, check this neato little “invention” out.

Goodnight.

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the jostling thousands


Good Wednesday evening to you folks – had a good, but slow, day (work-wise, at least). I think people must still be on vacation or something, as the flow of e-mail was low-low-low (cue car salesman voice). It’s OK though, because the work part of my day is over and Keaton was looking cuuuuute when I got home. And now, I’m reclined on the couch typing. Spent some time putting up some new pictures from our Memorial Day weekend camping trip, mostly of Keaton. You can check them out by visiting her gallery here. Hope you enjoy ’em.

This weekend is the Arcade Fire show in Berkeley. We’ve got a huge entourage of ten peoples going, from the music-nuts to the casual fans to the relatively uninitiated. We had considered renting a minibus/van thing to all caravan down together, but several calls to every rental agency in the area turned up nothing. No worries though… we’ll figure it out. I’m excited, if a little worried about trying to get a decent spot among the jostling thousands (a capacity sellout, around eight-thousand) packed into the 100% general-admission venue. Recent setlists look extremely promising, and the band have been planning some super-cool afterparties at local venues. Not that I think us almost-adults would entertain the idea of heading out to a club after the show (we’re old as balls these days)… but a guy can pretend.

I just don’t have anything more to write… Goodnight.