OK, truth be told we took this right before the Falcons game a couple of weeks ago, but the sentiment is the same today

We happen to have coffee concentrate around anyway so this is pretty convenient for me. If you’re not familiar with it, concentrate is made using a cold filtering process. We have a cold filter concentrate maker already, but if you don’t have one around and want to experiment, it’s pretty easy to make. Here’s a sample recipe. It also makes fantastic coffee, and is a convenient way to have a single cup when you don’t want to brew a pot.

A word of warning about this recipe – for whatever reason, it causes the soda to fizz up more dramatically than if you make Dr Pete’s without the concentrate, so open the bottle carefully or you’ll end up with soda everywhere. Also make sure to leave a little room in the bottle when you make the seltzer – fill it just a bit below the regular fill line, or pour a little out after you mix it so there is room for the concentrate in the bottle.

I once proposed a line of perverse vegan aerosol meat substitutes like “I can’t believe it’s not organ meat” and “I can’t believe it’s not marrow bones” that would come as a soy spray in a mousse can whose nozzle mated with a dishwasher/microwave-safe mold (with plastic “bones” as appropriate) that you could nuke for a minute before ejecting the piping hot reformed slurry on a plate and popping the mold right into the dishwasher.

Let me go on record as someone who would buy such a product for the gag gift/social commentary value alone. My dog might even eat the output. Someone get a kickstarter going!

It’s too early to make predictions I have confidence in, and there’s the whole on any given sunday thing, but barring a string of injuries the Packers look even better than they did last season and an easy pick for NFC champs. I haven’t seen enough AFC games to have an informed opinion, but I’ll go with the Pats  and their explosive offense in the AFC.

The well seems straightforward, but the fencing turns out to be complicated. There’s lots of ways to fence livestock. We could pay for or build permanent wooden, plastic or metal fencing. We could use horse panels, which are basically stiff steel wire fence panels with large rectangular holes, and move the animals around along with the fencing every couple of days. We could use corral panels, which are steel tube fencing panels which are sturdier than the horse panels but much more expensive. We could use movable plastic ribbon electric fence, which use plastic rods with foot pedals on them that you reposition periodically. Or we could do something we haven’t thought of yet. What would you do were you us? Permanent fencing doesn’t appeal much because of the cost and the lack of flexibility. Horse panels leave me nervous that I’m going to be chasing down escaped goats all the time. Corral panels seem pretty expensive (they run ~$8-10 a foot). The plastic ribbon fence is an eye sore and a lot of work to move around, plus even though they can use solar power, they do require the power. Basically, we’re not loving any of the options and debating what to do. Anyone else got an opinion they want to share, or other options?

Tell me you’ve seen a better goal – that’s the most amazing hockey play I’ve ever seen.

Is the worlds imagined by Studio Ghibli as recreated by a bunch of folks using the Minecraft engine.

If you’re unfamiliar with Studio Ghibli, stop what you’re doing and go watch Laputa, Castle in the Sky, or Grave of the Fireflies, or Porco Rosso, or, well, anything they’ve done, but especially those. Shorthand explanation would be that they’re a Japanese analog to Walt Disney.

If you’re unfamiliar with Minecraft, and you have a computer that’s less than 6-7 years old that can run Java, go spend the $15 or so to register. It’s a 3d lego toolkit with world generation, multiplayer, and zombies, plus a whole lot more, but that should be enough right there. Plus it’s absolutely brilliant.

…and the Night’s Watch had a proud tradition of protecting the King for over 2,000 years,

or this from science fiction:

…a galaxy spanning civilization that had endured over 5,000 years…

Here’s the thing: we humans can’t state with much certainty what happened to us a couple of thousand years ago, and generalizing, we can’t say much about what happened earlier than that with any specificity. There is nothing to suggest that anything we produce, from structures, to works of art, to political institutions, to societies, has much chance of surviving more than a few hundred years at best. And yet epic fantasy and science fiction are replete with examples of passages like the above, with authors imagining societies that have persisted statically for millennium only to be disrupted by the events depicted in the novels.

I get that I’m nitpicking forms which by their nature are intended to entertain us by challenging our sense of how things work, but it just doesn’t scan, especially in fantasy. If you could spend some time explaining to me how a society remained stuck as a feudal state for 6,000 years (and even be aware of the passage of that many years), or at least offer some clues as to why, or even wave your hands about and blame it on ‘magic,’ great, maybe I can look past it, and sometimes authors even try to do this. Most of the time though, they don’t (and as far as I can recall anyway, even when they try I haven’t come close to buying it). They want to imagine some grand civilization on the precipice of change and imbue this with a sense of drama and poignancy implied by just how long these institutions have stood, but instead it just comes across as bombastic and silly.

TL;DR: Fantasy and Science fiction authors: please read some history and get a more realistic sense of scale for human endeavors. ‘Fantasy’ is not the same as ‘impossible.’

The littlest New York Giants fan

Latest in a series. I’ve been doing a bad job keeping this updated, but Susan’s been plugging away at it, uploading new photos of Brady on a regular basis to the image gallery on this site. She started month three of the gallery not long ago – check it out here.

(Thanks, btw, to the Lord family for the awesome giants getup. There’s also a bib that he’s not wearing in this shot).

Brady smiling, captured on camera for the first time

Holiday Letter 2010

Hard to believe another year has come and gone but this one has been filled with lots of activity here in Hamilton/Kimball land. For a second year running our biggest news (and belly) is in the photo. We are expecting a little one of some variety yet to be determined sometime around January 8th. Preparations are in full swing and David’s getting in as much video gaming and toy purchasing as possible before the new arrival. We are very excited and can’t wait to see what we’ve been gestating here for the last 9 months. Once again, we were beat by not one but two Hamiltons in our exciting news. In April, Kirsten, Brian and Isabella welcomed Dashiel Carl into the world in Australia while Jesse, Michelle and Raven were busy introducing Benjamin Elliot to the Seattle scene. Fortunately for us, we are in the right position for hand-me-downs!

In preparation for our growing family, we bought a new house this spring and moved in the first of May. Leaving Holyoke was bittersweet. We’re no longer as close to many dear friends and the easy drive up Route 5 to Northampton, but neither of us will miss the city itself much, and we love our little cape in Belchertown. It’s located on a beautiful 3-acre lot with a 4 stall barn and horse ring and abuts 100s of acres of conservation land. We were sure the dogs would love this endless playground, and they do, but it turns out Soolin is more interested in stalking the neighbor’s cat than exploring the acreage. Still, it provides for fantastic daily walks off the lead that Soolin loves more than most things. We managed to get a garden in before it was too late in the spring and even did pretty well with it, bringing about what David dubbed the ‘tomatopocalypse’ in late summer. Our freezer’s stocked, we’re eying new canning techniques and a chest freezer for next season, and we figure we can grow a substantial portion of our child’s food for its first year on our own land. We also purchased chickens this fall, and fit in lots of indoor and outdoor house projects, including trying to coax some of the dozen or so apple trees on the land into producing apples next year. If David has his way, besides this baby, the chickens, and a kitten, we’ll end up with sheep, goats, and whatever else catches his fancy that will fit in 4 barn stalls.

Amidst all the excitement and happiness we’ve experienced this year we also suffered a terrible loss this summer. After a relatively brief battle with cancer we had to have our beloved dog Nori put to sleep. Shortly after moving to our new home she got quite sick and spent several weeks shuttling back and forth to the emergency vet here in Western Mass and finally to Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston for the cancer diagnosis. She died peacefully at home with us by her side and now rests among our flower beds where we visit her regularly. It’s not the same without her around and we miss her terribly, but we’re truly blessed to have shared the time with her that we had.

We’re both doing well at work despite some challenges. Both of us lost our long term bosses this year, with Susan’s heading off to a happy retirement and David’s moving on to greener pastures at NYU. The changes have been an adjustment but with new challenges come new opportunities and all that, and David was asked to serve in his boss’s role while the college searches for a replacement. That’ll take a year or so and in the interim, he reports that it’s mostly good to be the king. Both of us were also secretly nominated to serve on the college’s employee council, which was really gratifying for both of us and felt like an affirmation of the hard work and dedication we bring to our careers. Of course, we then turned them down what with a baby on the way and David basically having two jobs for the next year it just felt like too much to take on.

The second annual deep fat turkey fry was much more successful this Thanksgiving with a yummy crispy-skinned, super-moist turkey breast replacing last year’s turkey sushi surprise. Susan still didn’t trust David to fry the “real” turkey so an 18-pounder was roasted in the traditional way leading to more leftovers than you can possibly imagine. We also managed to get some Twinkies into the oil this year but as Susan’s dad pointed out, we still spent more money on the oil than all the cooked things put together. Not the most efficient cooking method, apparently, but delicious all the same, and what price is too much for delicious on Thanksgiving!
Who knows if we’ll have recovered from becoming new parents by the time the next holiday letter is due but we’ll do our best. Until then, we hope you have a happy and healthy 2011.

Love,
Susan, David, & Soolin

!!!

Fucking rabbits.

I spent June and part of July experimenting with my use of social media. The widely reported Facebook privacy issues left me questioning how I was using these things, so I decided to stop for a month and get a feel for what that was like.

Turns out I didn’t much notice, or at least not to the extent I expected to.

Granted, I didn’t 100% withdraw from all these services I’ve been using. Partly this is because as part of my job I have to use and understand these tools. Partly this is because it’s harder to disentangle oneself than it ought to be. And partly, it’s because I was occasionally too lazy to take care of the details.

While I’ve really enjoyed reconnecting with old friends on Facebook, particularly friends from my college years, the number of interactions I have with them are an infinitesimally small part of the activity that Facebook generates, and much of that activity is just a distracting cacophony – alerts from crummy webgame and silly apps, mentions of sports results, good and bad meals, and what the weather’s like. I get that even this shallow stuff can help me keep my finger on the pulse of my friends’ lives, and there are also plentiful examples of meaningful and poignant events that I get clued into via all of this, but when I balance it against the amount of time it’s taking, and against my conclusion that basically Facebook is not a company I trust or want to do business with, I conclude that I’m better off disengaging.

This doesn’t mean I’m deleting my Facebook account. What I’ve done is disconnect all third party tools from Facebook, including my twitter account. I’m going to begin routing all content to facebook via my website, because I control it and I can be sure I’m not sharing my friends contact or other information with third parties should they decide to click through on something I’ve posted.

This does mean my Facebook wall will be a lot quieter than in the past, mostly because of the absence of the twitter feed. I’m not going to connect it to my website. I am going to try and return to my previous writing habits over on my site to try and make up for the difference but I’ve had mixed success with that in the past, so who knows how it will go. It shouldn’t make much of  a difference to most folks one way or another is the bottom line, and it leaves me with the peace of mind that I’m not an unwitting marketing accomplice for Facebook.

It also means I’ll be a little less likely to respond to stuff that happens on Facebook, because by and large I’m not going to log into the site using a web browser. Instead I’ll use my phone. The iphone facebook app is pretty good, but has some bugs, especially related to photos, meaning sometimes even when I want to look at a photo someone has posted, I can’t. It’s also more awkward to type on, a disincentive to participate in comment threads.

Anyway, that’s the story for now. I’m going to try this for several months and see how it goes.

Our black lab Nori. She died on July 7, 2010

Our beloved black lab Nori died last week after a sudden and mercifully brief battle with cancer.

Her last month was rough. In mid May she contracted salmonella and spent several days in the animal hospital. At one point during this I actually thought she was going to die she was so ill. Susan and I were greatly relieved when she came home and quickly reverted to her normal self.

Sadly this was not to last. After a couple of weeks we noted that she had begun to put on weight, and within a few days of that we knew something was wrong – she was gaining weight too quickly for this to be normal. The vet suggested it might be gas and we spent several days trying a medication, but to no avail. Within a week she was having so much difficulty breathing that Susan took her off to the animal hospital.

We then spent several weeks trying to figure out what was wrong with her. They drained 2 litres of fluid out of her during her first visit. Her recent bout with salmonella confused the diagnosis, but long story short within a couple of anxious weeks that included multiple hospital visits and drainings and a visit to a specialist hospital in Boston, we had a diagnosis – terminal cancer, probably in multiple locations in her body, but certainly in her bladder and almost certainly in her glands.

Within a week or so of this diagnosis, Nori was dead.

Needless to say this completely sucked. Susan and I were shocked and emotionally devastated. About the only good I can say of this experience was that fortunately Nori did not have to suffer very long. She had some rough weeks, with labored breathing and a rapid decline in body weight and stamina, but she was a trooper right through to the end, still anxious for her meals, eager to please us, and ready with a kiss and a wag of her tail, even when it cost her dearly to raise herself up.

She died in our arms at home on July 7, surrounded by those who loved her. Most of the folks who knew her well got a chance to see her at least once before she died. She’s buried in our yard, in view of the picture windows which look out over one of our gardens.

I’ll miss her dearly. Soolin and Nori did everything with Susan and I – they came to work with us, they’d usually accompany us on our errands, they were our hiking companions, they even attended our wedding (in fact, they’re the only people who attended our wedding!). It’s a terrible loss for us.

We’re going to spruce up the flower garden we buried her in, and I’m going to get a memorial page up for her on this site at www.metamusing.net/nori as soon as I have a chance to pull together enough photos for it.

The hospital’s first guess was a possible blockage of her innards, most likely by chicken bone. Fortunately shortly after they admitted her she got violently ill from the rear, and at the time they thought this was a great sign and that she would soon be on the mend. They x-rayed her and found nothing foreign in her, which was a relief and another good sign.

Unfortunately by Tuesday she hadn’t really improved, and they decided to keep her for observation. She wasn’t eating, and she was still throwing up and leaking from her rear constantly. By this point they concluded she had a bacterial infection of some sort. We were worried but not terribly so.

Wednesday morning Nori ate a little bit and so by lunchtime they concluded it was safe to take her home. Susan picked her up and spent the afternoon watching her, and it wasn’t pretty. She wouldn’t eat, she was still constantly and pretty much uncontrollably leaking from the rear, she was in significant pain that was causing her to constantly pant and quake, and she was completely distressed emotionally. This was really really hard to see and absolutely heartbreaking. She was looking for comfort and spent her time trying to literally crawl under our clothing and huddle against our skin, shivering in pain and staring up at us with pleading eyes. The closest I’ve come to crying in years was that night, looking into her eyes and feeling helpless. At this point I was beginning to think she would die, and the following morning was worse – while she did seem to sleep that night, when she woke up she wouldn’t eat anything, and after drinking a little water she threw it up all over Susan. We called the hospital and they had us bring her back.

This time they did an ultrasound and again found no blockage. They concluded their initial diagnosis was still the likeliest explanation, she was just sicker than we thought, but the ultrasound did pick up fluid in her abdominal cavity. Apparently this is not unusual with bad digestive infections, but it’s also a sign of certain cancers, so they sent a sample to the lab. Meanwhile she went back on the IV and Susan and I sat on pins and needles, getting an update from the doctors every 6 hours or so.

Thursday was status quo until the evening when Nori finally ate something after 4 days of eating basically nothing, which was a great sign, and Friday morning she ate again. They decided if she ate around lunchtime we could come get her, and after she did I went up late afternoon and got her.

It was like night and day. While she had clearly lost a fair bit of weight, and has a shaved belly and rear end (a rear end that looked ridiculous when I first got her – it was literally as red as a baboons ass), she is back to her peppy self – no more pleading eyes, a not infrequent grin to share, energy to bounce around the house and, most importantly for Nori, beg us for food

So – she’s not entirely out of the woods (5 days of a diet of small portions of rice and boiled meat, a bunch of different medications, low activity), but things are definitely looking good. The lab results came back and there was no sign of cancer. Our fingers crossed that she comes through this just fine and with no lasting side effects, except perhaps more of an aversion to food from the trash/wherever the hell she found those mashed potatoes and chicken.

As a side note, we do wish we had health insurance on the dogs. This was expensive, owe $2k and we’re not quite done yet. I’d spend the money again without thinking twice, but man, it still hurts the wallet. This has been the most expensive month of my life, what with a new house, appliances, a tractor, and this being the capper. I told Susan we’re going to rent Nori out as a ‘companion’ to the neighborhood dogs to help pay for all of this l-)

Bad choice, which I basically knew when I was making it. This rendered the machine unbootable. With so much else on my plate I turned my attention to other tasks and only returned to it last night. Thanks to a pointer from someone at work the repair was relatively painless. Recovery mode ftw

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

Herbie the Elm, courtesy of Flickr

Well, here’s a minor bummer. I lived in Yarmouth, Maine for like 7-8 years, and right around the corner from my house was the largest living Elm tree in the US. I used to jog by it almost daily when I exercised. It went by the name Herbie and it had a plaque at its base explaining how it was still around despite Dutch Elms disease. turns out that it finally lost the battle with the disease after a ~50 year fight, and the town is taking down the tree. There’s a piece about this on the Portland Press Herald site, plus more details and info on chotkes they’re going to make from the tree on the Yarmouth website

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Rattlesnake from David Hamilton on Vimeo.