First post of 2009

So, it has been a while again since I've posted. I'll be surprised if anyone reads this anymore!

First, we went to see Godspell last night, put on by Lourdes High School. They did a great job, sounded and looked great, of course. The unique bit was that it was put on in a movie theater. The Chateau theater in town puts up a stage over some chairs in front of the screen. Plays done there are best for ones with minimal scene or costume changes, as well as minimal entrances...since it is still a movie theater. (We saw The Taming of the Shrew there previously, which worked well too.) The funny thing is when other movies are playing next store, all of the sudden, out of nowhere (always in the quiet points in the play) there will be a giant rumbling that sounds over the theater. This time, it was probably from Wolverine. Perhaps it was the voice of God for this play...

Second, I have been wanting to acknowledge an awesome restaurant in Milwaukee, WI that my even more awesomer sister- and brother-in-law took us to. The Palomino is a resturant/bar with a wide selection of entrees including, from what I remember, country fried steak, chili mac-n-cheese, tater tots (!) and many vegetarian and vegan entrees like veg-sloppy joe. I had the chili mac-n-cheese, which was delicious - why didn't anyone think this up previously? Try it out next time you are there.

Third, now that its finally getting warm out, I finished my sweater! (its the knitter's murphy's law) It fits pretty well, not perfect of course as my sweaters never fit just right, but its not too bad. I think the gauge was on, but I just made the wrong size... Either way, I wore it on Sunday when it was 45F, but not that its 60F, its a bit too warm for worsted wool.







And finally, this is one of the most awesome knitting things I've seen in a long time. Way to go.

See you next time.

2008 Garden: pictures I

Slightly behind, but pictures of the patio garden from mid-May. We are using the planter boxes again for flowers and also peas! Jon helped me find this interestingly awesome wooden stand at a garage sale, so it'll get some of the plants off the ground a bit. Kind of rustic looking.

We also decided to try something new, since none of the pots would ever seem to be big enough to grow pumpkins or cucumbers...so we think at least. We bought a kiddie pool at Walmart and filled it up with dirt. We've got pumpkins, cucumbers, beans and radishes growing in there now. Hopefully there will be enough room for everything!


I must say I'm excited to get a house where I can have a real garden. That will be spectacular. Not that I don't love carting packages of dirt up stairs and filling pots, but I sure was spoiled living at home with the big garden in the back!

Some socks

As promised, a picture of the finished Strawberry Shortcake socks. They turned out pretty good, a little big, but not too bad. So that is what the knit up yarn that was dyed with Kool Aide looks like. Pretty cool eh? There are so many cool things to try with dying yarn...I'm looking forward to doing it again! Maybe green and pink this time...



This yarn was called "Cloud 9" from Cascade. It was on clearance at The Yarnery a while back, so I got some and finally got around to making the socks. Its a wool/angora mix, so they are quite fuzzy and warm. Plus they are awesome shades of pink.

In the queue now are a pair of light brown lacy socks for work and some pink verigated Tofutsies yarn on two circulars. Good times.

Congrats, Kristine!

Another job well done!

Dying yarn

I recently bought some dye-it-yourself yarn from KnitPicks and I thought I'd begin my yarn dying experience with the Kool Aid technique. We got out the plastic bag to cover the table, bought a turkey baster and got down to it.


We had red and yellow colors that mixed together to get some great orangey colors as well. The turkey baster seemed to work pretty well, although it was kinda cheap and was a bit drippy sometimes... Jim did the color mixing for me and he did a great job at it as well!


Once all the color was in and the white *mostly* gone. Then Jim helped with the microwaving to set the color. It turned out really nice. I'll post a picture of the socks once they are finished.

CA Oddities

So once again I was in California for a conference of The Green Grid. California always seems to be a strange and unusual place to me.

I flew into the San Jose airport. (One nice thing about this...it felt like spring when I got off the plane!) I rented a car to drive to San Francisco, where the first portion of my meeting was. The drive wasn't too bad at first. I was looking for a place to eat lunch, and there was nothing along the highway. I would get off at an exit, drive around a bit, found no restaurants, got back on the freeway and drove around some more. Aparently, people don't eat much in CA. I finally found a Togos, which was pretty good. I seem to be making a habit of going there every time I'm in CA. They are always quite pleasant and perky when I go in there, which is nice I guess.

The drivers in CA are interesting. Some of them go fast on the freeway, but some of them go quite slow! They will be driving 50 MPH in a 65 area. It happened to me getting stuck behind them multiple times, multiple different cards. Crazy. Typically, everyone just flies by me.

So I was driving to San Francisco to my hotel, following my directions from Google like a good girl. It said to take 101 follow the signs to I80, get off at exit 1 and go downtown from there. Well I was driving along, following the signs to I80 - nothing seemed to say I got on it, just going toward it - when I went past a sign that said "last SF exit". There was a lot of construction in the area, so it was hard to see things. I realized as I was driving by that exit, watching it go by, that I should have gotten off a while back...but alas it was too late. I was already driving across THE BAY BRIDGE. So of course from there I didn't know where I was going because I only had San Fransisco maps, not Oakland maps! I made the 5 mile (or whatever it was) trek across the bridge and just figured I'd get off and the first exit and get back on and go back. Well, all the exits were just for more freeways, so I kept getting further and further away from where I wanted to be. After I drove around for 20 minutes, I finally had to call Jim to give him an intersection that he looked up on google for me so I could get back on the freeway. It only cost me $4 to go back over the bridge! But I finally made it to the hotel.

That evening a guy from my work group who grew up in San Francisco showed me around a bit. We rode a cable car down to the wharf, where we had dinner at a nice restaurant with good green beans. We ended up taking an old style street car back up, so I got to ride on multiple types of SF transportation! We saw all of the piers and lots of other cool stuff. Its a cool city, I would like to explore it more some day.

The next day after the meeting I had to drive back to San Jose for the next portion of the meeting, so for something different I took I280 back to SJ. It was quite a scenic drive, very pretty. Once you get out of the city, there are some spectacular hills full of trees and greenery. I also drove past Stanford and their linear accelerator. It is LONG. I also saw some of the said "happy" CA cows. Well, let me tell you, they looked no happier than the cows in WI or MN. In fact, they weren't even Holstein cows, like they show in the commercials! So as far as I'm concerned, its false advertising.

I finally made it to SJ - the traffic wasn't too bad till I was in the city. I had dinner at the place I passed up last time, Weinerschitzel, of a yummy corn dog and chili cheese fries. It was quite good. Kris wouldn't have liked the cheese fries, as they actually had real cheese on them, but I thought it was quite delicious. I also stopped at the grocery store to get some fruit and snacks for the way home. The regular food prices were a little high - but the produce was so cheap! I couldn't get over it. So there you go. I finally stopped at a gas station to fill up my little gold Focus rental. I went to swipe my card at the pump - no swiper. I see a machine in the middle of the pumps - only takes ATM cards. I go inside - sure enough, this gas station only takes cash and ATM cards. How weird is that? I don't get it. So I went somewhere else. Only in CA.

On the plus side, I finished the book club book. I thought it was quite humorous, I quite enjoyed it. A few twists and turns like any good mystery, very silly and unusual as you might expect with a satirical "nursery crime" novel, but not quite as wacky as Shroud of the Thwacker. I think it had a good amount of weirdness vs funny. I am looking forward to the next one!

Pierogies

Several weeks ago we made pierogies with the remainder of the filling that was frozen from last time. For the most part they were all normal. We did run out of eggs half way through, so we had to make some last minute substitutions using baking soda and such from some recipe we found on the web. They turned out...well, ok...the dough was kinda cakey and fluffy. But interesting none the less.

We had enough dough left to make one large pierogi that kind of looked like a pasty. Jim made it, so he got to eat it.

Yum, yum.

Tubes. Not just for old organs.

So, in the last few months I have learned a great deal (well, some deal) about tubes from the organ. I have seen this "technology" in what was its prime. I'm sure the organ was very high tech for its day. It is still amazing to me now, not so much how it works, but that it did one day a long time ago, work better than anything else. I am also not surprised that as we proceeded down the technology path, it did not include tubes. They are what you might call...cumbersome. ( In this day and age, at least. I understand there were tube testers in the 60s.)

So imagine my surprise when I walked into a Sharper Image store over Thanksgiving (2007 mind you) and saw this Philips sound system THAT HAD TUBES. It didn't just have tubes, it advertised tubes. I understand that many people think that tubes have a sound quality that just cannot be matched in the digital world. Perhaps they are right. I am not yet persuaded from what I have seen or heard (aka my organ that sounds like an Atari).

Look, its a mere $600.

Anyway, since this is available now, there must be a way to test tubes still somewhere out there. Perhaps Philips has my answer...

http://www.p4c.philips.com/files/m/mcd908_98/mcd908_98_pss_aen.pdf

October Organ Update

In October, we (we being mainly Jim and Jon, but I did help press some keys and take out some screws) started taking the organ apart to clean and fix. Not knowing exactly where to start, we began by taking out all 59 tubes. Yes, we did label them so they can go back in the correct place. Yes, it was in fact a rather complex numbering system.

After the tubes were out, this is what the back panel looked like. We needed to get to the power cord area to replace the cord, as it was bad (lower right corner). We started by taking off one of the small panels toward the right, to see if we could get to the power cord.

After taking out the screws, this is what we found. Oh my goodness. Turns out we couldn't just take that part off, it was connected to other panels by those curly black and brown wires. And they didn't stretch very far.
After taking off another panel and determining they were all connected together by solder, we figured there had to be another way. There was, in fact. The whole silver section can be slid off, placed on the floor and a front cover opened. Aha! we said. So we did that. And this is what we found there...

Yikes.

Well this isn't something you see every day.

What a pleasant surprise!
http://wcha.cstv.com/
http://www.ncaasports.com/icehockey/mens/polls

Maybe we'll get to go to St Paul again this year...and not just to see the pep band!

The Organ

Yes, thats right. The organ.

Jim and I were driving home from Milwaukee today, going through lovely Lannon, WI and we happened to see what looked like a small organ sitting out by the side of the road. We actually drove past it and I slowed down (slammed on the breaks Jim says, but I was gentle!) and turned around to get a closer look. Sure enough, it was an organ. I'm thinking to myself, how can we pass something like this up? Yes, I know we are not typically garabage pickers, but after all that is where several of my favorite childhood toys came from (my slide and my bike). So why not.

Luckily several of the family members of the house were sitting outside because it was so sunny out today (chilly, but sunny), so I called out to them, "Does it still work?" The gentlemen were very nice and assured me that yet it did in fact play and that no one in the house played it anymore and they just didn't need it. So I said, "Perfect!" and three of them, Jim and I placed it into the back of the escape. We had our bags, a case of Sprecher rootbeer, and two bags of grocery's from Trader Joe's - low and behold though, everything fit in there just perfectly. Like it was meant to be.

So the trip home was fine. We got back and I got the vacuum cleaner out and vacuumed it off while it was still in the car (it had been sitting outside by the road overnight aparently), ran an extention cord to the car to see if it did in fact work before we hauled it all the way upstairs...and the thing played! Then, we called Jon. Jon is ever so nice to us and always willing to be our muscle man. So he came over later and him and Jim hauled the thing out of the car, up the front steps and into the living room.

Ok, in the living room, lets plug it in. The cord is a little scary and needs to be fixed, but we take the necessary precautions and no one gets shocked. Turn it on and play up the scale. Haha. The C and the D (a 2nd) actually sound a 3rd. The C and E play the same note. The F plays two notes at once (sounds a bit like an Atari), but the G and A seemed alright. Actually the whole top octive plays perfectly. It has pedals - they kinda work. Sorta.

So we take off the back to check it out. Tubes. My goodness were Jim and Jon excited. They talked about schematics and capactitors and transitors (which were aparently in abundance behind the silver panel) and Faradays and all kinds of exciting electrical things. I started cleaning the keyboard off and got some pledge on the wood.

Needless to say, it needs a little work, but in the end should be fun. If worse comes to worse, it sounds like we can just take out the insides, salvage the keyboards, stops and box, and turn it into something a bit more modern.

The pictures really don't do it justice. Stop by sometime to see it. (After I've cleaned the dust out of the back so it stops smelling when we turn it on.)

And now we have an organ.

Resilient Marigods

We have very resilient marigolds. At our apartment we have a little patio on top of the garage. There are cement blocks that make up the patio, no dirt, but there are little cracks between the blocks. Apparently there is enough room for marigolds to grow. It was really windy a while back, so as best we can figure, the seeds blew on to the cement and they just started growing. They have survived for weeks now. I mean the darn things are blooming for pete's sake. Unfortunately, the second picture didn't turn out too nice, but you get the idea. How curious!

Weeds in the onions!

We had onions growing in a window box on our porch this summer. Onions grow with a couple stalks shooting up from the onion...kinda like really long grass. There was about 20 onions in the box, they were packed in pretty well. We hardly noticed when a small little grass like weed started growing. We didn't know it was a weed actually. Low and behold it was though. And it grew to something out of control in like 3 days. I don't know what happened, but somehow we didnt' see it growing. Jim and Jon then tried to pull it out. It wasn't coming. Couldn't figure out why...finally they pull out the roots, and half of the window box with it. That was one big weed.

As many of you know I have a very cool Disney Princess phone. Unfortuantely, that phone was having some problems. It would ring when someone called, but to wouldn't pick up when you pressed to button to talk. It was very sad because whenever the phone rang I had to either run upstairs or downstairs to answer it, hopefully in time before the person hung up! And then to make the call of course I had to do the running too.

So, Jim and I figured maybe there was a spring broken or popped out. Since the rest of the phone seemed still to work, I really didn't just want to scrap the thing.

I unscrewed the screws and pried the cover off, I don't think I broke anything. There was the little computer bit attached to the antena. Sadly for me, there was no springs, just little sensor touchpad thingies. Darn it. So we cleaned them off, because there appeared to be some glue or something on them. After several tries putting it back together (everything has to go in in a certain order!), reattached the battery, and.... it worked! When the talk shows in the window, that means its working! :) Yay for the Disney Princess Phone!

traveling

Ok, so I have been in 5 states in 5 days. i'm getting tired tired of airplanes.

last week I went to Poughkeepsie NY for an IPR conference.

• the flight to NY was a bit crazy. we were supposed to leave at 4pm from rochester to chicago - we got on the plane at 4pm, but didn't take off until 6pm. We did make it to chicago on time for our next flight, but that one got delayed...and delayed...and delayed...I think we finally took off about 11:30 or so. We got to our hotel at 3:30am Monday morning. ew. it screwed me up for the rest of the week.
• the highways in NY label their exits funny. On the plus side, they are labeled things like "3N" or "5W" if there are two exits that go to one direction or another. thats a brilliant idea - you just go to the direction you want to go, and don't have to try to figure out if 6A is east or 6B is east. sadly though, they label them in asending order, not labeled at what mile they are at. so exit 10 could be 5 miles from exit 11, it could be 2 miles, it could be 20 miles, and you have NO IDEA
• I heard a German man say "Jamaica" - of course it came out "Chamaica" because German's can say "gee" for some reason. i found it humorous.

On Friday I flew back from Westchester to Chicago, then to Minneapolis, so I wouldn't miss my flight from MSP to Grand Rapids MI. I had to fly to MSP instead of RST because I have really bad luck at ORD airport...its a long story. anyway, I made it in plenty of time, so I work for 5 hours at the airport, then Jim and I went to our Grand Rapids flight. That of course was delayed because of first, mechanical problems, second because a pasenger suddenly decided they were sick and had to get off the plane, the three because there was construction on the run ways at MSP, so there was delays and like 30 planes in front of us.

The wedding was in Mount Pleasant, so we drove there Saturday morning. It has changed quite a bit since I've been there - the college and the town. There is a coney island and a Tim Hortons! Geeze, if I would have known that, I might have stayed there. Just kidding :)

The wedding went pretty well. The was huge - there was 9 couples, plus the bride and groom. Plus about 350 people, at my best guess.


I bet you haven't seen a bride in cowboy boots in a while.


And it was the old gang together again. Its been a long time... Obviously, we are a lot older now :)


Then Monday afternoon I flew to San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale for The Green Grid technical committee meeting. I have never been to CA before. I must say its a lot different that I expected it to be. There are mountains all around, but they look like they are made of sand. So strange. I have a little 2008 Aveo as a rental car, its really cool, I like it a lot. Apparently its called a sedan, but its really far from it...it is cute though.

So there are strange things here in CA

• Buses and some cars run on "compressed natural gas". I have never heard of that. There are little compressed natural gas filling stations - its only $1.29/gallon. I don't know what efficiencies are like though (I guess we call that mpg for cars, don't we? too much green grid...)
• I drove by this resturant today: Wienerschnitzel. Now, I didn't go in it, but I'm hoping to tomorrow. It looks awesome. Although I have to say when I first saw it, I thought it was the German fast food resturant I have been looking for....sadly no. Maybe some day.
  
• Aparently people do not read in California. I drove like 20 miles today looking for one and did not see one ANYWHERE. Seriously people. (I finished Persuasion - I thought I hadn't read it before, but I just have a really bad memory...as I was reading it, I realized I remember all the bad parts - ie when people fall off walls. So shame on me. But its a good book. Although I have to say, Anne sometimes just seems too perfect. But I'm glad it has a happy ending.)
  

I come home tomorrow. With any luck, my planes will be on time and there will be a bookshop at the airport. Otherwise I'll get a lot of knitting done I guess.

another wedding this weekend! best of luck to the bride and groom!

Creme Brule

So Jon makes a mean creme brule. He got a book a while back, then some ramikins and a blow torch (creme brule torch?), and the rest is history. He was generous enough to let Jim and I partake.


So this is how it works. Jon makes up some little custards, often involving berries, always involving vanilla bean, on a day prior to the torching event. They cool in the fridge for some time. Then get them out and sprinkle sugar on top:


Next, light 'er up. The brule that is, not anything else. (That thing can act as a flame thrower if you are not careful...I'm telling you like 5 foot flames. Well, something close to that at least.)




Sugar melts and then rehardens all together to form a very nice, hard candy top coat on the brule. Its a fine line between getting it all to melt and burning the sugar. Jon is an expert though and we had no burning incidents.


Voila! Pretty as a picture. But tastes much better :) Way to go Jon

Randomness

Sometimes you just have to throw in some wierd stuff. First of all, Jim's socks. For some reason he felt the need to roll them one day, and I felt the need to take a picture. Then I felt the need to show you all. Second, a sign near Madison. Thank you Wisconsin DOT - once again proving putting up a sign is cheaper than fixing roads. Finally, these are the honeybears I made in my polymer lab in college. I didn't think I needed to keep them all anymore, so I took some pictures of them. Those green ones are made from recycled plastic (not easy to blow mold, let me tell ya...) however the white ones are made from virgin resin and that is why they worked good and turned out normal.

Jim's Birthday Party

After Jim opened his presents, we went out to dinner to Redwood Room, it was quite nice. We came back and played some cribage, then lots of people came over for cake and ice cream. Omoleye made a great orange cake and we have several kinds of ice cream, including a homemade one by Jim, which involved butter roasted almond coffee or something like that. It had a long name. It also tasted good.


Whew 26! What a fire.

Serve that cake Jim. Yum yum.


Jared enjoyed himself - doesn't he look like he's have a great time?


We then proceeded to listen to Disney hits in foreign languages and somehow moved on to theme songs for cartoon hits of the 80s. Don't ask.

Jim's birthday

So Picasa is working again and makes it easy to put pics up again! That is why I'm blogging so much now.

Jim's birthday! Made this Superman cake - turned out alright, just a funny looking nose :)



Jim got some awesome presents, which included several pie making accessories.



Looks happy doesn't he? Now he can make me pies all the time.

Summer band concert 1

So. Sometime back in June before Jim's birthday we had our first summer band concert in "central" park in Rochester. It was a beautiful day, not too hot (actually it was national knit in public day, if I remember correctly. sadly I didn't becuase I cannot play my horn and knit at the sametime. I am not as accomplished as my sister, who I'm sure could if she tried.).



Pretty, eh? The is a fountain off to the left of this picture and halfway through out concert a wedding party came to take pictures! I wonder if we got in the background.



And the story on the hats. Here's the thing - the piece we played was called Tobagan Ride, however people in the band (arrg) thought it would be clever to call it Waterslide instead, because it was summer. Well I thought that was stupid and we horns decided to wear winter hats in protest. The saxophones laughed at least.



Good times.