Miscellaneous

Some of you may have seen this coming, but I'm guessing a lot of people weren't paying close enough attention. As of the night of May 24, 2008, Sarah and I are officially engaged. This happened at the end of her week-long trip to visit me in Nashua and was really sort of the only big thing we did the whole week. That's probably for the best, since it's a really big one. Well you might want to know how it went down.

I'd made reservations and purchases well in advance, but had been keeping it a secret. The plan was we'd get really dressed up, go to the Federalist near the State House for drinks, then walk over to No. 9 Park for dinner, then the next day we would just sort of walk around downtown Boston and see whatever Sarah wanted to see. I sort of left out the whole engagement part when I went over this plan with her. The dressing up went well. I wore my new pinstriped suit, and she wore her new blue silk dress. She looked very pretty, even though she was uncomfortable walking around in the shoes.

Going to the Federalist didn't go quite so well. This is a bar that had been recommended to me by my friend Jared (who also happens to be a bartender in Nashua). He said they made a great old fashioned and was a good place to start an evening. Well, the Federalist no longer exists. It has since been renamed to Moo and redone on the inside to look a little more hip. We found it without too much more trouble, sat down, and ordered some drinks. Since we had a late (9pm) dinner reservation at No. 9, I was in no real rush. Sarah ordered some sort of lemonade drink and I went with the old fashioned. It was quite expertly made. We debated ordering an appetizer but somehow neglected to. That would end up being a tactical error.

After lots of talking with each other and the bartenders, it was closing in on 9pm. We left Moo and walked around the corner to No. 9 Park. What a tiny place, both inside and out. It was pretty busy but since we had a reservation, all we had to do was sit around and wait for the table to be ready. While they were preparing the table, Sarah and I sat in the bar area and I ordered a flight of Aviators. Then it was time to move to the table. Strangely, everyone in the dining room sat so we faced away from the entrance to the kitchen. Our waitress was very knowledgeable and attentive. No problems at all with the service. The only real problem I had was the portion size of my duck meal. This combined with the very late reservation made me start to feel pretty out of it. I don't think Sarah had any problems with her meal at all. After eating, drinking, talking, and waiting around for the check, it was nearly 11pm when we left.

I suggested we walk over into the Boston Common, which is right across the street. Sarah agreed but had to take off the shoes before her feet fell off. We wandered around for a while in the dark until we got close to the lake. This looked as good a place as any, so I stopped her, took the ring out of my jacket pocket, and WHAM! I believe her exact response was "Of course." And then that was that - all the thinking and planning and it was all over very quickly. How strange. I only felt slightly awkward doing it. I don't think it was quite what I wanted it to be given how I felt with the late meal, but she was happy and that's probably all that counts.

The next day we spent wandering around downtown. We saw the park again by daylight, the Boston Public Library, some fancy mall down in that area, more of the North End, and some other stuff. Basically we just walked around. There was also gelato involved. Then it was time to flee the city and go back up to Nashua so we could spend some time around my house. Back in Nashua, we took a bunch of pictures of ourselves to mail to people. Above is the one picture we decided came out pretty good. Too bad you can't see the ring.

It may be 2007, but November Rain is still awesome. That is all.

Sarah's been here all week, which is why there haven't been any updates. That's also why I haven't made any progress on the book. Oh well. I'll try to describe what we've been up to starting with the most recent.

Yesterday the plan was to go to Plymouth, MA and then go to a lambic tasting in Brookline. We got going late so we had to move pretty quickly. Plymouth is a good 90 minutes driving time from here including a very boring portion along US 3 towards the end. I also had to stop for gas. We finally got there sometime around noon, parked the car, and checked out the visitors center. They wanted to sell us tickets to see the Mayflower and Plimouth Plantation for $25 a person but we weren't having any of that. Instead, we took the walking around self-guided free tour. Sure we didn't go in all the really old houses and museums but we've seen those sorts of things before.

It being a weekday, there was almost nobody there. We saw a couple school groups and tour buses but it was not crowded. We also stayed away from the most touristy of places which probably helped. We saw Plymouth rock, which still looks the same as last time I was in Plymouth. We also saw the native American monument nearby commemorating Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. That was definitely picture-worthy. Nearby, there was a winery so we stopped and tasted a bunch of fruity wines. After taking up so much of the guy's time, I felt compelled to buy a bottle of his cranberry wine. We rounded out the trip with a very old cemetary, a couple churches, some shops, a walk out on the breakwater, and a gigantic granite monument. I then tried to drive us to the beach but our tourist center not-to-scale map was not at all detailed so we just ended up driving back and forth.

Then it was off for more fun elsewhere. The drive from Plymouth to Brookline was fine until we got off the interstate in south Boston. The directions I carefully wrote down ceased being helpful at all as we entered the maze of rotaries and roads curving back in on themselves and disappearing lanes. Somewhere after passing Northeastern University, we ended up on Park Street and needed to keep following it. A few turns later, we had magically gotten back to where we started. I decided to get us out of that mess but that somehow put us into a parking deck instead. We threw the directions out at that point and just took the most simple way.

Our destination was the Publick House on Beacon Street where there was a tasting of two Boon Gueze lambics that had never been sold in this country before. Gueze is the base beer that the flavored lambics (kriek, framboise, etc.) are made from. There's not much between you and the raw lambic flavors. The tasting itself was very informal - we got a small glass of each and a plate of cheese. Each sample was pretty funky as we were expecting. Sarah picked out her favorite but I wasn't able to decide on which one I liked more. However, we both decided that we didn't like either enough to drink a whole $8 glass. Instead, she got a glass of Cantillion lambic and I got a glass of Gulden Draak. Eventually, David and then Karen joined us for more drinks, dinner, and socializing. So while the tasting was a little bit disappointing, the fine beer selection and good atmosphere more than made up for it.

Seen on the highway this morning:

• A tanker truck with the words "TECHNICAL ANIMAL FAT NOT FIT FOR HUMAN FOOD" on the side. I wonder what technical animal fat is.


• A Mass Highway truck driving down the shoulder dragging a dead deer behind it.

I would like to wish my friend Sarah a happy birthday! Even though she has a final today and needs to be studying for another one on Thursday, I hope she finds something much more interesting to do. In case anyone's wondering, I got her some hiking boots for her birthday so now there's no excuse for us to not go hiking together.

We haven't had a single strong snowfall this entire winter. Sure, there have been a couple light ones from time to time but it's nothing like the first year I lived here. There are plenty of places where there isn't even any snow on the ground. In fact, I can't remember the last time I was woken up at 4am by the lights and sirens of plows going by my window. It certainly hasn't been any time in the last twelve months. David and I had this big New Year's party this year and were hoping for a really serious snowstorm to scare our friends from the south. That almost worked with a good storm the day people arrived but it quickly disappeared. I don't think anyone was too impressed.

Well it looks like all of that is about to change. The weather forecasts are all conflicting but right now the totals through Thursday look to be somewhere around a foot of snow, some ice and sleet, and winds gusting up to 50 mph. This may not sound like much fun to other people but I am really excited about that. If we do actually see winds around 50 and big huge snow drifts, I will have to go outside and run around in it. Let's just hope that this doesn't end up like all the other forecasts this winter and fizzle out at the last minute. That'd be disappointing.

I spent all Friday at FUDCon and then all Saturday and Sunday working on repoman. I figured I owed myself a break. So I took today off from work to sit around the house and not get anything important done. The one thing I did do was pick up Guitar Hero again and make another effort at beating hard.

I started out having three songs left to go. The first was "Institutionalized", the only song I haven't gotten five stars at on medium diffculty. Well I stumbled through that one to get three stars right off. It's a really tough song with lots of goofy tempo changes and rhythm changes. However I don't think playing it on hard was all that much difficult than medium. Feeling pretty good about that, I decided to tackle "The Beast and the Harlot". Oh, how I hate this song with its cheesy arpeggios and poppy chorus. The first time I played it, I failed miserably. This time I did much better but still only got three stars due to my unfamiliarity with it on hard.

And that was it - I'd beaten all four regular songs in the last group (I'd done "Misrilou" and "Hangar 18" previously since they're fun) and only had the encore to do. The last encore is "Free Bird" and I knew I was going to get into some trouble with it. I fumbled through the hammer ons a little too much in the slow beginning but did pretty well overall. So I was feeling competent when I hit the giant solo. The amazing thing about the solo was that it wasn't really all that much harder than on medium. Sure there were a ton more notes, but I guess I've gotten good enough to deal with them. There are certainly more difficult songs on hard.

Regardless, I beat it with a much smaller score than I have gotten on medium. So I got three stars on all but one of thte final group. I still beat hard, though. What's next? I guess I will keep playing until I get more songs up to five stars. I didn't move from medium to hard until medium started to bore me. I'll follow the same plan here.

I've been going pretty crazy on cooking this past month. For Christmas I got a couple cookbooks and I have been picking things out at random to make. In addition to dinners and sides, I have been trying to get into some baking as well. It's seemed like this mysterious other half of cooking knowledge, completely different from the typical things I do like making a roast or sauteeing something in garlic. The first thing I baked was banana bread. It was so simple and so good that I felt like an idiot for throwing away perfectly black bananas for all those years. I've resolved to never do that again. I also made some chocolate oat bars that would have been almost perfect if I'd had the right dish.

Last night, however, I decided to get more complicated and make raisin bread. I've always loved raisin bread so it was a natural choice for my first bread baking experience. The recipe was really fairly straightforward, but time consuming. Reconstituting the yeast and adding in all the flour smelled very much like brewing a batch of beer. And when you get down to it, I suppose they are very similar processes - in both instances, you're taking a bunch of grain and adding yeast to it for fermentation. The bread's just a little more solid than the beer. Since I'm pretty good at the brewing thing (though I haven't done it for about two months) I figured I would be pretty good at this.

I don't have a big mixer or bread machine, so I had to knead the dough by hand. That wasn't really hard at all except that it was tough to figure out when it was done. I kept working and working on it for about 15 minutes which was probably long enough. I guess more experience will help there. After I finished that, I set it aside to rise while I went running. I had a really crappy run, then came back to see that the dough had indeed risen (which I was only a little bit nervous about) and worked on finishing it up. However, I made two mistakes at this time. First, I turned on the wrong burner and ended up burning butter to the bottom of my glass pot and filling the apartment with smoke. Second, I forgot to read the last part of the recipe where it said to let it rise for another hour. Whoops.

Well, I recovered from those minor mistakes and finally got the loaf in the oven. The place slowly filled with the smells of baking bread and cinnamon which was a good contrast to the smoke from earlier. Forty-five minutes later it was done. I took the bread out and promptly went to bed.

This morning, I gave it a try. The crust is nicely crunchy and cinnamony. The bread is decently balanced between dense and light. It tastes just like I was hoping my own raisin bread would. So I am quite pleased with how it worked out. For the next time, I think I need to embed the raisins in the dough instead of just sprinkling them as they like to fall out when I slice it. I'd also work on my kneading technique and perhaps my mixing technique as I've noticed a couple flour pockets. However, I think the next time will be a couple weeks from now because of the time required to bake a single loaf. It was still a pretty fun experience, though.

After many, many hours spent in front of the TV playing Guitar Hero 2, I can state with some authority that I believe pull offs are impossible to do. This may just be because I have stupid fingers, but I believe it being impossible for anyone is more likely. I can do the hammer ons with pretty good precision at this point, but I just can't convince my fingers to do the opposite motion. I don't suppose anyone has any suggestions for mastering this.

If I could figure this out, I'd be a whole lot better at the game. I can strum pretty quickly, though not quite fast enough yet to play through Misirlou on expert. That's going to take a lot of work, but it's doable. And I can get through songs like YYZ on hard with some competency as well as do a lot of the chord stuff. It's just that moving back and forth on the fret buttons that I can't figure out yet. But once I do, I figure I will be unstoppable.

In no particular order:

• We have a real kitchen with a useful microwave and a stove with two larger burners on it.


• The hot water is really hot, and the cold water is really cold.


• The windows are large enough for me to stand in with plenty of clearance and have an interesting view.


• I can walk to interesting places like Nashua Garden, the homebrew store, and so forth.


• Since it's an old mill building, it has character. It's much more interesting than just another apartment building.


• There's this bizarre little uninsulated sun room thing off the living room.


• I have a pantry again.


• We have cables running through the walls to every bedroom so there's no need to run our own ethernet.


• I'm saving a couple hundred bucks every month.


• There's a ladder in the living room that goes to a storage area over the kitchen.


• The hot tub and pool are right down the hall.

Today, we received a package from UPS containing twenty shower heads.

Well it has been a very long time since I last updated things here. In the last week and a half, a whole lot of stuff has happened. First off, I moved into the new place at Clocktower last Wednesday. David and I rented a truck to move all our furniture and large boxes. It took the entire day (as in, we were still moving my furniture in around 9pm) and we got a $100 parking ticket because of it, but we got it done. It was a horrible chore involving walking several miles and lifting everything we own at least four times. But we got it done. With this stuff moved, I was able to stay in the new place that first night. I got all the other essentials like kitchen things, clothes, and bathroom stuff moved in fairly quickly too. Most of the nights since then have involved trips to and from Royal Crest with my car full of junk. I almost have it finished now - just a couple more trips plus cleaning and I'll be all moved out.

I haven't yet explored the new place all that much. I enjoyed the hot tub after a hike and I've walked all around, but I have not really gotten to know the building. I think there's some exploration and writing to be done about that. I did explore downtown a little bit over several nights, going over to Nashua Garden for sandwiches and drinks, walking to the homebrew store for supplies, and finding the nearest post office. I think I could get used to living in this downtown. It's decently urban, but I don't feel cramped like I am living right on top of other people.

You may have noticed that there was no DSL outage over the past 10 days. Well, Covad decided to take their time getting things set up here at the new place so Speakeasy hasn't moved my service over yet. The servers are all still hooked up and running in the mostly empty old apartment now. I expect they'll stay over there until the very end of the month when I have to move them because the power will be turned off.

Lon and I went for a hike on Sunday up Moosilauke. That was my second time up the mountain this year following my solo adventure several months ago. This time the weather cooperated a little bit more and I was able to see the summit and ridgeline as soon as we got to the ridge. The whole way up, we were covered by the clouds. However, we got above them once we hit the ridge and even saw the sun for a while. The summit itself drifted in and ouf of the clouds but we were lucky enough to have clear skies long enough to sit up top and eat lunch. The trip really deserves a longer description, but that will have to do for now.

Early tomorrow I'll be leaving for yet another solo hike up Pierce and maybe Eisenhower if I'm feeling good after the first four miles. It's supposed to be a very nice day, and I don't think we are going to have too many more of those this year so I had better take advantage of the ones we get. Also I bought beer ingredients today so I will probably do that on Sunday. I'd link to the recipe, but there's no name yet so there's no point in linking to something that's going to change soon. I'll just have to leave you with the basic outline that this beer is a typical stout with cherries and chocolate added. It's for the season.

Really, this entry was just to get me back into the habit of writing.

Tomorrow is moving day around here. I'm mostly packed and ready to start hauling things off. The plan is to head up to Clocktower tomorrow morning to pick up keys, inspect the place, and take some pictures. Then we're going to go pick up a rental truck and carry all our furniture and boxed up things. Hopefully by evening, the bulk of my stuff will be at the new apartment and the old apartment will only be what's left.

There's going to be some computer outage while I'm doing this, of course. I'm hoping that the speakeasy side of things went really smoothly and all that needs to happen is I give them a call to switch things over, plug in my server, and away we go. Of course if DNS decides to be a problem, it could be a day or two before things are reachable again. So expect several hours of downtime with a slight possibility of it extending to more.

I'll make another post when everything is hooked back up and ready to go. Hopefully with the two weeks of overlap I've got here, things will go very smoothly. That'd be a nice change.

I have been spending a lot of time the past two nights playing Guitar Hero 2. For the uninformed, it's a video game where you have a guitar-like controller and you play along with famous rock songs. It's the guitar equivalent of Dance Dance Revolution or Karoke. The controller itself is a pretty reasonable approximation of a guitar in that there's a couple fret buttons, a strum button, and a whammie bar. You play chords by holding down several fret buttons at once, instead of contorting your fingers to hit all the strings. If it were too much more realistic, it would turn off all the people like me who can't actually play guitar.

I played the original game back at Will and Leah's wedding. It was a lot of fun, but since I don't own a Playstation 2 I didn't spend much time thinking about it. Well now that David and I are moving in to one apartment, I have access to one. So Sunday night I bought it in anticipation. Tonight, I finished making my way through the 40 songs on medium mode. I was able to cruise through them pretty quickly despite not playing much before now. I was also concentrating on getting everything beat to unlock more songs instead of perfecting them.

Now that I've gotten all the way through and unlocked things, I need to start going through them again to get good so I can tackle hard mode. It's a lot of fun to play. You forget you're playing with a fake guitar and really get into playing along with these famous songs. So I have been enjoying it quite a bit and will be enjoying it a lot more in the future. I'm also looking forward to getting a second controller so we can play co-op mode with one person on lead and one on rhythm or bass. Hooray.

This is a reminder to the nine people who read this thing to go do their civic duty today and go vote. There's no excuse. You can always get time off work to do it and if you can't, you should go get a different job while you're at it. I went and voted at the elementary school on East Dunstable Road today, and here's how it went.

There's apparently no law about campaigning outside the polling place, as there were people holding signs up to within several yards of the door. The parking lot was pretty full, but there was no line going outside. This was encouraging compared to the last election I participated in. Inside, there was no line either. I walked right up to the table, told the man sitting there my name, and he checked a box next to it. He did not ask me for identification. He then handed me a large card with Constitutional questions on one side and candidates for office on another and directed me to any of the nearby booths.

The card itself is essentially a scantron. You fill in the oval next to who you are voting for with a thick felt-like black pen. I voted on the two rather boring Constitutional questions quickly, then flipped over to examine the candidates. True to my vow, I voted against all incumbents on the Federal level. I don't think they have performed their jobs well at all, and in regular life when people don't perform at their jobs you fire them. So consider this my vote that they should be fired. The hardest part of the ballot was figuring out which candidates for state House of Representatives to vote for. There were twenty names, and you could select a maximum of ten. In the end, I only voted for seven. I knew there were people I did not want to vote for and people I certainly did, but it just didn't add up to ten. There were a couple other offices to vote for that I was completely unprepared for.

After finishing filling in the ballot, I carried it over to the counting machine. The machine is literally a black box - about four feet high, three feet wide, and four feet deep. I fed the ballot into the top and it self-fed in as it was scanned. The entire process took about five minutes from getting in the door to leaving. I feel good about how I voted - no regrets about the candidates or issues. Now it's just a matter of time to see if the rest of the country feels the way I do about my elected officials.