Tag: Anti complaint

Im one of those DC snow car people now

When I first moved to the DC Metro area back in 2001, I was living in Fairfax, VA, and working on Wisconsin Ave NW.  I used to park on a little un-zoned residential street.  One winter, either 2001 or 2002, I forget, we had a big snow that was on the ground for a couple of weeks.  We got 4-6 inches, and then it just stayed cold.  Most of the cars in the neighborhood just didn’t move.  For weeks, they just sat, covered in snow.

Now, today we got our first snow since we moved to the city, and my car is still covered.  I expect it will be covered tomorrow.  I mean, it’s supposed to get up close to 40 degrees tomorrow, so there’s not much point in clearing the car.  In fact, since street cleaning has been suspended for the winter, I don’t expect to touch the car during the week until March or so.

Well, tomorrow we have errands to run in Virginia.  But other than that.

It’s funny how quickly my attitude about driving has changed now that, for the most part, I don’t have to do it.  Going a day without driving used to be really strange, and now it’s the norm.

Anyway, the snow’s kind of nice.  My commute is only outdoors for three blocks to Metro, and then a minute where the Yellow Line train goes over the Potomac into Virginia.  So the snow isn’t really a concern.  I do have to take some trash out tonight, though.

Bread is delicious

So, the bread I made last night was fantastic. It’s the kind of stuff you can just sit and eat. We haven’t even tried toasting it or putting butter or anything else on it. I’m all ready to go out and find a good recipe for some fancier bread. Some 100% whole wheat, maybe some grains and other bits of goodness. Maybe some raisin bread, although the wife doesn’t love raisin bread.

I would recommend that anyone who is disappointed by the quality of bread in the grocery store (Or the omnipresence of everyone’s favorite, high-fructose corn syrup) try baking his or her own. Yes, it helps a lot to have a Kitchen Aid mixer, and I know these are not cheap, but you don’t HAVE to have one, and it’ll probably save you money in the long run if you actually bake your own bread regularly.

The instructions for baking, incidentally, are very detailed and easy to follow.  We had to look up how to prepare the yeast, which wasn’t explained, but that wasn’t too hard.

Doing a little baking

The Simple Dollar » Homemade Bread: Cheap, Delicious, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think

It does take time, but once you get used to it, most food preparation doesn’t take much more time than going to the store, buying it, taking it home, popping it out of the package, and following the directions.

Bread!So I’m baking bread tonight. I found the above link somewhere, Lifehacker I think, a while back. And it seemed like a good idea. So here it is. It smells delicious. We have to wait until it cools to slice it, apparently.

I’ll tell you all how it tastes tomorrow.

Sean Taylor tribute

So, I haven’t heard all the details.  But it looks like Taylor wasn’t doing anything wrong, which is both better and worse.  If he really had turned his life around, it’s an even bigger tragedy that he died so young.

Anyway, a ticket to tomorrow’s game just fell into my lap, so I’ll get to see the tribute and pick up a #21 towel that they’re giving out to everyone.

I’m excited to go, although that’s mostly because I haven’t been to a game in years.  An old college roommate has season tickets, and when we lived together, I used to go to some of the games with him. But we kind of lost touch after I graduated, and I’m not on his invite list anymore.

So, it should be cool.  It’s definitely a winnable game against Buffalo, although we haven’t played too well against that division this year.  Two overtime wins against the miserable Jets and Dolphins, and that utter embarrassment against the Patriots.

I’m going to Metro there, which I’ve never done before.  Apparently there’s a relatively new Blue Line stop that’s less than a mile away.  That should be a disaster after the game, but that’s fine.  Getting out of FedEx is always an ordeal.

But it will all be worth it to spend the day yelling and drinking beer.

Nano is done

At 7:21PM Eastern, I saved my 2007 Nano novel for the last time.  50,262 words, according to the word counting robots at the website.  I’m happier with it than I was before, but the plot is still kind of strange, and I think my characters are motivated more by wanting to advance the story than by any sort of realistically human motivations.  But that’s okay.

Now I can go back to my normal routine.  There are a bunch of things I thought of doing in November that I’ve had to put off.  Now I can not think of them again until next November, when I’ll remember that I said I would do them in December or January.

Anyway, it feels good to finish again.

Officially back on track

For the first time since November 7th, I am back on the Nanowrimo pace.  I just hit the 35,000 word mark, and things seem to be going well.  It’s been my experience, as a four-time Nano winner, that 40,000 is the magic number where the writing just comes out.  I want to say it all goes downhill, but I mean that in the sense of a river flowing, not the quality.  Once you hit 40,000 and your ‘words to go’ number is only four digits, it gets easier.  You can see the finish line, and it’s not that far away.  It just gets easier from there.

So I only need 5,000 more words to hit that mark, and then I might as well be done.  That’s encouraging.  The story is going sort of okay, I guess.  There are a lot of things I wanted to get into that I haven’t.  There’s one character who wasn’t important, and then she was, and now I have no idea what to do with her.  She’s stuck at her sister’s house, an invalid on the couch with a broken leg, and I haven’t the slightest clue how to get her involved in the story again.  My female main character is doing okay.  I feel that I’ve written a passable female character, believable but not very interesting.  I don’t think she’s a bad character, and I don’t think she’s a bad female character, but she isn’t very interesting.

Anyway, it feels good to be back on the pace.   Just in time to get behind again because of the holiday.

The Kindle is here

So I’ve spent most of my morning reading everything I can find about the Kindle.  I mean, I’ve spent most of my morning working dilligently.  Yeah.

So, Amazon is going to charge for the books, charge for newspaper subscriptions, and charge for full-text blog feeds.  But they aren’t charging any extra for the network connection.

This is pretty cool.  There are some drawbacks.  It’s not as sexy as an iPhone, but that’s really not that big a deal for me.  It doesn’t seem to support PDF, which people had been saying it would, but it supports some ebook formats, plus Microsoft Word and HTML.  Some of the details are fuzzy.  I’m hearing that you can’t transfer your own content through the USB port, but not from anyone reliable.  I suppose you could always do it via SD card.

I think I’m going to have to buy one.