Relaxing

Today I didn't work! I went to church, and I've relaxed all afternoon and evening. it's a good feeling.

Nearly done...

NaBloPoMo is nearly over. I've managed quite well in finding stuff to talk about, I think, and only a few days of silly short posts.

Work's been very busy - in fact I worked another full day today, because there's a deadline looming, and my part in the project has been fraught with problem after problem. Working through these problems diligently, with the help of colleagues, has got me to a place where the big deadline ought to go ok. However, I've managed once again to find some more problems. Fortunately, these new problems aren't show stoppers, and can be addressed after the big deadline has passed.

Also, the parent company of the company I work for has now completed a big deal, with a large amount of the new company, Clearwire, being owned by Sprint, Google, Time Warner, Comcast, and Intel, along with the original share holders. It some exciting times and should mean an interesting but good future.

That Thanksgiving Meal

Although I've cooked a turkey before, this was the first time since I've been in the US that I've not spent Thanksgiving at someone's house. It's also the first time since moving here that I've cooked a Thanksgiving dinner, all on my own, because Karyn had to work that morning.

With an oven that's not working, I had available to me a portable convection oven, a roaster oven and the stove top. The roaster oven is kind of like a very large crockpot but with a metal insert instead of a ceramic one. The 12lb turkey fit inside it fine, and I put it on, along with some potatoes for roasting. In the convection oven, I'd already baked a frozen apple pie for later, and I then put in a number of large sweet potatoes. Green bean casserole was prepared, ready to go in at the appropriate moment. Then I worked on a box of stuffing, but I added some chopped apricots and some pecans to it. That then went in a dish, and into the roaster oven as well. Once the sweet potatoes were cooked, they came out. I saved two for another meal, and the rest were mashed with butter, brown sugar and nutmeg, then topped with marshmallows, to go back in later. The green bean casserole cooked, but was a little soupy (partly because they were frozen beans that I'd not drained as well as I could have after having cooked them). Giblets, onion and celery simmered merrily for hours as well, along with a lot of the juices from the cooking bird, to make the basis of a lovely gravy, and lastly some bread rolls were heated in the convection oven after everything else was done. When I came to move the turkey from the roaster oven to the serving platter... it fell apart. It was really well done, but because the roaster oven kept the moisture in it didn't dry out. It was most yummy. I think I like that way of cooking poultry and will most likely do so again in the future. After the meal, I removed the meat from the bones and then put the carcass in the crock pot with onion and spice herbs and spices to make some nice rich turkey broth. That's now cooling down ready to be put into some smaller containers to go in the freezer. I don't want to put it all in one as it's very intense and really doesn't need a lot to use in whatever it is I'll use it for. But I look forward to using it!

A yummy meal with some yummy leftovers. Yum.

Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving over here in the US. The closest equivalent UK celebration would be Harvest Festival. However, we don't stuff ourselves silly in the UK - just likely to have something similar to a Ploughman's, and also likely to have a variety show as entertainment - various skits and songs, completely unrelated to each other, just for a bit of fun, sometime in the evening.

This year, I'm thankful for a wonderful job that I really enjoy, I'm thankful for my health, thankful for an imminent chance to head back to the UK to see family.

What are you thankful for? Please comment and let me know!

Oh, and as you're sleeping off your turkey today, just remember it's nothing special about the turkey, you just likely overate.

plans for England

Plans are moving on for England. I should be meeting up with a friend from University (still waiting on the final confirmation though!). We also bought new luggage today (the sale was better than the one's advertised for Black Friday, so no 4am visit to the store!).

And I've found a wonderful new (sort of) musical group to listen to, made famous by the phenomenon of youtube. That would be Straight No Chaser

Ever have one of those days?

Ever known that guy who has a day that starts with everything having gone pear-shaped overnight, and he's spending all day fixing a major problem instead of doing the actual work he'd planned to do that day, even though that actual work is really important and a deadline is looming? Yeah, I'm that guy.

Mac update

So, my Mac is happy again - it may have taken a long time to restore from my Time Machine backup, and then several Mac Updates later to get everything back to where it should be, but it's nice and happy again. It took a while to do, but it was a pretty painless process.

Tonight we had a venison pot roast which was tasty, and we have a turkey defrosting in the fridge for Thursday. Just wish I was spending it with friends, but everyone seems busy this year.

sad mac

Another mac update, and again the mac fails to boot after the install. This time the Genius said that it looked like the disk really had gone bad, and they'd replace it for free. Since my last experience, I've been using TimeMachine to do backups and it's currently restoring. Only another 12 or so hours to go...

Leaf raking

Today, my church went to neighbours and raked leaves. We did it for free, and to bless the homeowners. The two houses we did (one was a corner lot and was huge) both had owners who were sick. I took some pictures

Latest stats

I just updated the record of game plays in my gaming group, and Dominion, which first hit the table November 6th is already the most played game of 2008.

I think people are enjoying it.

Anathem

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson is my current late-night read. But be warned, if you're getting it from the library, it will likely take longer than your allotted 3 weeks to read it. I'm thankful for a wife that works in a library!

It's a very good book, and well written, but I don't want to say more as I don't want to spoil it! :)

it's not that hard...

It's so true.

(Thanks to Laura for sharing that with me.)

it's cold

This morning it was cold. Not really cold like it gets in St Louis sometimes, but cold enough. But I'm reminded of my first winter here in the US. It was winter then. I'd not really appreciated how cold it would get, and many of my warm clothes were on the slow boat.

I went to a clothing store, and was asked if I needed any help. I said that I was looking for a jumper for myself. She looked at me. "Are you sure?"

"I think so", I replied, "it goes over a shirt, thick, knitted, to keep me warm..."

"I think you mean a sweater" and she showed me, and yes, I did mean a sweater.

Little did I know that "jumper" is the American English for what I would call a "pinafore dress".

It's not the same language. Really

it can be frustrating

Deadlines suck, sometimes. I know, I have to get the work I need to do done. But there are other things I'd rather do with my evenings.

being busy

Work's been crazy, my gaming life has been crazy (playing games, and Dominion has been a lot of that, both online and face to face, and also doing administrative work for the Gaming group I run, including an early announcement of the Geekway to the West event in late April), my church life has been crazy (setting up schedules, going to a housewarming party of church members who just bought a house), catching up on TV (House, Fringe, Heroes), it's amazing I have time to blog!

ack

can't miss nablopomo post.

better update tomorrow, promise!

i'm not playing dominion!

I'm playing New World - a Carcassonne game.

knitting

One of the gifts previously blogged about can now be revealed. Vicki received a belated birthday present of a hand knit hat and scarf, which she's really happy with. Should help with the cold weather in the UK as she will be moving there for a semester to study. Glad you like them Vicki!

Work amusements

• In a meeting, with someone on the conference phone - I sneeze. Loudly. This causes the loud-detector of the phone to put it into mute (presumably to protect the ears of the person on the other end). When we unmute, that person says "goodness, I had to look in the direction of St Louis to see if there was a mushroom cloud..."


• Person 1: Why did I get this email?
  Person 2: It's for some software which we license. I was told to put the team's email on it rather than mine, in case I get run over by a bus.
  Person 3: Oooh... Can I watch?
  Person 4: Oooh... Can I drive?

whew!

So, work's fairly busy. There's a lot to do, not much time to do it in, and then I'm going to be off for 2 weeks in the new year. And it's frustrating to discover that something we had made so much progress on still has another issue. Grr. But I also had an interesting problem late this afternoon - it was one of those problems that first looked like it could be one problem, then investigating gave more evidence to suggest it was something else. Figuring what was common to the servers having a problem, but not common to others... it wasn't easy. But I've just realised I solved it like playing Zendo. I tried several servers that had the problem, thought we had the common piece, so started looking at the system that I thought was affecting it, but that seemed fine - indeed, looking at some other servers that used the same system weren't having the problem. But... I did have a "half rule" in Zendo terms. All the servers being affected were indeed using the system that I'd thought was the problem in the first place, even though we could find several that used the system that weren't affected. However, none of the servers that didn't use that system had the problem. Then I remembered that that system had two network interfaces, and that all the affected servers contacted the system on one interface, and all the unaffected ones that used the system used the other interface. With that information, a closer look on that system again showed that one of the network interfaces was down. A trip over to the datacentre to replace a loose network cable fixed the problem.

So, first of all, I am pretty sure that playing this game, and others that I play has improved my critical thinking, and how to figure out problems. And, figuring out the root cause of the problem... well, it was fun. I came away from the problem once it was all resolved, and I knew I'd enjoyed myself. In fact, just thinking back about how I figured out the problem still makes me smile!

Leaving work, I went to my Board Game Group, and played 5 games of Dominion, with four players. It plays significantly differently with four rather than two, but was still very enjoyable. It's a great game, and going to get a lot more play over the coming months.

Belated Birthday Gifts

Belated birthday gifts are winging their way to both sides of the country. Can't say more about that yet until the recipients have safely received them. And my belated birthday gift, Dominion, saw another 5 games, of which, Karyn won 4. She and I have now played all the different recommended sets multiple times. Time to do it differently. Most likely, we'll go for a standard set up, and then the loser gets to chose a card to remove, and a card to add. I like that idea.

Also, our TV is dying. A little while back, it had started to go fuzzy and we thought it was the cable. The cable guy came round to take a look. He checked things out and his test equipment suggested it was fine, so he got a splitter and a spare TV fro his van, and hooked both his TV and our TV up at the same time. His TV: clear as a bell. Ours, not so much. We discovered that turning it off, then on, would return it to non-fuzziness, for a while, but this has been working less and less often. It's not like this TV owes us anything; I've had it for 8 years nearly, and I bought it ex-rental. Ideally, we'd love to take the chance to buy a nice new HD tv. But with our finances tight with a trip to England coming up, that really isn't going to happen. Then I had the bright idea that as we have the analog cable, we don't actually need a digital TV yet, and thought we might be able to get an analog TV from someone who's upgrading ready for the digital switchover in February. A plea in a facebook status netted us a free one from a friend from Church! Yay! It will last us for now, and we can spend our money where we need to.

Dominion!

Oh my. Dominion is fun. My wife and I just played 5 games of it this evening, Twice using the recommended first game set up, twice using another recommended set up and once using a third. There's so much to it, yet it's so easy to play. I think I'm going to take it to work and play at lunch time. Hee!

Oh and was that a small flurry of snow I saw this morning? It was. Sigh.

I'm so tired

I really am. I've been so busy with work, and with church responsibilities. I just want to sleep. But I still have more to do before tomorrow. Ah well.

I did manage to get some relaxing time playing HeroScape with some friends today though. Pictures soon I hope.

mobile blogging

I need to post to maintain my NaBloPoMo commitment, but I'm out this evening so I'm posting from my phone.
Tonight I'm playing games - particularly Dominion. It should be a fun evening. And I feel accomplished at work. A software install that's been plaguing me for over a month finally got working in the pre-production envirinment so we should have the new production environment up over the weekend. At last!

NaBloPoMo Day 6

Tonight, I've been helping out a friend with some algebra homework. The original problem was

One apartment is directly above a second apartment. The resident living downstairs calls his neighbor living above him and states: "If one of you is willing to come downstairs, we'll have the same number of people in both apartments". The upstairs resident responds" We're all too tired to move. Why dont' one of you come up here? Then we will have twice as many up here as you've got down there"
How many people are in each apartment?

Not a very hard problem, when you come from a mathy background. The actual math isn't that hard. The harder part is translating the problem into equations, and then deciding what to do with the equations to go in a sensible direction.

In other news, I might be travelling in December, to the Ukraine, to do an install for a customer. Makes me almost wish I'd not shaved my head! Could be quite a lot of fun, though.

And, I'm gearing up for my trip to the UK. Trying to find a hotel that's reasonable for price and location in London isn't easy. But I think I've found a place. Hope so anyway.

PostSecret

Tonight I went to the Post Secret event at UMSL. Frank Warren was a very engaging speaker, describing how what started as a small art project, to try and relieve some boredom of his day job, took on a life of its own and because an internet phenomenon. If you've never been to the Post Secret site, I heartily recommend that you do. I also recommend going to hear Frank speak if you find he's coming anywhere near you.

Happy belated birthday to me!

Today I finally got my birthday present from my wife. It's Dominion, a game I played a prototype of at Origins back in the summer. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to playing the now released game with my gaming group. It's a fairly short game in duration, so I hope to get a couple of games in at the next event

I've also been playing Agricola and Wealth of Nations, both of which are longer, but have some interesting game play.

Another game that I recently acquired that I like is Monty Python Fluxx, a version of Fluxx with a Monty Python theme, cunningly enough. It's almost as if they were made for each other.

OK, I now have to go back to putting the 500 cards in Dominion in sleeves to protect them.

Flights are booked

It's official. I'm going back to England. No, not permanently. I'm going back just after Christmas for two weeks. I've not been back in a few years, and we were thinking of going anyway. In particular, though, my father is pretty ill, so I want to go visit. It turns out that there are three family birthdays, including Dad's, in the first week of January, so it that will be good. I also have a nephew to meet for the first time!

I think we'll be in Bedford for most of the trip, plus some time in London, and possibly, Guildford. I'd certainly love to meet up with friends, but we really won't be able to afford to travel around much. So please, get in touch, and see if we can see about getting together.

I'm hoping to get some gaming in as well! I have a number of friends in London I used to game with, that I hope to meet up with. We shall see.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

For this year's halloween, I dressed up as one of the managers at work. This necessitated shaving my head, as he's bald. Here's the "before" picture.


And here's the "after". I'm hoping to get a picture of the two of us together.

Chili (NaBlogPoMo - Day 1)

So, it's November, the first day of National Blog Posting Month. I don't think I could write a novel in a month, but I have a friend or two who are. So, instead, I'm aiming for writing a blog post a day.

So, Chili.

Yesterday was our annual chili cookoff at work, and today is the annual chili cookoff at church. With them back-to-back, I decided to make a bigger batch, and then just take what was needed for each event. So, I got my large roaster out - it can be used to roast things (cunning that, from the name) or used a a giant slow cooker - and made a large batch of chili, on Thursday night, after board gaming. I think it's quite delicious. It cooked overnight, and I took some to work. The remainder continued to cook in the roaster. The chili seemed to go down well at work - one of the only ones to be completely finished - but I managed to drop the crock pot when taking it back to my car, which broke the ceramic insert. So... I need to get a new one for tonight. The chili in the roaster has continued to cook overnight last night, and it's now tasting even better. I'm looking forward to the chili cookoff tonight. The square dance part of it? Well... maybe not so much.