Well, OK. It’s not a willow and it doesn’t whomp anything as far as I’m aware. At least, not the Wife who got pretty close to it for a couple of pictures. Still, it’s a neat old tree and it just so happens to sit on the grounds of one of the local private schools.
Here’s some pretty remarkable footage of the meteor shower that occurred over Russia yesterday:
(hattip: Watts Up With That)
Would this be considered adding insult to injury?
The temp this morning at 7:20.
As of now, I’ve cleared our driveway (most of it anyway- there’s only so much room to put that much snow) and front walk. It took me 3 hours to get that much done. Part of that is because are driveway is fairly long, part of it is because there was a lot of snow. And, frankly, part of it is because CONN DOT plowed the top of our driveway in and I had a very dense 3 foot tall, 30 foot wide wall of snow to push through. I wasn’t happy with that but I understand the plow guys have the same problem I do- there’s only so many places to put the snow.
There really aren’t words to adequately describe the scene here. I’ve seen a few references to the tried and true “Winter Wonderland” but that’s only true until the clearing starts, then it’s more like “Hell frozen over.”
As I type this, skies are clearing and the Sun is poking through a bit. The temps have warmed to the mid 20’s and the house is nice and warm with the fire running. My soaked clothes from my earlier snow-clearing are drying so that I can go out and clear our deck next.
Speaking of which, here’s what it looks like:
That’s our Weber Smokey Mountain on the left and our Weber gas grill on the right. The WSM stands about 4 feet tall, normally. It’s boosted up a bit by a large flat rock I have under it to protect the deck from the heat. For that matter, the top of the deck railing measures 42 inches from the deck surface.
Of all the pics in this post, this one probably gives the best idea for how much snow there is. That’s the path I kept clearing so I could take pictures for my Blizzard of 2013 page here on the site.
I mentioned our driveway up above. Here we go:
The before shot is snow that’s basically a foot deep or so for the main portion of the driveway. I’d already cleared it once last night to make today’s clearing a little easier. I’m glad I did. That ridge in the snow on the left of the first picture is the unplowed snow line. It matches up with the wall of snow on the left in the after picture.
Speaking of our driveway, it has a rather unique feature: a large rock set off to the side. It stands about 3 feet tall. Here’s a picture of it:
That’s the rock in the foreground, smack in the middle of the picture under the tree that’s bent over due to the weight of the snow on its branches. The covered portion of the rock is at about 3 feet. Not the biggest of drifts, but impressive none the less.
Here’s our front walk, before and after:
The piles on the right and left are probably 4 feet high.
If you look closely in the Before picture, there are some twiggy things sticking out of the snow. Here’s a slightly better shot of them:
See them? Those little twigs in the foreground? Those are the branches of a Japanese Maple. It’s a little over 2 feet tall.
Here’s a shot of the front of the house:
That lower roof over the front porch looks like I might need to do something about. The upper roof doesn’t look nearly as bad though. I assume that’s because it was exposed to the wind more and didn’t pile up to quite the same degree up there.
Finally, something fun. Here’s Dog2, our male German Shepherd. He’s leaping up at snow the boy has tossed into the air. As many times as someone will toss snow in the air, he’ll leap to snap at it. Just don’t stick your face in there.
We had similar conditions a couple of years ago, believe it or not. But in that case, we had 2 storms come through and dump on us on consecutive weekends. While both storms then were pretty impressive, they weren’t this one.
It’s not unusual for us to have rain come through that dumps 2 or three inches on us. I’ve often wondered what such a storm would be like if it fell in the form of snow. Now, I know.
Awhile back I linked to an article profiling Apollo Robbins, “The Gentleman Thief.” He’s a professional pickpocket who plies his trade for entertainment purposed only. Here’s some video of him in action (thanks to John Gruber):
Having read the article, I knew what to look for and I picked up on a few things in action. But I can totally understand how if I was the actual mark, I’d have no idea what was happening. Pretty slick stuff.
The snow started falling about 8:30 this morning. I was headed out to the car to run some last minute errands and was just climbing in when I saw the first flakes. Driving around town, the roads had all been pre-salted so there wasn’t any accumulation on them. It also wasn’t coming down that hard, though that’s clearly supposed to change.
As far as prep goes, I’ve loaded up plenty of firewood, got fresh gas for the snowblower, went grocery shopping and picked up a power inverter. I’m not overly concerned about losing power, but in the event we do we need a way to run the fan on our wood stove. Using the car to power the inverter should work nicely. It can supply 500W continuously, though I should only need a fraction of that for the blower.
Accumulation predictions are for 2 feet plus, which is unprecedented in my memory for any storm I’ve gone through. I’ve seen predictions for 18-24 a few times, though none of them actually managed that. We’ll see how things go with this one.
Since it’s supposed to be such a hum-dinger of a storm, I decided to create a page to document it’s progress here at the house. That page can be found here. I’ll get around to putting up an appropriate main page link. Look for updates about the storm’s progress on that page as well. I’ll try to do so hourly. One of the pictures is of a yardstick, which I’ve lashed to one of the posts on our deck. With all the project wind to come, I don’t know how accurate it will be, but it might be fun to watch it get covered. At least, the boy thought it was a good idea.
Now I have to get to the other things I haven’t got to yet. Back later.
Interesting read here on gluten free diets and the like. My first reaction was to lump it in with other food studies of the past like salt. First, it was bad for you. Then it was good. Then it was sort-of-OK-but-not-too-much. I think that’s still where we’re at with salt.
I also find it interesting that the doctors admit that, aside from celiac disease, they don’t really know what they’re talking about. But they still insist that changing diets is bad. Or the fellow at the end who states “No more than 1 percent” of people have “gluten sensitivity. But then admits all numbers are speculative. So he doesn’t know, but he does know. Whatever.
Anyway, here ’bouts we’ve drastically reduced our gluten intake, but as part of a broader plan of carb reduction. Bread and pasta are the two major foods that provide carbs, well, along with sugars of course, so we’ve all but eliminated them from our diet. The kids still enjoy certain pasta dishes, so we do occasionally partake, but without nearly the same frequency.
Interestingly, as reported by those “sensitive” to gluten, I can also report that I feel better without all the carbs in the diet. Not that I felt bad per say, but I noticed feeling like I had more energy. So maybe there’s more to the whole gluten thing than meets the eye.
(hattip: Instapundit)
I just read this article by Bill Simmons. It is, bar none, the best article Simmons has ever written. Or at least, it’s the best one of his I’ve ever read.
Here are the concluding paragraphs (lightly edited):
I believe that Ray Lewis cheated. I believe that to be true based on circumstantial evidence, his age, his overcompetitiveness, the history of that specific injury, and the fact that his “recovery” made my s**t detector start vibrating like a chainsaw.
I believe in my right to write the previous paragraph because athletes pushed us to this point. We need better drug testing. We need blood testing. We need biological passports. We need that stuff now. Not in three years. Not in two years. Now. I don’t even know what I am watching anymore.
I believe we need to fix this disconnect between our private conversations and our public ones. Cheating in professional sports is an epidemic. Wondering about the reasons behind a dramatically improved performance, or a dramatically fast recovery time, shouldn’t be considered off-limits for media members. We shouldn’t feel like scumbags bringing this stuff up. It’s part of sports.
I believe that, if I played sports for a living, I would steer clear of performance enhancers no matter how many millions were at stake, no matter how famous they might make me, no matter how many titles I might win. I like to believe that, anyway. The truth is … I don’t really know what I would do. And neither do you.
As far as I’m concerned, this article is directed more at the sports media- ESPN, Sports Illustrated and so forth- than non-media people. As he says, non-media people think of this all the time, but we never see sports media figures say “You know what, I’m not buying it- prove it.”
Something to consider- it’s possible that it’s impossible to play professional sports without drug enhancement. Think about it- 160+ games in baseball; 80+ games in basketball and hockey; 16 games in football which is more physically taxing than the others. It may be that even the best-of-the-best can’t make it through their sport’s season without drugs simply because it’s not possible for their body to recover and heal from game to game.
Anyway, Simmons’ article is well worth the time to read it.
Who doesn’t love them some extreme weather?
Right now, as I type this, the thermometer reads 32 degrees. That’s the first time it’s reached that threshold since last Sunday, January 20th. Since then, it hasn’t managed to got out of the 20’s. The only bummer, as it were, is that we never had any negative lows. We did have one night where it was 0, though. We’re supposed to hit 50 tomorrow, according the to the last local forecast I’d seen.
I have no ulterior motive behind this post. I just wanted to note the extent of a pretty cool patch of weather. Cool both figuratively, for me, and literally for everyone.
Today is Day 2 of the most recent cold snap, or deep freeze or whatever it’s called. It occurs that a “heat wave” is defined as 3 consecutive days with highs of 90 degrees (F) or higher, but as a far as I’m aware there is no equivalent for stretches of cold.
According to the short range forecast, temps won’t get above freezing again until next Monday- meaning 7 consecutive days with highs below freezing. Should this be a “cold wave”? Or perhaps we can come up with something catchier sounding for at least 3 days with temps below freezing, like…well, nothing clever comes to mind at the moment.
But surely consecutive days below freezing are worthy of some kind of moniker, right? I mean, water phase changes! That doesn’t even happen in a “heat wave.” Arguably, it’s more impressive.
Given his big interview tomorrow, which I won’t watch and don’t have any interest in at this point, I thought I’d just point out that 2-and-a-half years ago I called it correctly regarding his PED usage.
At the time, I also wrote that I’d like to be wrong. I still wish that were the case. I think a world in which a guy with an extraordinary gift who honed it to levels unheard of before him is a better world to live in than the one we are now in, where the guy’s gift was at deception.
One thing I will pay attention to tomorrow is the Manti Te’o press conference where he’ll explain this bizarre girlfriend story. I didn’t follow his final season all that closely, but he seems like a decent kid with a talent for football. I bear him no ill will and thus have no reason to prejudge him. I think it’s perfectly reasonable that he got snookered, badly, and upon realizing it had trouble accepting the humiliating reality. I expect he’ll be owning up to that embarrassment tomorrow as best he can, given his youth and status.
Like Armstrong, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Unlike Armstrong, I’m hopeful that he wasn’t part of this prank. I also think that’s a better world to live in than th alternative.
As I was sitting here pondering a universe in which the Patriots are in yet another Championship game, the Wife come down the stairs and informs me that “The faucet has a steady stream and I can’t get it to stop. I tried turning the handle as far as I could and it still won’t shut off.” She doesn’t have to say the last part because it’s obvious, I need to fix it.
I’ve done this before and I know exactly what I’ll need: my pair of force grips and a set of allen wrenches. I got half-way up the steps and had a brilliant idea: I’ll blog it! Complete with pictures! It would be the my most tedious post yet!
Hey, I’ve been sniffing paint today, as opposed to pine, from the kid’s derby cars. I’ll get to those in another post.
Via Instapundit, an article about a performing pickpocket. Really interesting stuff and not the first time I’ve read about this connection between neuroscience and magic. Basically, scientists are breaking down magic routines to study how our attention can be manipulated, and thus theorize on how it actually works.
Here’s the best bit in the whole article:
“I been playing since I was knee-high to a shit-ball,” he said. “At first, I was a moll buzzer. I used to play in the ghetto. Then I started playing Skokie, then I started playing downtown in the Loop. They got Shot-Jims down there, and if you can play at that level and beat a chump, right there on the corner in front of they face- believe me, you can play.”
That’s a quote from another pickpocket mentioned in the article. You’ll have to go read the article for a translation.
As in degrees, right now. It was actually warmer an hour ago, a whopping 5. I think it might start warming from here, but it’s been awhile since its been this cold.
Cool stuff, er, literally.
Welcome to the new year, may it be full of good cheer, good friends and good times.
I made a mistake.
On Friday evening, I told the boy it was supposed to snow the next day, which now is yesterday- Saturday. Not only did I tell him but I foolishly parroted more or less the exact forecast down to the start time and amounts. I may as well have told him that a second Christmas had been scheduled.
He spent the rest of that evening double checking that it was still going to snow. It was as if he’d decided that he needed to maintain vigilance on the matter, lest the foretold events not come to pass. He double checked the snowfall amounts, the start time, the end time. He was particularly fascinated by the end time, confirming on multiple occasions that the snow would end Sunday morning at 7, rather than Saturday morning at 7 (even though the start time wasn’t supposed to be until Saturday morning at 11).
When he woke up on yesterday, he wanted to look at a weather map and ensure that it was still supposed to snow. Perhaps he was concerned that his 10 hour slumber had allowed the probability fields to shift such that no snow was coming, or not as much, or- worst of all- that it would fall as rain.
It finally started in the mid-afternoon hours. I happened to look out and the first sporadic flakes were falling. Big, fluffy cotton balls from the sky that disintegrated on contact with the ground. I pointed outside and made a face like the people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Both kids laughed, but then the boy rushed to look at the thermometer, wanting to make sure it would not turn to rain.
The start of the snow was the end of the worrying. The boy was noticeably more relaxed as the snowfall proceeded through the afternoon. His vigilance and wishing was paying off. It was now only a question of “How much?” not “Will it?” But the “How much?” question is more pleasant to fret over. It’s like momentum- once getting things moving, they tend to want to stay that way. Now that the snow was falling and the hard part was over.
By the time they went to bed, there was about 6 inches on the ground. The boy had been monitoring the situation and was keenly aware the amount now exceeded the prediction I’d given him the day before. Even better- the snow continued to fall without any sign of letting up. He went to bed easily, dreaming of snowmen, snowballs and sledding.
Here’s what he awoke to:
All pictures courtesy of the Wife and her Canon EOS60D.
In addition to the various traditional techniques associated with martial arts like kicking, blocking and punching the martial arts school has a physical component in order to earn a black belt. One of those is to perform 100 push ups and 100 sit-ups. I’m assuming it’s supposed to be 100 straight, although we’ve never done more that 25 in a set in our testing. Regardless, I can’t do it at this point. Not even close.
From my years of weight training for football, I thought I had a decent start on this task. Further, the pitch the instructors use for making it seem more attainable is that a student only has to improve by 2 per month over the 4 year period towards becoming a black belt. Doesn’t seem so bad, really.
Well, I’ve been stuck at about the same level ever since my arm fully recovered from the surgery. And that level is about the same I was at prior to the surgery. I can complete about 35 for a single set, or I can manage a couple of sets of 25 before I run out of steam.
So, in order to try and make some progress, I’ve decided that over a 1 week period, I’m going to do 700 pushups- 100 per day. Today is day 3. I didn’t do push-ups per say yesterday, I used our Total Gym instead but managed to do the 100 reps in 2 sets.
My arms hurt. My chest hurts. Four more days to go. Yay.
Via Wired’s GeekDad twitter feed, here’s a list of the top 50 Dad blog’s. Sadly, yours truly isn’t on the list. I’ll have to cull through some of them looking for inspiration for future posts.
One of the hard things about the blog for me, which I kind of anticipated, is coming up with interesting material. Obviously, the main source has been the kids and my trials and tribulations with raising them on a day-to-day basis. But they’re in a kind of holding pattern now, where change is slower so I’ve had fewer new things to write about. At least, that’s how it feels.
Thus, I’ve supplemented the blog with stuff about woodworking, computer maintenance (Linux particularly), bread recipes, football and other items along the way. Yet even here, the posts seem to take on the same flavor over time. Even with football, the themes are similar or at least they seem that way to me. Thus, I’ve posted less about football this year than any year previous.
I’ve no plans for going anywhere, but I’d like to find a new source to tap or a new angle from which to looks at things. In the meantime, check out some of the blogs in the links above, if nothing else you should be able to find something interesting to read.
In this case, literally!
I’ve been eating a lot of breakfast sausage of late because of a diet change, and I finally decided to give it a go making my own. Having only a basic idea of how to go about it (slice up some pork, season it then send it through a grinder), I googled it and up turned an Alton Brown recipe. I’ve found that, by and large, an Alton Brown recipe is a good place to start when venturing into uncharted cooking waters.
The only modification I made to the recipe was the amounts and I didn’t use any salt because the fatback was coated in it. I basically scaled everything up by a factor of 4 because I had a, roughly, 9 pound butt to slice up. Alright, enough with the snickering…
I went with one-and-a-half pounds of fatback. I’m not sure if what I got was salt pork, or fatback. It was labeled fatback, but was heavily coated in salt and seemed like it was alternately called salt pork. Perhaps I got something that was like bride-of-salt-pork-and-fatback.
Anyway, it was a long process turning all that meat and fat into sausage. I’d say I had about 3 hours worth of work into it. The three sticking points were cutting up the pork butt, sending the mixture through the grinder, and finally turning it all into patties. A lot of work making sausage. The patty making had me wondering about where I could get me some intestine. I suppose a sock might work as well. Or stockings…
Anyway, I’m happy to report that it’s a good recipe. I cooked up a patty and scarfed it down with gusto. The boy got to sample a bite as well and even he enjoyed it. The Wife will be the real test though- she not much of a sausage fan, but this doesn’t taste like store bought sausage, so perhaps it stands a chance.
At any rate, if you’re looking for something different, here’s your ticket.