Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.

Back in December, before I was having any issues that made me think I was going to have to quit running, I signed up for the Dunedin Rotary Club Triathlon. It would be my first ever Triathlon. (It may end up being my only Triathlon) I set up a Garmin 12-week training plan and, when the time came, I started my training. I was feeling pretty good as the date approached. Unlike many others doing Triathlons, I’ve been swimming my entire life. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is reflected in my 2nd place ranking for the swim portion of the Triathlon.

Last year when I was looking at potential competitions to participate in, it saw that RipIt Events had a Duathlon pretty close to the house. I figured it’d be neat to try out a Run-Cycle-Run event. This would end up being my first competitive cycling event. However, it was scheduled for about ¾ of the way through my Triathlon training so I figured that I would be nice and trained up for the cycling portion.

It’s been a while since we last went to Disney; five years, in fact. We were originally supposed to go in 2020, but then, a week before our trip, Disney closed for COVID-19. Finally it was time to go back and boy have things changed. Back when we just had Scarlett, I wrote a blog post about Visiting to Disney with a 2-year-old and another about Visiting to Disney with a 3-year-old. While I don’t intend for this blog post to be nearly as formal as those entries, they do serve as a contrast for this trip.

Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).

Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.

2021

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.

Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.

The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.

As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.

This morning it suddenly hit me why this injury has messed with my head so much. I realized that “runner” has become a part of my identity and now I’d temporarily (hopefully) lost access to that part of myself.

I’ve already communicated this with most of my family and friends who support me in running, but I’ve suffered my second setback of 2022. The first one was back in January when I had to miss out on my first chance to do an in-person half marathon due to catching a really bad cold or flu. I don’t remember which, only that it wasn’t COVID.

Now, a few days away from my next 10K, I seem to have developed a pain in the ball of my right foot. I will be seeing a doctor to find out what it actually is, but there’s a 99.99999% chance that it would not be a good idea to even attempt to run the 10K at a slow speed if I want a chance of recovering in time for the marathon this fall.

Before Race Day

Ready for the Race!

I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.

A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.

Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.

Pre-Race

A couple weeks ago, anticipating the coming spring showers and the possibility of having to race in the rain, I bought an outfit from Tracksmith’s new Thaw collection. As usual, I brought all my running clothes to NYC, not knowing what the weather has in store. After all, it wasn’t supposed to snow last race. I woke up at 0500 since the MTA trip planner told me I’d need to start my journey at 0544 to get to The Armory by 0730. It was in the 40s outside so while I brushed my teeth I waffled about what to wear.  By race time (0900) it would be in the 50s. Complicating things: it was almost guaranteed to rain during the race. So my mid-layer was out. My jacket was waterproof, but that would certainly be too hot for the race. Should I wear it and unzip? In the end, I decided to go for just the Thaw long sleeve shirt, Thaw half tights, Thaw beanie, and inverno gloves. I had my usual pre-race breakfast of a quarter cup of raisins and headed out the door.

My second race for 2022 came right on the heels of the previous one. This time it was for the NYRR Gridiron 4 mile race. After this one I have a break for a little bit before the next race I’m running.

Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head

This turned out to be my first race run in the snow. I got pretty lucky with my running wardrobe, but I’ll get to that in a second. Early in the week, I checked the weather to see what kind of running clothes to pack; there was a 17% chance of precipitation. Based on the forecast temperature of 33F (versus last week’s 18-22F), I was just going to wear the Tracksmith Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, and tights. But I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to just bring my entire Tracksmith wardrobe. The night before the race I once again checked the weather. There was now a 50% chance of snow or rain. When I woke up, the forecast was now 90% chance. So I went with the same getup I had last week - the Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, jacket, and Bislett pants. The jacket and pants are both wind and water resistant so I figured they’d keep me a lot warmer. The Bisless pants proved to be especially great to have because they have stirrups that keep the pants from moving up and, therefore, keep the legs from getting wet when it’s snowing. It was snowing when I left the house, on the train ride up to Central Park and as I warmed up. Luckily, the snow stopped right before race started and didn’t start up again until I was done.

Sunday, 6 February 2022, was my first race of 2022. I’d been looking forward to the Fred Lebow Half Marathon to both be my first race of 2022 and first half marathon race. Unfortunately, I got really sick with something not-COVID and couldn’t attend. So I was extra excited about getting to this race. Last year’s COVID winter surge and summer Delta wave meant that I didn’t get to any in-person races until the fall when I FINALLY got to do the CUCB Cherry Blossom race. This year it seems, so far, that in-person races are here to stay with various COVID mitigations in place. NYRR is requiring racers to be fully vaccinated and mask wearing until runners leave the corrals. Folks seem to be mostly complying with the latter, although it’s inevitable that some folks slip through the cracks.

if you look at my knee, this is after I fell

From the race I wrote about previously.

Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.

The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).

After nearly 2 years of training, I finally was able to run the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile race on 12 Sept. Yeah, last year I ran a virtual race, but that was really no different than a training run. This year we finally had the COVID-19 vaccine and so the race was able to take place in person. It was worth it.

The starting line when I first arrived to the race.

Twenty years ago today I was a freshman at Cornell University. I’d only been to NYC once before, during my family’s college tour trip in spring of 2000.

It was part of my college visitation trip and it was a surprise that we would get to see NYC. It was a miserable day, but I was ecstatic to see this place I’d only heard of in movies.

I begged my mom to let us visit the World Trade Center since I’d seen Kevin go up there in Home Alone 2 and I wanted to stand at the top of the world in the largest city in the world. But there wasn’t time for that. She said we’d see them next time we came to NYC….

It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it.

It was 11 March (I believe) when the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. One of the first things I remember hearing about COVID-19 was the cruise ship that was stuck offshore because President Trump was so afraid of the numbers rising that he couldn’t let the folks off the ship. Turns out that was going to be a foreshadowing the likes of which we couldn’t quite understand at the time. My first inkling that maybe this was starting to become an issue in the US was in late February or early March when we went to visit relatives in New York City and they were against eating out because they were scared of getting sick. At the time, we thought they were just being a bit germaphobic. In fact, at the end of March we went to a restaurant for what we didn’t know at the time would be our last time to go out to eat for a year. (To date we still haven’t eaten out, not even for outdoor dining)

lamb and onion burger

In September I made two new recipes. One was the Lamb and Grilled Onion burger from Weber’s Big Book of Burgers. I also tried a hot and fast recipe for pulled pork from Raichlen’s Project Fire. The taste was good, but the biggest hit was the recipe he had for a mustard sauce.

beef short rib ragu

For October the only new recipe I made was America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for beef short rib ragu. I really enjoyed a different take on a ragu than the more French and Cuban versions I’d had in the past. It is definitely a recipe I’d like to make again.

chicken cacciatore

Just one new dish in August. We had lots of repeat foods, but only one new dish. As far as I know, I didn’t have it until I was an adult and visited my sister-in-law in Long Island. At their favorite Italian restuarant / pizza joint I ordered it once when we were on the restaurant side. This America’s Test Kitchen version was very tasty and I would definitely make it again. Danielle liked it too, but it wasn’t a MUST COOK AGAIN dish with her.

As food stocks started to normalize towards the middle of COVID summer, I started to take advantage and try out more new dishes. It also helped that we were FINALLY able to find yeast again!

• Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
• hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
• oatmeal-rasin bread
• Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
• succotash
• vanilla icebox cookies

The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed to have both time and pepperoni at the same time. So I finally made it. I think America’s Test Kitchen’s decision to have me precook the pepperoni to render some of the fat helped both mellow the pepperoni taste (my kids were able to eat it) and keep this from being a greasy mess.

• bistec de palomilla
• bistec empanizado
• potaje de frijoles negros
• lechon asado

May was Cuban food month. I’d received a new cookbook of recipes from the Miami diaspora and back in Cuba. So I tried my hand at a few new recipes. Technically, I’d done the breaded steak (usually called Chicken Fried Steak in the USA) and pork shoulder Cuban style before, but this was the first time doing it with these recipes. I was very happy with all the results, although I learned a few things along the way for the next time I make these dishes.

When it came to new dishes, April was all about bread. First, I made a no-knead bread with America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe.

Almost No-Knead Bread

It came out OK. I actually tried it again the following day to try and get a darker crust. The funny thing is that this is one of the easiest breads to make and yet it’s the one I’ve had the worst results with. The crumb wasn’t as open as it was supposed to be and for all the time it took to proof it was pretty meh.

Brown Sugar Cookies

While I did a lot of cooking in March, I only made one new dish - Brown Sugar cookies. I’d had regular sugar cookies my entire life. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I had sugar cookies made with brown sugar instead. The brown sugar definitely took these cookies to a whole other taste realm where the molasses in the sugar added another dimension to the taste. I’m not saying it’s supplanted [white] sugar cookies in my heart, but that there’s a place for each of them. If the kids ate more cookies or if I didn’t care about my heart health (most cookies have a LOT of butter) I’d make these a lot more often.

a post-race selfie

Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)

• 1 Hour Pizza
• Quesadilla

Very low number of new dishes. Mostly because I was obsessed with programming and Gwent.

Both recipes were from America’s Test Kitchen. The pizza recipe was a challenge to be able to make a pizza that would be ready in an hour and not suffer too much from not having the pizza ferment for a few days. I thought it was alright. Despite liberally dusting the pizza peel, had a hard time getting the pizza off.

Without a doubt, the biggest story to tell about my cooking in 2019 is learning how to make, and no longer be intimidated by, breads. I made 15 different new breads and biscuits this year, including new family favorites like the Amish Friendship Bread and Brown Butter-Cardemom Banana bread. Also, there were the harder breads like the braided cinnamon bread and hot cross buns.

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• cinnamon swirl bread
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After spending years wanting to make my own bacon, I finally did!

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December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish garlic soup was pretty good, except they didn’t mention how much Sherry vinegar to use and I guessed a little too high. The coffee cake was pretty good, and the first time I’d made one.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, my first running race was the 5k at the 2019 Red Hat Summit. I caught the bug and started thinking about running longer races. Since a lot of races use official USATF-certified times to qualify or to get a corral placement, I wanted to find a race that was USATF-certified. So in July I signed up for the 9th Annual Annapolis Running Classic. I started training and working my Saturday runs up towards a 10k distance. Today, it finally all paid off.

• Chicken Chilaquiles
• Fried Tofu with Cabbage Salad
• Dave’s Fish Tacos
• Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos
• Great Grilled Pizza
• Pecan-Crusted Fish
• Fluffiest Pull-Apart Rolls

Lots of Mexican food and a some other neat, ambitious dishes in August. The by this point the chicken chilaquiles were one of the oldest chicken dishes on my To-Make list. I just never happened to have the ingredients around and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a hit or a flop. Finally, I decided to do it! I went overly ambitious and made my own corn tortillas, which I then toasted in the oven to create chips which I then put into the chilaquilas. It was quite delicious. On the other hand I was not a fan of “Dave’s Fish Tacos” from the Weber Charcoal Grilling book. But, redemption came in the form of Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos, one of the newest additions to my To-Make list from America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook it in your Dutch Oven. It had a good blend of citrus and Mexican flavors. I’d definitely like to make it again.

I finally made bacon from scratch for the first time, so that deserves its own gallery:

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One of the things that had been stopping me was the fact that Costco only sold pork bellies already sliced for Korean dishes. Then, the weekend I was going to ask them if I could buy a full pork belly, they had one there. They said customers had been asking for it so they were going to start selling some whole. It was a pretty neat experience making my own bacon. I can see why it’s so expensive - it involves a lot of waiting and a lot of labor.

• bigger on the inside burger patties
• FreshJax Bold Bayou Rub
• pit beef
• quick cheese bread
• quinoa taco salad
• roasted asparagus with gremolata
• Speculoos (aka Biscoffs)

The biggest dish for me this month was the pit beef, which I’d been wanting to make for at least two years now. I finally went ahead and smoked it according to Meathead’s recipe (along with his recipe for Tiger Sauce - a type of horseradish). I was afraid after waiting for so long I’d have hyped it up too much in my head, but it turned out to be my new favorite way to eat roast beef.

Oatmeal and toppings

Sometimes you only think you don’t like a dish because you simply don’t like the way it’s been prepared for you in the past. This has happened to me with a LOT of foods. Most recently I realized had written off oatmeal simply because my tastes didn’t match that of the others around me. From childhood to adulthood I’d only been given instant oatmeal if I’d asked to taste oatmeal. It has a place in people’s lives, but like most instant foods, the instant version is a pale imitation of the real thing. Then, when I got married my wife ate steel cut oats. I tried them, but again didn’t like them. It wasn’t until Red Hat Summit this year when I ended up trying them again because I wasn’t really feeling the other breakfast options. And it turned out that I could indeed enjoy oatmeal. It’s just that I liked it more al dente than my wife. Armed with the knowledge that oatmeal didn’t have to be mushy, I set about figuring out the right water to oats ratios to get it to the consistency I preferred. Now, at least once a week I have oatmeal with some fruit and, if we have some in the house, nuts. In the photo above I have some brown suger, but I’ve stopped adding that. With the sugars in the fruit, it’s not necessary. I do add a little vanilla extract and, if the flavors make sense, some cinnamon or cardamom.

• beef enchilada casserole
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I didn’t cook many new dishes in May, although I did have some encores of dishes that the family enjoyed. Since there are too few dishes to group them by theme, I’ll just go chronologically this month.

Ever since getting America’s Test Kitchen’s book on Mexican dishes, I’d made some great enchiladas a few times. Both their beef and ground beef enchiladas bring some great flavors to the table. The former is a bit more flavorful, but it also takes longer. So I wanted to see how the casserole version would come out. Overall, it’s very similar in flavor and tastes very good. Where it excels is as a party or potluck food. In the same dish that only makes about 12 conventional enchiladas, you can feed a lot more people because individual squares can be cut to any size. Also, like a lasagna, it has layers so there’s more to eat for a given amount of space on the dish.

• grilled chicken with mustard-tarragon paste
• bratwurst “hot tub”
• crispy chickpeas
• grilled steak fries
• Vermont Maple-Mustard Glazed Burgers
• Piadine
• Hot Cross Buns
• Tilefish with Jax Citrus Pepper rub
• scones

April was a month for getting a little more ambitious as well as trying variations on dishes I’d made before. Among the variations I would count the tilefish, grilled chicken thighs, and bratwust hot tub. The tilefish was just a variation on the Raichlen grilled fish recipe I’d tried before with blackfish. This time I removed the scales to ensure the flavoring on the outside of the fish wouldn’t be wasted. It still wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I think grilled fish like this one is a great candidate for an after-grill marinade. I’ll try that next time. The grilled chicken thighs were a variation on the gochujang paste recipe from America’s Test Kitchen. I liked the mustard-tarragon paste, but Danielle was pretty blase about it. Finally, the bratwurst hot tub was the third such variation on braising bratwurst on the grill. It was fine, but I prefer Meathead and America’s Test Kitchen’s versions to Raichlen’s, which was the one I did here.

• Bake-Sale Berry Muffins
• banana poppy seed muffins
• gochujang chicken
• black bean soup
• boiled carrot with Cumin, Cilantro, and Lime
• chicken burritos mojados
• chicken burritos mojados
• cinnamon swirl bread
• cinnamon swirl bread
• cinnamon swirl bread
• first from easy fish and chips
• chips from easy fish and chips
• Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
• Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• rustic italian loaf
• rustic italian loaf
• rustic italian loaf
• skillet-roasted cauliflower
• Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
• Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)

March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.

• Amish Cinnamon Bread
• Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana Bread
• Buttermilk Biscuits
• Buttermilk Biscuits
• Vermouth Cracked Potatoes
• Skillet Turkey Burgers
• Pork Posole
• North Carolina Cheese Biscuits
• Stuffed Chicken Breasts
• Thai Chicken Soup

February is when I started really getting confident about my bread-making skills. Most of it was great although I didn’t like either of the two buttermilk biscuit recipes I made in February. By contrast the Amish Cinnamon Bread (ATK’s version of Amish Friendship bread) and Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana breads were SO GOOD. Both have been made again in the few months since. Everyone who was here to celebrate a birthday party couldn’t get enough of the Amish bread. The North Carolina cheese biscuits were another of those recipes where Danielle was skeptical when I told her what I was making, but ended up really liking them. The pork posole was good, but flavor-wise reminded me a lot of the chili from the same ATK book. The Vermouth cracked potatoes from Milk Street were certainly a different flavor than I’m used to for potatoes, but I wasn’t dying to make it again. By contrast I loved the stuffed chicken. It had a pesto I finally loved (no pine nuts and lots of basil) and great flavor. It was my mom’s favorite dish for the weekend she was visiting. The skillet turkey burgers were also great. The panade made it the best turkey burgers I’d ever had even though I would still prefer a beef burger if given a choice. Finally, the thai chicken soup was good and spicy.

• Big Butts Pork Steak
• Big Butts Pork Steak smoke ring
• fattoush
• Happy Mouth Yakitori
• Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies

In January I made a lot less new things than in previous months, but I did prove that even in sub-freezing temperatures I still BBQ and Smoke. My least favorite were the macadamia nut, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. I’ve liked white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies in the past, but this was my first time adding cranberries. But it was the macadamia nuts I wasn’t a fan of this time. I’m not sure why, I just didn’t liek the taste. The fattoush was a neat taste for a new salad and I learned how easy it is to make your own pita chips! The glazed ribs were OK, but I didn’t fill the water pan in the Weber Smokey Mountain and I think that led to a more smokey/burnt taste as the glaze dripped off and into the empty water pan. The Big Butts Pork Steak was pretty awesome, though. The recipe also contained my favorite home-made BBQ sauce. I definitely look forward to revisiting that recipe!

• Bourbon Burger with Caramelized Onions and Horseradish sauce
• chopped winter salad with butternut squash
• Egg and Sausage McMuffin
• English Muffins
• English Muffins
• Ground Beef Enchladas
• Ladybird Johnson’s Barbecue Sauce
• roti canai
• Brussels Sprouts with Lemon
• Thai-Style Pork Burgers

It’s hard to say which dish was the best one, because lots of them came out great. But it’s pretty easy to say which was the worst - the roti canai came out very much unlike what I was trying to replicate despite following a recipe that went along with a youtube video. Second worst were the English muffins, but they were WAY better than the roti was. They just came out more dense than I was hoping for and they didn’t quite have the nooks and crannies they were supposed to. This was a relatively fast recipe from my Cook it in Cast Iron book. I’ve got another in Bread Illustrated that has a longer rise overnight in the fridge so maybe that one will come out better. Lady Bird Johnson’s BBQ sauce came from Legends of Texas Barbecue, a part of a Humble Cookbook bundle. I took it with me to my mom’s house for Christmas. It was the first time I’d ever made it, but I thought it came out really well - it got lots of kudos. The ground beef enchiladas were a great approximation of the beef enchiladas which normally take twice as long to cook. The Egg and sausage McMuffin came from learning how to make the egg cook the right way by reading about it on Serious Eats. It was pretty good, but I was wishing I had some Canadian bacon instead so it could be more like the real thing. The Brussels sprouts with lemon was a dish I made to try something different with the veggie and it turned out great. It was a very simple recipe that I was able to memorize and so I also made it during Christmas at my folks’ and people really liked it - even those who professed not to like Brussels sprouts. The chopper winter salad with butternut squash came from Dinner Illustrated and it was a very fun, new type of salad that I’d never eaten before. Danielle has made roasted butternut squash before, but we usually consume it via soup. Finally, the two burgers. Of the two, the Bourbon burger was the more universal hit. Danielle was really impressed with my caramelized onions (given my newbie status on making them) and the horseradish sauce was pretty good, too. While I liked the Thai-style pork burgers, Danielle wasn’t quite into the taste of Asian-style pork in a burger. That said, I also cooked them in the carbon steel pan to try and get more use out of it, but it was just a little smaller than the 12 inch pan the recipe called for and so the pan was a bit crowded and I think that deterred some Maillard reaction from happening.

While I was swimming last week I came to the realization that my daily snack between lunch and dinner hits pretty much all the food groups. I usually have some afternoon tea with milk (dairy - check!), a couple servings of whatever fruit we happen to have at the house (fruit/veggie - check!), and peanut-butter filled pretzels (carbs, protein, and fats/salts - check, check check!)

• chicken tonkatsu
• donuts
• Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma)
• Grilled Chicken Fajitas
• Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2
• Mushroom Pork Omelet

The biggest success of the new dishes in Nov 2018 was the grilled chicken fajitas. We already had a recipe we often used for grilled chicken fajitas, but I wanted to stretch out and used the recipe from America’s Test Kitchen Mexican Recipes book. The biggest disappointment was the Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma). It was almost universally reviled in the house. I thought ti was fine, but everyone else hated it. The Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2 gives poultry a taste similar to satay, so it works quite well with peanut sauce. The mushroom pork omelet was promising, but I added way too many mushrooms because they called for mushrooms by weight and I used dried mushrooms rather than regular, hydrated mushrooms. Everyone liked the chicken tonkatsu, but only I liked the tonkatsu sauce. Finally, the donuts were a bummer, but I think that’s because it didn’t rise as much as it was supposed to, leaving it a bit dense.

Yeah, I’m a bit late to this, but I just finished up with my October photos.

• Chicken and cauliflower tikka masala
• Cuban Picadillo
• Ground pork tacos
• Teriyaki Chicken Thighs
• Teriyaki Chicken Thighs
• lemon-dill biscuits
• Za’atar chicken cutlets
• Korean Pork and Kim Chi Stew
• brussels sprouts and garlic chips

Back in October I went to BBQ and was shocked to see something moving. When I opened the grill all the way, I saw:

Mouse living on my Weber Spirit

Somehow, even with the lid closed and the cover on, the mouse had ripped off bits of my charcoal bag to climb into here and make a nest.

Mouse and fuzzies in my BBQ

In September I tried out four new recipes. The grilled breakfast quesadillas were surprisingly great. An egg is cracked into a ring of cheese and topped with grilled bacon and cilantro. The cauliflower gratin was WAY too rich for just Danielle and I to finish it. But I could see it working well for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. The carnitas were a great indoor version. Finally, for the first time I grilled a full, in tact fish. My father-in-law had given me some sea bass he caught and I filled it with aromatics and then covered it in more herbs and aromatics after grilling. It was very, very good.

It’s been 2.5 years since I discovered Amazingribs.com and Meathead when I was trying to figure out why my BBQ wasn’t as good as the best BBQ joints I’d visited. Last year I ordered the 2016 and 2017 Annuals from Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country as well as getting into Chris Kimball’s spin-off Milk Street. This year I continued my journey with the purchase of a bunch of cookbooks in a Humble Bundle sale as well as ATK’s Dinner Illustrated and Milk Street’s Tuesday Nights, both of which focus on weeknight meals that can be completed in 1 hour or less. I also began to take some steps towards being able to cook intuitively via Samin’s Salt Fat Acid Fire which I haven’t read, but I did see the Netflix show of the same name.

I think it’s hilarious that they way they’re capitalizing on my nostalgia for computer games is by turning them into card games.

Just a small image gallery of food I tried cooking for the first time in June.

Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.

Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.

Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.

Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.

I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.

Just using the Weber Kettle mom got me last winter to make some AWESOME fajitas!

For a long time we’d been avoiding New York Strip Steak. I’d tried to grill some a long time ago and it just couldn’t hold a candle to a Ribeye. But recently my father-in-law bought a bunch and gave us some so I gave it another shot. I took all I’d learned in the past year or so from Meathead and used my thermometer to get a prefer medium steak. Here’s where I ended up:

Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the right thickness. Butchers here don’t know what it is, so they have a hard time helping me. But this time I got through to a butcher at Wegmans - who let me in on the secret - using a mallet to squish the meat skinnier than it can be cut on a steak slicer. The only thing that sucks is that my example of thinness was some Korean meat so he thought I wanted it cut into little strips. Still, I finally was successful at making a very tasty breaded steak:

I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.

My favorite concert shirt and one of my favorite old shirts has gained too many holes to continue wearing. Here’s the memorial:

It wasn’t until this year that I realized I was no longer in control of my personal narrative. I believed that I could be in charge of how private or public my life was. But it’s become increasingly obvious this year that it’s not in Facebook’s financial interest for me to be able to control my narrative. Too many of us are disengaging with the social network to a large degree. So now others can post about me and tag me and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s quite frustrating that all too many conversations nowadays begin with, “please don’t post this to Facebook.” It just makes me want to turn in on myself and spend less time socializing. Because, at least for now, anything that happens in my home when I’m by myself will only end up on the Internet if Danielle and I both want it online.

When I was in my senior year at Cornell, my adviser tried to get me to enroll into graduate school. My dad had advised me to wait and see what it turned out I wanted to specialize in. Also, I’d likely be able to get work to pay for my degree. My adviser told me I’d never end up getting a graduate degree. Those who don’t do it right away end up procrastinating forever and don’t get one. I knew I’d work at getting one, so I didn’t pay him any mind. I went to work and work did have a program by which they paid for college classes. But I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. Almost everyone went to Johns Hopkins Engineering because they didn’t require the GRE. But something inside just didn’t feel right. So I waited.

I’m not letting near-freezing weather stop me from eating awesome food. Pre-heating the BBQ for some ribs!

Until I was in high school, my dad and I didn’t bond over much. I knew he was a caring father and loved me, but we just didn’t have much to share except for one thing: Car Talk. My dad was never one to suffer fools, so when he drove me to school in the mornings we listened to NPR, not the music stations with their endless morning show prattle. Every time I hear the horn intro to Morning Edition it reminds me of my childhood.

Interviewed for MyLinuxRig.com about my desktop setup and Linux history. Press Coverage of Baltimore Comic-Con 2014

And working on my graduate degree.

Yesterday, just outside my neighborhood, my Civic reached 100 000 miles. So far the only problem is that the radio’s a bit wonky with the front speakers.

Finally Got my URL: www.ericmesa.com

This’ll be a semi-recurring blog post highlighting some of my work on other websites. (Most often, but not necessarily, other sites I own/run)

Race Flipping in Comic Movies over at Comic POW! in which I discuss Johnny Storm being cast with an African American actor in the new film.

Autobiographies: Swimming Part 1 over at I’m not Mad in which I take a stab at autobiographical comics. It’ll be a little bit until Part 2 - probably around May when this semester ends.

Made a gamble last night. Time will tell whether it pays off.

[caption id=“attachment_7745” align=“alignleft” width=“404”] Self-Portrait[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_6598” align=“aligncenter” width=“443”] Rock the Universe (1999)[/caption]

The last time I went to Universal Studios Orlando was nearly 20 years ago for Rock the Universe 1999. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done - enjoying the park by day with all my close friends and then a series of concerts at night. Despite getting soaked by the night-time storms we had a blast.

Dan and I started a website called Comic POW! Where each week we go over the best comics of that week.  It’s been going for approximately 3 months and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.  The main feature is posted every Friday, but we occasionally have content on other days.  I’ve also started writing for Player Affinity.  They saw my work and invited me to write for them.  My news articles are posted on Wednesdays and my reviews on Fridays.  (With extra reviews sometimes appearing on Mondays and Tuesdays) Here’s one of my latest reviews.

So, I started working on my Nanowrimo partway through November.  I quit partway through because I fell too far behind.  So I reworked the story to have a better ending than the rambling mess it had become and tried to get some people to edit it for me.  They’ve been busy and I’m sick of seeing it on my TODO list.  So here’s my Nanowrimo Entry for 2010 as reworked -> NanoWrimo 2010 Reworked

I love to write so when I started the 2010 NanoWrimo competition 9 days late I thought it would be no big deal to get caught up.  I really under-estimated the effort behind writing over two thousand words a day.  I think I probably could have made it if I had an idea ahead of time, but I ran out of steam somewhere around 15 thousand words.  I’m nearly at 18 thousand and nearly everything I’ve written has been complete and utter crap.  Being very trope savvy has made it hard for me to just make stuff up as I go along because I’ve been trying to avoid plot and logic holes.

Today I went to the funeral of my wife’s uncle.  It was a Catholic Mass, so it was pretty interesting trying to match up the Vietnamese with what I knew from English mass.  It was also interesting to hear how the priest pronounced “amen” and “hallelujah”.  So far in my life I’ve been to two Cuban funerals and one Vietnamese funeral.  One of the Cuban funerals was a masonic funeral.  The other was Protestant.  Really the only difference in my limited experience is that the Vietnamese take photos and video to document the event.

Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month.  The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start.  I’d heard about it on NPR and on Linux Outlaws and I thought - why not?  The website seems to have a Lomography vibe to it - just write and don’t worry about editing until later.  I love working under constraints.  I feel that my 365 Project really pushed me to learn a LOT more about photography and techniques - especially lighting.  Anyway, you can follow my progress on the NanoWrimo site here.  See if I can make it or not.  Whatever I have at the end of the project will be posted here under a Creative Commons license and probably also posted to lulu.com.

Last year was Dina’s graduation Tiki Party.  This year it was Daniel’s turn.  We arrived the night before (no hospital visits this time) and so we had plenty of time to help cook and set up.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina’s interpretation of how the party would go”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The BSO Warms up for the Concert”] [/caption]

Danielle and I recently went to see " Peter and the Wolf" at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO.  I don’t care how amazing the speakers are in your home theater system, nothing sounds as amazing as the orchestra.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“These eyes, specifically”] [/caption]

I think it’s pretty interesting that my eyes can see without seeing.  For example, when I’m walking through the hallways at work, my eyes often end up in collision-avoidance mode.  That is, I don’t see through my eyes because I’m busy seeing something else in my mind’s eye.  So my eyes become visible-spectrum sonar and keep me from bumping into people and things.  It’s often while in this mode that friends and coworkers will go out of their way to snap me out of my trance to bring to my attention the fact that I didn’t acknowledge their presence in the hallway.  They never believe me that I didn’t see them because they were the only person in the hallway.  In extreme cases I have literally manoeuvred around a person to get into a door or otherwise not crash, and still did not see the person.  I mean, my brain knows I went around a human, but it doesn’t bother to decode the face so I have no idea who I narrowly missed.  This makes them even more incredulous when I deny having seen them.  Sorry, but it’s true.  My brain decided that whatever it was picturing was more important than dedicating some neurons for facial recognition.

At the end of June I went to my grandfather’s 70th birthday party.  But, before that, we went on a small vacation to Naples, Fl.  My mom got us a very expensive hotel on the beach and we had a blast! I got another change to use the underwater housing I first used on my Hawaii Trip.

This is the view of the very expensive houses I could see from the balcony.

A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:

My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!

Been silent on the blog because I’ve been very busy with other things. Mostly I’ve been busy going through the 800+ pictures I took on my recent trip to Oahu, HI. Expect to see a fully illustrated blog post about my trip once I’m done uploading the pictures to flickr. And I’ve been doing this in Adobe Lightroom 2, which I recently gave my first impressions of. I’ve been doing a live blog which I’ll be publishing later. I’ve also been working on “I’m Not Mad”. I hope to have some more tech and political posts soon, but even sooner I’ll have an entertainment post.

Here are some pictures of the flood & damage:

The sewers backed up in my apartment flooding my bathroom via my bathtub and toilet and my living room via the front door with water full of excrement and urine.  However, even in these horrible and anoying times, you still have to look at it positively.  Our neighbors got flooded throughout their entire house.  For us it didn’t spread of out the bathroom or living room.  It was royally disgusting and smelly, but at least the cleaning crew worked through the night and morning to get our apartment to a usable state.

I’m glad the weekend is fast upon us…..

Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got to the Powerplant Live area and no one knew how to get into Babalu Grill. The people blocking the area told us to go down the block, the people at the end of the block told us to go back to the original people. When we finally get in, the bouncer said it was $5 per person, but the person taking the cash said it was $10 per person. It was so loud outside from a concert going on that it was impossible to reconcile. Perhaps I was just tired from a long day’s work, but had the concert not been going on a mere 20 feet away, I would have disputed this.

In case you might have been wondering why the posts have been lacking a bit of substance, it’s because I’ve been in England for the past month. I’ve been very busy (it was a business trip) and also did a lot of exploring for pictures.

I learned around the time I was in middle school that it takes 21 days to form new habits. I had been gone for nearly 30, so everything at home seems strange now. When I went to take a shower last night, it seemed as if Niagra Falls was coming out of my shower head. The water pressure was so much greater than the pressure in England, that I just couldn’t comprehend it. I was extremely happy to be home, but home was slightly foreign to me. Even being on my computer now is a little weird. It’s different than my laptop, and being on my Windows computer is even stranger.

I have come to see the most annoying thing in my known universe to be having to urinate as soon as I get out of the shower. It’s like dropping your clothes in the mud on the way back from the laundromat. This, for me, is second only to people chatting on their cell phones on busses and trains. I have no problem with people talking on their cell phones in these places. Perhaps they need to coordinate the night or let someone know that they are running late or running early. But chatting is quite annoying. It’s worse when all I hear is “really? wow” and other such utterances that let me know that I’m clearly listening to the wrong half of the conversation. I don’t think it would bother me at all if both halves of the conversation were there. If someone was going to talk loud enough for me to hear, I’d at least like to hear both sides.

This was one of the best Christmas celebrations either in spite of or because it was so simple. I got some really great gifts including:

• Final Fantasy 6: Grand Finale - this CD has some AWESOME symphonic recordings of the best songs of FF6
• Fantastic Plastic Machine: Les Plus - a great remix CD of that funky Japanese DJ, FPM. I’m sure you’ve heard him in commercials and movies and didn’t even know it. For example, one of his songs from this CD was in the second Austin Powers movie.
• Linux Shell Scripting with Bash - to help me continue honing my programming skills
• A great book on creating surreal artwork with Photoshop
• Hollywood Shuffle - a great movie about Blaxsploitation films
• 1776 - a book about the American Revolution
• some other stuff that was ordered, but didn’t arrive on time

But my favorite part was giving my presents to my family members. I made a calendar for my mom and her brothers with old pictures from their childhood since their mother died this year. I don’t know how my uncle in Miami reacted, but my uncle who was with us in Tampa was near tears. I’m glad I was able to make them emotional in a good way as they remembered simpler times. I think that’s one of the reasons God gave me the talent of photography and photo editing. Oh, and I gave my cousin a blog for Christmas as one of her presents. She loves to write and now she can write for the world. She has some great poetry up. You can check out her site here.

Went to Disney a few days ago with my family and found out that Disney is not quite the innocent little park it once was. I never quite felt the same about the park after 11 Sept 2001 when they began checking bags, but this time it was even more invasive. In order to enter the park I had to insert my ticket and then be digitally fingerprinted. Why did I have to be fingerprinted? To tie the ticket to me. In addition to the fact that it had my name printed on it, it now had my fingerprints attached to it. Now, I can’t really think of too many nefarious things Disney can do with my prints, but it was just really weird. Are that many people having their tickets stolen?

The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:

May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.

Mauricio replied to my post yesterday in order to placate my fears about his changing. (You can read it by clicking on comments below now that it’s been approved) In his post, he reminded me of why most of us blog (if our blogs are not simply parroting the news). We blog to sort out our feelings. We write what we would write in private in a journal or diary. But, unlike those devices, we put our lives out on display - really put our hearts on our sleaves. I know I’ve written some blog posts that we so slanted towards the way I was feeling that day, that they don’t represent the average me. They represent me happy/mad/sad/etc. I knew that in the back of my head and his comments just reminded me of the fact.

back from my honeymoon. Just found out the server was down the entire time. I plan to buy a UPS tomorrow if I get the chance. More posts to follow.

Oh, and FC4 is 4k kernel stack, but linuxant has finally released a 16k kernel patch so I should be able to upgrade my main linux computer!

Enjoying Mexico and each other…

happy birthday USA

Today’s the Asian wedding ceremoney and reception. If you’re good you’ll get to see some pictures.

If nothing has gone wrong, I am getting married today and thus will have no time to blog. Tell you about it when I get back from my Honeymoon.

weather has delayed her arrival to 1 am !

get to see my fiancee in about 5.5-6 hours! Then we’ll never be apart for more than the length of a business trip.

By this time next week I will have been married for around six hours. We would have been married under God and with all of my relatives as our witness. We would have had some fun, albeit muted fun, at my reception. If things to go plan, we would have been at our wedding night hotel for about two hours now. In about six and one half we’d have to start getting ready to fly to New York. And twelve hours from this time next week, I should be in New York City, resting or helping get things ready for the New York Wedding. Of course, I’ll volunteer to help, but often times in their culture, this is women’s work to be done. That’s fine with me, I’d certainly try for a nap if I could get one because even we were sleeping at this time next week, we’d still only have six hours of sleep after running around all day. Wedding days are notorious for using up not only all the energy you have, but also your energy reserves. Hopefully I can sleep on the plane to New York, but I don’t usually have good luck sleeping on planes. I have to make sure to find my travel pillow before I go.

I haven’t Googled myself in a while, so I decided to see what would come up with my first and last name. What a paper trail I’ve left since the last time I was here.

Item number 2 on page 1 was a link to my book at Lulu.com, the self-publishing company. Items 3 and 4 were links to my ICQ page (I had forgotten about that!) Item 6 went to my webpage on Tripod.com Item 8 was a question I had asked on the Octave List-serve

And just seven until I see my bride-to-be again. I wish this time would fly by a little faster. Unfortunately, work has been a little slow. I’m in a place at work where I think I may be close to finishing up my project, but I have been making a lot of requested revisions and, as such, have to meet a lot with people. They happen to be a little busier than me, so this has been stopping me. Perhaps today I’ll ask for another project to keep me busy. I think I’m more anxious about the wedding because the wedding means that I’ll get to see Danielle again. If she were living in Tampa, I probably wouldn’t be as anxious, maybe only seventy percent of my current level. The only part of my day that’s flying by right now is the afternoon because I have so much work to do to help my parents get the house ready for the reception next Friday. (and it actually has to be done by the rehearsal dinner on Thursday) So my days drag on while my evenings and nights go by way too quickly.

If I were someone else, I’d cry. I don’t cry for much, though, so I’m not. Today I got some luggage as a wedding present from my grandmother who passed away during Spring Break. She actually had a little piggy bank where she had been saving up money for my wedding present. It came out to be enough for the suitcase and an overnight bag. I am sad because she was so important to me and she’s missing from my wedding. That’s why I put more pictures of her in my wedding video than anyone else in my family. I miss you so much Abuela. Danielle misses you too! Thanks for the presents, I’ll enjoy them a lot.

just 12 more days! Less than two weeks before I get married.

I started upgrading my laptop from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 today. After 9 hours it STILL wasn’t done. This is because I was installing it on a P3 600 Mhz computer. Hopefully I’ll get to play with it a little tomorrow. If not, I’ve got all the time after the wedding to play with and explore this sucker. Plus, the way people are complaining about different issues on the Fedora List-serves, it’s apparent that waiting a few days probably wouldn’t be such a bad idea as it will give the teams some time to patch up whatever software isn’t working quite right.

Just 16 more days left. I have so many things to blog about, but I have no time because of wedding preparations. I barely even have time to talk to my bride daily, ironic since I’m preparing for the wedding.

Only 18 more days until I get to marry the love of my life. The days couldn’t possibly go by fast enough! (And yet, they better not go by too quickly because there are still so many things to do in preparation)

As I drove to work today I came to a realization: my college life was like a type of poem I remember learning about in high school. It may not be 100% exact, but do you remember those poems where the first and last line rhymed while the inside lines rhymed? That’s exactly what’s happened to me. As I wait for some stuff to clear up on my permanent job I’m doing a temporary job at Baxter Healthcare, where I had my first summer internship. Thus, my jobs in my Cornell Years have been:

I now have a newly minted Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Phillips School of Electrical Engineering. So that’s it, I’m official now. I now have my first degree. How do I feel? I feel like I’m on summer vacation. Doesn’t feel any different than any other summer. It DOES feel really good when I tell someone that I’ve graduated. It has the accomplishment feeling to it. Also, I get to tell people that I graduated from Cornell and that usually gets another round of congrats. It’s funny because for the past two days I’ve been really busy helping out around the house, unpacking my computers, and doing wedding preperations, but at the same time it feels like an eternity until my marriage.

the last day of my last year at Cornell….

I’m really busy trying to wrap up classes so that I can enjoy the last few weeks before graduating and being thrust into the “real world” so today’s post is just a minor observation. Of course, any of my long-time readers will know that as soon as I say that I’m too busy to post, I explode with a bunch of posts. Well, not for now, but who knows what tomorrow holds.

I am now officially a published author. Of course, my first published work wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, but I’m still excited about it! I decided my first book would not be a photography or fictional book. Instead, my first book is a report I wrote about migrating from a MS Windows environment to a GNU/Linux environment. Since I really want people to be able to read this, I am offering my first book for FREE on Lulu.com. It’s a PDF download that will cost you nothing! Go check it out and see how you can stop paying for software.

Technology continues to be an amazing force and I’m always amazed at even the little things that technology can achieve. Until I was in High School I used to read Marvel comics every month when a new issue would come out. There were only three Marvel comics I cared about: (which happen to be some of the most famous ones) Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

I liked Spiderman because he was really witty. Even when he was getting beaten up by his enemies, he would still make fun of them with all sorts of wise guy remarks. I also liked the fact that he always had a lot of real-world problems. Unlike a lot of other super heroes he always had problems. His best friend’s dad goes crazy and he is constantly battling with him. Jameson, at the newpaper, is always writing bad articles about Spiderman. No matter how good of a job he does, Jameson is always dragging his name through the mud. He has issues with MJ about why he is always dissapearing. Unlike Lois Lane, she doesn’t naively accept this, she gets ticked and goes out with other guys. Also, for most of the time, his Aunt May, who he so dearly loves, hates Spiderman.

My grandmother was buried today. Everything has revolved around the burial and funeral. It’s been weird meeting people and talking about the future with these sad events around. Not much else to say - I’m very low on sleep. The funeral went from 4p to 1a. Burial stuff began at 9a.

Didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I’m looking forward to Cornell.

Thanks, my love, for being here for me these past few days.

Just when you thought the world was in huge trouble, you see an act that give you faith in humanity. I truly love those moments because so often we see these negative things on Tv: rape, murder, suicide, and hatred.

Yesterday I was with a friend of mine, talking his recent slip into some rather unfortunate circumstances. He told me I could blog about yesterday’s events, but I’ll protect his identity for now. If he wants to out himself, he can do that through commenting on this post. He cast some pretty bad lots and was lamenting not having been hugged in a long time. I suggested, in a tone of mirth, that he walk through Ho Plaza (where each student passes at least once a day according to the campus tours) with his arms outstretched in a hug shape and see if some random person hugged him. He responded that he would find that unsatisfactory because he wouldn’t know the person. He may as well just walk up to some random person and ask for a hug. At least one person, he claimed, would comply. While I disagreed people would hug on command (I certainly wouldn’t!), I didn’t say anything because there are always bozos out there that will act irrationally when compared to normal social protocol.

My fiancee and I stopped keeping track of how many months we’d been together once we reached the year-mark. However, since this is the last major milestone left before marriage later this year, I wanted to wish you a happy 3.5 years!

It seems already as though we’ve been together for an eternity. Everything is as perfect as it can be at this point in our lives. Every day I look forward to the day the pastor presents us to the world as husband and wife!

Today while talking to my dad about dancing, I realized I really don’t like booty dancing. I mean, I’ve done it before at numerous dances and I’d do it again instead of just sitting around bored, but I just don’t like it. I think it’s too repetitive and, frankly, not creative at all. I don’t know, it just bores me to dance it. Spanish music, on the other hand, I could dance all night long - or until I got tired. I guess I just feel more connected to my partner, for starters. When I’m in the groove I feel like we’re both one organism moving together. We move around seamlessly, without any verbal communication. Additionally, who knows, I may spin her or do another of the hundreds of moves from the dance. It also looks a lot more beautiful. Finally, it’s much more intimate. There aren’t too many social activities that make me feel as close to someone as when we’re dancing a bachata. I feel so connected and that’s why I love it so much.

This weekend my youngest brother and my fiancee’s youngest sister (with her best friend) came up to see us at school. It was one of the most fun times I’ve had here at Cornell. I don’t think I have as much fun with too many other people as when I’m with my brothers. We’re usually on fire, just bouncing off each other’s jokes and references.

Arranged in birth order and inverse size order

I’m quite excited about this weekend. My fiancee’s sister is up with her friend and my brother flies in tomorrow. We are planning on spending at least Saturday together in order to have a good time and take a break from Cornell. Saturday night is also the final hockey game of the season. It should make for a good game and they usually have a little something special for the last game.

I want to give a huge thanks to Katie Cheng who dropped what she was doing Friday night to give my car a jump. Even though I hadn’t left the lights on in the car or anything, the car refused to start, leaving me stranded at Best Buy. It was near 10p and Katie didn’t mind coming out in the freezing cold with her car to help me out.

Also, thanks to Benny. Even though I was able to get my car started to go to Sears to get a replacement battery, he was ready and willing to help me out too.