Why I Hate Wrong Numbers

The Wife goes to sleep pretty early most nights -- generally before 8:00.

Often, when she or someone else calls me on my cell phone, I can't hear it, so I turn the volume up as loud as it will go. Only The Wife has a special ringtone; everyone else rings in with the Miami Vice theme because I think it's a cool piece of music and it seems to induce smiles in people of my generation.

I try, as hard as I can, to remember to silence the phone at night when I put the it away to charge up. But I'm not perfect and forget to do this sometimes. And of course, only on the nights when I forget to do this does someone misdial the phone and call me at 9:00. So then I have to leap out of my chair and spill the computer dangerously on the floor, go running for the phone, and try to silence it as soon as I can.

Of course I never get there in time to prevent The Wife from waking up and asking me if I hate her. And then I feel guilty the rest of the night. Because someone I don't know dialed a wrong number.

Three Dimensional Lime Matrix Explains All

I'm sure that real economists have thought about this issue already and my thoughts are well behind formal economic teaching. But for me, it started with The Wife asking for a packet of coffee sweetener for her margarita.  We observed that limes bought from Costco are just not as sweet as the ones we got from Trader Joe's the previous week.  It occurred to me that we paid at least twice as much for limes at Trader Joe's as we had at Costco.  But I preferred the higher-quality, higher-priced limes to the alternative, which required sweetener to overcome the sour taste.

Then it occurred to me that there were those sorts of people for whom the more sour limes were more desirable because they were less sensitive to the quality issue. They might be using the limes for something other than margaritas, they might be unaware of or indifferent to the idea that different limes have different tastes, they might be adding so much sweetener to whatever they were making that the sourness of the cheap limes didn't matter.  But for whatever reason, they wanted sour limes where I wanted sweet ones.

Now, I'd been considering comparative microeconomics the previous day anyway, as a result of explaining to a client that while the myth is that drug dealers make huge amounts of money for essentially no work, the reality is that there is so much competition for retail illegal drug sales that street-level dealers have to cut their profit margins to nearly nothing. The result being that drug dealers need economic support while they attempt to ascend the ladder of their criminal organizations. In our case, that economic support was the device of pooling resources: six drug dealers in a two-bedroom apartment unable to come up with $800 a month rent, ergo, an eviction against them. So if drug dealing were all that profitable, wouldn't six dealers be able to come up with $800 between them and thus avoid having to come in contact with the law? Clients angry at their tenants resist this line of reasoning, but I can find no flaw with it.

That was why I had microeconomics on my mind as I encountered the sweet-versus-sour lime dichotomy. I mentally graphed out the matrix as I'd been taught in college, with price the vertical axis and quantity on the horizontal axis, and two curves representing supply (increasing quantity as price rises) and demand (decreasing quantity as price rises) and with the intersection of those two curves representing the maximization of the rectangular area between that and the source point of the graph as the equilibrium point. Easy stuff, any microeconomics student should be able to do that.

But this did not explain the whole phenomenon with the limes. I preferred the pricier but higher-quality limes; other preferred the less-expensive but less sweet limes. I had been taught that when one good substitutes for another, that the substitute good works on its own microeconomic matrix. But here, it wasn't a question of a similar good. This isn't comparing limes and lemons. This is comparing high-quality limes to low-quality limes.

There needs to be a third dimension to the graph, I thought. Actually, I think I said it out loud, but fortunately The Wife didn't hear me because if she had, it would have been a complete non sequitur.  But the microeconomic graph representing the market for limes needs a "Z" axis, too, because sweet limes and sour limes are still within the market for limes globally, and are not really distinct goods from one another. 

Presumably, the sweet limes are more desirable than the sour limes, and therefore command a higher price. Furthermore, lime merchants can be expected to know a thing or two about the quality of the goods they are bringing to market and will demand prices accordingly.  I got to wondering what the curve would look like, and assumed that it would reflect a lower quantity of sweet limes as compared to sour limes, precisely because the price would increase, and because it dovetailed with my experience of seeing dozens of limes (which turned out to be sweet) available for purchase at Trader Joe's but hundreds of limes (which turned out to be sour) available for purchase at Costco. 

Thinking about what the graph would describe, my assumption was it would be a cone, or at least a section of a cone. A two-dimensional cross-section "slice" of the cone taken at the price apex would represent the price for the one and only superlatively sweetest possible lime in existence, the one so sweet it tastes like candy coming right off the tree.  Another "slice" would represent the price for the sourest but most plentiful limes out there, the ones used at the industrial foodservice level, for which only the tartness mattered because so much sugar would be added that the sour component of their taste was irrelevant.

But it might not necessarily be that way; it could be that most limes are sweet and command the higher price, and Costco assembles the remainders and sells them at a discount price.  Experience, however, suggested that sour limes were more plentiful but cheaper, so it seemed natural to assume that sweet limes would be more scarce and that explained the price differential.

Why aren't all limes sweet?  Wouldn't lime growers would prefer to sell limes that command a higher price as opposed to a lower price, all other things being equal?

In a world with a three-dimensional microeconomic matrix, however, all other things aren't equal.  The market will find its equilibrium point in such a world where the intersection of the supply curve, demand curve, and quality curves maximize the amount of money to be paid for the good in question.  That point might not be the point where all the goods that are available are of the highest quality. That point will be at the intersection between the arc describing where consumers find the balance between price and quality to be maximally acceptable, and the arc describing where producers find the balance between price and quantity to be maximally acceptable.

So my epiphany was that while individual consumers might prefer sweet limes to sour, the market as a whole might prefer sour limes to sweet, because that represented the efficient equilibrium point for the market. That's why my margaritas came out sour instead of sweet.

What I Learned In Cooking Class

As an early birthday present, and as an opportunity to get me back for all those times I've indulged her, The Wife enrolled us in a sous vide cooking class that we went to over the weekend. It was great fun! I was already well aware of what the sous vide water oven can do with meat so this was not a huge surprise to me. But there were plenty of things I learned about anyway.

• Better knife technique from one of the sous-chefs helping out with the class. Choke up on the handle and pinch the heel of the blade itself; don't run your index finger down the spine of the blade.
• All that stuff in my sous vide manual about avoiding alcohol, using only powdered garlic and powdered onion, and exercising restraint with other spices is all bullshit. The Doctors Eades who market the product apparently just like their food bland.
• They also like their food overcooked; the temperatures in the sous vide manual are too high.
• High temperatures will soften vegetables nicely. Pre-heat the sous vide to a high temperature, maybe 185 degrees, before adding vegetables and then immediately put them in an ice bath to blanch them while still in the bag, and they will stay greener. 
• Unlike meats, you can easily cook vegetables for too long in a sous vide.  An hour or so should do the trick.
• A ceramic santoku knife, although much lighter than the steel I'm used to, slices through raw potatoes like nobody's business. I may need to look in to lighter knives.
  
• Speaking of potatoes, I seemed to be the only one who thought potatoes were interesting subjects for cooking. I love eating potatoes and I notice they're popular whenever I serve them. Why don't other amateur cooks understand this and spend some time figuring out how to please their guests with this very affordable staple? Part of the ongoing and thoughtless campaign against carbohydrates, I suppose.
• As I learned through experimentation a few days later, too much fat added to the vegetable during cooking will leach out the chlorophyll and deaden the color, so I'll add to that -- sous vide your vegetables without butter or other fats, add those later. Adding fat to vegetables this way is pretty much the same thing as using a crock pot, and I already have one of those. I didn't learn this lesson at the class but I learned it as a result of the class.
• The sous vide is ideal for making delicate French dessert custards and silks, because the material will never boil and harden the egg or egg component in the ingredient. The sauvignon we had on the dessert was divine. Getting the liquid in the sealed bag, however, can be quite a trick.
• Melons can be compressed, softened, and infused with flavor (and sugar, if they are not naturally sweet enough for your taste) in the sous vide, at temperatures similar to those used for vegetables.
• Pearl onions taste great with a sprinkling of cinnamon, and they squirt free of their skins easily when you parboil and blanch them beforehand.
• Olive oil will produce the much-prized Maillard reaction just fine as long as it isn't smoking too much. Heat the pan up until the oil in it smokes, then let it cool until it stops smoking, then use the pan to brown your protein.
• We bought the right vacuum bag sealer. The one sold by the manufacturer of the Sous Vide Supreme got demo'ed at the class, was unreliable at sealing the bags, and it looked difficult to use.
• Ice baths for "blanching" the still-bagged food just out of a sous vide should be 80% ice and 20% cold water. 
• From a fellow student, a tip: the problem with using the butane torch that came as part of a gift crème brûlée kit was that it was too small and puny. No need for a special "foodservice" butane torch; one marketed for light soldering would be easier and safer to handle, cost less money, and hold more fuel. Obviously, do not handle while drunk, but that rule should have applied even for the puny torch.
• Once you've got your food above 140 degrees, the longer it cooks, the safer is is -- and thus the magic of the sous vide, which lets you keep the flavor and texture of rarer meats with the safety prized by lovers of well-done meat. The struggle with more traditional means of cooking isn't exposing the food to those kinds of temperatures, it's getting the food itself to elevate to those temperatures fast enough and for long enough that you don't lose the taste, texture, and enjoyment of what you're going to eat.

Not bad for an hour and a half, plus of course we ate the food we'd made which was quite good -- 1 hour was not quite enough for the potatoes but everything else turned out nicely. Kind of a high fat meal, because the potatoes and onions had both olive oil and butter in them and the lamb is high fat to start with even before it got seared in the olive oil. It's hard to go wrong with your taste when you use lots of good fats.

We didn't much like the traffic getting there or back but this sort of thing just isn't going to be found in the Antelope Valley. The rest of my present is on its way and should provide me with many challenging recipes and techniques to try, even if I can't realistically make use of all of them at home because I just don't have the budget or space or experience needed to upgrade from a sous vide oven to an immersion circulator or a salamander broiler around.

What I need next is a fine-mesh cone strainer for my sauces and stocks, and I think that I can do better than the price demanded for one by Snooty Kitchen Stores, Inc. They offered a nice class but their equipment isn't worth the price. In fact, I found a reasonable substitute for one-ninth the price on my very first search.

Axe Man

The Wife and I took out some bushes from our front yard over the weekend and replaced them with flowering plants.  Taking out the bushes involved me chopping them out with an axe and then digging out the taproots with a garden spade.  The post-yardwork margaritas made me feel better that evening but alas, I've no ability to enjoy such a painkiller today at work.

Summertime Margaritas:

6 limes
6 tangerines
1 cup añejo tequila
1 oz. agave nectar
6 cups ice
Splash of Grand Marinier

Juice the fruit, add all ingredients to blender, drink.  Repeat as necessary.

Service Matters

Last weekend, The Wife and I went out to our Friday night date.  We went to a new restaurant in the area, one that advertises that its very name refers to its excellence.  We, however, were underwhelmed, and in the process learned something about ourselves.

The food was actually quite good, for the price.  That wasn't the problem.  Neither was the beer selection, which was excellent, and the decor, that was interesting and enjoyable.  The problem was the service.

The service model appears to be "we will take care of you when it's convenient for us to do so."  When you show up, you wait in line to get a pager, and once you get that, you have to mill around the sidewalk in front of the restaurant looking at a high-gloss copy of the menu.  In this sense, the restaurant resembles nothing so much as the Department of Motor Vehicles.

When your pager buzzes, you are then given the privilege of standing in another line, which takes you to a counter, where your food order is taken and you are given a paper receipt to take with you.  If you order a soft drink, they give you a waxy-cardboard container.  Now, your experience has been upgraded to McDonald's.

Then, a hostess takes you to your seat.  You are met by a "D&D Specialist," meaning that she is in charge of bringing you "D"rinks and "D"esserts.  She runs a scanner over the receipt and explains that she's going to bring you your alcohol and later, your dessert.  She wants your order RIGHT NOW, even though you haven't had a chance to look at the drink list yet.  If you're one of those people who always orders the same thing, that's probably not such a big deal; but if you're there to sample new beers, the feeling is a bit rushed.  The "D&D Specialist" also informs you that even though it's six o'clock in the evening, they are almost out of desserts for the entire day, so if you want one, you'd better put your order in first.

Meanwhile, expediters from the kitchen run your food out to you.  As soon as it's ready.  One dish at a time.  The Wife got her soup within sixty seconds of our sitting down; my sandwich came a few minutes later, and the french fries came a good ten minutes after we were seated.

You might take for granted that things like plates, napkins, and utensils were either waiting for us at the table or were brought along with the food.  Not so.  If you want a napkin or a fork or a plate, you have to get up and walk over to the service station yourself and carry it back to your table yourself.  This has some minor upsides -- if you are having soup, for instance, you don't need a knife or fork so you can leave them there.  On the other hand, if you're going to sample your companion's food, that gets slowed down.  The utensils are also stored next to the soda fountains where you pour yourself your soft drinks or water, which are also near the pump stations for ketchup and other "dipping sauces" for your food along with the disposable paper mini-cups in which you are expected to take it all back to your table.

You are charged separately for the drink and dinner tab. No suggestions are offered about the tip -- do you tip for the entire meal, for just the drinks and dessert, at a counter-service tip rate for the food and a full-service rate for the drinks?  Are the tips pooled for the staff, since a massive number of people have actually waited on you?

This is not done for the purpose of reducing the demand for service.  The place is crawling with help -- busboys, expediters, "D&D" girls (who are all appropriately hot), hostesses, counter clerks, bartenders, and cooks.  If anything, there are more employees working here than at a standard full-service restaurant.  No, the customer-operated service stations appear to be an intentionally designed feature of the restaurant.

The Wife later theorized that the idea is to force you to interact with other customers, which might be an advantage if you're single and looking to meet other single people while waiting in line for a squirt of the pesto remoulade.

I noticed, however, that we were not in the place for very long.  Once we were allowed to enter, we were in the premises for not much more than half an hour, pretty much just as long as it took to eat the food.  So my theory is that it's set up this way so that the restaurant can turn the tables around faster and get more customers in.  We the customers get to wait outside and not enjoy the ambiance of the place, and in exchange the people who work there are able to perform their jobs more conveniently. 

Which is a bargain one can make, I suppose, but not one that sounds so great to me, the one whose role is also to pay for it all.

The result was that we both felt treated like livestock, and enjoyed what we had hoped would be a nice night out together a lot less than we would have otherwise.  So what we learned about ourselves is that we have risen above a threshold for service.  I don't mind ordering at a counter and doing some of my own table-bussing at a fast food restaurant, but I'm also paying a lot less, and it's not the sort of place that I would go expecting to have a nice date with my wife.  But at the point where I'm paying ten bucks or so per meal, my expectations are such that I expect to have someone wait on me so that I can relax and enjoy the company of my companions rather than doing the work of enabling a meal to be prepared, served, and eaten.

So this week, The Wife and I drove to Santa Clarita and tried another place that wound up offering a similar service model.  If anything, I enjoyed it less, because the quality of the food and the drink options were not nearly as good as what we had available closer to home.  However, we found that there were other options available afterwards -- not wanting to muscle our way in to a place like a bar at a chain restaurant, we chose to pay a little bit extra to have a drink and dessert afterwards at a swanky hotel bar, which was quiet enough that we could talk to each other and unpopulated enough that we were able to sit and relax easily.  We got good service, a good atmosphere, and didn't have to fight crowds or stand in line.  That's the way to go for a nice night out with your spouse.

Guidelines For Dinner Parties At Soffit House

1. If you aren't invited to dinner this time around, please don't be offended.  We can't have everyone over all the time.  We try to bring together interesting people interacting with one another.  Singles are welcome to, but not obliged to, bring dates even if we don't know them.  Married guests leaving their spouses at home got some 'splainin to do.
2. We like to start around 6:00 p.m. and generally, we're sorry to see you go whenever that time comes.  But we understand if you want to be home and in bed before midnight.  We have a spare bed available in an allergen-free room if you have a little too much to drink.
3. All food will be prepared from scratch, or very close to it. We might use dried pasta rather than rolling out our own. Or, as we've done with other guests who had a great time helping us out with it, we might just conscript you to help us roll out the pasta.
4. Booze, beer and/or wine will be consumed.  You don't have to drink it.  But we're going to imbibe freely.  The house drink is a vodka Aviation and if you haven't had one, it's worth trying.  So come thirsty.
5. The only thing we really want a guest to bring is interesting conversation.  Bottles of wine, dishes to pass, flowers, and other gifts are warmly appreciated and will be graciously accepted as tokens of friendship, but they are absolutely unnecessary.
6. Soffit House is not child-friendly.  We have no television, no toys, no video games, glass-topped coffee tables, unsafeguarded electrical outlets and unhatched cabinets.  There is nothing for your child to do here other than play with our pets, and they will lose interest in your child after about half an hour of play.  There are some power tools and spare sheets of lumber in the garage so if your child can amuse herself for hours on end with a double-miter saw while you booze it up in the other room, I suppose we can set her up there.  But if not, and you simply cannot leave your kids with a sitter or a grandparent for an evening, well, The Wife and I would be happy to to meet up with you and your charming-and-well-behaved children in some other venue, at some other time.
7. We love our proteins here.  Most likely, meat of some kind will be served as the focal point of the meal, and in generous quantities.  Sometimes, fish may be served.  If you are vegetarian, not a fish-eater, or are otherwise picky about your protein, you may be out of luck.  There will be plenty of other food for you and you wouldn't be our first dinner guest to make a (typically quite enjoyable) meal out of side dishes.
8. 
   Special dietary needs can be accommodated.  A preference for meat cooked to a temperature higher than "medium rare" is a "special dietary need" around here, and I'll need at least 48 hours notice that you want your steak medium or well done.  No vegetarian dinner guest has ever left Soffit House hungry.  But if you're a vegan, I can't offer the same assurance; see guideline #9.
9. You really ought to think of dinner over here as your "break day" from whatever diet or weight loss program you're on.  You're almost certain to be offered foods made using some kind of tasty animal fat.  I'm talking real butter, real bacon grease, real cheese, real cream.  No apologies will be made for the high fat content of any of these ingredients.  They taste good and the purported substitutes for these products produce unacceptably inferior results.  The Wife typically uses liquor (tequila and whiskey are her favorites for this purpose) instead of milk as the liquid ingredient in her batters, and butter cream frosting (primary ingredients being powdered sugar and butter-not-no-stinking-margarine).  This is all very tasty but none of it is even remotely dietetic.
10. If you leave hungry, it's surely going to be your own damn fault.  And we will try to send extra food home with you no matter how stuffed you say you are.

Visiting A Super-Secret Location

What to do with the large tax return the accountant tells us to expect?  I have an idea....

... but I'll have to see what The Wife thinks of my plan.

This Is Almost Certainly Correct

I've little time for blogging right now.  In between a heavy work schedule and a mission from The Wife to build a table that seats eight for the back patio in time for a dinner party on Saturday* (she is doing a lot of the work on the project too), by the time I sit down to a computer I've little writing left in me -- much as I want to do it.  So for the time being, I have to point to some other writers and await the day when I can sit down and organize my thoughts about something of general interest, not related to a case I am actively handling, and unrelated to my feeble attempts at carpentry.

But I came across one thing that I think is dead on.  Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have killed Mitt Romney's chances at getting the 2012 GOP nomination for President.  The just-passed health care reform plan is too similar to the one Romney handled and praised as governor of Massachusetts, and the GOP is lined up lockstep in opposition to it.  While it might be a principled and appropriate thing for a Constitutional law professor to say, "It's one thing for a state to do it and something else for the Federal government to do it," to a Presidential candidate, it's either a good idea or it's a bad idea, and Romney can't criticize something he once endorsed. 

Well, then again, Romney was pro-choice before he wasn't, and he was anti-balanced budget until he wasn't, and he was anti-gun until he wasn't, was anti-Department of Education until he wasn't, and so on -- so why should he have been pro-health care entitlement until some point in the future he isn't?

Anyway, it's off to a late-night client meeting, so more from the busy busy busy TL when I have a chance.


* On that note, thanks to Commenter zzi for a recipe for pesto alla Trapanese that I intend to use as the foundation for my pasta sauce on Saturday.  Unless I get my mind changed for me, and do rosemary roasted potatoes instead.  The good news is, I should have my sous vide at last for the meat!

Miracles Of Modern Commerce

Grandma only turns 88 years old once in her life.  And she's had a shortage of real, just-for-her, birthday parties.  So The Wife and I got tickets for a weekend trip to Milwaukee, which is why I've not been blogging and instead spending a lot of time in airplanes and with family.  Living my life instead of blogging about it.  Sadly, my neck is still sore.

You know, there's still snow on the ground in Wisconsin?  Dirty, sooty, ugly piles of compacted snow left over from plows and clearing parking lots, mainly, and almost no clean white drifts.  And it's cold there.  Not insufferably cold, but I was glad to have brought my heavy coat and beanie.  And the lake next to my aunt and uncle's house is still frozen over -- over a square mile's worth of frozen lake.  Those are ice drifts, not waves, in the photograph.

And I got reminded, taking this photograph, of what is meant by the joking phrase "frozen tundra" for Wisconsin's environment.  When tundra thaws out, it is a swamp.  Wet, cold, and muddy.  Later in the year, this lakeside location will become a very pleasant place to sit and eat an apple while watching the lake and enjoying the warm Wisconsin summer.  Right now, though, it takes a willingness to get your socks soggy and a tolerance for wind blowing across that ice right in your face, all in the quest for a good shot.

Coming home was a wonderfully pleasant shock.  The Wife and I ate lunch outside in shirt sleeves after our plane landed, with half the clientele at one of my old haunts wearing shorts.  Tonight there was enough light and warmth in the air for us to walk the dogs after dinner.  I'll take California over Wisconsin, thank you very much.

This Is The Droid I Was Looking For

My cell phone has been crapping out on me too often recently -- the battery drains in two days or less whether I make calls on the phone or not.  So it was time to say goodbye and get a new one.  Costco had a great deal that The Wife and I decided to take advantage of -- buy one Droid phone, get one free.  We've had the Droids for about a day now and neither of us can put them down.

The Droid looks and feels similar to our friends' iPhones.  The screen works the same way and the resolution is visibly better.  The 5 megapixel camera is powerful and comes with a very bright flash.  The software works the same way, too -- it comes with a pre-packaged suite of software and you download the rest of the software you want from the Droid Market, which is like the iPhone Store.  The software and support behind Droid is a partnership between Verizon and Google, and fortunately, I have a google account.  As soon as I gave my phone my e-mail address and password, it had all my contacts from Google Mail imported and it was a short project to transfer my old phone's data to the new phone.

"Phone" isn't really the right noun.  It's a mini-computer.  It only plays simple games and doesn't have a full-functioning word processor, but it is fully linkable to and compatible with other networks and computer units.  I can plug it in to my laptop at home and transfer music and photographs for use as ringtones and wallpaper.  It did take a little bit of detective work on the net to figure out how to do that -- the trick is, once the data cable for the phone is plugged in to your computer's USB jack, you need to activate the phone and then pull the menu down from the top to "dock" the phone's chip with the computer, where it shows up as a removable flash memory drive.

With a little bit of exploration, I found how to remotely integrate the phone's calendar with my computer at work's calendar, so now I have my schedule with me wirelessly updating wherever I go.  Handy for court.  I've also found a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure application, so I can have that with me when I go to court too.  If I can figure out how to get the California Code of Civil Procedure and Rules of Court, that would be an even hotter setup.

Pros:

• Intuitive, easy controls.
• Integrates with existing exchanges, on either Microsoft Office suites or open-source Google suites.
• Reasonably high-quality speaker.
• Wide selection of free downloadable applications.
• Memory management is great; can switch from application to application seamlessly. 
• Web interface fast and fluid.
• Silencing the phone is quick and easy.

Cons:

• Weighs about eight ounces, a little bit heavier than most cell phones.
• Battery seems to drop through the 90% to 80% range fairly quickly with wireless network use.
• Setup from scratch is a little more time-consuming than I preferred.
• Answering incoming calls takes two steps (unlocking phone and answering). 
• Touchscreen smudges easily and requires frequent cleaning.  Or maybe I need less oily fingers.
• Google is now watching everything I do.  I get a lot of utility in exchange for my privacy, but I do lose my privacy.

The Wife likes that she can play Pandora on the Droid wherever we go.  I like the Google Maps navigation.  When we travel, we will now only need our Droids and Kindles and can leave all the bigger, bulkier electronics at home.

A Love Note To My Wife

Thank you.  Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

For not wanting to have children.

Oh, and for the cleaning and work you do around the house and taking care of the animals and supporting me in my many endeavors and being affectionate and friendly and a good companion and a good friend.

But tonight, I'm especially grateful that you share my lack of desire to have children around.

Thank you, my darling.  I love you and I'm very very happy that we get to spend our child-free lives together.

TL The Tour Guide

The in-laws are out from Wisconsin to visit.  Yesterday The Wife and I drove down to the airport to pick them up in the late morning.

The Wife suggested we take them to Philippe for lunch, which seemed like a great idea -- a fine sample of old Los Angeles.  Unfortunately, the place was shut down -- the County closed it for health code violations!  I've never known Philippe to be closed for any reason before.

Plan B was dim sum, since we were right there in Chinatown.  Just up the block from Philippe was a place where we were the only white folks there and the signs on the wall had no English.  Taking that as a good sign, we popped in and had a bunch of stuff.  The in-laws had never before had dim sum and didn't really know what to expect.  But the food was really good and amazingly affordable.  We also indulged in Pinkberry (warning, link goes to a site that violates TL's Rule 1 of Web Design -- do not auto-load audio).

Then it was back up to the high desert and more sitting around and catching up.  The in-laws enjoy board games and we played some Blokus, which they enjoyed.  After that, we went to Palmdale's finest restaurant, a Persian place.  We got lucky and it happened to be exhibition night -- seven belly-dancers performing for their class.  So the in-laws have got a good sample of a bunch of different experiences, ethnic foods, and other things that they would have limited access to back home in Wisconsin.

Today we're going to try and get more fun stuff.

Food Tips For The Holiday

Tip #1: If you're just having a few people for your Thanksgiving, you only need a turkey breast or a small ham. I used a 7-pound turkey breast and when I got it home, it was frozen solid and in a mesh bag -- you could have killed a man with that thing. After cooking, we're going to get probably 20,000 calories and five pound of meat off of this guy. That's plenty.

Tip #2: Start your bird at about 450 degrees and after about ten minutes, drop the temperature in your oven to 350. This sears the outside but still cooks the bird slow. Give yourself 20 minutes of roasting for every pound of bird, including bone and stuffing, that you've got in there. Then, give yourself an extra hour for basting and checking on internal temperature. Don't pull the bird from the oven to rest until the meat temperature close to the bone is 160 degrees. Use a probe thermometer to get there.

Tip #3: Drape your bird in bacon. Oh, yeah. Actually, this is a good suggestion -- turkey is naturally a relatively lean and dry meat and the bacon adds fat (as well as smoky, bacony flavor) and therefore moisture. If you do it right, your turkey will fall be so tender and moist it will fall apart when you use harsh language at it.

Tip #4: Use your pan drippings in the gravy. Mix it with chicken stock (or turkey stock if you can get it) and flour. Mix the stock and flour first, while the stock is cold, and then add only small amounts of flour to thicken until you get the consistency you want in your gravy because some like it thick and some like it thin.

Tip #5: If at all possible, try to have one chef in charge of the cooking and everyone else is "helping out" -- which means they are acting under the direction of the chef. "Chef" means "chief" and cooking is not a democracy. Further to that end, do try to avoid having your wife get into a rivalry with the wife of the other couple you're sharing Thanksgiving with about how and where things are going to be done. The Revolutionary Government in France was run by Committee after the Revolution, and things didn't work out so well. One chef per meal, please.

Tip #6: You don't have to wait until the food is served to break out the alcohol. Unless your family has a propensity to domestic violence, in which case I suggest no booze at all. But if you're dealing with a lot of unnecessary social tension, a martini while the bird is roasting really takes the edge off.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Is The Start Of The Holiday Season Really The Best Time For This?

Counting calories sucks.  It leaves me feeling hungry and conscious of food all the time. 

What I can do, though, is work a lot.  When I get into my work, I don't think so much about feeling hungry.

Cutting back on the alcohol is not so great a sacrifice, although my football buddy would rather I had more than one beer with him while watching the game.  We've just discovered Alaskan Ale, which is very good, but a commitment to moderation means not having a lot of them.

The Wife and I are rededicating ourselves to more frequently walking the dogs.  That's more exercise than I have been getting.  The yoga mat has been trotted out in the past few months, but it needs to see the outside of the closet more frequently than it has.

And with the change to standard time, I can get up earlier and maybe work earlier, so I can come home before it gets completely dark to walk the dogs.  The dogs are more active and playful with the walks, which makes them more fun to play with.  I feel a little better too and it will make my doctor happy for me.

It's cooler now than it has been, but a fleece and a hat helps out there.  I get the hat hair afterwards but so what?

Still, these are lifestyle changes.  I don't do well with lifestyle changes.

My preferred lifestyle would see me sleeping until about 8:30 or 9:00, then writing for several hours, then cooking a nice dinner, followed by an evening of goofing off and going to sleep around 11:00 or 11:30.  Left on my own, that's what I do.  I have to discipline myself to go to bed earlier than that, to get up earlier than that, to punctuate the day with exercise, and to make smarter food choices.

I Must Have A Very Forgettable Face

When it was growing in, I only got a few comments about my beard. This I chalked up to people being polite about it looking crappy while it was growing in.  But after about two weeks, it was pretty much done.  And a few people -- clients, mostly -- remarked about the beard and said it looked good.

But The Wife said it was prickly and sharp and because I had to so frequently trim the mustache, that never softed the way the beard did.  And yeah, it itched all the time (that was probably partially the coconut oil drying).  So off it came Friday night.

Thereafter, I had to point out to my loving wife that I'd shaved off my beard.  She spoke with me for ten minutes without saying a word.  But don't feel bad for me about that.  Turns out, she has a lot of good company in not noticing that once again I'm clean-shaven.

Saturday, she had to point out to our friends, who otherwise would not have noticed, either.

No one here at work noticed my beard's absence -- or if they did, no one said anything about it.

We'll see if any of my fellow courthouse haunters notice it tomorrow.  Or maybe my class on Wednesday night.  But at this rate, I'm guessing not.  To me, the beard and mustache were something I saw clearly multiple times a day when I looked at myself in the mirror.  But to others, including people very close to me, my face must be very forgettable indeed.

Experimenting With Coconut Oil

I like having a goatee. It gives my face a different look -- a look that I think is actually a little bit slimming for my face; unfortunately carrying around too many pounds produces cheeks that are rounded and puffy like a baby's. So over Labor Day weekend I let my beard grow out and only trimmed back around my cheeks, leaving the goatee and mustache in place.

More After The Jump -->

New Stuff

New oven. The Wife had several bad experiences with the old one -- it never got hot enough, then it got too hot. The window cannot be cleaned. It doesn't fit in with our decor. And the cast-iron spiders that sit over the burners no longer sit level. So we went to Sears, dropped six hundred bucks, and come Wednesday we'll have a new oven. And in a few days we'll have a rebate card in the mail.

And The Wife insisted that I have a Kindle, and they were on sale. Mine came today and it had a lot of charge on its battery. So I downloaded a book (Free, by Chris Anderson, which was available for a price of, appropriately enough, nothing) and started reading it while I got a prescription filled (more about that in a few moments). The device is easy to use, not-quite-intuitive, light as a paperback book but thinner, and the screen is as easy on the eyes as regular paper (which is particularly important today; again, more about that in a bit).

So, yeah, new stuff. New stuff is cool.

Idiotic Online Banking Problems

A while back The Wife expressed dissatisfaction with Stagecoach Bank. (Not the actual name of the bank in question.) She wanted to switch to another bank and that was okay with me. Stagecoach Bank had done something rather stupid with putting a hold on a cashier's check and that caused us to delay closing escrow on Soffit House, which got me pretty steamed.

Also a while back, the partners at the firm told me that they had a great banking relationship with Big Manhattan Bank (also not the real name of the bank in question), which had a few branches in California. They were so happy with it that they were willing to bank by courier -- the bank's courier would come every other day to the office and run stuff down to Santa Clarita where the nearest branch was, and they didn't have to do anything. And at the time, direct deposit was available only to people who had their personal accounts with Big Manhattan Bank, which was at the time not me because I was with Stagecoach Bank.

The Wife and I heard that Big Manhattan Bank was going to open an office up here in our part of the world soon, so we resolved to wait until that happened, and switch.

After a time, I stopped being irritated at Stagecoach Bank because it stopped charging me a fee for keeping a savings account. And then it stopped charging a fee for keeping a checking account. And in fact my experiences with Stagecoach Bank got better and better and I was pretty happy with it by the end of the day.

But then Big Manhattan Bank bought out Distressed Cascadian Bank (again, a pseudonym), also known as DisCas, which had some local branches. And to promote the newly-created Really Big Manhattan Bank, we got a promotional flyer saying "DisCas is now Big Manhattan!" and offering us a $100 incentive to open up accounts with direct deposit there.

So we did it. The Wife had apparently not ever gotten over her irritation at Stagecoach Bank and hey, a C-note is a C-note.

We went to the local branch, which was covered in the corporate logo of Big Manhattan Bank. We signed a banking agreement with Big Manhattan Bank, spoke with a representative who identified himself as working for Big Manhattan Bank, gave us a business card with the Big Manhattan Bank name and logo on it, tapped into a computer that had Big Manhattan Bank's name on the splash screen, got issued checks (both temporary at the branch, and custom checks that came in the mail) and ATM cards with Big Manhattan Bank's name and logo on them.

So the time came to pay bills for the month. I went to www.bigmanhattanbank.com and put in our chosen user name and password. Nothing. It didn't recognize me at all.

I had The Wife try. She opened up her computer, and got right on. She passed it along to me and I registered all our vendors and got bills set up. But I still couldn't get on with my computer. And that didn't make any sense. And I couldn't check on the account's status so I was walking around with no idea of how much money I had in the bank from day to day. This makes me anxious to not know how much money I have. Even if it's not a lot, at least I know.

So after a week of this, I called customer support and the CSR on the other end said, "Oh, are you a former DisCas customer?"

"Well, no. It was a DisCas bank and--"

"So are you a-- sorry, finish what you were saying, sir?" (At least she apologized for interrupting me.)

"The branch used to be a DisCas bank, but then you guys bought it, and when we went there to open up the account, it was all Big Manhattan."

"So you are a former DisCas customer."

"Well, not really, but --"

"Try using DisCas.com. I can't help you with that but I can give you a phone number to call for support for that website."

I tried DisCas.com. It worked great, first time out. The Wife said that it had never even occurred to her that I would be using anything but DisCas.com, that she wouldn't have imagined or dreamed of going to Big Manhattan Bank's website.

Made me feel kind of stupid.

The Costco Dog Birthday Wish

I would have liked to have been a fountain of bubbly energy and enthusiasm for The Wife's birthday tonight. But I had little energy left over after an all-over-the-place day at the office. I hope that a bunch of gifts over the weekend, even if not presented with spectacular elan, was enough to keep her happy and let her know that I love her and that I enjoy indulging her.

See, I really enjoy making her a special dinner on her special days. I'd like to think that's when I can pull out the stops, use all premium ingredients, kick it up a notch, and really put in the effort to turn out some spectacular food. Usually what she wants is crepes with lemon filling, which is relatively easy -- I just have to make sure to turn the crepes before they brown. But this year she said no, she didn't want that.

I kind of had to draw the line at her request to have Costco hot dogs for dinner, though. And I feel bad because my initial reaction to that should have been to say "You got it! If that's what you want, that's what we'll do!" But it had already been a long, mostly unpleasant day by the time she called me and said that's what she wanted for her birthday meal.

Seriously, she wanted to get hot dogs from Costco. Sorry you had to deal with the trays of canteloupe, blackberries, two kinds of pears, apples, soprasetta; another tray of mozzarella, smoked gouda, Parmaseano reggiano, and roasted garlic-inflused cheddar; and a green salad; followed by ice cream cake brought over by your best friend. Maybe next year we can go to Costco instead, honey.

Cambrian Adventure

"Dude. TL, where have you been? No posts since Thursday!"

Staying at a hotel that has no internet access, that's what. Yes, there are still such places out there. I couldn't even get the phone to work right the one time I needed to use a land line (because cell phone service is spotty in that part of the world). Next question?

"TL, what on Earth were you doing at a place so far out of touch that you couldn't get internet or cell phone service?"

Having a wonderful long weekend with my wife and our friends, that's what.

We sampled about three dozen wineries around El Paso De Robles. We drank good wine, plenty of it. And bought a lot of it. Our wine racks at home are now full; five dozen bottles of hand-selected or gifted wines. That's never a bad thing.

I took The Wife to redwood groves around Big Sur. She'd never seen live redwoods before. A drive up the coast from our hotel took us onto the narrow, twisty part of Pacific Coast Highway where it clings to the cliffs on the coastal range; there, we found the southernmost redwood groves in the state by clear, beautiful waterfalls. Salmon Creek Falls, not pictured here, were going at a spectacular rate, but I sort of preferred this less-frequented grove with the stream falling down off the rocks into the mossy quiet of the forest.

We watched sea otters diving for their breakfasts off of the rocky beaches near Cambria. I've got photos of otters out hunting, but they just look like little dots in the sea. There were, however, hundreds of otters out there. You'll have to trust me on that.

We partied with winemakers. Our friends are very close with one of the winery families, and we got to participate in their spring celebration and enjoy pizza and chicken and sample their entire library of wines. Along the way we got a glimpse into what the winemaker's life is really like -- for much of the year, it's reasonably relaxing once they've found a wholesale customer for their product; they just work the tasting room themselves and sell what they can on their own and the rest goes to their customer. They can give hayrides and relax and have a good time with their friends and family. For a couple weeks out of the year, around harvest time, they work like hell -- one guy described going six days straight without sleep, and eventually when the tractor broke down he and his crew were passed out from exhaustion by the time the repairman showed up and said "Add diesel."

We got to breathe fresh clean ocean air, and were overwhelmed by the beauty of emerald mountains and sapphire seas. Of the many really beautiful places in California, this just about takes the cake. Harmony, the little village between Cambria and Morro Bay, seems to always be green and the beef from there tastes especially good -- maybe because the cows have such steep hills to climb while they're grazing. I've not been to Ireland but I have to imagine that's kind of what it looks like. If it weren't for the lack of cell phone and internet service, I'd have been hard pressed to find a good reason to come home. Oh, well, we had to take care of the animals. But man, that is one heartbreakingly beautiful part of California.

We shopped for antiques and gifts. Cambria is a charming little tourist town, filled with bakeries, antique shops, tchotchke vendors, and Italian restaurants. I finally got my beret.

And we both got enough sleep. The hotel, as mentioned before, lacked the modern amenity of free wireless internet access. Whatever dwarf built the shower seemed to think that a nozzle four and a half feet off the ground was high enough for anyone. And the continental breakfast left something to be desired. But during warmer times, I'd have availed myself of the par-3 golf course, the pool, and the croquet court; and the price was quite reasonable. I would stay there again; after all, we didn't really do much in the hotel but sleep there.

I've got to say that I enjoy the Paso Robles wine region better than the Santa Ynez, Napa, or Sonoma regions. There are still wineries that do complimentary tastings. Many wineries include food in their tastings -- not just some palate-clearing crackers, but real food like chipotle burgers, carnitas, and substantial chocolate treats. There are more wineries, in a smaller area, and the ratio of superb wines available for sampling is high. It is wine country the way it was meant to be, the way it used to be in a lot of other places.

On the way back, we also stopped to visit Fort Tejon. I've driven through the Grapevine a hundred times and seen the sign for a historical monument but never been. So this time, we pulled off the road and stopped. There are several buildings from the original fort still there and some very interesting exhibits. This is where the Army experimented with using camels as pack animals in the 1850's, and it was the epicenter of Edward F. Beale's blatant abuse of military and Federal civil power to create a massive real estate empire for himself at the southern end of California's central valley, which today survives as a private enterprise known as Tejon Ranch Corporation and is now the largest private landholder in the state.

When we were there, we saw a bunch of kids wearing period costumes doing things like making nails in the blacksmiths' shop, cutting lumber with old-fashioned saws, churning butter and cooking food, and firing adobe bricks. They were on an overnight field trip and it looked like about the coolest field trip I've ever heard of kids doing. Good for them and their teachers (some of whom were staying the night with them for the trip; they were sleeping in the old barracks building) that they got this really interesting experience.

I found, upon my return to mundane life, five hundred entries on my blog reader which I've simply marked as "read" despite not reading them, a desk full of fires to put out at the office, and plumbing problems at home. And a Wife determined to eliminate every last shred of carpet in our house, uncaring if that means leaving bare concrete subfloors to walk on, waiting for me at home. Well, that's a crash back to real life for you, but that's what you get sometimes.

"TL, can we come along next time?"

No. Well, two of you can, and you know who you are. See you in Los Olivos next month for the barbeque, friends.