November 2001 Archives

I've finally finished Jennifer's bodice and it looks pretty darn hot, if I say so myself. I just hope it fits!

While I appreciate my Elna serger, I absolutely adore my Pfaff Creative 7550. That machine totally rules. I also couldn't live without my cutting table - if you're shopping for someone who sews and doesn't have one, this would be a perfect gift and highly appreciated.

There was freezing rain last night and this morning, the the trees and bushes were enclosed in cocoons of ice. It was a little surreal walking through the brisk air, watching the tree branches bending under their icy weight and hearing the ice entombed leaves in the trees creaking.

The road crew didn't sand the overpasses on Braker so the traffic was moving very slowly (and I got to test my ABS, which works very well). On the MoPac overpass, there was a sports car in the lane next to mine with its back wheels spinning on the ice. Traffic was piled up behind him as people tried to pass him by merging into the other non-moving lane. Nobody bothered to get out of their car to give him a shove - it wouldn't have taken much effort and would have sped up their progress as well. Had this been two months ago, people would have been more helpful. I guess it's back to normal here.

I've made progress on Jennifer's wench outfit. On Monday I finally duct taped her and last night I made a mockup of the bodice and adjusted the final pattern. The skirt and chemise are done (I'll hem the chemise after Madrigal). Let me tell ya, hemming a floor length full circle skirt takes for ever and kind of spoils the fun of it.

We're having dreadful weather. It's in the thirties and raining. Homer got to sleep inside last night (a first) and he was very good. He milled around for a short while but then he slept very quietly. No loud licking, scratching or snoring.

There is a web site, Freck's New Feet, by a guy who's planning to amputate his feet life on the internet to buy prostheses. It actually may not be a hoax, which is even more disturbing.

I went by UT tonight to sell the extra tickets for our table at Madrigal Dinner. It's their first dress rehearsal and I cought them coming down into the presidential lobby and I stayed until the Greeting Song. It was weird watching it from the sideline. I know some of the people in this year's choir and recognize most of the costumes, but I'm no longer part of it. That's kinda sad.

From what I could see, the script is a cleaned up version of one that was submitted last year - so it should be pretty darn funny, if I remember it correctly. So I'm looking forward to Friday's show, although I'm a bit aprehensive by the fact that I have to have Jennifer's outfit finished by then and I haven't started on her bodice yet. I hop I won't have to call in sick on Friday in order to finish it.

Thanksgiving was a blast. The thursday dinner at Rita's was great - Jerry outdid himself again. The friday dinner at Benny's was awesome, too - I wish I had the space to try all four of Dianne's home made pies. And lunch on Saturday with Hanka and Ron wasn't too bad either.

So we visited three pieces of the family and now have a standing invitation for Christmas Eve at my cousin's. If we come, she'll even make fish head soup!

It's Thanksgiving and I'm having a Spam sandwich to tide me over until the turkey hits the table. Spam is really such an underappreciated meat flavored product. I haven't had it in years and it's bringing back a flood of fond memories. Let's hear a huray for its delicious pinkishness.

The Christmas trees have finally arrived! I've been following the construction and evolution of the red-and-white striped tent that has sprung up on the field next to our parking lot. First, they laid a base of gravel, next they errected the tent (which survived the recent thunderstorm unscathed), then the rental fence enclosed the tent and the two campers that come with it. And today, the first 18-wheeler full of christmas trees has arrived and they are being unloaded even as I write. I guess they need to get ready for the Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, but it still feels to damn early. Really, a tree should be up just during the twelve days of Christmas - Christmas Eve through Epiphany.

Of course, if you buy a tree right before Christmas, you'll end up with some dried out pathetic thing (but you get it on a discount). And if you keep it up until Epiphany, you'll miss the street-curb tree pickup that the city provides. Sigh.

We had gourmet club on Saturday. Since we were bringing the main dish, we got to pick the cuisine and decided on Czech. I always wanted to make my favorite Czech dish - pork roast, sauerkraut and bread dumplings - but never quite had the right opportunity. As it turned out, making pork roast is completely trivial and sauerkraut wasn't much more difficult, either. The dumplings were a breeze, too, but that's because I had a mix that I bought last time we were in Prague. I'll need to ask for more of it for Christmas. So it took me over a decade to discover that I can easily make my favorite dish! Now that I know, I should make it as frequently as the wienerschnitzels that I also occasional create.

For the dinner, Suzan and Ken made appetizers and a very interesting sour cherry soup. John made kolatches for dessert - apparently he spend the entire day making them - and they were absolutely fabulous. Much better than the ones you get in West.

Next time it's going to be Scandinavian food. Lutefisk anyone?

We had some impressive weather in Austin yesterday - thunderstorms, tornados and some 14 inches of rain. Today is supposed to be more of the same.

Behind my office building runs a line of the Union Pacific Railroad. It's a bit elevated and blocks the water coming from our parking lots (where they recently paved over a big chunk of grass). The runoff from the lots washed away part of the rail embankment and I called the railroad to let them know about it (trying to suck up to the future father-in-law, I guess). At the pedestrian underpass the water was almost up tot he rails, too, so it must have been some 10 feet deep!

Jennifer called around 5 pm, hinting that I should go home to let Homer in, but I figured he'd be fine, since he doesn't have problems with storms and the doghouse we borrowed is nice and sturdy. Jennifer got home first and apparently he was fine, although ready to go in. I noticed a weird thing when I got home, though. Homer looks really bug eyed! I don't remember noticing anything yesterday morning, but last night he looked like he was part Chihuahua. He seems and acts like usual but looks totally weird. It's freaky and I hope it goes away.

The Leonids are comming! There is supposed to be a great meteor shower, peaking around 4am this coming Sunday. I'll try to remember and get us up at that ungodly hour to watch them. They're supposed to be falling at a rate of several thousand per hour, that's a meteor every couple of seconds!

It's Jennifer's birthday today (yes, I'm engaged to an old woman now). Her company goes out for lunch on employee's birthdays, and Jennifer picked Bistro 88, which we had just discovered on Sunday, because Ray and Rhona hat the dinner following Ava's christening there.

That place rocks. The food is awesome - a weird mix of neuveau European/Asian cuisine, but ir really works. The decor goes right along with that, they have a bunch of cool Lucky Bamboo plants/sculptures throughout the restaurant. On Sunday I had the duck, and today the Salmon - yum!

We saw Gounod's Faust at the ALO last night. The music was very pleasant and we really liked Mephistopheles and Marguerite - Faust, on the other hand, was a little weak.

While I never dozed off, I do keep having problems staying awake at the opera. It's always a little too warm and the music can be so soothing...

Since Oct. 31, the feds can monitor lawyer-client calls if there is "reasonable suspicion'' that the communications are related to future terrorist acts. So if you're talking to your defense attorney about your case, the DA may be listening in on it because, hey, you might be a terrorist. Bye, bye to another civil liberty: client-lawyer confidentiality.

I find it appropriate that this scarry thing was published on Halloween.

I'm feeling cruddy this morning. Not the allergy-cruddy kind, but more the kind like the day-after-you-worked-out-without-stretching or right-after-a-sunburn ache. Except that I didn't work out or tan. Maybe it's a delayed reaction to my shots - I don't think it's anthrax...

So it took me a while to drag my carcass out of bed and take Homer for a walk. In the park I ran into a guy with two cool dogs - one is a chow-lab mix that kinda looks like a hyena (I didn't use those words to the owner). Homer had a blast chasing them around, splashing through the creek and getting pushed into a deep spot by one of the dogs. Meanwhile we were talking about winter coming, and how much fun the dogs have chasing squirrels and he said that his dog had killed one or two at the park and I said that Homer likes chasing them but has never caught one and wouldn't know what to do with it if he did.

Speak of the squirrel - less than five minutes later I see this lady yelling and Homer running around with something in his mouth. I figured it was another smelly dead bird he picked up somewhere. But then I notice that the thing is furry and squeaking! I manage to get him to drop the baby squirrel and we're desperately trying to keep all the dogs away from pouncing on it (which they do, anyway) and after it's been picked up and dropped a couple of times, I manage to herd it under the fence where it's no longer accessible to the dogs. Well Homer didn't draw any blood so I'm hoping for the best, but I'm not holding my breath since the thing looked pretty fragile.

This episode also shines a new light in Homer's fascination with and love for his squeaky toy balls that he often abuses at night in the back yard. At least, I hope it's the squeaky balls that we hear!

I wonder if his majesty Ashcroft always gets what he wants? Sure, Oregon's doctor assisted suicide law is contraversial, but it is based on an informed decision of a patient and his or her physician, and it's a law that is supported by Oregon's public. So what happened to the Reps' holy grail of individual and state's right?
Fleischer answers the aparent contradiction of Bush's vaunted support for state' rights by saying that "the president believes that we must value life and promote a culture that respects the sanctity of lif..." Let's see, respecting the sanctity of life: that would mean reducing accidental gun deaths and giving out life-without-parole sentences instead of death?

Right, I didn't think so :-(

Cool. I'm using blogBuddy to post to my blogs at work. I wonder if there is something similar on the Mac?

I'm setting up a page for tracking our wedding progress - inspired by Cecily's ephiphany pages. There is really nothing there yet. I needmore time for everything.

Jennifer and I decided to give her sister a domain, mermu.net for her birthday. I got the domain and found a host and set up a blog over a month ago, but, being the procrastinator that I am, I only finished working on it at like 2am last night.

This meant that Jennifer had to give Meredith a bogus gift on friday night. This was a left-handed fiddle bow knife and, according to Jennifer, Meredith loved it. Of course, she's a pretty good actress, so who knows.

Anyway, she has now received the real present, which included a T-Shirt with her domain name on it, and she appears to like it as well.

This is my second domain that I've gifted (the first one being jfer.net for Jennifer) and it's getting easier. Meredith's is actually cooler since I installed dotcomments as well as search capabilities.

Jfer's off to NYC (she left at like 4AM this morning) to visit Meredith and celebrate her birthday, along with Rita. So I'll need to entertain myself until Monday, which, given the chores I have, shouldn't be too difficult.

I've delt with my vaccines pretty well. At noon yesterday the "typhoid shoulder" started to ache (as the nurse said it probably would) but now it's mostly gone. Speeking of vaccines, the round scar on my left shoulder is actually from a small pox vaccine (looks like they vaccinated against it a few years longer in Czechoslovakia than in the US) so should this be the next biological weapen of choice, I may have a fighting chance.

I went with Jennifer to the Travel Clinic at the ADC to get started on our shots for the trip to Brazil. We both got three shots consisting of Yellow Fever, Typhoid and Heppatitis A&B vaccinations. I'm curious how my system deals with these. We also go prescriptions for Malaria and a presciption of Cipro(!) for Traveler's Diarrhea.

Traveling to Europe is sooo much easier...