Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:

• 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!

As I continue to work through my backlog of photos from last year (I’m finally done with 2018 after this post!), I come to my annual self-portrait. Yeah, yeah - even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most primal photographic urge; even stronger than the urge to create art. It’s the urge to document my life and the life of those around me. And so I take these self-portraits at roughly the same time every year to be able to view them as a series documenting my aging. And so here is the one I took in 2018.

One day the forest outside my house just looked all ominous

• 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!)

Often people try and dissuade you from installing CentOS onto a laptop because they say the chipsets on the laptops are so varied it’s likely you will end up unable to use your laptop because the drivers aren’t there. Well, I don’t know if it’s because this netbook is so old (I mean, netbooks as a category don’t exist anymore - having been supplanted by tablets) or just uses common chipsets, but when I ended up with some Fedora configuration error that I didn’t want to bother debugging (I hate using the netbook on an everyday basis because the keys are too small and the screen is pretty low resolution), I figured it’d be a fun time to test if I could install CentOS on there. During the installation GUI the trackpad worked fine and WiFi connected just fine as well. So if you’ve still got one of these lying around and prefer the longer support windows of CentOS / RHEL - feel free to install CentOS on there.

https://youtu.be/nz_O2chaIiQ

In 2018 I played a little more than double the amount of video games as I did in 2017. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, now that the twins are older I don’t have to watch them as diligently. I can’t be as off-hands as I was when it was just Scarlett at this age, but I can spend a little more time on my hobbies. Second, a pretty good chunk of that time (15 hours) was spent playing video games with Scarlett so it just took the place of other potential Father/Daughter projects. That said, with me bouncing around various hobbies, it doesn’t matter that I have more free time now because of the kids getting older because I’m splitting it over more tasks. As I write this I’ve really gotten back into programming. It’s all I think about in the pool and whenever I’m not doing it. So much so that I’m 3.5 months behind on organizing and editing my photos. This bouncing around between hobbies is something I’ve documented many times on this blog. It happened a lot throughout the year so there were times where I’d play games for tons of days in a row and then not play video games (other than my Civ VI multiplayer turns) for months. I’d legitimately forgotten about having played some of these games until I went back to compile the list for the year.

• 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.

My main server, Tanukimario, has a 120GB hard drive in it and it’s started to become annoying to butt up against that limit. I have an 512GB SSD that I only used for a couple years that I wanted to use as a replacement. In order to reduce the annoyances that come from setting things up from scratch, I decided to try and use Clonezilla to copy the drive over. Since the hard drive is so small, it told me it would only take 40 minutes, so I was jazzed I’d be able to do it in the afternoon while everyone was out and I wouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.