Squeaking through

Is there anything better than a nice cup of hot chocolate (with marshmallows, and lots of them) for breakfast? I think not.

The forecasts were all a bit slippery for the overnight, but they all agreed on one thing: it would be near or at freezing inland here. And so it was freezing, right at 32 this morning between 4AM and 5 AM somewhere. Having made the executive decision last night after many hours at the NOC doing various things that dragging out the heavy plastic when everything sailed through the last (unexpected) light freeze was not happening, I am once again pleasantly surprised to see – from the comfortable distance of the kitchen windows – that nothing appears to have been torched by frost. That is one of the benefits to our peculiar weather: no rain, and humidity under 40% does not lend itself to coating the plants in an icy sheen that will eventually cause their cells to burst when the sun hits them. We’ve been lucky, but we’re looking at a few days in the middle of the week for more of the same, so I suppose it is time to rig the covered wagons for ease of shuttering for the evenings.

Today: work, work, work, both in and out. The snow pea variety we have out currently (Oregon Sugar Pod) cares not about either 80 degree heat or 32 degree freezes. One of the trellises needs to be reworked so the peas have somewhere to climb, but every single frame has flowers, and we should be harvesting the first of the peas, whole pod, in the next week or so, with those reserved for shelling in about two. Yes, I know, you don’t usually grow snow peas to shell, but various people – including my mother – have decided they love those peas even better than the usual shelling peas I’ve grown, so who am I to argue?

Fall

I had originally started this post on November 1, thinking the end of hurricane season for us would be a good jumping off point to begin posting once more, and specifically, to begin ruminating about fall. Then two things came to mind: first, that the next day was election day, and I needed to post network traffic warnings (because of all the sites we host that would be posting/following various things) and take care of some things before the next day, to make sure all the pieces were in place for appropriate monitoring. Second, that it’s hard to think “fall” when it’s still in the mid-80s and there are various medical appointments that are weighing on your mind.

So I stopped, saved it as a draft, and thought I would pick it up again post-election, and when I might be in a better frame of mind. But I didn’t, and tonight I deleted it since it seemed rather pointless to pick up a draft of five sentences when anyone who knows me knows that five sentences takes about a minute flat for me to recreate in a new post. I do ted to be verbose.

I’ve been a blog slacker of late, for reasons I don’t quite know, although I am by nature a quiet, private person, something that drives (or drove) certain people nuts. As it happens, I now firmly believe this is also something holding back my writing, because although I’ve have ideas bouncing around in my skull for 20 years, I’ve yet to put any of them to paper, so to speak, as this may have the result of showing something within myself and as a bonus, it may also well and truly suck and not live up to what are likely impossibly high standards I usually set, even though I know at the same time I am perfectly capable of crafting good writing. Quite the dilemma.

As usual, I digress. Fall is indeed upon us, such as it is here, and this month we’ve had several nights where we’ve dipped into freezing temperatures. Not many, naturally, as this is the south, and fall here means mid-70s in the day and 40s-50s in the evenings. The freezes are here and there, scattered like so many leaves giving up and spiraling to the ground. Tomorrow night, and again in the latter part of this week, we’re expecting more freezing overnight, which means it’s time to drag out the plastic and make covered wagons to protect the tomatoes, peppers, and other things that are a bit fragile from the weather in hopes that we can baby them through and get a harvest out.

There is more to come, and I’ll be backtracking a bit to pick up the pieces of my tales that I have missed by not taking a break from work.

Thanksgiving 2010 at Lazy Dog Ranch

Thanksgiving 2010 at Lazy Dog Ranch. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Very large image, I know – I’m too lazy to do anything about it.

Dinner: two 14 pound turkeys, one on the smoker, one roasted. One 18 pound ham, glazed and delicious. Cranberry-apple compote. Stuffing. Sweet potato souffle (sweet potatoes from our garden, with marshmallows, of course). Corn, green beans, mashed potatoes. Gravy. Roasted vegetables (sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots, squash, zucchini, onions, mushrooms). Apple-raisin salad. Rolls (not pictured – I made two batches of dinner rolls and a batch of buns as well for the inevitable leftover sandwiches). Deserts, including various cookies, breads, a cherry pie, and an apple pie, and there’s still some cherry-chocolate-almond ice cream I made hanging around in the freezer).

We had originally planned for a small gathering – half a dozen people, tops. We wound up with 15. I’m officially popped out here, and the incision from the lung surgery is actually burning something fierce, like all the nerves along that area have been lit by a forestry team setting a backfire.

Enough

Could November whatever get here already so these stupid Conan O’Brian ads will stop? They’re getting as annoying as the ridiculous campaign ads that continue to snowball as we move closer to election day. Thank you.

Tech funnies: outages

Facebook went down for a bit today, and apparently yesterday as well. Since I don’t hang out on facebook all day, every day, I didn’t realize they’d been down yesterday, and only noticed today because of the posts to one of the admin-type lists to which we subscribe here. I was kind of waiting for a snowball effect of twitter taking a dive as everyone flocked there to tweet about how facebook was down…

What I did on my non-vacation weekend

I worked. I cooked. Worked. Cooked. The usual.

I wasn’t feeling quite well over the weekend, and today still do not feel as well as I did last weekend. I’m not quite sick now that whatever minor sinus infection I had cleared itself out, but also not quite feeling a hundred percent. Generally, I blame this on the fact that I’ve had far too many doctor/hospital visits, and there are simply too many sick people in those places. Fortunately, I’m done with the doctors until November unless something comes up, since the last visit to the pulmonologist this past week gave me an all clear after an xray followup to track that nasty fluid buildup to make sure it was fully drained. But like I said, hanging around in hospitals and offices brings with it the potential for random bugs to crop up, and I’m guessing that’s what this nonsense is.

On the plus side, I cooked, a lot, this weekend. Today is mom’s birthday (happy birthday, Mom!), and we just had a small dinner for immediate family Saturday night: my sister was down from Georgia, my brothers both up from Orlando, and my other sister and I. Saturday night: classic steakhouse dinner, with steak (grass-fed, organic, no less), shrimp three ways (boiled, scampi, and asian-inspired), baked potatoes, corn, bruschetta (I made two loaves of Italian bread, and by the end of the night, both were gone). Sunday morning, as is his habit, my brother made breakfast, and people went about their business for awhile before returning for a day of football. The football food: roasted red pepper soup, guacamole, more bruschetta (and two more loaves of Italian bread), roasted sweet potatoes and carrots from the Lazy Dog Ranch garden, and two chickens that had been brined in a honey-pepper mixture and then smoked for about four hours (plus a fresh batch of bbq sauce). I also made some cherry-chocolate-toasted almond ice cream for those who like that sort of thing. The youngest brother also assembled an eggplant parmigian after I fried off the eggplant slices, and one of my sisters made sauce, since my sisters were bugging him to make it.

We watched the Dolphins take a win against the Vikings, and turned off the Jaguars game in disgust after the Chargers reached the 30-point mark. The battle of the Mannings was not all together that interesting as the Colts put the beatdown on the Giants, but that is what younger brothers are for, as everyone who has a younger brother knows.

Overall, a very nice weekend indeed. The weather is not yet modulating into fall for us here, even though some mornings have dipped near the 60 degree mark. This is actually a good thing in my book, as my seedlings in the flats will go out into the garden in the coming weeks, hopefully to give us some good output now that the captain is back in the game and not having another chunk of something cut out. I could use about five degrees of cooler weather in order to get the fall snow pea round started. Out in the frames directly, I put in a round of limas, snap beans, carrots, cukes, leeks, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, and cowpeas. We’ll see how they do in what can still be some brutal heat, with no rain and only the standard watering. If I can stay healthy, with no more nasty surprises coming up to kick me in the ass, and I’m able to hold the bugs at bay, I’m hoping to get some kind of decent production out of this season yet.

Yet more ways to irritate tech support

So, you write in, telling us that you’re getting all sorts of trojans in your email. Mind you, you don’t bother to provide any evidence of anything of the sort, but someone on the staff tells you (quite correctly) that the virus definitions are always being updated, and if for some reason the server where you’re located needs an updated signature set, we’ll take care of it. You go away. We check, everything is up to date. Three days later, you’re back, telling us that you’re still getting these mysterious trojans, you’re not satisfied with the service, and you want to cancel. After five years of us hosing the account – during which you’ve opened very few tickets indeed, and which gives you plenty of time to know how we work, knowing that we do the things we say we will – instead of just saying “Hey, I’m still having this problem, what can we do”, you just want to cancel the account entirely. Then, when you’re asked, multiple times, for the headers of the mail you’re claiming is trojan-laden, so we can look at the logs, claim you have no idea what we’re asking for – this is even more ironic if your site indicates you’re claiming to be some kind of software developer. Then tell us we are “unconcerned”, “harsh”,  and have “email security issues”, and continue to ignore the requests we’ve made of you to provide any sort of information whatsoever that we can use. In the meantime, we’ve been going line by line in the mail logs finding every instance of your domain, including the system rejecting all kinds of crap from known spammers/spam locations, and, as it happens, deleting outright things found to have trojan-laden packages attached. That just makes us feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy around here, to be insulted while we’re trying to figure out, sans any useful information from you, what exactly you’re talking about, wasting our time because clearly you have zero interest in actually addressing the issue. And then to top it all off, claim that two of your systems were “damaged” by these so-called trojans, after telling us in response to our query about what it is that you’re seeing as trojans is whatever your antivirus says they are. That, of course, will make us wonder which of these situations apply: you foolishly didn’t actually have any antivirus  applications installed previously, and someone stupidly opened some random attachment. You didn’t keep your antivirus application up to date, so it didn’t trigger by whatever you claim was damaged when someone stupidly opened some random attachment. Or, the antivirus signatures were not updated in response to whatever the latest crap is being sent out – which, ironically enough, is exactly what we ourselves told you was a possibility and which we were checking on. Somehow, though, I figure in the latter case, you probably didn’t bother to write to the developer of whatever antivirus app you’re using to insult them in the same manner you insulted us. However, it’s a very interesting, although quite idiotic, way of dealing with a vendor with whom you’ve had a relationship for years. I’d say we’d keep that in mind, but pointing to an issue for which you won’t provide any investigative material, and which, remarkably enough, no one else has reported, is probably not a good framework on which to base just dumping a vendor without even bothering to make a good faith attempt to determine what is going on. But hey, best of luck with the next host, who perhaps will be able to read you mind.

I know people like to claim or think that tech support folks don’t like people. But that just isn’t true. They just  don’t like you.

Wabbit season

Duck season! Football season! Yay!

About damn time. College kicked off last night and continues through the weekend, the NFL begins next week, and soon we will be awash in games. I watched – or, rather, listened while helping paint one of the bedrooms – to South Carolina stomp all over Southern Miss, and then USC make it past Hawaii. As for Towson and Indiana? Yeah, right.

Anyway, the painting. Someone who shall not be named decided one of the bedrooms needed to be painted a different color: radiant sun, to be exact, although to me it looks like an off-white sort of color, but who am I to say? It will take a couple of coats, since it’s lighter than the current color, but it’s good exercise for me, even though by the end of the taping around the baseboards and the subsequent painting in that area, I was getting a bit sore. Still, with that part done, the rest is fairly easy, just rolling away, and we should finish today. Just in time for some Georgia person to arrive and stay for a few days.

And it’s time to go back to cooking a bit, too: this afternoon, stir fry, with chicken and lots of veggies, and scallion noodles. Since we will have people in the house this weekend even though we are not doing a big gathering as in years past, I’ll be brining a butt today so it can go on the smoker in the wee hours and be ready for Saturday afternoon’s more traditional kickoff of a slate of college games. We also need more bbq sauce. And I think, just for fun, we’ll do a bit of chicken as well, as it’s been forever since I’ve done any smoked poultry. Chicken breasts alone are tricky, as they’ll go from tender, moist, and delicious to rubbery dried out nastiness in no time, so perhaps a whole chicken is in order (but I’ll have to rig something so the chicken doesn’t drip on the porkalicious goodness that will be in the smoker before it). Applewood smoked chicken quesadillas for leftovers, anyone?

Reflections on gardening, cooking, and life