Last weekend we went to the Jersey shore.  It was nice to camp out with our friend George again, and to do the campfire thing, and it was a pretty fun trip.  But we both agreed that it’s harder to enjoy the black ocean waters of New Jersey after having been in the turquois Bahamian seas and the crystal clear streams of Colorado.

We started out on the beach in Ocean City, but it was packed as usual, and being the long, flat, straight beach that it is, it was really windy.  So we drove route 619 (?) down the coast and eventually ended up at 67th Street in Avalon.  It was now just after 5 PM, so the annoying lifeguards were packing it in, and the beach was far less crowded & windy.

On another day we went to a beach near 2nd Street in Sea Isle City.  This day had been extremely rainy and windy, but we caught a break from the rain and hit the beach.  It was still really windy, though, and this beach was nearly deserted; and the waves were HUGE, I’d say it was probably 6 foot seas when we went in.  They were definitely the biggest waves I’d ever seen in person, and big enough that it was a struggle just to get out into the water.  A wind-surfer came past us up the coast, and he was getting amazing air -- about 30 feet at one point.  It was like he was flying.

We had dinner at The Lobster House one night, which means that I got Alaskan King Crab legs.  They’re so big that they only give you 3 of them, and you still get as much meat as when you get a dozen regular crab legs -- only it’s far easier to get at it what with only having to break open 3 shells instead of 12.  Also, we went at about 6 PM on a Sunday, and it was packed; but they told us our wait would be 60-80 minutes and it ended up being only 25, probably because there were only 2 of us.

We ate a late breakfast at Uncle Bill’s, but we went to the one in Cape May instead of the one on 21st & Asbury in Ocean City where we usually go.  You’d think they’d be the same, but the stuffed french toast came with Reddi-Wip instead of cinnamon butter.  Of course it’s the cinnamon butter that makes the meal, but when we asked the waitress about it, she said she’d never heard of it.

Of course we went to Mack and Manco’s a couple of times to get the greatest pizza ever.

When you land in Philadelphia after flying from Colorado, the first thing you think is, "Where are all the mountains?"  And the second thing is, "Man, there are trees everywhere."

Having been born and raised in Pennsylvania, I have grown accustomed to all the trees, to the point that I don’t even think we have an abnormal amount of trees.  But being in Colorado, with its vast open ranges, mountains, and whitewater rivers, dotted but not smothered in trees, I feel like I’m on another planet.

This trip was only a short 5 days, and it stormed or threatened to storm almost every day, but we managed to get in a couple of hikes, a bike ride, a trip down the Alpine Slide, some whitewater rafting, and a trip to the rodeo.

The bike ride and the rafting were both along the Yampa River, which is slow and tranquil in some spots and fairly frothy in others -- it’s considered a stage 2 whitewater, though probably only because of one or two drops of perhaps 3-5 feet.  Most of its whitewater sections along the ~5 mile, 90-minute trip are pretty tame; we were neither required nor advised to wear helmets for example.  But the scenic beauty of the river, the surrounding landscape, and the charming backyards of Steamboat Springs make it an extremely enjoyable ride even if the rafting isn’t extreme.

During our first hike, at Mad Creek, I got into the creek up to my waist; and at the end of our bike ride I got into the Yampa completely.  The water was freezing both times, but it was at least a hot sunny day for the bike ride.  When I got into Mad Creek, it was the middle of a downpour.  But I generally can’t resist getting into rivers and lakes given the opportunity.

I’d never ridden an Alpine Slide before, but I gather that it’s something icy, fast, and fun in the winter.  And in the summer they let you ride down it on these little carts that are about twice the size of a skateboard, with 2 wheels on one end and just friction on the other end, to prevent you from going too fast down the long concrete slide.  There’s a single joystick-like control that you push forward to go and pull back on to stop.  The track itself is probably a quarter-mile long, just winding back and forth down the mountain.

As we rode the chairlift up to the top, a girl went down the slide below us, going full speed, and wiped out pretty badly right in front of us on the first curve.  Some of her arms and legs went over the side of the track, and she ended up with a big gash in her hand and probably some nasty scrapes all over.  If I hadn’t seen that, I might have just floored it when it was my turn, falsely assuming that the arched sides of the track would keep me safe all the way down.

The rodeo was pretty interesting and not exactly the redneck-infested event that you might expect, though we weren’t in the south so maybe you wouldn’t expect that.  The best part was the "calf scramble," where they invite all the 6-12 year old kids into the arena and then let loose a calf which has a ribbon on its tail; the kid who gets the ribbon wins.  There must have been 200 kids and it was a hilarious sight to see the mob of them chasing this calf, which was running for its life.  They then repeated this event with kids 5 and under and using a sheep instead of a calf; this had the added bonus of the sheep bounding right on top of the mob of kids as it tried to escape.

On Saturday we had to drive from Steamboat to Denver to catch our flight home.  It’s a 4-hour trip, but the country out there is just beautiful, and since our rental F-150 had a line-in jack through which we could play the music on our iPhones, it was a nice drive.  We passed through Winter Park, which has a restaurant called Fontenot’s, and I got a dish called Orzo Pasta Salad.  It’s a base of cold orzo -- which I’d never had nor heard of before -- with field greens on top, then hot sauteed mushrooms in a "roasted red pepper balsamic dressing," and finally Pecorino cheese on top of that.  I ordered it without the actual red peppers, and would have also omitted the onions had I known they would be hiding in it; but regardless it was an amazing meal.

Another great thing about Colorado is the climate: whereas in PA, during the summer, the temperature may go from a high of sweltering 90 degrees to a low of sweltering 70 degrees, in Steamboat Springs it goes from the 80s to the 40s.  So you get the nice hot summer days and still have nice cool nights.  The pool at the condo was even heated, so while not great for daytime swimming, it was a giant hot tub at night.

It’s difficult to describe just how different and amazing Colorado, and Steamboat in particular, is.  It’s huge, it’s wide open, the sky is far more blue, the rivers are clean, and the views, pretty much no matter where you look, are breathtaking: there are mountains everywhere, many of them snow-capped all year ’round.  Not to mention the skiing and snowboarding in the winter...

I’ve been to Steamboat 3 times now, and it’s hard to leave.  I feel like I belong there.  We would move to Steamboat in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that we’d miss all of our family in PA too much.  But Kim’s mom would follow us there.  So I know I won’t be able to convince all of my family to come, but I figure at least one or two of you would be down for it.  Rolly and Margie?  Maria?  ...Sinjin?

Kim was on photo duty for this trip; here are her albums:

Drive to Colorado

Mad Creek Hike

Steamboat Lake Hike / Aunt Nancy & Uncle Robert Visit

Biking and the Alpine Slide

Whitewater Rafting

Rodeo and 4th of July Fireworks

Drive to Denver

We’re pet-sitting Heidi this week.  I’m really not used to having a dog around the house.

When I’m talking to clients on the phone, I always use the speakerphone, because I usually need to be typing and/or clicking the mouse while talking to them.

For some reason, this often causes the cats to flock to my desk, get on my lap, and sometimes meow a lot.  Occasionally a client will hear the meowing, and they’ll say aw, is that your cat, etc.  No big deal.

But today when I get on the phone, Heidi comes in, plops down next to my desk where her food bowl is, and starts crunching away.  I mean Captain friggin’ Crunching away.  The loudest crunching that I’ve ever heard and, I’m sure, that my client has ever heard.  She politely pretended not to notice.

Here are a couple of images uploaded to the FileChucker upload demo this week.  I have no idea what the original sources of these images are; I’ve searched briefly for the first one, and didn’t bother for the second.

This first one is beautiful, evocative, and extremely well-executed; I’d love to have it on my wall if I could find a high-resolution version:

This second one is nothing special, just some chicks in a hot tub:

It’s common for my clients to call me Tony, despite the fact that in my email address, and in my email signature, it plainly says "Anthony."  Not that it bothers me, and it’s always been that way in real life too: some people just default to using nicknames, I guess.  But today, a client called me "Antonio."  That’s a new one.  I don’t think anyone’s called me that since my Ukranian roommates did back in college.

So there I am, watching an episode of How It’s Made, which incidentally may be my favorite show ever, and as it ends I catch a moment of the next show, which is apparently Unraveling the Mystery of Alien Abduction.  And right off the bat they start talking about sleep paralysis!

But I only catch a few seconds of this show, because the episode of How It’s Made is from a few days ago and I’m watching it on my TiVo, which incidentally is one of the greatest inventions of all time, and as a result the next show naturally hadn’t been recorded because it wasn’t one that I had told the TiVo to always record.

The problem now is that I can hardly find any mention of this show online, other than the fact that it’s a Discovery Channel show, and the TiVo doesn’t show it running again anytime in the next couple of weeks.  I really want to see this show, because I’ve never heard any mention of sleep paralysis in the media before (nor from any other kind of official source for that matter).

Could it be that my (undiagnosed) sleep paralysis is really just a matter of alien abduction??

NB: I don’t actually have any interest, much less belief, in the concept of alien abduction, except when portrayed by Mulder and Scully.

Probably the best thing about working from home is being able to spend all day every day with your cat.  Here are a few cat videos showing Cheshire doing funny stuff around the house.  The "wind" videos aren’t bad but the "water" ones are great.

I’ve also just finished adding a feature to my photos pages whereby video files such as these can be played right within the page, instead of having to click a "download" link to view the video in a separate application on your system.  But embedding videos in web pages like this is tricky and error-prone so please let me know whether/how it works for you.

Hey Anthony, 

Have a great birthday, bro.

Leo Laporte has multiple really cool weekly technology shows -- formerly on TV and now on radio/podcasts -- and he also apparently has this show called Jumping Monkeys that’s about "parenting in the digital age."  That’s not something that I personally am particularly interested in right now, but as I was browsing Leo’s site, the latest episode caught my eye because it’s about sleep.

I’ve always been fascinated by sleep, not least because I have a slightly freakish condition relating to sleep.  So I found this podcast interesting because it contains an interview with Ashley Merryman, a woman who is writing a book on cutting-edge sleep knowledge based on current research.  The main tenet seems to be that although we have always known that sleep is important, we’re only beginning to learn just how important it is, in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious.

The whole episode is worth listening to; the interview starts about 15 minutes into it.  But two things stood out to me as especially interesting.  First, during sleep, apparently the brain reprocesses the things that it learned during the day, and on some level it re-learns them and/or learns them better or in different ways.  And second, in a University of Pennsylvania study, there were two groups of people: in one group the people were kept awake for 24 hours straight, and were consequently cognitively impaired as you might expect.  The second group of people were allowed to sleep daily but for only 6 hours instead of 8.  After 14 days, the people from the second group were just as cognitively impaired as those from the first group, but they did not realize it.

I would say that "she all but said that a lack of sleep will make you fat and stupid," but she actually did say that.

As an aside: since podcasts are basically just downloadable radio shows, you can listen to them on your computer; but naturally I listen to them on my iPhone, and that’s probably the iPhone feature that I use the most.  There are about 5 weekly shows that I never miss, and about 5 more that I enjoy but don’t necessarily always listen to, yet like having the ability to listen to them anytime anywhere if I want to.  And podcasts are so great while driving, walking/running, or washing the dishes -- basically anytime you’re busy with something relatively mundane.  The icing on the cake is the fact that iTunes automatically downloads the latest episodes of my favorite shows and automatically puts the 5 most recent ones on my iPhone whenever I put it on the charger.  The whole system requires no effort on my part, other than occasionally finding a new podcast I like and clicking on its iTunes link to tell iTunes to automatically download it.

Photos from yesterday’s get-together at Rolly and Margie’s are now online.

[Note: scroll to the end of this post to see the restaurant list.]

The Allentown location of Carrabba’s Italian Grill has gone completely smoke-free!  Kim and I went there for dinner the other night, and when I asked (as I always do) to be seated as far from the smoking section as possible, the hostess replied that there’s no longer a smoking section!  Tears of joy streamed down my face.  And just when I thought that the day couldn’t get any better, they had swordfish on the specials menu.  It was amazing, as swordfish tends to be.

Carrabba’s has been one of my favorite restaurants for almost 10 years, and the only bad thing about it was the cigarette smoke.  With that issue resolved, I intend to visit Carrabba’s much more often.  I called the manager the next day to express my support for the decision, and to ask what made them do it; he said that more and more people were complaining about the smoke, and the majority of their patrons are non-smokers, so it was a good business decision for them to make.

Indeed, nearly 80% of Pennsylvanians are non-smokers.  It’s always been absurd that smokers were allowed to foul the air with toxins in public places, but it’s especially absurd in light of how outnumbered they are.  That being the case, the Pennsylvania legislature had better get their act together and pass a statewide smoking ban this fall.  Not only is it obviously the correct thing to do since second-hand smoke kills people by the thousands, but it’s also what the vast majority of the population wants.

If the government fails to take responsibility in this area, then I sure hope that more restaurants will do it themselves.  Carrabba’s is currently the only real restaurant to have gone smoke-free in our area.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, all the other restaurants that we visit still allow smoking: Applebee’s, Chili’s, Grotto Pizza, the Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Ruby Tuesday’s, TGI Friday’s.  (The website smokefreevalley.org has a list of smoke-free restaurants, but the vast majority of them are McDonald’s, Burger King, etc -- not real restaurants.)

Smoke-Free Restaurant List:

Carrabba’s on Cedar Crest Boulevard in Allentown; smoke-free as of Sept 2007.

Bravo at the Lehigh Valley Mall in Whitehall; smoke-free since its opening in Sept 2007.

I’ve posted a set of miscellaneous photos taken this past July.  Well, they’re not that miscellaneous; mostly they’re of Cheshire.  But they were all taken with the iPhone.

The traditional solution to "mains buzz" or "mains hum" is to make sure that all of the components in your audio/video setup are plugged into the same outlet, thus ensuring that all grounds are at the same electrical potential.  As long as there’s no potential difference between grounds, then by definition there’s no voltage, so via Ohm’s Law there can be no current flow, and thus no unwanted hum caused by the current flow.

I just finally got around to setting up my receiver here, and got some pretty nasty hum right away, which I figured was due to the computers being plugged into different outlets than the TV and receiver.  So I ran an extension cord from the computers’ power outlet over to the TV/receiver, but it made no difference.

After a little bit of searching I found out that the coaxial cable line can cause a ground loop with the other components in the system, because it’s actually only grounded at the cable company (!) and not at your house.  Sure enough, unplugging the coax resulted in beautiful silence through the stereo speakers.

To fix the problem, you need to break the ground loop, which can be done with an old 75-ohm to 300-ohm matching transformer (Radio Shack Cat. No. 15-1140).  Of course, you need a 75-ohm signal for any modern TV equipment, so the solution is to buy 2 of these transformers and hook them together: the second one reverses the transformation done by the first, so the output signal is (theoretically) the same as the input signal, except that the ground loop is broken.

Radio Shack’s Cat. No. 15-1253 is pretty much the same thing except in the opposite gender, so I bought one of each to make it simple to hook the two transformers together.  But note that item 15-1253 does not break continuity between the input and output grounds (outer shield), so using two of those won’t break the ground loop; you need at least one 15-1140.

Here are some more kitten pictures from March.  The set contains a few funny movie clips too, of Cheshire attacking his orange ball.

Apparently the people who lived here before us had DirecTV.  We’ve never had it, and we sure don’t now.  A few days ago I heard what sounded like a metal trash can blowing around in the parking lot, but, no, it’s just a satellite dish hanging from the roof and banging against the siding.  I told the landlord about it a few days ago, but nothing’s come of that yet.

Cheshire has been running around here chasing a fly that was buzzing along the wall.  He finally caught the fly while it was hanging around a small table lamp.  He batted at the fly with his paws until it mostly stopped moving, and then he ate it.  Now he’s running around crying because he can’t find the fly.

The past couple of Daily Dilbert comics have been near and dear to my heart:

May 7th:

May 8th:

When we got Cheshire a few weeks ago, we were required to purchase a bag of the same food that he was eating at the pet store.  This was to make sure that he continued to eat during the stressful and scary transition to a new environment without his feline siblings that he’d grown up with to that point.

But for the first 2 days, he didn’t eat (though he had no problem drinking water).  And I didn’t want to give him wet food, because I thought once he had that, he’d definitely never want to eat the dry food.  But Kim was worried and just wanted him to eat something, so we eventually gave him some wet food, which he fangoriously devoured in about 3 seconds and promptly threw up again.  And I think he might have thrown up one more time, but after that, he was fine.

Meanwhile I started doing some research into the wet food vs. dry food issue.  I had never really thought about it before, but I’d always heard that cats need dry food, one of the reasons being that it’s good for keeping their teeth clean.  But in my research I read that that’s hogwash, because cats don’t even chew their food up; they just crunch it one time and swallow the pieces, so there is very little friction with the teeth which would be required for the "keep the teeth clean" theory.  And furthermore, dry food is something like 40% carbohydrates, so it eventually just turns to sugar on their teeth, which means it’s actually worse for their teeth.

This brings me to the second and bigger issue: cats shouldn’t be eating dry food period.  Cats are carnivores; their bodies are designed to eat and digest meat, and they never naturally eat vegetables or grains.  When I think about this now, it’s entirely obvious, and the only reason I can figure for why it never occurred to me before is that I never had a kitten before and thus never had to worry about what to feed it.

In the wild, big cats eat big animals (deer, zebras, etc) and small cats eat small animals like mice.  From what I’ve read, this natural diet gives them something like 5% carbs, and wet cat food is similarly proportioned, plus wet cat food being mostly meat has all the stuff that a carnivore needs.  Contrast that to dry food, which is around 40% carbs, and is mostly grains and vegetables, which a cat would never naturally eat.

As cats get older and many of them have diet-related diseases, often the first thing the vet does is switch them to a lower-carb (i.e. wet food) diet.  From what I’ve read, vets are coming around to the realization that cats should have been eating that kind of diet all along.

Of course, you need to take a grain of salt with the things you read online, but I’ve found quite a few different sites recommending an all-wet-food diet.  And today I had to take Cheshire to the vet for shots, and she actually said the same thing.  That, coupled with the fact that it’s common sense to feed a carnivore meat, makes it pretty clear to me that it’s the right way to go.

(And we were pretty terrified to discover that the food we’ve been feeding Cheshire is one of the dozens of brands that are part of a massive pet-food recall, but fortunately it looks like none of our cans/pouches are in the recalled batches, and Cheshire seems perfectly healthy in any case.  I asked the vet today and she pointed out that Friskies and Fancy Feast are two of the (few) brands not part of the recall, so we’re going to stock up on them for now.)

OK, so California isn’t new.  But I did finally just post a set of photos from our trip to California: Redwood Trees at Muir Woods National Monument.

In even more exciting news, Kim and I got a kitten last night!  He doesn’t have a name yet, but he is already an internet superstar with his own kitten photos online.

We just got back from an awesome trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  I went snow-skiing for the first time ever and had tons of fun.  We got a few inches of snow every day, and 10" on one of the days, and it was cold enough that at times we were up to our knees in "fresh powder" as they say.  People were saying this was the best week for skiing that they had all year.

We had also gone to Steamboat in the summer of 2005, and it was equally awesome during that time of year.  We did lots of hiking, some biking, and almost did some white-water rafting.  (I took photos at Fish Creek Falls and Rabbit Ears Pass.)

In any season, Colorado is a beautiful and amazing place.  Steamboat Springs in particular is a nice and quaint little town that just feels like home.  I’m having a hard time understanding why anyone would want to live anywhere other than Colorado.

I didn’t take many photos on this trip since we mostly just skied, but Kim took some, and I’m sure she’ll post them soon.  The few photos that I took were from the plane and I’ll post them if there are any decent ones.

First of all, don’t you hate when your Mom does this to you? :)  Second, Happy 26th Birthday to my first born son!  Mom’s get to do this ’cause we were there going through it all so that gives us priority over all.

It’s very weird to process that you breathed your first minutes 26 years ago.  But it was amazing and awesome then as it is today.  I am so blessed because of it.

Enjoy your day.

lvu always...

Mom

Kim recently had a business meeting in Utah, and despite the fact that airfare to go out west is astronomical, I went along for the trip.  Her ticket was on the company dime, of course.

The farthest west I’d ever been before this trip was Colorado, and Utah is the next state to the west, so it was a new record for me.

Utah is beautiful.  We only had 3 and a half days there, 1 and a half of which were work days, so we didn’t have too much time to explore; we saw Salt Lake City, Alta, and Antelope Island (briefly).  But even just in Salt Lake City, it’s so clean, and there are mountains everywhere; it’s a lovely city.

We took lots of photos.  Here are the ones I’ve posted so far:

Update 2006-12-17: here are the final 2 sets:

Some random interesting things about Utah or the Salt Lake area in particular:

The highways are really wide.  Route 15 is 6 lanes in both directions at some points.

Every shopping center has a pawn shop and/or a payday-loan shop.  Literally every one.  There must be hundreds of them in and around Salt Lake alone.  It’s weird because those kinds of places are so tacky, and there were other tacky/gaudy shops, but then the next block would be really nice.

All restaurants in UT are non-smoking.  That alone is nearly enough reason to move there.

They have this great little restaurant called Noodles & Company.  We went there twice in 3 days if that tells you anything.  I had the mushroom stroganoff and the penne rosa, and both were amazing, for $5.  It is a chain, so I can only hope that one comes to PA soon.

And finally, not really about Utah, but about the flight out there: it was non-stop, which I always figured (you always hear) is ideal, but 2 hours into the 4.5 hour flight I started getting really claustrophobic and fidgety.  And the seat next to me was empty.  I don’t know what my problem was, but Kim also was really claustrophobic on the flight back (due to the huge guy next to her).  So from now on I think I prefer that longish flights like this have a layover.  And I would certainly always rather drive 8 hours in my own car than fly any amount of time.  Of course to go this far west, driving isn’t usually a viable option, but I’m just saying.

Also, they tricked us when we got our seats: they were like, you’re in an exit row, are you willing and able to assist others in the event of an emergency?  And we’re like of course, no problem.  What they DON’T tell you is that the exit row seats don’t recline!!  On a 4.5 hour flight, that’s something they ought to tell you.

Kim and I were in Utah last weekend, and I’ll be posting about that soon, but one of the really cool things about Utah is that smoking is prohibited in all public places including restaurants and bars.  It was so nice to go out to eat and not be bothered by the smoke that never fails to infiltrate the "non-smoking section" in Pennsylvania restaurants.

When I learned about Utah’s public smoking ban, I looked it up and found lots of other good news on the subject:

On September 25th, a public-smoking ban went into effect in Philadelphia.  And Allentown is making noises along the same lines:

On Sept. 20, Allentown City Council approved a resolution urging the state of Pennsylvania to enact a statewide ban on smoking in public places.
...
This is not an issue of choice.  Those directly affected by second-hand smoke did not choose to bear the negative effects of someone else’s habit.  Taxpayers do not choose to shoulder the financial burden of those who require regular, costly treatment for lung disease.  In fact, most consumers are in favor of indoor bans.  According to a national Zagat Survey of more that 110,000 restaurant patrons in the United States, 80 percent of respondents said that all restaurants should be smokefree.  In California, 70 percent of respondents said they would eat out less if smoking were permitted again in restaurants.

Earlier this month, Philadelphia became the latest major U.S. city to go smoke-free indoors.  This continues a trend at the state and municipal level that is spreading across the United States.  According to Americans for Non-smokers’ Rights, a California-based lobbying organization, 17 states and 474 municipalities have enacted smoking bans in restaurants, bars and other workplaces.  Hawaii begins a ban in this November, and Washington, D.C., is going smokeless in January.

Even those crazy Europeans are on board with this:

Four fifths of EU citizens support a ban on smoking in offices, shops and other indoor public spaces, according to a poll marking World No Tobacco Day.

However, they are less sure when asked specifically if they support a ban in bars - in this case, 61% are in favour.
...
The world’s first nationwide smoking ban in public places was imposed in Ireland in 2004.

Italy and Scotland have outlawed smoking in enclosed public places and the rest of the UK is following suit in 2007.
...
"More and more of us don’t smoke and don’t want to be anywhere near smokers either."

The poll suggests that young people are the most likely to find smoke unpleasant, for reasons such as its smell.

This is January 2005, and even Italy, where it is not unusual to see doctors smoking in hospitals and pupils lighting up in school corridors, has moved with the times by introducing a harsh new law banning smoking in public places, including bars and restaurants.

France is to ban smoking in all public places from next February, the prime minister has announced.

Cafes, nightclubs and restaurants are to be given until January 2008 to adapt, said Dominique de Villepin.
...
Smoking kills more than 13 people a day in France, said Mr de Villepin - calling it an "unacceptable reality".
...
Opinion polls in France - often considered a nation of smokers - suggest 70% of the people support the ban.

And the BBC has this roundup of smoking bans around the world.

About a month ago, on August 8th, my family was shocked by the sudden loss of Kim’s father.  In addition to being extremely busy with moving and helping Kim’s mom take care of the many, many things that Warner always took care of for us, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to post about this.  It’s very hard and very personal, but I think that not saying anything about it here would be worse.

Lots of great things have been said about Warner and his very full life.  It is true that he lived a happy and full life -- probably more full than anyone else I know -- and we know that because he was born again, he is now with the Lord.  We also know that God’s timing is correct.  Still, right now it’s hard to focus on anything but the fact that he’s not here with us, and it’s hard not to think that his life was cut short.  I always unconsciously assumed that there would be many more long hikes and fun trips with my father-in-law.

I only knew Warner for about 2 years, and I am hurting a lot now, so I can only imagine what Kim, her mom, and Travis are going through.  You didn’t have to spend much time with Warner to see that he was a great dad and a great husband.  But if you did spend any considerable amount of time with him, you realized that he was just a great person period.  He was unquestionably one of the greatest men I have ever known, and quite possibly the single greatest.  He was a role model, an inspiration, and a friend to me, and I miss him.

Wow, quiet times around here, no?  I know it’s time to make a new post when I get one of those "are you still alive??" emails from my mom.

I’ve been extremely busy with work, which I’m extremely thankful for.  July was my most profitable month to date, and business -- both sales and custom work -- seems to be steadily picking up.  Don’t get me wrong: my income is still no match for my student loan bills, but I’m making way more money doing web programming than I was making as a PC technician.

A couple weeks ago, Dan imparted unto me the secret to grilling with charcoal.  My problem has been that the coals are always too cool to put a nice charred exterior on meats, yet ironically I still can’t avoid making things more dry and well-done than I’d like.  Dan’s tip was to spread the coals out unevenly (after they turn gray, of course), so that they are just a single layer deep on one side of the grill, but stacked up on the other side.  That way one side of the grill is extremely hot and puts those nice grill-lines on your steaks, but you can move them off to the other cooler side after that.

To wrap things up, I’d like to say that Groove Salad on SomaFM is a great internet radio station.  They call it: "A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves."  It’s largely instrumental, and on the occasional vocal track, I usually enjoy the vocals too.  I listen to it pretty much all day every day.