Like A Boss

I'm wrapping up a week of crashing at Jason and Enid's place in Sacramento. "I don't normally visit a place to ______, but when I do I go to Sacramento." Insert 'sweat balls', 'be bored out of my mind', or 'laugh my ass off with friends'.

Here's my life for the past two nights:

1. 4pm (Friday) JayNid's wedding rehearsal in Davis;
2. 7pm rehearsal dinner at Il Fornaio, back to their house;
3. 9pm head over to Corey's house for drinks and Monte Cristos;
4. 1am view the GUSD season 1/episode 2, really hard to explain what the self made video of a middle school student looks like, but try to imagine a young Jason using the commode as a steering wheel and putting on his mom's mascara for a mustache.
5. 2:30am (Saturday) back home.
6. 6am up;
7. 6:30am Enid's grandfather in Puerto Rico calls to wish them a happy wedding, I answered thinking that he needed to be buzzed in, JO took the phone from me and figured out who it was;
8. 7:15am walk over to the 24hr Fitness, where all week I've been getting masseef;
9. 8:40am crash the breakfast at Embassy Suites, had an omelette and fruit;
10. 11:30am lunch with Jason's family;
11. 12:45pm arrive at the chapel;
12. 4pm wedding is over, despite the rumors I did not drop the ring;
13. 4:30pm back at the apartment, tried to nap again in the analgesic chair, but too many things in kicking around in my head;
14. 6pm walked over to the Delta King for the reception;
15. 7:30pm deliver the best man speech, man, I really need to get back into Toastmaster's {thanks to Jason for bringing me to his club meeting earlier this week}
16. 10pm shutdown the dance floor then head over to Backdoor Lounge {the Backdoor is less of a lounge and more of a dance club, I still had more dancing to do, but the two old DJs did let me play the cow bell, some buzzkills on the floor told me to stop}
17. 12am (Sunday) rendezvous with Cadillac Frank, Amy, and Dawn, our party now consisted of them plus Wendy Sue, DB Steve, Brandi, and the Henderbalz {soon after they peaced out, people just can't party like they used to I guess...}, cabbed it over to the Shady Lady where there were a poop tonne of zombies and pirates clogging up the bar {god I hate pirates!}
18. 1am Steve and Brandi peaced out;
19. 2am last call, returned a cell phone to some guy;
20. Got home watched the season finale of BrBa where Heisenberg blew the fae off of the chicken king;
21. 6am up;
22. 9am breakfast at the Delta King;
23. 10:30am gym to do a back work out: did 3 sets of pull ups, TRX rows, and some stretching.

 

If you wanna get on the supplements that allow me to do party like a rockstar, have almost zero muscle soreness and more let me know!

It was really great to finally meet Cadillac Frank and Corey, while having a good time with all the people mentioned above plus Scotty C. When's the pubcrawl Portlandia?!

Nearly Screwed a Brew!

Two weeks ago I brewed a 5-gallon batch of beer that was going to be a pale ale using Irish Yeast. I screwed up big time by letting the temperature run up to about 180deg F while it should have gone no higher than 160deg F. By letting it elevate that much I inadvertently locked the sugars in the grain. The whole point of the mash is to release those simple sugars for the yeast to consume.

I noticed I had a real problem when I took a sample and checked the specific gravity and it said 1.013, which is pretty much where the final gravity should be after the yeast has eaten the sugars. I went next door to my neighbor who is also a homebrewer and told him what my OG (original gravity) was. He said that was really low and brought out a couple of his brew books to the porch to see what I could do.

We found that adding honey would be a good option because yeast converts about 99% of honey into alcohol. I borrow his digital scale and got my old honey viscous again and poured 4.3lbs of Oregon wildflower honey, it should bring the OG back up to 1.060 (may need to recalc that) with a potential ABV of 3.5%. Oh yeah, this is going to be a light ale using Irish yeast, Irish Ale Yeast - Wyeast 1084. The reason I chose Irish Ale yeast is that when I rack this one into my spare carboy I am going to reuse the yeast immediately in the next batch which I will make during weekend Staycation. Gonna be an Irish Coffee Mint Beer, using peppermint/spearmint from my garden, espresso from AJ's (24oz espresso => ~37.5mg caffeine per 12oz!).

This is a shot of the batch, it volcanoed pretty violently after the temp in the kitchen activated the yeast, that slug of honey in the bottom helped! The airlock is super crusty, it probably won't come clean, but they're only a buck and I got the benjamins rollin' in!

The other reason to use this strain of yeast is because it's pretty versatile, here are some of the styles that Wyeast suggests:

• American Barleywine
• Baltic Porter
• Dry Stout
• Foreign Extra Stout
• Imperial IPA
• Irish Red Ale
• Oatmeal Stout
• Other Smoked Beer
• Robust Porter
• Scottish Export 80/-
• Scottish Heavy 70/-
• Scottish Light 60/-
• Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer
• Strong Scotch Ale
• Sweet Stout
• Wood-Aged Beer

So if I figure out how to store yeast rather than continuous usage I will be able to make quite a few different things.

Random Photos

Phil, a guy at work retired on April 1st, he left behind his 2010 Jackasses (and the funny things they say) Calendar. You should see Miss April!!














View west down the center line of Rosa Parks Blvd waiting for the bus at 5AM to go to the airport to go to Spokane. Got lots of comp time for coming back on the evening flight.













Some people from the neighborhood at the seed exchange.














View from the floor of my office lobby.

Fixin' Things

For a while I was living in two worlds, one was the post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert from Fallout: New Vegas and the other was real life. But, they connected when my dryer died, well, stopped putting out heat. I have a really old dryer, made in like the 60's, it is commonly known as the "halo of heat" because of the heating coil around the front of the drum.

I used the book pictured below only after I'd taken it pretty much apart - the controls, wires, top of the shell and tested the resistance going through each of the thermistors. I looked in the book and it had a step by step procedure, 1st was to examine the power coming in, which I should have done first. The power coming into the dryer had either vibrated or shorted apart, luckily I had a new connector and enough existing wire to fix that and it worked fine. I did end up with a few extra screws but they're only for the sheet metal shell.

In Fallout you can get books that will improve your skillz during the game, if you want to repair something like a robot or a set of armor you may need to use one of these books to temporarily improve your skill score like Fixin' Things (pictured below).

It turns out the Reader's Digest doesn't make these Home Repair books much anymore, probably because everything is so digital. But, it did come in handy for this old dryer.

Dave's Kill Mill

That's Dave Dahl from Dave's Killer Bread (and a friend) at an event tonight, him and Colonel Arnold Strong spoke tonight at a Bright Neighbor (brightneighbor.com) sponsored event. The topic was how to develop a thriving community supported business and they both spoke about their experiences and theories that lead them to where they are today.

I drew a lot of parallels to Dave's story of coming out of prison and wanting to find the thing that is organic with a short shelf life and improve upon it, it sounds a lot like a theory of technology innovation I learned about in my Engineering and Technology Management class last quarter about technology imitators. They are the people that will dissect an existing technology in the market to make it better. The benefit if it's already successful that a market has already been established for it and you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel to recreate the process, but its not an innovation.

Where Dave differs is that he's got a strong passion behind making bread and improving the quality of the bread. He was baking bread before his incarceration, so he already knew about bread and the business. Dave's story.

A quote from Machiavelli on Innovators:

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who should gain by the new ones."

Niccolo Machiavelli - From "The Prince", another great read!

After the end of the discussion Dave and his friend rocked out and played us three songs. We all sang along to Mustang Sally, it was awesome!

Washougal: A Zip Line Runs Through It

In a world, where the economy is in shambles, one over zealous County intern infiltrates a zip line operation to bring it down from the inside and ruin everyone else's fun!

Zip Line Controversy - Columbian.com

Feds Sue Washougal Man - Columbian.com

Gov v. D.Hoyt - Justia.com

How to be more of a Portlander

Sort of like a feature I did on another website I'm again high on caffo and I need to make a costume for the Night Ride tonight, just like before I decided to re-purpose some old clothes to make a Cast Away type outfit.

Using my same Benchmade (made in Oregon) knife to create the frayed edges that key to the effect.





Least this episode won't be lost in the ether!

No, but I've got a Three-Five-Seven.

Dad said in jest to me after the old man had turned back after asking “You boys got a tow strap?”

This is what I'd call about midway into my Father's Day adventure. It starts out like this:

Meet Dad at his house, drive to Rainbow Lake to meet my Sister according to her text message directions which said grab the map out of the Winco bag tacked to the street sign for Cooper Ridge and follow road 205 and pink ribbon the whole way. Easy right?!

Everything was cool until we tried to find the route up to Rainbow Lake, it was about 7pm on Friday night when we pulled up into the hills. 'Reprod' is a new word I learned to describe the area around Rainbow Pond, it's where it's clear cut then re-planted to reproduce the timber.

My Dad and I were driving for about 2 hours trying to find the right road, there was no road that was 205, there was no pink ribbon, and the Google map left for us in the Winco bag was just a line tracing a white line for some unlabeled road on this map. Dad was getting ultra mad, like: I didn't f'ing sign up to hunt around in the backwoods for a campsite. So at about 9 we were done and heading back out to the highway to sleep there the night, driving down this steep gravel road through the reprod I noticed headlights from another truck coming up, so we pulled to the side so they could pass. We pulled over, but the lights weren't advancing, so we crept down a little further and rounded a corner to find an old truck stopped.

This old guy comes shambling up to us and says 'You boys got a tow strap?' like we'd turn around the truck somewhere and pull him up the hill, with his tent trailer. Dad said, no sorry, but we backed up to a wide spot and helped them push the truck and trailer. The old man was also carrying around a fat old dachshund close to his belly, he climbed back into the truck and gave it some gas, but it wouldn't go!

As the old man climbed out of his old truck, with the dog still hunched into his stomach a large Pyrex measuring cup fell out of the cab, my Dad grabbed it and handed it back.

The old guy had some friends behind him in a Mercedes SUV and one of them backed the pickup truck and trailer down to a wide spot. We asked the old man where he was heading and he said 'Rainbow Lake,' Dad said 'We were headed there to find my daughter's camp.' The old guy said 'Rainbow Lake is great! It's so nice!' He proceeded to tell us how to get there, we decided to continue our plan to sleep by Highway 22 for the night and look for Twisted Sister the next morning. As we passed by the Mercedes Dad told that guy that we were just going down to sleep down at the bottom. 'Okay man, we'll see ya down there. Hey, happy Father's Day, man!' So weird! Dad returned the holiday wishes and we rolled down.

Fast forward (because this is getting really long!) to my Sister showing us the actual way to get up to her campground that she intended with her map and the few pieces of pink tape she put out. It was this rutted out, overgrown, practically a goat trail of a logging road, but we took it up, no way we would have found this on our own! Didn't catch any fish and got really cold, but spent some good times with Dad, I just wish he'd chill out sometimes!

We hiked up to Marion Lake, a real lake, with Sevlyor rubber rafts and fished for about 5 hours, got a bunch of nibbles and cold feet. It was pretty fun though! I would row the boat as my sister would hold the two rods and we'd kind of troll with out neon, sparkly marshmellow compound on the hook.





Another thing about this trip: my Sister and I pulled our raft in before Dad, he finally showed up to the little beach, you could really tell how much concentration he had on his face and coordination with careful paddle strokes to get that little raft around a snag and to the beach.

Dog Show!

This past weekend I helped at a canine (has anyone noticed how K9 and canine mean the same thing but kinda bring up different connotations) agility competition. My role was to sit in the ring, not move, or make eye contact with the dogs, and reset or change the jumps.

It was amazing to see how well trained and speedy these dogs are. These pictures show some of the typical obstacles. In the first round the owner can have the dog do them in any order for maximum points, this was also the round where there was an area where only the dog could go into. This forced the owner to direct the dog by verbal commands only to get the bonus for doing the 3 obstacles correctly.

The most common dogs for the agility competition seem to be dobermans, german shephards, border collies, but there were also shaggy afghans, poodles, scotty dogs and other tiny dogs who were pretty dang adorable! Especially when the small ones would rum up the teeter toter and scrunch down as it would slowly tip down the other way.

A guy that works in finance in my office was also there with his wife and their dog, he also takes photos to sell at the show, he's shared a few with me.

Joe's dog leaving the weave obstacle.

Dog going up narrow ramp.

Bishu jumping an 8" jump.

Beagle jumping and 8" jump.



Bishu coming out of the chute.

Big dog jumping.

Big dog coming out of the chute.


At some point during the show, while there are dogs barking and people cheering I dozed off.

Piedmont Neighborhood Update

I just got back from the Piedmont Neighborhood Association meeting, it was great, I signed up to help a local school build a community garden - I'll use my rain barrel skills for good now. It was funny, a woman stood up to introduce herself as a person involved in the Stop The Columbia River Crossing (stopthecrc.org) and a couple of people were also there to promote the $4.2B mega highway, bridge, and lightrail project.

I am going to write a letter to the Portland Parks Department telling them that they should grow fruit trees in their parks, people can enter a lottery to be able to pick bushel of apples when they come ripe, for example.

I'm also going to write a letter to the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services telling them to build more bioswale treatment facilities in our neighborhood. These will treat (and store) road runoff prior to their entry into the UICs that handle our road runoff in this area of Portland.

We may be getting a Farmer's Market soon at Ainsworth and Albina, in the vacant lot there. That would be so great for the area.

Brew-a-thon

Last Sunday was a big day of beer brewing and total fun! I want to get into brewing beer, so I got my Dad's old kit (carboy, bottle capper, bottles, tubes, other things that I don't know how to use yet) and headed over to my coworker Brian's house to make some beer with him and his friend Ox.

The night before we spent about $200 on malt extract, yeast, and malt grain. Brian had thought up 6 recipes for different kinds of beer, when we get done we'll have a: nut-brown stout, IPA, a red, a dark lager, a citrus blonde, and something else I can't quite remember.

We had malt cooking on two burners inside and a turkey deep-fat fryer outside, then added the malt extract, then the hops, then the rest of the hops. It was quite a process! I was there about 9 hours, Brian didn't wrap up until about 11pm. That all after he drove up from Corvallis with a hangover after partying it up after the Floater concert.

During the off time we drank beer and played a couple games of Settlers. Settlers is great! It's got this board made of hexagonal cards that you rearrange for each new game, it's really fun and fast paced!

I will have to let you know when I get my share of the 32 gallons of beer, which will be about 100 bottles of beer (on the wall) to try to fit in my fridge!

Gary Johnson

The guy in the center of the picture is Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico whom I had a chance to hear speak a few weeks ago at Lola's Room, I'll get back to this place. He is running an exploratory campaign right now to decide whether to run as Libertarian, I'll get back to them. He's a really interesting guy, he was or is an entreprenuer; he started a handy-man business and grew it to over a thousand employees, he sold it before becoming governor.

He talked about his background and answered questions from the audience. This was one of the few times that I've been around a politician and it was really interesting when he answered questions from these people, straight off the cuff and honest.

I'm a poster boy for big government, my position was created through ARRA (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), it has a website where contractors and other employers enter how many people they've hired as a result of the stimulus every quarter. Anyways, Gary Johnson is the man when it comes to keeping government small, he cut 1,000 jobs during his two terms (which seems like as many would be reduced through natural attrition), while the guy after him increased their roles by 4,500. He also talked about how he is different from the present governor from A to Z, he told about 'H' which was for 'helicopter', he flew in it something like 6 times, his successor has flown in it 1,000 times and purchased one for his official use, seems wasteful to me...

Another thing I liked about him was his stance on legalization of drugs, he talked about a policy called harm reduction. Harm reduction is the reduction in harm that a drug user would cause themselves or others in order to get their fix. An real world example he had of this was from the chief of police in Zurich, Switzerland, if anyone had an addiction to heroin they could get an authorization to have as much heroin as they needed. They would no longer need to steal to pay for the heroin, dealers would have to move somewhere else, and the drug disputes would be handled in the courts. This police chief told him that crime had been reduced significantly in Zurich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_E._Johnson

I've been reading a lot about the Libertarian ideals lately and though I'm not a Republican nor one of the crazy Tea Party people, I feel more and more like our liberties have been taken away.

About Lola's Room: it's usually a dance club at night playing eighties music while people bounce up and down on the bouncy wood floor. That made it kind of an odd venue for this event.

Lazy Blog

I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but my POS computer bit the dust and I didn't want to put a new video card, or motherboard for that matter, into the box. This opening paragraph inspired by Jim Anchower.

Jim Anchower's Hard Rockin' Home Page

I bought a shiny new laptop, it's totally awesome, it's really fast and has a really good video card. Windows 7 seems alright to me, but I'm having problems figuring out how to make audio come out of the HDMI jack, it says it should but it don't...

Lazy post: email converted to a blog post.
I just love bringing up the Za za za song. But, I have good reason to because last night there was a great interview on Fresh Air of Jake Adelstein who was a reporter in Japan who often covered the Yakuza. Really interesting about how a bunch of the crime bosses came to UCLA medical center (or other Cali medical university) for liver transplants with help from the FBI by rolling on some other Yakuza dudes.

http://www.npr.mobi/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120237244

Transcript:

http://www.npr.mobi/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=120237244

The book sounds really good, plus other book whose authors have been interviewed on Fresh Air have turned out to be great: Fahreed Zakaria's The Post-American World, Illicit, and that book about the ADM informant.

20 Bucks Richer!

I was bet $10 that I couldn't eat 40 ounces of chili while traveling for work. My coworker saw a can of chili, 2.5 pounder and bet me $10 that I couldn't eat it in an hour. Then the contractor saw us as we were walking back to our car from this grocery store, tried to get us to come up to his room because he had some bourbon, ice, and water - he asked us if we like bourbon and I, right off the bat, said 'no.' That guy was, I don't know... a little too much for me, but he heard the details of the bet and added his $10 if I could finish it in 30 minutes, I was still down. So next day lunch time comes around and I am also not allowed to heat the chili up, okay, that's fine. I found a big spoon and borrowed a guy's leatherman to open it up and went to town, I finished it in 10 minutes!

I was on the rowing team as a freshman in college, the coach for the freshman boat was this tall skinny guy and he said that when he was going to school he'd load up his plate with food and just start shoveling the food in, he was burning so many calories on the rowing team that he needed to do that, but he learned that about 20 minutes in the stomach finally realizes you're full and tells the brain, so I knew that I couldn't dilly dally.

My coworker was trying to freak me out by saying "Ya know, I've always wanted to tour a Western Family food plant. I'll bet it's the kind of place you walk through and see some nasty stuff and never want to eat again!"

Crazy Dream - Mad Men

I think all dreams are a bit crazy, this one was wild! I wasn't sure when I'd get a chance to write it out, but this evening I didn't get anything done and forgot to do the run I was supposed to do (speedwork: 5 miles including 1600m (1 mi) @ 8:15 min/mi with 800m (0.5 mile) jogs). So, I'll describe the dream.

I don't know if anyone's been watching Mad Men lately, there's been a merger and a bunch of the other stuff going on... Anyways the scene starts there.

I don't remember much before the part where I'm given a weird little quiz book and I sit down to fill it out. Then this woman comes and sits down next to me and starts taunting me, I tell her to shut up! She won't, she keeps saying that now that there's been a merger that her dad will be my dad's boss. I don't like that so I knocker her backwards in her chair and tell her to shut up, she gets up and leaves.

I go back to the test, one question I remember is that somebody's wife hosted a themed dinner around A) a letter from the EPA or B) a bill from the EPA. I think the wife in question is Don Draper's.

Next scene is the British guy with the red hair walking the office about to tell everyone about the merger, there's a blown up W-2 form with the new name and address of the new company projected onto a screen he walks past. He says "But, first let's show you this movie to show you how this all happened."

The movie starts in a bright, shiny lobby with a black and white tile floor, the camera starts out above Don Draper as he walks over to two other men that I got the impression were reclusive owners of the other company. Then, Roger Sterling walks over and the British guy walks over, all three are wearing London Fog rain coats. Then they have like a group hug (maybe a manwich) and smile really big. Then Don Draper and Roger Sterling walk to the right of the group and open up umbrellas. But, the umbrellas turn out to be organic like flower shapes that suck them up.

End

Cupcake Party

I went to the Hoot's condo with Hanna for a cupcake party. I used some 'no pudge fudge' brownie mix, but with the cake option. Then put some of our homemade peanut butter on the top, healthiest cupcakes there. But, I ate like 6 cupcakes and a few glasses of wine, definite sugar crash happening now.

I need to develop a savory cup cake! Tortilla chips and cheese and beans?

Street Breakdancing

Audio Book Run Down (1)

I got a new job, woot! But, when I was searching for work I was also doing stuff around the house (see the tags marked home project and while I did them I often listened to OPB, music I've got, or audio books. I'm sorta new to audio books and devoting a little bit of the focus to the story while doing something else can be tough.

Here's the list:

Homer's The Illiad then The Odyssey -

Both were great tales of mythological conquest and adventure, I liked the Odyssey more because there was more travel involved while the Illiad is staged in and around Troy, when names are mentioned it's harder to keep track of what they are doing if they aren't moving somewhere. Made me want to reread Route 66 A.D., a great book about the beginning of travel and tourism in times of Ancient Rome.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers then The Tipping Point then started Blink - Outliers is about individuals and other groups of people who have bucked the trends and been successful or limited their success by the culture, period of time in which they lived, and social interactions. Once example I found interesting was about some airline pilots in Korea, because of their social structure the co-pilot often speaks in a differential tone to the captain even when there are serious problems the plane may soon encounter, this made Korean Airlines an outlier because accidents were happening more frequently not because of inexperienced pilots or planes needing repair but because there was an ingrained culture of hierarchy.

I liked The Tipping Point to learn how some new fashion trends had gotten started.

Blink, seemed like stuff I already knew so I didn't finish that one.

Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, Freaky Deaky, City Primeval, Bandits - These were all great bubble gum novels about detectives bending the law, con men setting up a grift, organized crime, but what made them all great was that they were read by Frank Muller. I just found his personal website and learned that he's dead! He's the best!! Luckily I've got more Frank Muller narrated books for the bus rides.

Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes The Sign of Four - Good story, I couldn't really get into it, but I've got just about the whole Sherlock Holmes collection so I may do them all.

Sunflower finally bloomed

Sunflower finally bloomed
Originally uploaded by red_5_rogue

This 3 foot tall sunflower finally bloomed, I hope I get some seeds to eat and save to plant more of them next season.

Activity Universal Associates

I went to the farmers market up in St. John's this morning and there was a band called Activity Universal Associates playing on the stage. It was the oddest band I'd ever seen. The video isn't good, I totally cut out the guitar player, but I was more interested in the sound machine the other guy is playing. He use this white card that starts to slide on this machine and makes a series of sounds, then when he slides it back it repeats. He had a couple different kind of cards with different music on them.



This is the only link I could find about them.