On the Fourth of July

One of my friends is a fairly recent Russian immigrant, and we were out with some other friends the other night. She offered a comment about her green card and how important it was to her, which was both surprising and quite affecting in its sincerity.

I wish I could remember her exact words, but they were something to the effect that when she returns to this country from Russia, upon seeing her green card, the people in customs tell her, "Welcome home." She spoke of how much she loved hearing that, and it was clear that it meant a very great deal to her. Much more than it would probably mean to any of us.

Came to mind this morning thinking about the holiday.

Cheese Omelet: Tempus Fuggedaboutit

...time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister

but boring stories of glory days

Where the heck does the time go?

Okay, Battlestar Galactica appreciation is well underway, but it's taking a while. It's long (It was an 80 hour movie, fer chrissakes!), and I find I write a little, go back and edit a lot, then write a little more, and so it goes. Hopefully it'll be short enough that someone may actually read it. And hopefully it'll be worth reading. If I only knew what not to write as I was writing it, so I wasn't going back and editing it out later, that would save a little time. Anyway, I digress.

Kitchen sink remains spotless. Counters are clobbered, but that's a project in progress. I'm in the midst of an effort to figure out how to actually prepare food for myself. I have two challenges. The first is I'm lazy. So if I can have a machine chop something up for me, that's good, because I hate chopping with a knife. I bought this Cuisinart blender a couple of years ago, and I think the only thing it's ever done is crush ice for some margaritas once. It came with this small food processor bowl and blades. I think at the time I was thinking smoothies and the food processor thing looked like a bonus. So I've broken out the instruction book and I have some vegetables I'm going to "process" today or tomorrow and see how that works. Probably not as advertised, as these things usually go.

The other problem is that I'm preparing food for just me, and you mostly buy food in quantities for more than just one person. So I have all these plastic bowls with airtight lids and plastic wrap, but I still end up throwing stuff away more than actually eating it. So again, a couple of years ago I bought this Foodsaver vacuum thing. I used it last week to wrap and freeze some bananas. I always used to wind up throwing away bananas. Now I just buy a bunch, wait till they're ripe, peel 'em all at once and freeze 'em. A frozen banana is a nice treat after a run. But I'm also playing around with other aspects of vacuum sealing. Here's a tip: Don't do it for blueberries. They just mash together. Those will go in a smoothie eventually, but they're frozen for now. Blueberries you just throw in a freezer bag and eliminate as much of the air as you can by hand and freeze 'em. Nothing better on your cereal in the morning.

When I hang out at the pool, it's important to have on hand adequate quantities of fluids to maintain proper hydration. It's been in the '90s here all week. Unless it's a party, it's usually cans or 20 oz plastic bottles of diet soft drinks. Well, I'm really trying to cut down on the soft drinks, so I bought a 2 qt Igloo pitcher, and it's going to be Crystal Light from now on. Or, at least after I get through caffeine withdrawal. I bought a 3 gal one too, but that's too big for just me.

So the counters are clobbered while I sort this stuff out. The sink is immaculate though.

Wanted to do something a little geeky this weekend, so I'm going to pop a new battery in my old iPod 3g. It's the one with the four touch-sensitive buttons in a row above the scroll wheel. I actually love that design, because you can control the iPod with just the barest touch, which is important when it's sitting in a dock of some kind. No stress whatsoever on the docking connector. My music collection has grown now to actually fill the 30GB iPod, so my next geeky act may be to swap out the hard drive. But we'll see.

My little brother Eric called last weekend, and my brother Mark and I helped him solve a little technical issue. He has a small Acer computer that he uses for his electrical engineering course, which runs a Windows app he needs for the course. Well, it died and so he was wondering about installing Windows on the iMac. He was going to run out and buy Vista Home Premium Edition for about $238.00 I think he said, could be wrong about the price, but I told him he could download and install Windows 7 for free and use it long enough to finish the course, and install it with Bootcamp. Long story short, a couple of video iChats, (including one 4-way conference with the parents too) and he was up and running.

So of course now I want to put Windows 7 on my iMac! That may be in the cards this weekend as well. We shall see. I have a full plate.

And just to round out the geek trivia here, I bought Toslink to Mini plug fiber optic digital audio cable to connect the Mac mini I have in my "home theater" setup to my 50" Panasonic plasma TV. I'm not expecting any great improvement in audio quality. I'm mostly doing it because, you know, I can. The audio runs analog out of the Panny to a Zvox speaker box, so there you go - analog. (Update: Doh! The Panny only supports digital out. Sigh. Oh well. Can never have too many cables, no? Well, yeah, you can.) But I will say that if you run digital audio out of an Airport Express to an iPod HiFi, the audio quality is noticeably better. Awesome in fact. I normally play iTunes from the MacBook through Airtunes to the HiFi above my kitchen counters. But I can also play it through the mini in the home theater, where it also plays through the Zvox and can really rock the house. Of course, forget about soundstage and all that nonsense. Still sounds good to me.

Took Bodhi to the vet yesterday for his check-up, shots, heart worm meds and this time I bought this Comfortis stuff which is a 30 day flea treatment in pill form. The fleas are killer this summer and Frontline isn't touching them. We'll see if this stuff is any better. Of course, it was a $350.00 vet bill and that, um, bites!

Some friends and I are going to cook out at the pool tonight. It'll probably be crowded because of the holiday, but hopefully not too bad. Most people still like to go out and party on Friday nights, so we should have some time on the grill. We're going to make another beer can chicken, which is something of a tradition here.

Monica and I are running again. I have to lose about 5 pounds I gained sitting on my ass and eating conference food for nearly two weeks, plus eating out every night. I ran solo on Sunday, but I sucked. We ran together on Monday and our pace was 11:37 for five miles. We ran the same route on Wednesday and cut 30 seconds off the pace for 11:07, so we should be back on track here shortly. Of course, it feels like we're running in soup, it's 80 degrees in the morning and the relative humidity is probably close to 80%! But it's good to be back out moving again.

For those of you who've been with me through the "blog wars," I wish to observe that I've been reading Scoble lately, and it seems as though his point of view is slowly approaching that of reality. The longer I live, the more it becomes clear to me that what Sandy told me is true, we only learn from the consequences of our actions. You can't tell anybody anything. Other opposing parties still reside firmly within their reality distortion fields where technology is the solution to all problems, including the deficits within the human heart; and universal happiness and utopia are always just another iteration of Moore's Law away.

For the rest of us, just be here now. Everything is exactly the way it's supposed to be; and if you can't figure out why, you aren't paying attention yet.