Hobbits In Rivendell

FauxOreos, Redux

May 8, 2016

3:41 pm

Back in 2010 we made fauxoreos, and don’t know why we haven’t made them since. Possibly because they’re so fabulously addictive?

Well, we decided that, rather than baking a carrot cake (which seems to be the most favorite thing of all things, at D’s work), we’d try the oreos again. We have decided that they are so awesome that they need to leave the house first thing tomorrow, if they survive that long (they will – there’s no way we can eat more than a few bites and stay sensible about sugar intake).

We had set out to roll these out as we did last time, but D wasn’t happy with them being oval for some reason (he’d forgotten that last time we didn’t roll them out, but smooshed them with the bench scraper – the bench scraper that’s gotten lost somewhere along the way, and was perfect for smooshing things). So, instead, we made the best use of our sushi press/mold ever, and used it as the thickness guide for rolling these out to a perfect 1/4 inch thickness.

Of course, in addition to the more reasonably-sized oreos, D had to make one that’s about 6 inches in diameter. Just because. And then we got down to the icing things portion of the exercise, and realized that we didn’t have any icing sugar in the house … so we used granulated instead, sent for a spin through the cuisinart for long enough to at least be finely ground.

Tomorrow morning, some of these will be going to the Honda dealer in Vacaville, because they’ve been so good to us. Some others will be going to D’s work, possibly to be handed out to a few special people, ’cause there really aren’t all that many in this batch. As to the huge one … we’re not sure. That may just have to stay home.

-D & T

Marauding Squirrel

by David T. Macknet

May 8, 2016

11:58 am

Automobile Woes

by David T. Macknet

May 6, 2016

7:56 pm

They’re baaaack….

by TadMack

April 20, 2016

1:44 pm

1 Comment on They’re baaaack….

California, Life

Despite the perception of turkeys as Thanksgiving beasties, they’re really showing off those traditional tail-feathers in mid-to-late Spring. They’re noisy and twitchy and generally a mess, as most grooms are.

Meanwhile, the intermittent rains keep are keeping things gorgeously, almost historically (hysterically?) green — and we find ourselves torn — wanting to go outside and revel in all the color, while knowing full well we’ll end up sneezing and wheezing and regretting the whole thing. Life with seasonal allergies; life in California. Life in the Spring.

Carpe diem.

Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow and plough…

by TadMack

April 2, 2016

7:56 pm

Leave a comment on Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow and plough…

California, Life

Pied Beauty

~ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;

Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)

With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

Práise hím.

First published in 1918, the above poem can be found in:

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Catherine Phillips, ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems (Second Edition).
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Happy National Poetry Month!

‘I’ll to thee a Simnell bring,’ Part i

by TadMack

March 24, 2016

12:57 pm

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Baking

A great deal can change in a short time. Contracts can be changed, lives or health can be lost, and vacation plans altered mid-stride. We’ve all lived it.

What’s weird is how rarely that impacts our daily world. Most of the time, things change realllllly slowly. At the speed of glacial snails. We’re dying for Something To Happen, and …nothing much does. That, too, is life.

Culinarily, change is never swift. A recipe from the 15th century still today can bear the echo of its roots. Take, for example, the Simnel cake. This is an old, old English Easter cake, mentioned in a 17th century Herrick (1591-1674) poem from 1648. ‘I’ll to thee a Simnell bring ‘Gainst thou go’st a mothering, So that, when she blesseth thee, Half thou’lt give to me.’ The narrator (we assume Robert Herrick) confides that he’ll bring his friend a Simnel cake, so that, on the festival day of Mothering Sunday, which is the fourth Sunday of Lent, he’ll receive half of her blessing. Interestingly, Mothering Sunday can allegedly be traced back to the Greeks celebrating a three-day festival of the goddess Cybele, mother of all gods. Rather than celebrating motherhood, the festival apparently celebrates the Mother Church. Used as part of Mothering Sunday celebrations through Britain and beyond, it’s a specialty because Mothering Sunday, or “Refreshment Sunday” as it’s also called, relaxes the strict fasting rules for Lent. Thus: cake!

Sounds good to us.

More information we ferreted out: the word simnel is from Old French simenel, or spelled seminel, based on Latin simila, meaning fine flour. In Greek semidalis means finest wheaten flour, and an old Assyrian word, samīdu and the Syriac word sĕmīdā, mean fine meal. (Semolina, anyone? It’s the same root. Also semmel in German means a bread roll.) Thus, we know that this Simnel cake is made with finely milled flour, probably white, or as close to white as a household could get. It was studded with dried fruits – what was available at the beginning of Spring, leftover from winter – and heavily seasoned. Some recipes call for it being both boiled AND baked. Of course, boiling is traditional for many Scottish cakes, as boiling was all some households had. Few working people had ovens in the 18th-19th century, and cooked in a kettle over a fire, or on a hearth. However, there’s a goofy legend attached to this — a man called Simon and his wife Nell argued over whether the cake for Mothering Sunday should be baked or boiled. Too keep peace, they did both, so the cake was named after both of them: Sim-Nell. Aaand, we don’t believe that at all, but it’s convenient fiction to explain why some recipes call for both methods of cookery.

Our first shot at this cake comes from England. We used the hand-written recipe recorded between 1705 and 1726 blogged at Cooking in the Archives. The recipe is held at the University of Pennsylvania library, and calls for ingredients like “a peck of flour” “a race of Ginger” “Balme,” which was the wild yeast found floating atop fermenting beer, and “sack,” which is kind of like sherry. We didn’t have spirits or fermenting anything in the house, so skipped that step. We noticed that this old recipe did not call for marzipan or peel or anything like more modern Simnel recipes call for, but we made sure to honor the “fine flour” aspect of it by using a strong white bread flour. We substituted the “boyl” – er, boiling for a long, slow rise in a slightly warmed oven. This was a necessity, as it’s still pretty cool here of an afternoon and evening, and the nights are crisp, and this bread just didn’t otherwise want to raise. This could also be blamed on the absolute stuffing of raisins and currants. This stuff is LOADED.

Rode hard, put up wet, still smiling

by TadMack

March 11, 2016

12:28 pm

1 Comment on Rode hard, put up wet, still smiling

California, Life

Friends in the East are having very different weather than ours today. “Oh, spring has sprung,” one said Tuesday. “The rest is just details.” Another crowed on her blog the other day, “The air is glorious like wine! Saw my first tiger swallowtail, and all the frogs are singing!”

Our friends are reveling in their gardens, sitting on front stoops with cider and books, and stretching their limbs in the sun. “Must be nice,” we sigh, as another gust of wiiiind slaps a handful of rain into our faces, but then we look over our shoulders nervously. We are NOT, repeat, NOT tired of the rain. No, no! Californians who whine are subject to lightning strikes about the head and shoulders, so we are NOT whining, not when we’ve finally seen a light at the end (well, the beginning of the end) of the nastiest drought tunnel in years. Even in the face of a potential Category 3 storm (the weather person who said this was met with bewildered, “What?” faces), we are sucking it up to relearn appropriate rain behavior. We first met this in Seattle, and really learned the ropes in Scotland. The Just Do It school of rainy weather behavior is “if you let the rain chase you indoors, you’ll never come out again ’til July,” so we’re managing the trick of being out/about anyway when we’d rather stay in and read and bake and schlepp around the house. One of the ways we keep moving, as Lake Shasta and the reservoirs, creeks and rivers are filling – or in poor Sebastopol/Guerneville/Monte Rio’s case, overfilling AGAIN – is to step outside and remember one of the ten thousand reasons to be happy right now.

So, go outside. We’ll wait.

You out there? Good. Listen.

In the daytime, in between the soughing of the wind and the plink and prickle of raindrops against the earth (and the unfortunate wail of sirens, as people collide and slide across the road) you can hear something else. Birdsong. Millions of birds, tweeting and squeaking and singing. And, of an evening, you can hear this:

Okay, this is two hours from our house, on the edge of a meadow facing a great thousand acre swath of woods, true, but the frogs are singing at our house, too- even in the damp and cold and wet (why would that make a difference to them??) – singing. Singing aloud – I’d say with joy, but no point in waxing ridiculous; they’re singing aloud with an “I’m an available mate” tune going on. 😈 It’s what Spring is all about.

As the traffic snarls and you watch the eejits in front of you speed, then hydroplane and fishtail up the road (note to people who own pickups – in high wind and rain, put something in the truck bed; didn’t they tell you that in Driver’s Ed???), remember the birds. Remember the frogs. Drive carefully, stay out of the wind, if you can, and remember to take a little bit to listen – and be grateful.

Happy storm weekend.

Old Code Lives On

by David T. Macknet

March 1, 2016

2:08 pm

1 Comment on Old Code Lives On

Miscellany, Rant

Occasionally I remember how old I am. Thinking about how I got into computer programming, I usually tell the story about how I was working doing data entry and got tired of the repetitive nature of the job, so automated a piece of it and ended up drawing the attention of the IT department as a result. (I still keep in contact with that guy, 20 years later.) Thinking about it, though, I realized that my start was a lot earlier than that. I realized this when reading an article on The Law of Accelerating Returns. Something in there struck me as being … well, wrong.

The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movie’s Marty McFly was in 1955.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my first DOS-based computer resembled something like the PC3 “LunchBox” Portable Computer, and came to me in something like 1984. Of course, somewhere around the same time we were playing with the Commodore Vic-20 (came out in 1981), Commodore 64 (1982), and the Commodore 128 (1985). So, no, going back to 1985 wouldn’t be all that shocking. Yes, it’d be annoying to have to use a card catalog in order to find something, rather than asking teh interwebs. It’d also be strange not to have call waiting, or cell phones, but I can’t say that it’d be particularly troublesome overall. Nor can I really say the world was all that much different.

I got to thinking about how long I’ve been writing software (this time) because I’d been asked to pull together some screenshots and instructions for a database application I built back in 1998. This application is still running, 18 years later, and still the “system of record” for the company. This and a couple other systems I’ve written are still ticking over in some form or another (this one’s running on a virtual machine just to keep it alive, because nobody can get the software any more, and nobody really knows how to replace it – I had to install an older development tool just to convert it to what it would have been in 2003’s format so that I could convert it to the current format and have a look through things.).

In any event, I think it’s important to point out that yes, the rate of technological change is ever-increasing. On the other hand, there are these bedrock systems which keep on running that nobody is willing to replace because they aren’t broken – they still do their job just fine, and there really is no need to change them. (Have a look at this PCWorld article, for instance.) In parallel with these systems, old code keeps on ticking over, and continues to work (e.g., just about the entire Banking sector of the UK runs on COBOL, or the VA Hospital’s Electronic Medical Records system is .NET wrapped around Java wrapped around Delphi wrapped around a file-based storage system – so, your medical record is just a text file somewhere, when all’s said and done). Other, operating-system type foundations have also not shifted – there really are only 2 operating systems in use today, *NIX and Windows NT – and those have been around for decades – everything added to them is just window-dressing.

It’s only the surface of things which has really shifted – the core remains as it was 20 or even 40 years ago. Yes, computers are much faster. Yes, computers are way smaller, and in seemingly everything. But I just don’t see the level of technological change being all that huge even now, nor do I think it’s changing as rapidly as Kurzweil thinks. Or, rather, I don’t think that the entire ecosystem changes as rapidly as all that – it’s that the outliers are arriving faster, but their adoption depends upon their incorporation into the devices and technologies we already use, which is necessarily slowed by our very humanity.

So. Take the time to look back at all the computing you’ve done, and realize how much things haven’t changed, despite the new names and different packages. Ignore the window-dressing and really think about the technology and you may be surprised at how, really, things haven’t changed. Sure, if they implanted teh interwebs into your head you’d be hugely changed – and, yes, they’re working on that somewhere – but do we really see it happening in our lifetimes? I really don’t think so, because I really think that the rate of change is not solely governed by tech, but by the economics of the matter, and by our ability to incorporate that change.

-D

Aside from reading for a book award, reviewing other books and pretending to be a competent writerly being…

by TadMack

January 26, 2016

1:25 pm

2 Comments on Aside from reading for a book award, reviewing other books and pretending to be a competent writerly being…

California, Life, Literature Review, Scholarly Things

I’m told the candy does NOT, in fact, taste like peas or carrots. Bummer.

…I’m up to a few other things:

February is not just when the groundhog emerges (albeit with a LOT of help from people pulling it) from its hole to find its shadow – it’s apparently the month when introverts Make An Effort (also with a LOT of help from people… pulling). I’ll be booktalking, and being visible this February here and there – first, I’m presenting a webinar February 2nd for The National WWII Museum on Mare’s War as part of their WWII emphasis this year. Teachers and families who do homeschooling, you’ll want to jump on this! The week following, I’ll be on the blog STACKED and then the tumblr Size Acceptance in YA; at BN Teen Blog’s Open Mic project sometime next month, and on John Scalzi’s WHATEVER blog’s Big Idea project on February 9th, which is the same day that PEAS AND CARROTS has its book birthday.

I’m grateful to everyone who asked me to show up and hang out next month, and given me the opportunity to talk about what I do and how I do it.

X-posted from {fiction, instead of lies}

– T

{the people that walked in darkness}

by TadMack

January 22, 2016

7:23 pm

1 Comment on {the people that walked in darkness}

In Retrospect

when you walk through the storm, keep your head up high,
and don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of a storm is a golden sky, and the sweet silver song of the lark –

…Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain
though your dreams be tossed and blown –

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
and you’ll never walk alone… you’ll never walk alone.

To the people still walking in darkness, and waking in darkness, and whose spirits are flattened beneath the hideous orangish glow of sodium lights — hang in there.

And to those who are buckling down for wind, sleet, storm and blizzard this weekend — see you on the other side. Stay warm!

Glasgow:
NY:
Grinnell:
Roswell:
Berkeley: