Category: Personal

Having recently finished up the last of my birthday present, I decided I needed to celebrate the birth of our nation in an appropriate manner. I have a strict rule about not drinking during the day unless I have people over, so now the wait …

… the peaty goodness begins after dinner. I’ve heard the 30 year Laphroaig is wonderful, but at 230 bucks a bottle, it’s a bit steep for me. I’ve also had Caol Ila recommended to me, which is another Islay scotch. I found exactly one bottle in the entire State of Pennsylvania, which I plan to snatch up at my earliest convenience.

UPDATE: After posting this, Bitter quite correctly pointed out that I had just announced the last remaining bottle of Caol Ila in the entire state was to be had, and that it would not be out of the realm of possibility for an intrepid reader to beat me to the punch, and buy the bottle. So my earliest convenience became now. So now the last bottle for sale of Caol Ila in the entire PA Liquor System is owned my me.

Sorry for the light blogging yesterday, but my schedule got really screwed up by a morning overturned trash truck on the PA Turnpike. They closed the westbound direction, and diverted everyone eastbound. That created a horrible traffic jam, as the next eastbound exit is not normally heavily trafficked. I can normally get to work in 40 minutes. It took me more than two hours. I reserve a little bit of time each morning to throw up posts, and that got eaten up by the mess. Combine that with a club meeting in the evening, and I am recording secretary so I have to be there to record, and I just had no time for it. When you pack your schedule up like that, losing even an hour has bad consequences for the day.

In addition to that, I’ve been working on putting together a new machine for X-Plane. Currently I do X-Plane on the same Linux box that hosts the blogs. You guys probably don’t notice me, but I sure as hell notice you when I’m in the virtual skies. I’m asking that box to do too much running a graphic intense OpenGL and CPU hogging app, along with all the Apache and MySQL instances. We have four cores and 8 gigs of RAM on this box, so it doesn’t cause it to screech to a halt, but it slows me down. In addition to that, Linux users are third rate citizens in the X-Plane world. MacOS is the primary platform it runs on. But Macs high end enough to run X-Plane are expensive, and I just love Apple too much to consider running MacOS on a PC. I would never do that to Steve. Never. I’ll just have suffer through flying the new Version 4 Virtual 737s on the inferior platform. BTW, I highly encourage checking out the demo video for the x737 project. These guys do excellent and detailed work. There’s a lot of hidden craftsmanship in putting together these planes.

I hope everyone has an excellent holiday weekend, and get to spend time doing something fun with the family. We will be spending the holiday weekend working a table at a gun show. Now that the primary is over, and it’s officially election season, that means frequent appearances at places gun owners frequent, in an attempt to recruit volunteers for NRA endorsed candidates for November, and get the word out.

But this weekend I can’t help but feel like I need to BBQ some a piece of meat. But what piece of meat? Brisket requires me to lose sleep. Just did a pork butt a few weeks ago, so I’m pork butted out. Pork back ribs maybe? I like ribs, but I plan to make some ribs for my father in a few weeks. I like smoking fish, chicken, and sausage too, but it’s so easy it’s almost like grilling. If anyone has suggestions for a great meat to smoke that presents a bit of a challenge, but won’t keep me up, I’m all ears.

The thing about a decade is it doesn’t evenly divide up into a neat third. Typically you hear people say “Early X0’s, Mid X0’s, Late X0’s.”  So what do you do with the extra year? When I turned 33, I said “Well, that’s the last year of my early 30s.”  Now as I enter the last year of what is undisputedly my “Mid 30s,” I think I am going to reserve the right to transplant that floater year to 37, so that becomes the last year of my “Mid 30s” delaying “Late 30s” for the remaining years of 38 and 39. But still, you have to figure “Late 30s” is still better than “Early 40s,” which is still yet better than “Early 50s,” which is definitely better than being dead. Though lately I’ve been feeling dead, but it’s probably the long hours I’m working. Of course long hours are better than unemployment. So I guess despite the fact that I hate getting old, I’m happy to be mid-30s and employed (for now).

What a Beautiful day it is, a perfect day to do some BBQing and restock on some Vitamin D. Got some pork back ribs on the smoker as we speak, and I’m outside in the back yard enjoying a snifter of bourbon. Lately I’ve really liked Blanton’s Bourbon. I like mine with just a splash of water in a snifter, in this case my Monticello snifter, which is a souvenir I picked up while visiting. But the really important part of the first day of spring is getting the smoker going. This is my first smoke in this one. It’s a Weber Smokey Mountain. This winter I was considering whether I wanted to get an offset smoker, but decided, after a bit of research, that a quality bullet smoker was closer to what I was looking for. I have three racks of back ribs in it now, which were rubbed down last night. My previous smoker had difficulty staying at the right temperature, and always wanted to get hotter. This one seems to struggle to stay at a higher temperature, but I will say it holds a much more consistent temperature. I can throw in extra coals without getting a wild temperature flucuation. In a few hours I’ll be able to judge whether the end product of this smoker is better than the previous El-Cheapo Brinkmann. In the mean time I’ll enjoy the sun, the bourbon, watch the woodpecker fly around to the various trees in the neighborhood, and try really really hard not to think about the cluster fuck going on in DC right now.

I promise not to bore my non-classical-music-loving readers with this part of my life often, but my post yesterday comparing skills and knowledge got me thinking about piano again, so I was thinking back to some old pieces that I had started on and never finished. I have CDs of many of them so I was going back for a listen. The real danger of iTunes is that you suddenly have a world of music at your fingertips, and can go find, download, and listen to anything immediately. This can be a problem for the credit card if you lack self-discipline. But you can tell the pieces I’ve always been in love with by how many different recordings I have of them. One thing I never got to do when I played was play a piano concerto. One of my great disappointments in life that I never had the discipline to complete one when I could play. One day, when I have a lot of free time, I might finally learn one and then go find a local amateur orchestral group to play it with. It’s an oversight I’d really like to fix someday.

I started, but never finished Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. You could just as easily say the Grieg Piano Concerto, because he only ever wrote but one. It’s fairly well recognized even by non-classical music fans though, and most people are familiar with the first couple of measures of the piece. I have only one recording of it though, by Pianist Santiago Rodriguez. Rodriguez is an excellent Pianist, but his interpretation of these pieces is a bit too fast tempo for my liking. Excessive tempo is a common pet peeve of mine in classical recordings. I feel that often a slower, more deliberate pace allows more of the color in the piece to come out. One exception to this is the complete recording of Beethoven’s Symphonies by John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, which are at faster tempi than normally recorded, and on period instruments. In this case I believe the pieces are enhanced by the faster tempo, and the period instrumentation and orchestra size produces a very clean sound. It’s so good I have a hard time listening to a slower recording with a modern orchestra without thinking how much better this recording sounds.

But back to the Grieg. I was looking for a different take on his piano concerto, so I just downloaded, and am really enjoying Arthur Rubinstein’s recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting. It’s a slower, more expressive pace than the Rodriguez recording, but hey, it’s also Rubinstein, who is regarded as one of the great pianists, if not the greatest pianists of the 20th century. Along with the recording of the Grieg Piano Concerto I get yet another recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor. I have two others, one by Earl Wild, and the other by Vladimir Ashkenazy. I’m probably more partial to the Ashkenazy performance than I am by the Earl Wild performance, but there’s much to be said for both of them. We’ll see how I end up liking Rubinstein’s take of the piece.

The northeast is getting whited out again. It’s coming down 5-9 inches by the end of the day, and 6-12 by the time this is all over. I’ll be working from home. Tomorrow may be dicey too. Fortunately, I just switched work over to a 35 megabit/sec synchronous fiber connection from an old T1 circuit, which makes working from home not that materially different than working at the office.

Here’s a topic for discussion as you either take a break from digging out or take a break from watching footage of people digging out:

What so-called “chick flicks” should a man suck it up and see? You know, the ones that are cultural classics or just so often referenced that it makes more sense to just get those two (or more) hours out of the way to say you’ve seen it.

For example, I have forced Sebastian to watch Gone with the Wind, My Fair Lady, and Dirty Dancing. Because who doesn’t see those movies? It’s just part of our common culture. There are enough jokes about putting Baby in the Corner and common references to frankly just not giving a damn that you have to see the movies to get it.

It’s not a classic, but I also made Sebastian watch Atonement with me because I thought it was just a good movie. (Although I’m always very angry after watching it.) It had some war, so that was enough to convince him to sit still. (And really, that Dunkirk scene.)

Now I’m debating whether to make him watch the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice with me. I’ve seen several versions, but I hear this is the best. Is Mr. Darcy an important enough literary figure that he should know what the hell references to him mean? Or is making any man watch even the film version of an Austen story considered cruel and unusual punishment that is only slightly less harsh than actually reading her?

Beyond the question of Pride & Prejudice, are there others that you guys recommend? Anything the women in your lives made you watch that you’re now happy you saw because, at the very least, you now understand references in the real world?