I was having an issue with Kdenlive while rending my most recent tutorials for my Extra Life Donation Tracker and so I grabbed the latest Appimage version since it’s more up to date than the version in the Fedora 29 repos. Boy has it changed in the last year or so. Here’s the version in the Fedora 29 repos:

Kdenlive 18.12

And here’s the latest release with the exact same file open:

Sam sat on my lap and looked at the keyboard on the desk. At first he tried to do the ABCs, but he was stymied by the QWERTY layout. So then he looked at the numbers. He started with 1 and counted up. As Scarlett did before him, he automatically said “10” when he got to the 0. I told him, “That’s not 10, that’s 0”. To which he replied, “Zero doesn’t belong here! It belongs here! [pointing to the beginning of the row of numbers]”.

The Misbehavin’ Maidens at the New Deal Cafe

I would have backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter for Relatable Content no matter what because I loved Trust Issues and I enjoy nearly all of their older songs. But the thing that made me spread the word everyone and try to get more backers was that they had a goal to do an East Coast tour. When they came to the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD I was finally able to see them live for the first time. It was also my second time seeing The Misbehavin’ Maidens, who opened for The Doubleclicks earlier in the year.

I’ve done a few travelogues on this blog (like the series covering my trip to the Grand Canyon) and I usually cover things chronologically. However, this time around I’m writing things about 3.5 months later. So rather than worry about covering things chronologically, I’m going to cover them by topic.

Family Vacations

Dan making pizza for the family

We were visiting The Redwoods (or, rather, a number of state (and maybe national?) parks containing Redwood trees) for my mom’s birthday. It was her wish to gather the entire clan for her birthday and to check the Redwoods off her bucket list. This was extra special to her because it’s pretty rare for all of us to be in one place at once time. Dave’s family is in the Pacific Northwest while Dan’s family and mine are in the mid-Atlantic. Mom’s in Florida with my three youngest siblings and dad. With everyone married and with all the parents wanting holiday time we can’t always all make it together for the same holidays.

I’m getting really close to finally getting this program to where I wanted it to be 4 years ago. My most recent release adds in the Team info to the GUI (and the previous release, which I didn’t blog about added team info in general). I’m getting feature requests and bug reports and all those kinds of encouraging things that make people want to provide programs for others. Also new as of a couple releases ago is the fact that I’m using Github’s CI (called Github Actions) to produce binaries for me that I can attach to releases to make it easier for folks to use the software.

Scarlett was watching Peg + Cat which has an episode called Mack the Fork. So she asked me if that was a song and I told her that Mack the Knife was a song and she asked me to play it. Then the following exchange with my 3.5 year old happened:

Samuel: What’s this song?

Me: Mack the Knife

Samuel: The knife can talk?

• 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.

Scarlett’s scientific journal entry about a duck and a baby duck

Sometimes the things my kids focus on just crack me up.

Baby birds in BBQ prep station - the mom thought it was the best place to make a nest

I thought I’d blogged before about the bird who made a nest in my BBQ prep station, but a couple quick searches didn’t find it. So the background is that this bird decided the best place to nest is at my BBQ prep station which has a couple shelves that basically look like a bird house (a small, circular hole). I tried to frustrate the bird out of doing it by dumping out the nest daily. At some point I let the bird win. A few months later, these baby birds were born.