Some days...

...you just have to drag yourself kicking and screaming to work.

Argh...

Weekly Report #7

The path lead upwards past the timberline, to where the hard rock of the earth's bones was exposed.  All along the way, our hero found evidence of the ogre's passage.  The ogre was no more than a day ahead, and making slow time.  A hard fight was ahead, and it wasn't clear at all who might win it.

The Minnow Report:

I think we're going to make the transition after Christmas.  We'll see though.  

The Baby Report:

Well, mom got her wisdom teeth pulled, so baby and daddy have been spending a lot of time together.  I was borderline terrified about how this would go, considering the kid's love of mom, but it hasn't been hard at all.  Having said that, I took off this afternoon just so I could sit in front of the tv and play video games and then have a nap.  I don't know how single parents do it, I really don't.

Culinary:

I've decided that cooking for the freezer is an appropriate strategy.  What is this strategy, you say?  It's when you cook things in advance and freeze them.  There are a whole host of books and websites about this, but the websites are all crap (for the most part).  Basically, I think I'm going to just try things and see how they turn out.  I've got a few casseroles of enchiladas in the freezer right now, along with a broccoli/chicken casserole (that I've never made before).  We'll see how it turns out.

Oh, and I made Alton Brown's 'stovetop' mac and cheese the other night.  Pretty fantastic, although I left out all the zippy spices because the kid hates them.  I swear, my food has never been so bland in my life.  

Wisdom Teeth:

I must admit that I find it strange when I stick my tongue back there and there's a gap.  For the last six years I've had a tooth pointed all funny like there and no good way to clean it, and suddenly its gone.  Well, not gone gone...I have it in a little bag on my counter.  That tooth is black....yikes.  My wife's teeth seemed to come out more in 1 piece, and judas freaking monkeys, one of her teeth is the size of a small oak tree.   She's in the 'god, I'm never going to feel good again am I?' stage of the process.  I hope things turn for her on day 7 as they did for me.  

Moo:

I moo'd at someone in an email the other day and they shot an email right back to me saying (essentially) what the hell?  Uh...yeah.  Apparently this is a strange thing?  It is an expression of sadness and hopelessness.  It indicates you feel like a cow (domesticated, caged, feed too much corn, left out in the cold, and probably about to be eaten by someone for lunch).  

There's nothing weird about that.

Ok, maybe a little, but c'mon.  At this point, doesn't everybody know I'm a weirdo?

NBA:

   I don't know if people realize this or not, but Dirk Nowitzki is having a fantastic season...too bad the rest of his team stinks.  The Mavs are just a miserable collection of talent.  This ought to be some kind of lesson in how to go from 67 wins and a deep and talented squad to fighting for the playoffs and getting key contributions from J.J. Barea.

   Different NBA teams need different things, and I understand the Mavs and Suns looking at the Lakers and the Hornets last year and saying:  Wow, they are going to be good.  But you've got a window.  The Lakers and the Hornets were still teams looking for an identity.  Although they had all the talent they needed, they didn't have the chemistry.  And the Mavs and Suns had that chemistry, and a comparable amount of talent.  They each had a much better chance of winning a championship last year before the Shaq and Kidd trades than they did afterwards, because they lost the chemistry edge.  That was the only edge they had over the Lakers/Hornets/Jazz...and it's an important one.  Just look at how well the Spurs did with arguably less talent.  

  Instead the Mavs and Suns reacted to how good the Lakers would be this year and not only threw away last season, but, in the case of the Mavs, threw away the ability to get better this year.  

  My NBA fandom has always exceeded my Mavs fandom, and right now I almost want to re-declare as a free agent.  I have no particular loyalty to Dallas (I've never lived there, and I've only visited once), I only started rooting for them because it was a shorter drive than Denver.  And it isn't like its been all sugarplum kisses with this team either.  Cuban managed to swap Nick the Quick for Antawn Jamison and then ruined that by adding Antoine Walker.  Then he swapped Steve Nash and Walker for Erick Dampier and Jason Terry.  That doesn't even begin to get into paying $45 mil for Shawn Bradley (who did have 2 good seasons with the Mavs) or $80 mil for Raef LaFrentz.  And he pissed of the Heat in the Finals by talking about the victory parade after the Mavs went up 2-0.  This just isn't fun sometimes.  I don't need to be addicted to one team.

Other stuff:

I spent most of this week learning R and writing a paper.  R is both way more difficult and a lot easier than I imagined.  The help files are either incomprehensible or impossible to find or (occasionally) both.  R commander helped a lot...I was struggling to even get my data into the damned program without it.  So yeah R commander.

Weekly Report #6

Sure, our hero had been kidnapped, beaten, called nasty names, and left for dead in the snow. But he wasn't the type to hold a grudge. Especially when that had all been part of The Plan.


The Minnow Report:

Is it time? Maybe its time. I think it is getting close to time.


The Baby Report:

Such a cute little baby (toddler?). He's really developing an unstoppable engine though. Some days, we're just not ready to come inside. On Tuesday we went to Sears, and he wanted to run around the store. Ok...headache, but fine. Let's run around the store. The problem was, he didn't ever want to stop. So I ended up wrestling a small child into a car-seat. While he's crying. Sigh.

Of course, I also was able to successfully put him to bed (after making dinner for the next night) without any tears. I am a golden buddha!


Meat:

So I've gone so far away from my quasi-vegetarian mentality that it is hard to even see where I was. Does anyone remember how I didn't used to eat meat? I mean, at all? Yeah, what the hell was I eating?
The more I get into cooking, the more meat I cook. This isn't because I don't think you have to cook meat to be a good cook, far from it. Instead, I cook a lot with meat because I want to try a lot of different things. Also, being in Kansas, when you have conversations about food with people, you tend to talk about meat a lot. All this is made weird for me by my continued insistence to not eat beef. This is the last hold-out for me. The last vestige of me being an environmental vegetarian.
I told someone the other day that I act so weird that I'm approaching normal from the other side. This is a perfect example of that: First I was weird for not eating seafood, then I was weird for not eating meat, then I was weird for not eating meat because of environmental reasons (as opposed to ethical or health concerns), then I was weird for eating certain meats (chicken and turkey), but not others. Then, because I was dealing with such a limited diet, I started getting really interested in culinary science, which made me a weirdo male-in-the-kitchen in Oklahoma and Kansas. And now I'm weird because I'll pretty much eat anything except beef, provided you can tell me how you made it and its culinary history. I'm practically normal again.


Cooking (disasters edition):

Just a word of warning: No matter how good of an idea it seems like at the time, never put tomatoes and orange juice in the same dish. Especially if it is a breakfast casserole.


Cooking (anticipation edition):

My parents bought us an early christmas gift this week (THANKS!): A chest freezer. Why do I need a chest freezer? Well, hopefully next year's garden vegetables will be stored frozen (for starters), but also, I've got about 150 pounds of meat on the way (have I mentioned the meat yet?). That's a half a lamb and at least a quarter of a bison. I'm ridiculously excited about this: I've almost never cooked with lamb, and never cooked with lamb chops or leg of lamb. I've eaten plenty of ground bison, and I've tried a few roasts, but this is the first grass-fed animal I've had. I'm also excited because of aging. What's aging?
Well, after an animal is slaughtered, skinned, gutted and chopped into big chunks of meat, it is pratically inedible. That's not true, but it isn't far off. Especially with red meats, a critical step is letting the meat hang in a clean, cold, dark locker for awhile. According to the U. of Minnesota extension office, commercial cuts are aged 7 days on average, but according to everyone I know in Kansas, that is unlikely. According to some people I've talked to at the K-State Ag School, commercial operations often age their meat just 3-5 days. By comparisons, fine resturants purchase meat aged between 11 and 20 days.
I'm buying my lamb and bison from family farm operations, and they are/were butchered at local butchers. At this scale, meat gets aged a lot more (in both cases 10 days). The upshot is a much more tender cut of meat. This is especially true for bison, which are pretty much exclusively grown on grass (and therefore grow much slower than cattle). I'm hopeful that this will mean I will have more luck with my bison steaks than I've had in the past. We'll see.


Wisdom Teeth:

Despite my drug-induced optimism on full display elsewhere, it turned out to be a pretty crummy thanksgiving week. The pain felt minimal on Wednesday of last week, but by Thursday I was in agony again. Eventually I got back on the serious pain meds again, and they combined to make me 1) extremely hyperactive and 2) a very poor thinker. As you might imagine, that's a combination that makes for a very interesting week. Hopefully I didn't offend anyone. The best story I've heard from the wife is about my ridiculous excitment upon purchasing some pants. Yeah.
I mean, I need pants, and they are nice + cheap. But apparently I was really excited.


The NBA:

The more I watch the NBA (and I'm up to ~10 games a week), the more amazed I am that the Lakers and Celtics are doing so well. Talent-wise, there are a lot of really good teams in the NBA. The Memphis Grizzlies spring to mind as a perfect example of a team with loads of talent, but no cohesive plan for putting it together on the court. The Cleveland Cavs, by contrast, seem to have no significant talent after LeBron, but they definitely have a plan.
The Utah Jazz are a better example of this. There's no reason the Jazz shouldn't be the best team in the league when healthy. Obviously that hasn't been very often this year, but this should have been the case last year as well. They have excellent big men, an extremely good point guard, quality shooters all over the floor, the most versatile sixth man in the game, overachieving role players, and they've all been together for years. Yet the Jazz are often miserable to watch, can't control games at all, and never seem to be cohesive.
Is it coaching? Is that the problem? I think Jerry Sloan's a good coach, but maybe he's not? The Lakers under Phil Jackson always have had an identity. They've always had a plan. When they almost beat the Suns in the first round 3 years ago, it was because they had a plan. Turns out, it wasn't quite a perfect plan, but you could tell they were committed to it (until Kobe quit playing in Game 7). The teams I've seen this year that seem to have that plan are: the Lakers, the Celtics, the Knicks (on the court), the Heat, the Cavs, and the Spurs (the Blazers might be on this list, but they have two plans: 1 involving Greg Oden, and 1 involving just winning games). But that sure isn't every team with a good coach: The Bucks and Dallas seem to have good coaching, and I really think Terry Porter is a good coach in Phoenix (although not for the Nash-Bell-Amare-Diaw group).
I don't quite get it. The talent gap just isn't that great. The Bobcat's Richardson-Wallace-Okafor combination isn't that much worse in terms of pure talent than Allen-Pierce-Garnett. But the Bobcats play some of the stupidest basketball I have ever seen in my life, while the Celtics play as if they are all operated by a single brain.

Oh, and D.J. Augustine is the best guard on the Bobcats. I think he's bulked up since college.


AND:

That's all I've got to talk about.