The Failure of Phoenix

In the NBA, superstars usually come up short because they fail in some
way. Clyde Drexler couldn't beat MJ because he got outplayed.
Patrick Ewing would have won two championships if he (and John Starks)
hadn't fallen apart at key moments.

The Suns are different. Charles Barkley, Kevin Johnson and Thunder
Dan played their best basketball ever, and it was good enough to
inspire great memories, but they just couldn't beat MJ.

Nash's Suns are the same way. They play excellent. They come up big
late in games. None of the core guys plays like a dope. And yet they
keep coming up short anyway.

Man that sucks.

My blog

Did you know I've been updating my blog again?

Yeah, I think I'm funny.

I think its better because its just short snippets.

But that doesn't mean I like Twitter.

I just think most people only need a little bit of me at a time.

I am exhausted by Prairie Chickens

I've never really been interested in birds. In fact, I've been
actively opposed to learning anything about them.

But sometime in the last year or so I started thinking of them as dinosaurs.

Now I'm pretty into birds.

I feel this is important to share.

In case you didn't know...

The absolute best websites for food recipes (aggregation sites anyway)
are Allrecipes.com and the food network's websites. What makes these
sites so great is the comments on recipes. Lots of useful
information.

In the past week we've made a couple of new recipes off these sites
(Greek Green Beans and Greek pasta salad). Both excellent, but both
with very useful info on different varieties in the comments of
AllRecipes.

Argh

I practically write for a living, but when I'm writing a letter
committing us to spending $30k I suddenly can't figure out how to
construct a sentence.

Background noise

I usually listen to this, along with some light jazz, while I'm at work to set a relaxed mood.

Today? 

Today was just two tabs open to the rain, slightly off, so that the number of thunder-crashes was greater.  

I'm like some kind of genius.

The Tea

See, the tea is Earl Gray. I brewed it this morning (at like 7) and
put it, still rocket-hot, into my travel mug, sealed the lid on, and
just opened it at around 9 or so. Apparently that's just enough time
for the tea to cool to an acceptable temperature, without being cooled
completely.

Yeah, my travel mug is pretty awesome.

I thought you should know.

Ups and downs

Ups:

Child #2 is doing great, gaining weight, acting cute, trying to sit up
(working his core)

Downs:

Streams in are getting the short end of the stick

Ups:

Participated in a contest for high school students yesterday that was
focused on environmental concerns

Downs:

I feel excluded and isolated from everyone I interact with, plus I
have a generalized feeling of dread.

Ups:

This is really good tea.

Basketball

Blog posts will resume soon, however, I just wanted to point out that my favorite rookie in the NBA is Brandon Jennings and I think you're crazy if you believe he's not the biggest reason the Bucks are going to be about 10 games better this year than last.

What?  NCAA basketball?  What happened to Kansas?  

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my 2008 KU National Championship shirt.

I never knew I never knew

(The long delayed story of my second son's birth)

So there it was, early afternoon on a Monday.  I was finally back at work after basically two weeks of sickness and exhaustion and holiday.  A huge mountain of work, a huge project looming, a huge amount to do.  And then this little message popped up on my gmail chat window:  Wife: "I'm feeling weird"

"Like, uh, how weird"

"Like I'm having contractions."

(jaw drops....cold chill enters my bones....think.)

"Um."

This conversation is happening at the beginning of week 35 of the pregnancy.  This isn't so bad, really.  Thirty five weeks is just a week or so away from the point where I was going to stop worrying about the pregnancy.  But that week or so was a little foolish optimism.  Our due date is a month away!  Just over a month actually.  So uncertainty began on Monday just after lunch.

By Tuesday we were calling the OB's office, who reminded the Wife that she had missed a doctor's appointment on Monday and yes, come in today.  So we piled the fam into the car and drove the 1.5 hour to the doctor's office.  There to be told this could last 4 weeks.   Ugh...but ok.  We don't want him to come yet.  So we went back home.   Around 7 30, son slips in the kitchen and splits his lip open.  Blood everywhere.

But the contractions continued.  At 11 30, we called the local hospital.  They said: "Well, you're early, so if you can just make it to [Big City], you should, because we're going to helicopter you there anyway."  Oohhh-kay.

The contractions diminished, we went to be at like 12 30.  At 3 am Wednesday, we were awake again, thinking this was it.  The Wife took a shower (one of the things they said could reduce the pain).  Contractions continued, but the wife said "Just go back to sleep, I'll wake you if we need to go."  At 4 30, we re-awoke..dressed the kid, and drove the hour and a half to the big city hospital.  

Only after an hour in the car, the contractions stopped....great.  Instead we went to my parent's house in Big City, arriving at 6 am, woke up my dad, and Wife went to bed, Son went to sleep on Grandpa's chest, and I (hyped up on caffeine that I used to actually get there) couldn't sleep.  When the OB's office woke up (opened), the wife called.  They said:

"Take Tylenol and [something else, can't remember] and see if you can sleep through the contractions.  If you can't, come in."  

So from around 9 in the morning until around around 7 o'clock that night, the drugs worked.  At around 7 30, I'm looking at the boy running around Grandpa's basement (grandma was out of town helping my sister with her 2-week old).  I think to myself: "Kiddo, I'm about to grab you and take you to bed, because daddy's tired."  

At about that time Mom comes out of the bedroom and says:  :"Yeah, it's time.  We're going to the hospital now."

Adrenaline is a wonderful thing.  As it turns out, adrenaline can keep you going for a about 2.5 hours before total exhaustion kicks back in.  

And when it kicked in, it kicked in hard.  

(To be continued...)

Baby # 2 (the Younger)

Monday contractions began...at 12:02am on Thursday the contractions were done (or at least, the baby-birthing contractions). In between was very little sleep, and increasing sense of impending arrival, me fainting in the delivery room, lots of drugs injected directly into the spine, and finally, a screaming child.

Since screaming, the child was moved to the neonatal intensive care unit, since he's about a month early, but he's doing pretty darned well.

A full accounting of the delivery (complete with my increasingly complicated explanation for my own collapse) is forthcoming, this is a brief update.

And some music (first time trying the NPR embedding function):

I love K'Naan

I also love Regina Spektor:

And finally, Modest Mouse continues to be totally awesome:

What am I going to do with myself

I always assumed that I would, at some point, know what I wanted to do
with myself. You know, what kind of career I would want, what kind of
house I would want to live in, even the part of the country where I
would prefer to reside.

It comes as something of a continuing shock that I really don't have
the slightest clue. Sometimes I think Kansas is pretty awesome (and
sometimes it is), but other times I really, really want to move.
Oregon seems amazing. North Carolina seems beautiful. New Mexico and
Arizona have a strong appeal. Norway looks so awesome I can't even
fathom it. On some level, I can't imagine staying in one place for
any appreciable length of time.

And then there are career options. So I'm very slowly learning new
things. Things about programming and writing. Things about cooking.
How neat would it be to do these things in some professional capacity?
Pretty neat, I think, but then again...who knows? Everything I leave
behind (English lit, physics, research) becomes something I dearly
miss. Will I miss fighting for T&E species if I leave? I think I
might. I think that without some strong goal, I am going to
constantly be looking for the next thing and wondering why I left the
last thing.

Of course, there are a lot of really good aspects to the way things go
now. I have a hard time remembering why I was so angry all the time
in grad school. I have a hard time remembering why I was so
frustrated with my physics prof. I seem to only remember the good
stuff (well, except for Oklahoma. I'm not forgetting that). And each
move had taken me to a place where I meet and get to know amazing
people.

So I don't know what I want to do with myself. I don't know quite
what I want to accomplish. I guess my only real goals are to raise
happy kids and have a happy family and not be too bitter and jaded
when I come home at night. Well, and I want to figure out how to make
pickles that taste great every time, but I assume that's going to by
my personal Mt. Everest.

--

Cooking really is so much fun. Despite the
'so-good-I'd-blog-about-it-if-I-were-my-brother-in-law' meme that is
apparently floating out there (A and S!), I don't actually blog about
everything I cook. I only blog about the stuff that is somehow
fulfilling on both an intellectual and spiritual level.

And today was all about cooking. Apple Ketchup and Pumpkin bread and
grilled cheese and quesadillas and smoothies that the boy wouldn't
try.

Holy cow it was cold today...

I picked a great day to hike all over the Neosho River Basin. As I approached my destination, I realized it wasn't just that the sun wasn't up yet, it was also that a thick layer of clouds had developed. I was further clued into the blowing northerly wind by the presence of snow and ice pelting the window of my truck.

And did I mention that I didn't really bring appropriate clothes?

So from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon (with a half-hour break for lunch), I walked around looking at gravel bars, secretly grateful for the first time in my life that previous generations have so devastated the riverine environments that the 15-20 feet of channel degradation between field and stream bank was offering a modicum of protection from the wind.

Luckily I was wearing a flimsy pair of summer pants, so it only took about 30 minutes for the nerves in my legs to be permanently damaged, and thus cease sending little messages of protest to my brain.

I spent probably 45 minutes soaking in hot water before I felt warm again.

But worry not, the Neosho River will be protected...a little....by today's actions.

And it was actually way better than sitting in the office all day.

--

I find myself relating more to Jay-Z than Tiger Woods.

--

Parenting. A brief explanation as to why child # 2 will be arriving in a couple of months.

--

In case you didn't know....Daisy Owl. Actually, there aren't that many, just start at the beginning.

--

I guess that's it.

Good music

I've heard this before, of course, but it has been so long that I forgot and then remembered.

Chicago.

Twilight

So my wife read Twilight. Yeah. I know. I was opening scorning her as she was reading it. And she was expressing grave misgivings about reading it the whole time. And after the last book, her sentiment seemed to be: "Well that was a complete waste of my time."

Of course I had to pick up the first book and see what all the fuss is about (it was lying around the house).

A word about expectations here: I was expecting a book about vampires.

Twilight took me longer to read than any other book I've ever read (other than some textbooks). I am almost pathologically compelled to finish books when I start them, and this was hard. I think the writer is genuinely gifted with having a reasonably good 'voice', and I think when things start happening, she's better than most at capturing the sense of action.

Having said that, this is maybe the worst book I've ever read. The main character (and I use the term loosely) has no drive or ambition beyond her male love-interest. None. None. She has no interests. She has no motivations. She's an empty-headed dimwit who has all the personality of a cracker. She loathes everything. Her dad. Her mom (less obviously). Her classmates. In fact, I would not have been the least bit surprised to hear that the entire book, after a particular dramatic incident, was a drug-induced hallucination after a failed suicide attempt. Amazingly, that would improve my opinion of the book.

The vampires described here are ridiculous. They are virtually invincible beings who can't possibly have any reason to be hidden away. After reading synopses of the other books on Wikipedia (I'm not going to finish the series), I'm given to understand there is some kind of vampire authority that dictates they not reveal themselves. But, I'm going to be honest here, that is just dumb. In addition to the main character, it is clear that the vampires have no aspirations. They just...exist.

This is a book that actively seems to encourage women to think of themselves as incompetent, useless creatures with no skill or ability. Just accept whatever your man wants and accept that it may destroy you. Great.

I've been wrestling for days with trying to figure out what about this story appeals to anyone. The action is vanishingly brief, the two main character's interactions are basically just "You're so great." "No, you're so great." "Ha ha. No no. You're so great!" And the ending gives me absolutely no reason to want to continue the story. The are a handful of blunt references to a larger world history related to the supernatural, but, amazingly the main character is almost completely disinterested in knowing anything. You can see that the author is trying to entrance us with a rich world backstory, but her efforts to allude to that backstory are just so crude.

Basically, I give this book a frowny face sticker, and I really just wanted the main characters to die by the end. After reading the wikipedia summaries, I guess I can't even get that satisfaction if I read the remaining books.

Rant Over.

Let's have a talk.

Here's what is going on with me...

Grand projects spiraling out of control:

- The special issue I steamrolled forward has essentially burst into a million pieces. Why? Well, half of the contributors didn't come through (more than half actually) and at least two of the papers are not getting through (apparently). My paper is one of the ones that didn't get in on time...it still isn't in.

So what happened? Me doing two jobs for 4 months happened. I'm just not as good as I used to be.

- The online project review system. This is the big "light at the end of the tunnel" project for everyone at work. The three ecologists in my office all hate project reviews. They take time, they are tedious, and unfortunately, they are the reason we have jobs. So we got the bright idea of putting together an online system that would automate the majority of this process and simultaneously make the material we're being given more consistent.

And I volunteered to lead this.

Shit. Delays with our internal processes lead to the contractor going to other projects in the meantime, and now it doesn't look like things are going to get going until December. Which puts the critical time for this project right when child number 2 should be emerging screaming from the womb. This is going to be not fun.

- Dam removal is a pain in the ass. For some reason, things are just not moving forward.

Job Hunting:

- Yeah, I guess I'm looking for other positions. Except I feel like two years at my current employer have killed me. I'm tainted by my association with this place. Who's going to look at me, at what my employer does, and think 'This guy must be smart.'

Cooking:

-Hey! Fun stuff. Turns out I can cook pork really well. In two weeks we've had 3 'people over' meals, and I've done pork tenderloin with apricot stuffing, brined porkchops with apple ketchup, and pork 'kinda chili'. Those dishes were all amazing, and everyone thought so. I don't have nearly as much success with any other meat: I'm up and down w/ lamb...I try to do too much with chicken...and bison just isn't interesting. Pork, on the other hand, seems to always turn out great.

- So I've continued to play around with 5 minute a day bread. The first loaf was amazing. The 2nd and 3rd loaves were not great, although they made great stuffing and croutons. The dough can also be used for other stuff. We made calzones and pizzas with great success. I decided I'd give it one more try. So far, so good. The first loaf was slightly undercooked, but that was just my fault. I should have let it get a little more brown on the outside. It did make that wonderful crackle when we pulled it out of the oven.

- The salsa I made with the last of the fresh tomatoes is great. I made 8.5 pints, and I've gone through 1.5 so far. We have a problem in our house of not eating the food we freeze for later. We're always waiting for a 'special occasion'. We need to stop doing that. To start, I've been eating more of the canned foods we've made.

- I also brewed some quick apple cider. Turned out really good, and I might try brewing some other quick hard drinks (orange juice would probably be good).

- Watched another episode of Top Chef tonight (I'm in a hotel room) and a 'reunion' episode. The reunion episode was a stupid bit of nostalgic nonsense. The episode is the one where Mike got sent home, and the guy thought he was much better than he was. (the one with Natalie Portman) At first I was totally bored by the idea of Natalie Portman as a participant, but the twist of bringing them all to a steakhouse and then forcing them to cook vegetarian required a vegetarian to be involved. It seemed to me that everyone's dish was mediocre. I was surprised that Michael was so pissy about losing to Kevin. Kevin's freaking great...if he showed you up by making something simple that was better than your complicated stuff...well....I guess I can understand why you'd be irritated.

- Pull out a college ruled page of notebook paper. See how many lines there are? That's how many dishes I have in my repertoire that I feel I can pull off with success for most crowds (counting things like different types of pizza as 1 'category'). I think 5 years ago that list would have probably had half or a third that many items.

And what else:

- I'm bored with work, de-motivated to do anything new, and tired way more often than I ought to be. So I bought a playstation 3. Because I always said I hated Sony. Oh well, the online service is free. If anyone else plays Call of Duty 4, let me know, we can team up to collect some kills.

- There's absolutely no music better on earth than Matt and Kim. I have a hard time putting into words how awesome I think this music is:

Boring

Sitting in a meeting, waiting for the last guy to come.

Now we're cooking with cans!

More cooking updates:

This weekend was 38 jars of sand hill plum jam. That's a supremely tart version of the plum that is about the diameter of a quarter. We got them from my wife's family's house, and we got like 15 pounds of them. I wasn't sure how many that would make, but I figured it would be around 40. If you didn't know, jam takes a LOT of sugar. I went through about 13 pounds of sugar. Whoa. However, the whole process hardly took any time at all. Started sometime after 10 and was done by 1 30. I've already tried some, and yes, it is delicious. I did 2 batches of the regular recipe (from SureJell), 1 batch of low sugar, and 1 batch of freezer jam (although I used a sugar free pectin box.

What else did we cook this weekend? Not a lot (made a lot of pesto and froze it). The wife made a chicken and rice casserole.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was good times in the kitchen. I made a large pizza for dinner (Turkey pepperoni & garden tomatoes) and I made two more pizza crusts so when I'm on the road the fam will be able to prepare something quickly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that feta, basil, and oregano (with some olive oil) is the greatest topping possible on an italian style pizza. That combination is just amazing.

I also got 36 eggs from a friend who has chickens. Not sure what I'm going to do with all of them (angel food and lemon curd will probably be involved at some point). I made french toast yesterday, and I pickled hard-boiled eggs last night. The pickled eggs are in a spicy vinegar (which smelled terrible to make actually). I thought if they taste ok, I might use them in a spicy chicken salad recipe.

I also pickled probably the last of the fresh cucumbers from the farmer's market last night. Although the dill pickles have been in a hit in the house (wife and kid seem to like them), bread and butter's have just been even more popular. Although I've got about 8 jars of zucchini bread and butters, I'm down to two or so jars of cucumber bread and butters. After discussing other options with the wife (Thai pickles, yellow pickles, etc), we decided to go with the bread and butters. They are probably the tastiest pickles I've ever made (the recipe, not this particular batch). However, I have a hard time taking credit. The cucumbers themselves look so incredibly delicious. After they've been soaking in salt for a few hours the smell is amazing. In fact, after I drained them, all three of us huddled around the collander to smell the cucumbers, and the boy couldn't resist! He popped one in his mouth and loved it!

I say he couldn't resist. But in reality, he doesn't even know what that means.

Cooking fun

So I've been away from the house for most of the month of September, but from here on, things are going to hopefully get a lot easier. This means I'll be able to spend more time doing one of the few things that really allows me to achieve a zen-like state of happiness:

COOKING!!

Ok, so here's what I made this weekend:

Friday (I took friday off because I'd already worked 44 hours by Thursday evening):

Breakfast was boring, we re-heated pancakes we'd made last weekend and had some juice (the boy loves the orange juice).

The boy and I then ran to the store and just walked around to get a feel for what was out there.

We ended up making squash soup for lunch (previously described here). This was pretty funny because the boy has kind of a hard time with eating soups. He's decided he's no longer going to sit in a high chair, but he's not really tall enough to see what he's eating out of a bowl. So I made the soup a little thicker, and it basically had enough texture to stick to the spoon. Then I 'tempted' him to try it by putting croutons in there. He loves croutons. Well, he was eating the croutons (with bits of soup stuck to them). Then I said "Actually, that's soup. You can eat it like this" and demonstrated. He took a big spoonful, shoved it into his mouth. Looked blank for a second, and then scrunched up his face as if he had just eaten the most disgusting thing in the world. When my wife came home, she underestimated his distaste and gave him a spoonful of her soup (he wasn't paying attention). He promptly spit it back out, into my hand (I was anticipating that).

So then we had chicken nuggets.

For dinner I prepared the pork chili/stew that I've previously written about. Interestingly enough, I hadn't made either of these dishes since about a year ago. The pork chili included pattypan squash (cuz I had some sitting around), so we're sort of on a squash kick. I also bought another acorn squash and a butternut squash and a pumpkin. I think I'm going to make some dumblings. I also made cornbread, which I hadn't made in so long I couldn't even remember how to do it. I had also forgotten how little time it takes...like 10 minutes of prep! And they tasted great!

I think I'm getting better at figuring out how to put meals together.

Anyway, Alton didn't want to eat any of the chili for dinner (he had like a handful of bites), so he had a grilled cheese. I'm slowly learning what he doesn't like (if it ain't green, odds aren't good).

Saturday I was sick. Sunday we had lunch out, but for dinner we had:

BREAKFAST FOR DINNER!

Have you felt that slight chill in the air that means it is autumn? We got that for the first time last week (hence the soups). But what that did, more than anything, is tell me that my pickling days are coming to a close for this year, and my pumpkin days are beginning to emerge. And how does pumpkin work into a breakfast for dinner?

You guessed it: Pumpkin Pancakes. I mostly followed the recipe on AllRecipes (google it). They turned out great...fantastic actually. The recipe itself was too weird (called for vinegar!) and too thick (more like a dough than a batter). So I added a lot more milk and fiddled with the spices a little. But gosh dang, it turned out great. Everyone like it. I think I do well with pancakes because I have a ton of griddle patience. I am perfectly willing to keep the heat really low, because it seems to allow the most amount of rise in the pancakes. With these pumpkin pancakes, they needed all the rise they could get.

While I had the pancakes going, I also had bacon going. The idea was to have pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs. But then I realized we had three small red potatoes left over from a few weeks ago. So I had my sous chef shred those, and I thought I would make a hash (with the bacon grease). But apparently I don't know what I'm doing with a hash, because it really didn't work out. It just didn't taste right. So then I took all the eggs (egg beaters actually) and poured them into the pan, with some milk, and made a frittata. This was funny because I was using a pan you can't put into the over (the handle wasn't built for that), but I needed to broil the surface. So I had to shove it as far as I could into the toaster over and turn on its broiler. That worked, but if the door is open, the broiler won't work....so I had to rig up a knife to prop 'on' the little trigger that tells the toaster the door is closed.

Which was great because the knife was on the verge of flying across the room the whole time. But it all worked out and the fritter turned out really amazing.

So we had pumpkin pancakes with smart balance butter, turkey bacon, and a hash-brown and cheddar frittata.

It was actually embarassingly good. My wife was like "holy cow, I can't believe how awesome you are", which was nice, but I kinda felt like it all just came together super easy. And we've got 8 or so pumpkin pancakes frozen to use as breakfasts over the next few weeks!

So even though my last month has been hell and I'm sick of everything, cooking is really fun and yes please, I'd like to do more :)

And in case you're wondering, here's what I've pickled this year (i.e., it is considered a pickle or I canned it):

Thai Cucumber Pickles

Quick Dill Pickles

Really Quick Dill Pickles (yes, there is a difference)

Bread and Butter Zucchini Pickles

Bread and Butter Cucumber Pickles

Yellow Cucumber Pickles

Apple Ketchup

Mango Chutney

Lower-East Side Sours (a fermented pickle...that is actually looking pretty weird...not sure if I'm going to eat it or not)

Mousaka, mini meatloaf, and the weakerthans

The Mousaka saga is yet untold. It involves my culinary exploration, poor estimation of the carrying capacity of a baking dish, and the effect of smell on life in general.

And now I'm getting all crazy with mini meatloafs.

I should stay vegetarian.

Those of you wishing to subscribe to my musical tastes newsletter may. Just email me and I'll explain. Suffice to say, it involves Pandora, which isn't actually as good as you might think at bringing me new music.

Once again, the Weakerthans:



This song is pretty good as well.

As far as life in general goes: I am rapidly approaching the 'overload' portion of my stress carrying capacity. A nap this afternoon helped, but I'm not sure how long that energy can carry me.

I spent much of this week attending a 'range management' school. I attended to learn my plant identification (yes, I can now tell you the difference between fall witchgrass, little bluestem, windmill grass, and beadgrass; and I know why switchgrass is hilarious), but I learned more than that. Right now, I totally want to be a rancher. I'm interested in running the numbers, but I imagine grazing land ranching is the most environmentally sustainable agricultural practice out there.

I'm not even kidding.

Anymore the most productive ranchers are pouring a serious amount of ecological theory into their production methods. And when they are really cooking, they pretty much don't damage the native biotic community at all (assuming you can look past the widespread fencing and replacement of large mammalian grazers; bison and prairie dogs). The point is the birds and bugs and plants shouldn't be negatively affected.

Of course, I don't like or eat beef...

I guess the point is that I'm escaping from my job into a temporary imaginary world where I'm not exhausted by my job.

Saving the world one acre at a time is not easy.