First I was at a marina, looking at boats and trying to plan a trip to warm places on the west coast with some friends. Soon though, I was watching large boats and small ships give ice breaking demonstrations… from underwater.
Next I was wandering down Ellis Ave. toward downtown Ashland having skipped Taijutsu class. I got about halfway there when what should happen, but my friend Kyle (who I’m pretty sure doesn’t have two violent bones in his body) came running past in a white gi with Greg and Jack Hoban close on his heels. It seems that Greg had a surprise waiting for us at class (ala Jack), but everyone cut except for Kyle, who came to check things out for the first time. Of course, I did what anyone in my position and worth a bit of their salt would do: feel in line and chased them to a big playground on the edge of town where we did pull-ups and slid and played ninja tag through all the equipment and bleachers.
On the way back from this quasi-impromptu class, I passed through a collegiate soccer team that was having practice, intercepted a ball, and started a slow run toward some dorms in the distance, passing the ball back and forth to both sides with a couple other guys.
What’s it all mean? I’m not sure, but even though I woke up as sore as I’ve been in a while and tired from not getting as much sleep as I’d like, I feel really motivated and like I need to keep on with training no matter what. And watching ships break ice from underwater was just plain cool! :)
“Yes, Boy,” I said, really trying to be patient, “I understand that you want cheese and chips. However, I am not going to make you cheese and chips, because I’d like you to eat some Real Food today.”
And so it began. Again. The tears (his were born of frustration; mine came from two quarts of simmering onions), the yelling (his), the questions (mine: “Would you like a biscuit with some strawberry jam;” “Would you like some soup;” “Would you like a …”), the hitting (his), the leaving for a less hurty room (mine), the following (his), the questions, again (mine).
Now, finally, after an hour of war, quiet has returned to the kingdom. I resisted The Boy’s siege long enough for him to fall asleep on the couch (convenient, eh?) outside the gates of the city. We’ll (and by “we,” I mean The Wife) see what morning brings. Maybe more slings and arrows, but maybe negotiations.
Weekends in Wistucky — at least at the Casa del Beest — tend to be a lot about food. We have more time (and more energy!) to think about what to make and how to create it. That’s all by way of explaining how we ate a stick of butter for breakfast today.
The Wife and I were talking about going to the Glow, but we’re in the middle of a winter storm out here. Wind chill is in the vicinity of -20 (F) and we’re looking at another foot or so of snow on top of the foot we already have when all is said and done tomorrow. The roads are passible, but not great. We’re also out of eggs, so the usual spectacular, multi-story omelet bracketed by potatoes and toast was out of the question.
Once we whittled our options down, we settled on biscuits and gravy. I’ve been making scratch biscuits for ten years, but I’ve pretty much always used an egg to hold things together. The biscuits have always been good (fairly flaky and tender and golden), but not up to the standards of a Georgia truck-stop.
Today, though, that changed. After checking out suggestions from a handful of sites (cooks.com, epicurious.com, cookingforengineers.com), I made some “buttermilk” (a little lemon juice in the milk), used that and a little more butter than usual, and whipped up my biscuits, then half-carmalized some onions and garlic in butter as the base of a white sauce to which I eventually added a can of Cambell’s cream of mushroom soup.
And then there was breakfast. And it was good. All 2,000+ calories of it. mmmmmm… calories…
My grandparents in Texas just got a Skype account and a webcam and put it all together tonight while my Dad and uncle were visiting. Once we got a couple little kinks ironed out, we had a really nice video chat. Once The Wife wanted to join in from her computer, we moved the conversation to oovoo since Skype doesn’t offer more than two-way video conferencing.
This was the first time I’ve used oovoo for more than one-to-one chatting, and it was pretty good. We had some static bursts on the line, but I think they were from The Wife and I both running sessions from the same IP address. I’m sure there’s something we can do about that internally (maybe some clever port forwarding; Omar, do you have any advice?), but not tonight.
Last night at my gig (which went reasonably well, except for “Jingle Bells,” of all damn things), I played with Qik.com which let me stream video live from my mobile device. That was also totally cool. The only problem there was that, not surprisingly, streaming video just decimated the battery on my phone. Other than that, though, Qik (and especially the Windows mobile client) couldn’t have been any easier to use. That’s a solid three thumbs up! Especially from a couple coworkers I ambushed…
I’ve been a bad boy, what basically ignoring this blog for the last however long. Again. But now I’m done. Done ignoring the blog, and more importantly, done with the additional workload of teaching a couple classes at Northland. So that means I can start again. Here we go with a little retrospective:
Time sinks
This fall I’ve been working my regular full-time job at Bayfield County, disolving one side company while simultaneously building another, all while teaching four credits (a jazz history class and a jazz ensemble) at Northland College. I’ve learned a couple things:
I now have a better idea of when to say when re: commitments
Building a business (even a teeny one like mine) takes a lot more time than there is in any given day
While teachers, even at the college level still have it hard, they can still choose to be heroes or villains. Or, as is more often the case, they just get beat down and want to get the hell out of dodge.
Writing on the Wall
I’ve also learned that Northland College is *so* screwed. Enrollment is *still* down and the administration is scrambling to get money pretty much anyway it can. One of the upshots of this is that it seems like these days, they’re accepting almost anyone who can manage to fill out an application and come up with $120k for four years’ tuition. Oh sure, there are some smart kids on campus, but I had a couple in my class that could have been poster children for social promotion. Once they and their brethren get into the world and start representing a “Northland Education,” that’ll start a feedback loop that isn’t easily broken.
Last night, The Wife asked me to take a look at a website project she’s working on. Specifically, she was having trouble getting a sprite-based CSS image replacement navigation bar working properly. Being an appropriately geeky hubby, I said, “Sure, no problem.”
And true enough, it wasn’t a problem. For IE 7. Or Opera. Or Safari. But Firefox borked on my code no matter what I tried. *borkborkbork*
Brilliant stars chipped out of the black crystal sky glittered overhead as I slowly walked through the woods to the bottom of the hill and my deer stand Saturday morning. My breath came out in frozen clouds of ice in the 0-degree-Fahrenheit air, and the snow – what little of it there was – squeaked under my boots if I stepped the wrong way.
And that was the beautiful – and cold! – beginning of the 2008 deer gun season up here in Wistucky. I sat for almost two hours, watched the sun come up over my shoulder annd slowly light up the woods, then wobbled, shivering and unsteady, back up to the “hunting shack” to try and restore feeling to my fingers and toes, with nary a deer sighted.
An hour or so later, I went back down to the stand for a couple more hours of watching some of the fattest squirrels this side of Highway 8 frolic through the corn in my bait pile. They ate. I watched. They ate a little more. I shivered a little, then sent my work buddy a text message on his stand about a mile away: “All quiet on the northern front; U?” His answer came back a few minutes later: “Nutin.” So I watched the squirrels pack my bait away in their bellies, considered the merits of bringing home a couple field-dressed squirrel carcasses vs. one (admittedly invisible) deer, and left the rifle safed in the corner of the stand.
My buddy, the landowner we were hunting with, and I had some sausage and sauerkraut fro lunch, and I got the recipe for the kraut. I think the secret ingredient is the 2×4 used for smashing the cabbage into the container.
Since there were no traces of deer at all at my friend’s stand, and the bait at my stand was at least dissapearing each night, we decided to go back down and sit together, and maybe try a team shot, assuming the deer would cooperate. (Have I mentioned lately how Wistucky’s deer population seems to be particularly uncooperative lately?) We sat, watched some squirrels, had bouts of whispered conversation, made a couple goofy videos (coming soon to a blog near you), watched the squirrels some more, watched a flock of maybe 50 canada geese fly low overhead and land in the field at our backs, and waited for the Deer That Didn’t Show.
And that’s pretty much the story for my time in the woods so far this season: Lots of beautiful things to watch, lots of time to think and play (quietly!) with some of my toys, but no deer. I’m not even seeing deer along the road while I drive, which is pretty damn unusual. And the deer drought isn’t just a local (read: my stand) phenomenon, either. A lot of hunters in the area, pretty much all of whom are much better at this than I am, are saying that they’re not seeing deer out there either.
And where the hell are all those pesky whitetails, you may ask. Good question! Maybe they got tired of being shot and decided to go have a drink at the pub. Maybe I’ll run into them there on my way home from the stand tomorrow night. Maybe they’ll buy me a drink and we’ll commiserate together and never look at each other the same way when we cross paths in the woods. Or maybe I’ll light off my deer canon, get a double lung shot, then get my hands a little stained and stinky while doing a serviceable job of field-dressing that thing. Maybe…
I’m back at it this fall: trying to put Bambi in my chest freezer. Yesterday, my buddy from work and I went back to the farm (of skinned pig fame) and ran through a couple boxes of ammo.
I’m borrowing a .270 Winchester with a basic low-power scope this season from another farmer friend. I’m happy (and a little proud) to say that I was shooting inch-and-a-half groups at 100 yards from our bench. Of course, the groups were off, but that’s cake.
Today, I visited the blind I’m going to use on opening weekend and scoped out the lay of that bit of land a little. I also spread a little corn around in the middle o fmy primary shooting lane. I’m a little ambivalent about baiting. On one hand, it feels kind of like cheating, what with the bait and scent and blind and gun. On the other hand, the point is to fill the freezer with good meat. And anyhow, I’ll get my fill of stalking (read: “stepping on *yet another* twig and getting laughed at by the pine squirrels”) on closing weekend when I’ll go into the national forest with Dangerous Dan.
I’m feeling pretty good about my shooting this fall, and about putting the hammer down on a gentle, unsuspecting, big-brown-eyed, oh-so-tasty doe. I just hope that I make a clean shot, then deal with the carcass well. It’d be a helluva shame to go to all this work, just to botch things in the end. But that’s what the guys I’m hunting with are for: to laugh at me when I fuck up, then show me how it’s supposed to be done.
We’ve all heard a lot about “media bias” lately, and that’s a really tricky — and incredibly important — topic.
We can all agree that it’s good to know what’s going on in the world, and to base decisions on information that is as accurate as possible. We can also probably agree that by increasing the accuracy of our information, we inherently increase it’s complexity. Along the way, we each reach the point of information saturation and stop trying to drink directly from the fire hose. Instead, we start looking for someone else who’s willing to aggregate, analyze, and compress information for us. Enter the media.
Let’s face facts: there’s no such thing as “objective journalism.” Every camera is pointed in some direction. Every video is edited. Every reporter, editor, and producer acts as a filter for the information they pass along. There is, however, plenty of room for the ideas – and practices! – of fairness (give all sides of an issue equal opportunity to make their case) and accuracy (tell it like it is, without spin, and fer Pete’s sake, check the facts!) in the media.
So where does that leave us? With a whole lot of sources of information that each have a particular slant and “flavor.” Are these sources biased? Uh, yeah. Is that a bad thing? Not as long as they try to be fair and accurate.
We’re all big boys and girls and can deal with bias. The evil that we really need to guard against is two-faced: On one side is compromised journalism (media not being fair and accurate); on the other is external control of the press (via consolidation, legislation, or intimidation).
This morning, Will Bunch at Philly.com has this to say about journalistic objectivity and claims of bias in the press:
“…my personal belief that the greatest role for journalists is not to make sure that every story has 50 percent of one side and 50 percent of the other side – but that the vital function for reporters is to preserve democracy and the freedom of the press, because without those freedoms a valid media would cease to exist. Yes, they’re voicing outrage today inside the sacred sanctuary of the Temple of Objective Journalism , where the celebrants nervously fingered their rosaries rather than confront the Constitutional bonfire that was building outside.
“But for eight years now, there’s been an out-of-control fire raging outside of that temple – a fire that was built upon the USA Patriot Act and Guantanamo and rendition and torture and signing statements and 16 words in a State of the Union Address. Ultimately, saving the last fabric of democracy is more important than worrying about what contrived commandments of journalism were stepped on while the blaze was finally extinguished.
“I myself would call it truth-telling, and honest journalism, but now we have some who want to call it ‘media bias.’ That’s fine with me, but understand this.
