Gravy

(Originally posted on Saturday, July 16, 2005 by Tim)

It has been a long time since I?ve written up a recipe here. We actually haven?t been making many new meals lately. To be more honest, I haven?t been making many new meals of late. Cat has been trying new things and she?s found a few that are quite good.

Our big score this summer has been ?Chicken Fried Tofu?. Dave and I had a long discussion on ICQ over this one. He objected to the fact that the actual recipe contains no chicken and is not fried. This recipe come from our cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. Yes, that is her real name. I would guess she blames her parents. Almost all the meals we have made from this book have been good or great. We may have had one recipe that was OK. Once.

The best part of the Chicken Fried Tofu is an accompanying recipe for vegetarian gravy. Crescent goes on and on about how great this gravy is. I?m a pretty skeptical person and take all such ramblings with a nugget of salt. In Crescent?s case, I should just get over my cynicism. Whenever she goes on and on about something, it?s really good.

Vegetarian Gravy
4 cups vegetable stock
1 whole head of garlic, unpeeled
1 carrot, halved
1 onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
½ tsp coarsely crushed peppercorns
¼ cup nutritional yeast
½ tsp paprika
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
Extra salt and pepper to taste

Place stock, garlic, carrot, onion, bay leaf, and peppercorns in a pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and allow to simmer for 45 minutes. Remove from heat and pour stock through a strainer. You're interested in the garlic in the strainer and the stock so make sure to save both.

Allow garlic to cool. Squeeze the garlic cloves out of the skins into the stock. Mix in the paprika and nutritional yeast and place on low heat.

Melt the butter over low heat. Whisk in flour and cook until flour paste browns slightly (3 to 4 minutes). Slowly add butter/flour mixture to stock with stirring. Simmer stock until slightly thickened. Season with salt and pepper.

This stuff is amazing. I like to season it with lots of salt and fresh ground pepper, but I'm like that.

Things you don't want to hear from your dogsitter.

(Originally posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2005 by Tim)

So I've neglected to mention one detail of Cat's adventure to graduation on Friday morning, the call from the dog sitter. Cat got the call when we were speeding down Fair Oaks street (roughly 3 miles from Caltech). I didn't hear the conversation, but it did involve the phrase, "an impressive amount of diarrhea."

This is not a phrase you ever want to hear from your dog sitter. We have a great service that does the dog sitting. Besides the being great with the dogs, they also have a steam cleaner if you catch my meaning.

The event got me to thinking about what other things you wouldn't want to hear from the dogsitter.

Dogsitter top 10
10. "Did you have two or three plush chairs in the living room?"
9. "Wow, normally dogs get over that around age two."
8. "some dogs are just diggers"
7. "I think he made your vet's day"
6. "maybe you can call us back when he get's a little older"
5. "where did you leave that blank check again?"
4. "the officer left his card on the door"
3. any sentence that contains both the words "barf" and "wallpaper"
2. "Well, the dining room still looks OK..."

and, of course

1. "an impressive amount of diarrhea"

enjoy your dinner :)

B'burg transit

(Originally posted on Saturday, July 9, 2005 by Cathy)

What I love about Blacksburg transit:

• Buses run exactly like the schedule says, to the minute.
  
  This is a first. In Seattle, buses ran pretty much when they felt like it, and could be 10 minutes early or late. (Which meant you could easily stand in the rain for 20 minutes waiting for one.) At VT, you can sit there and watch every bus that timepoints somewhere on the drillfield start up and pull out at exactly quarter past. It verges on freaky.

• Free buses.
  
  Ok, technically they're "pre-paid" for VT students/faculty/staff/spouses with ID. But since that's all of B'burg, they're pretty much free. No scrounging for quarters in the bottom of my bag, no waiting while someone else does.
• They take the by-pass to Christiansburg, instead of stopping every four feet.

What I don't exactly love about Blacksburg transit:

• Limited summer schedule
  
  Granted, the ridership I see seems pretty limited, but not running the first bus on the line I need until noon means I can't take the bus to work. Cutting the bus schedule back so far seems counterproductive. Sure, there aren't all that many people on campus in summer, but the ones that are there are almost certainly either graduate students/post-docs, who have to be in first thing in the morning and last thing at night despite the summer schedule (but might sleep in on Sundays since it is summer), students taking and faculty teaching summer classes, most of which are over before noon, and staff, who work pretty much the same schedule in the summer as during the year (but with fewer interruptions). I guess the problem is that the bus I take home is the shopping mall run, and BB transit figures that no one shops before noon anyway. (Given how late our mall opens, this is almost true.)

• Stupid 20 minute loops around the mall and the Walmart.
  I actually take two buses to get home. The Blacksburg half of the two-town trolley line takes the bypass to the Pepper's Ferry exit, then goes to Walmart, then loops all around the mall before coming to a stop at the movie theater entrance at about 20 'til. At quarter 'til, the Christiansburg half of the TTT heads out. It goes to Walmart, then K-mart, then briefly heads north (right, back towards VT) to catch the DMV and Goodwill. THEN it starts heading towards C'burg. Notice how both buses visit Walmart? If you get off the TTT-B'burg at Walmart, you can actually sit there for 18 minutes (I've timed it) and get on the TTT-C'burg when it gets there. Yep, there's 18 extra minutes in the route. If someone would just offset the two bus-lines by 18 minutes so that the C'burg bus pulled up to Walmart at the same time as the B'burg bus, I could get home in 40 minutes, instead of closer to an hour. And that's without moving a single stop. Let me move the stops around and I could do it in 30. Actually, I guess I'd need to think about the impact on the northbound bus route (maybe that just puts the 18 minutes there), but since the northbound route is precisely useless to me this summer, I'm pretending it doesn't exist anyway.

• Limited stops
  
  Ok, I'll fess up. I love the fact that the B'burg bus takes the bypass. But I want the C'burg bus to stop closer to my house. From Pepper's Ferry, there's no point on getting back on the bypass anyway, so the bus just goes south on 460 business. It hits the highlights - the kroger, the rec center - but other than that, it just doesn't stop. It goes right by these places, going no more than 30 mph, with stop lights and all, but you can't get off. I walk twice as far home as I'd have to, if the powers-that-be only thought that letting me off near my corner was worhtwhile. (Unfortunately, the only thing near my corner is a detailing place, which is pretty worthless for a bus rider!) Given that the C'burg bus generally has like three people riding it, having a few extra stops on the book (that the bus just blows past) wouldn't slow it down. And heck, it might just increase ridership if the bus stops occured in quanta of less than 2 miles.

• Stupid stops
  
  The B'burg TTT bus makes two stops on the drillfield. The two stops are at 9 and 12 on the clock, if you have a Dali-style clock anyway. At 9 o'clock there is no shade and no bus shelter. But down at 6 o'clock is a nice bus shelter, with benches inside and out. (Did I mention that my office is at 6:15? No bias here.) I don't mind walking up to the 9 o'clock stop when the weather is nice, but when it isn't, a 5 minute walk in the rain with NO nice dry bus shelter at the end of it, when there's a nice dry shelter just outside the door to the building? Seems kinda silly. I got totally drenched on Thursday waiting for that bus to show up.

She made it!

(Originally posted on Monday, June 13, 2005 by Tim)

So our Thursday quest to get Cathy to graduation was filled with stress and angst, but mostly successful.

As described in the previous post, we had driven over 4 hours to Dulles Airport to catch a flight that would land us at LAX at 9:30 am. Graduation starts at 10:00 am. We had a very stressful morning. It was so stressful that I can?t actually bring myself to write about it at length. Essentially, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Well no, we didn?t run out of gas.

Here is a quick summary of what went wrong at Dulles Airport on Friday.

1. It took 30 minutes to get from the parking lot to the airport.
2. United?s e-ticket machines didn?t recognize that Cat had a ticket.
3. United?s e-ticket machines brought up ticket information for ?Andre Jahn? when I inserted my credit card.
4. An alert United employee directed us to the wrong line.
5. Cat got her ticket fixed but couldn?t fix mine because I was still holding our place in the ?wrong line?.
6. We missed our flight and got put on one with an arrival time of 10:30 am. Remember, graduation starts at 10 am.

It was really a very awful morning. Yet despite all the forces of fate against her, Cat still managed to get to graduation in time to be officially ?hooded?. The bulk of the credit goes to the Caltech Graduation Czar, Deborah White, and Cat?s Dad?s mad taxi driver skills. Jim literally sped up the sidewalk at Caltech, Cat jumped out the car, and Deborah rushed her over to the podium where she was slipped in as the last person to receive her degree at graduation. The picture above is not one taken by me, but one taken by an official Caltech photographer and posted on the Caltech website. I think that Cat?s expression adequately communicates what she had been through that morning.

In addition to the picture, there?s a whole video of graduation on the Caltech web site. You can download if for viewing here for broadband or here for modem. Rather than make you watch the entire thing, I thought I?d point out the important parts. It?s best to watch this while listening to the theme to Mission Impossible.

Under the section labeled ?Presentation of Doctoral Degrees.?
22:02 Cat runs onto the platform in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
22:06 Deborah on her walkie talkie calling Cat in.
22:15 Cat?s name is discussed in the background.
22:40 Cat gets her hood!
22:50 Someone says, ?You made it!?
22:56 David Baltimore (the President of Caltech) has to chase Cat down to hand over her diploma. For those of you who can?t read lips, she?s says, ?Where do I go??

I think that Cat and I have really bad travel karma and Jim and Carol have really good travel karma. Essentially, once Jim and Carol picked us up, everything started to go right. An example of this can be seen in the ?Introduction to Commencement? section of the video. Note that at 28:40 there is a 65 second ?moment of confusion?. Without this ?moment? David Baltimore would have begun his concluding remarks before Cat arrived.

So that was our Friday morning. The rest of the vacation has been a lot of fun and mostly stress free. I?ll try to post more later in the week.

Yeah Right

(Originally posted on Thursday, June 9, 2005 by Tim)

I have to write in here more often, or go to Roanoke Airport less, or both. Two posts in a row focused on our travel woes seems like a bit much.

Cat and I are on our way to CA once again. This time we're off for her to walk at graduation and to vacation with her parents for a few days. I'm looking forward to relaxing, eating good food, and spending some time with Cat's folks. However, to get to CA, we have to go through the purgatory that is Roanoke airport. This time we decided to double curse ourselves by choosing Roanoke and the corporate disaster that is United Airlines.

I could speculate that United is yet another terrorist organization trying to drain the productivity from this great land of ours. However, I have yet to see a United employee throwing ducks at landing Delta jets, so I have to conclude that they¡¦re just hopelessly disorganized.

For today¡¦s adventure, we were trying to get to Dulles to catch a connection to LAX. Before we even left the house we were pretty much doomed. The flight we were taking to Dulles comes into Roanoke and then flies back again. When Cat looked up information on that flight, it listed as "Delayed due to equipment swap." I don't think basic math skills are highly valued at United (can you say bankruptcy proceedings). The incoming flight was delayed by 2 hours and our outgoing flight on the same plane was listed as A OK on time! Hold on, it gets better.

We jump in the car and Cat calls United on her cell phone. It begins with her fighting with their voice recognition system.

Cat: 8077
(pause)
Cat: no
(pause)
Cat: 8077
(pause)
Cat: No
(pause)
Cat: 8077
(pause)
Cat: NO!

I couldn't hear the computer on the other end, but I think I can extrapolate from what Cat was saying. I'd like to thank Mom and Dad for all those expensive years of college, without which I would be unable to accomplish intellectual feats such as this.

Too Happy Computer Guy: Welcome to the United Automated Arrival/Departure system. What flight number?

Cat: 8077

Too Happy Computer Guy: 1775? Did you know that 1775 was the year that the first vintage port was created?

Cat: no

Too Happy Computer Guy: Amazing huh? How many bottles do you think were made that year?

Cat: 8077

Too Happy Computer Guy: That is a whole lot of bottles. They had not quite developed automated bottling methods back then. Do you really think it was that many?

Cat: No

Too Happy Computer Guy: I always get distracted when people start talking about port wines. What was the flight number again?

Cat: 8077

Too Happy Computer Guy: Speaking of port, we have a lovely steak tartar that we server on westbound flights. It is served with the United house port. Shall I replace your reserved vegetarian meal?

Cat: NO!

Well, more adventures have ensued which have resulted in our staying overnight at Brian and Anduin's house this evening (thanks Brian). We're still hoping to get Cat to graduation on time tomorrow. Wish us luck!

Congratulations Dr. S.!

(Originally posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by Tim)

Well, this is 2 weeks delayed at this point. I blame finals week and the nice weather and grant writing and...well you get the picture.

The title says it all. Cat and I journeyed out to Southern California this week for her Ph.D. defense which she passed with flying colors. I was torn on the title for this post. I wanted to name it, Cathy's big adventure after the cornucopia of mechanical problems that Delta subjected us to on Tuesday.

It all started in Roanoke airport. There are several things that I dislike about living removed from civilization and Roanoke airport is one of them. You can't go anywhere direct from Roanoke and it seems like we get delayed 50% of the time leaving the place. The worst thing is that the delays can be caused by events across the country. We have been delayed in Roanoke due to weather problems in Chicago and mechanical problems in San Francisco. As far as I can figure, if one of the luggage guys in Atlanta develops a hang nail, it translates into a delay at Roanoke.

Well, this time the delay was actually caused at Roanoke. It seems that when our plane was landing, it hit a bird. Said bird was clearly trying to get at the pilot because it bounced off the windshield rather than getting sucked through the engines. Come to think of it, the bird may have been a terrorist trying to bring our great nation to its knees by causing delays at Roanoke airport. I wonder if it had a laser pointer? In any case, the bird hit the windshield and took off the windshield wiper. Apparently the FFA considers windshield wipers essential and we couldn't take off until it was fixed. Of course it wasn't that simple. First, we were told our flight was canceled. At this point, everyone gets up and charges the attendant. Cat grabbed her cell phone and ran down to the ticket counter to try and make changes there. I sat and courageously guarded the luggage. I wasn't going to let it out of my sight and allow some crazy plane charging bird get at it.

After roughly 30 minutes, the attendant comes back on and tells us he was kidding, they didn't cancel our flight after all. It seems the maintenance guys were able to pull a wiper blade off an old VW bus out in the parking lot and attach it to our plane with a liberal amount of duct tape. Cathy comes back from the ticket counter and, with high hopes of making our connection, we get on the plane. Unfortunately, an on time take off was not to be. After we get into the plane, we end up sitting at the gate for 40 minutes. Eventually the pilot comes on and tells us that our resourceful maintenance guys forgot to write the make and model of the VW bus in the repair log. For us to take off, this critical information must be inscribed in the tome of repairs. So all they have to do now is find the maintenance guys and get the information they need for the log. This takes another 20 minutes and needless to say, we've missed our connection in Cincinati.

Arriving at Cincinati, we find that Delta has rebooked us on a later flight to Los Angeles. The flight is two hours later, but still gets us in at a resonable hour. I'm thinking, "Ok, not perfect, but it isn't too bad". Of course I should have knocked on wood or sacrificed a small animal or whatever one does to ward off bad luck in that situation. It turns out that our plane in Cincinati is also broken. I actually didn't listen to what the problem was, but they went and put us on a different plane, resulting in another one hour of delay. Cat was enjoying the extra time to work on her thesis and I managed to get this cheerful picture of her. Our new plane is coming in from San Francisco and there are some sort of delays there (probably mechanical). They keep bumping back our departure time and we lose another hour waiting for it to come on. Now, we're looking at getting to the hotel at something like 1:30 am in the morning.

Finally our plane arrives and we board. Then we sat at the gate for over an hour, big surprise huh. Eventually, one of the ground crew comes on the intercom and says, "We've been here at the gate for some time and we just wanted to let you know what is going on. There's a small fuel leak in the right engine and we're waiting for a ground crew to come look at it and tell us if it's too big a leak for us to take off." A SMALL FUEL LEAK! Clearly, someone needs to school these Delta guys in a little creative lying. If not creative lying, how about a little creative not giving out all the details.

So we wait some more. Meanwhile, as is always the case with these things, we have someone freaking out adjacent to our seats. This time the individual is in front of us. He calls the flight attendant over and says, "Can the Captain make an announcement? I'm a liscenced pilot and I'd never take off with a fuel leak." The flight attendent informs him that jets fly with small fuel leaks all the time and that he's welcome to walk up and talk to the Captain or get off the plane if he feels uncomfortable. Well he doesn't talk to the Captain and he doesn't get off the plane. The first thing he does is call his significant other and tell her/him to sue Delta should the plane goes down. Next he and the women across the isle start going on about how crazy it is to take off with a fuel leak and mutually raise each other's anxiety level. The flight attendent finally has to come over and tell him "mostly politely" to quiet down as he's scaring the natives.

Eventually the mechanics get there and determine that the leak is not large enough to prevent us from streaking through the troposphere. The Captain does come on and inform us that the leak is one drop every two seconds. I do a quick (and conservative) calculation in my head and inform the pullus minimus in front of us that it translates into us losing a whole liter of fuel over our four hour trip.

Finally, we pull out from the gate. Yay! We taxi out on the runway. Yay! We're 10th in line to take off. Yay! Well, ok, not yay, but we are in line. Then we sit. We sit for at least 30 minutes before the Captain comes on again and informs us that he has an "indicator" in the left engine and we have to go back to the gate. It turns out that the indicator is a fuel valve that needs to be replaced. We've now been on the ground so long that our flight crew is running out of time before they have to take a break and get us a new crew due to FFA regulations. So we sit on the runway for 25 minutes hoping that we get the fuel valve changed in time. If we don't, they need to get another flight crew and we will certainly be stuck in Cincinati overnight.

Well, people like to say that "Alls well that ends well." They managed to chainge the valve in time and rest of our flight was without event. We landed in Los Angeles at 2:30 am and got to our motel at 3:30 am. Cathy managed to get enough sleep to do very well at her defense and she is now Dr. S. I've attached some of the pictures from her defense below for your viewing.

Picture captions in reading order are:
1. Cathy opening champagne.
2. Cathy, Cynthia (Lab Administrative Assistant) and Marie (Lab Technical writer).
3. Cathy and Steve (Advisor).
4. Cathy and Steve (Advisor).
5. Happy Cathy.
6. Cathy, Rhonda (Lab Manager), Cynthia and Marie.
7. Cathy in the Mayo Labs.
8. Cathy outdoors.
9. Cathy by the DNA fountain.

Spring Flowers

(Originally posted on Sunday, April 24, 2005 by Tim)

My goodness it's been a long time since I've written in here. I could blame the insanely busy school year, but World of Warcraft (the new video game Cat and I are playing) gets some credit too. With all this stuff going on, we haven't had too much chance to try out new meals. It has been old, and easy, comfort food of late. Lots of Boca^TM burgers with corn on the cob and potato soup for us. We do have a new, and easy, vegetable fajita recipe but I'll leave that for a later post. Today I will talk about the flowers in our yard.

Cat and I put in some bulbs last fall. It's the first time we've seriously put in bulbs from a landscaping point of view. We did put a bunch in the brick flower boxes at the old place but that doesn't really count in my mind for some reason. Maybe it's because there were supposed to be flowers there.

In any case, we put a few hundred bulbs in last fall running along the fence and right in front of the house by the steps. Most of those bulbs have been coming up this spring. Some sad sad bulbs decided to come up during a warm spell this winter and got themselves a very rude surprise. In addition to the bulbs we planted, there have been some nice surprises in the yard. Apparently someone planted a bunch of bulbs at some point and all the flowers were gone by the time we moved into the house last summer. Either that or all the flowers were keeping their heads down for fear of the old wiring resulting in a fireball.

Of the flowers we have planted, daffodils and tulips have begun to bloom. Unfortunately I only have a picture of the daffodils at the moment. The tulips came up over the last few days and there is a nice variety of red, orange and white. We have a whole army of them that came up along the west fence that haven't bloomed yet. I'm expecting them to look quite good. You might want to click on these pictures to get a better view.

As I mentioned, we have a number of surprises in the yard that we weren't expecting. There are a number of daffodils coming up around the yard. We have a few coming up next to the grape vines. These are right next to the door and the dogs love them. I somehow doubt the feeling is mutual.

We also have a large bunch of daffodils coming up right next to the blackberry vines. The dogs don't seem to like these as much. I think the thorny blackberries and the daffodils have some sort of symbiotic arrangement. I have yet to figure out what the blackberries get out of it. I kept going back and forth on whether or not I should take the blackberries out. On one hand, they are a very invasive weed growing close to the house. On the other hand, they make blackberries. In the end, I was never next to them with a clippers and some spare time on my hands so they will get at least one more summer.

The yard also has a nice collection of purple and white wildflowers in the lawn. I've seen this sort of thing in a few yards around here. It looks very nice. I've been thinking of asking around to see if there is a way to encourage more of these to grow.

We also have this clump of surprise daffodils and crocuses in the front by the steps. These appear to have been growing thick for a number of years. I have a friend in Physics who is good with plants and landscaping. He has said that you need to dig things like this up and split up the bulbs. Digging up bulbs to just replant at the end of every couple years offends my sensibilities somehow. I want to plant bulbs and have them come up forever with little or no maintenance. Maybe if I was to plant roses? You just need to hack those back every once and a while, no?

Finally, we've a bunch of these purple things coming up in the front by the steps. I originally thought I had planted them, but I've found them in a couple of other places in the yard where I do not think I planted anything. When I dug up this section in the front, I dug into a bunch of bulbs that were already there. I think these are some of those I dug up. Note my attractive dead leaf mulch that I put in last fall. This stuff didn't turn out looking as nice as I would have hoped. I may have to consider real mulch next year.