Winter has dropped and so has the chore list

In case you missed the news winter fell on us like a brick here in the PAC NW. Here is a picture or two to show you how..nice it was. The dogs loved it! They played and frolicked and had a good old time! The kid, not kids but kid loved it as she got to stay home from school. It seems that no matter how much a kid loves school they still enjoy a good snow day or two. The Mrs. And I hated it. We missed two days of work and had to do chores around the house. Ok we didn't have to but with so many kids you have to clean up after them or risk living in a toxic waste dump. I have a long history of hating snow growing up in an area that gets snow nearly every winter. It sucks to drive in. It melts and turns into ice. It melts again and turns into water and mud, which dirties up the house. It shuts down work and interferes with my cash flow. F snow. 
ON THE UP SIDE.I did manage to get the downstairs bathroom completely painted, ceilings and all! It really needed it too as the old mustard color was just too much for my brain to process anymore and it made the room far too dark. It is now a nice (ok clean) oyster color. Oyster means really light beige in case you were wondering and it adds a lot of light and a cleaner feel to the bathroom, which was needed as that is the bathroom dominated by teenage boys! Ugh filthy creatures teenagers. Apparently I was just as bad, or so my wife tells me after a conversation with my mother. THANKS MOM!! I also managed to get a good section of the trim taped off around the house and I am now ready to paint the trim, unless my Bride decides to do it. She did the living room and it immediately cleaned the room up. It was pretty amazing how I paint walls and it looks good but when she finishes up the trim and the whole thing looks REALLY nice! This means she gets the credit for making it look amazing, it is a subsection of the International Rule of Dibs. I don't make the rules I just live by them. 
All this painting was precipitated by the window job. The seams have to be painted in the first X months or it voids the warrantee..ahhhhhh tricky huh!!!? So seams are being painted and since the window blinds are off the hard to paint areas around the window are being painted. That leads to walls getting painting. Which gets the trim being painted. Which leads to heaven knows what wlse getting painted! HAHA!! 
However in the midst of all this work and snow we discovered something really nice. The windows we just had put in do an amazing job and we are very pleased with them! I mean happy, happy, joy, joy pleased! I don't know how the energy savings vs price thing is going yet (that is always the selling point for a window company we know this because we talked to ALL of them) but I know the house feels much warmer and not a bit drafty. So let's hear it for windows! Yay windows keep that cold old white stuff at bay! 

The wonderful trouble with stuff.

So as I muse here I find that I have more aspirations than time and money! That is good because then a person is always improving and growing. It is bad because frustration can set in and cause stress. Stress is made up by the way Google the history of stress. So part of my wife’s dowry (oh I am in for it now) were her homes abroad. We are not rich, and never will be, so don’t start getting mad at the idea of multiple houses. Anyhoo. They are really cute things these village houses and last year I had a really nice time working on them, even if they needed more work than should have been needed. But I had a good time doing stuff to them. I enjoy, mostly, working on our home here too. Home ownership is new to me though. Land was considered a hazard to safe navigation for 20+ years while serving at sea, so it has taken some time to get use to the idea of land=good. However I think that now and have taken an interest in doing stuff to it that is positive. In fact so much I find myself mentally flip-flopping between houses going…”Paint here. Paint there. Bathroom remodel here. Balcony remodel there. Grass seed here. New railings there.” Etc.etc. ad nauseam because in the end this stuff costs money.
Boo hoo no kidding! The very up side to all this is that it really keeps the mind working and turning! I found that it is very good to keep me from “working for the weekend” and getting too lazy. I think we are very fortunate that we are getting along well in this economic nightmare that is happening. No we aren’t rich. We don’t have the savings that I would like to have stocked up (yes, I am a greedy miser). However we eat well, very well, as my wife is a superb cook with an imagination that astounds me not to mention the ability to coupon shop to the extent the managers at the local markets know her by sight when they have to over ride the cash register because she has saved so much. She works hard and has a job that she loves. 
You know what? Maybe we really are rich…

Infusion confusions

Ok so the title is a bit of a misnomer. The only word I could think of to rhyme with infusion was confusion. But infusions have been my latest hobby. It is where you take booze and put something in it to add flavor and fun. Now I am not a big drinker anymore. It seems I prefer a clear mind and steady temper in my dotage. I do enjoy a glass or three of absinthe on a long weekend when I am certain I have nowhere to go and plenty of time to nap, and I enjoy a nice glass of bourbon with my occasional cigar. A nice glass of beer goes well with certain meals and on warm sunny days but other than that I am tea toddling most of the time. So why would I take any interest in infusions? Well because they are fun and it is like cooking without the worry of burning stuff. Sure you can mess it up but the end product is still usually a nice change to an old classic. 
If you have read previously I made and infusion with some of the blackberries growing out back and it turned out nice. As it has aged it has a taste that my wife describes as a nice fortified wine almost. That is because of all the juice I added to it and the fact that I wanted something nice and sweet for the summer. I have already been told that next year’s batch should be much larger so that it will last the entire year. That will be a fun one and I am really looking forward to it! But that will be close to 9 months from now and far too long to wait on just one project! So I am trying other things…

The first, failed attempt was to take some Evan Williams Honey (a flavored Bourbon that was way too sweet) and cut it in half with some Jim Beam. We then added 2 vanilla beans split length wise. It was pretty much what you would expect. Too honey sweet to notice the vanilla properly. So I promptly ignored it and forgot about it. Well I remembered it last week and went to work. The taste had mellowed a bit but not enough. So I took some old clean jam jars and made smaller batches.
The first batch I cut it with more Jim Beam. Then I added both the old vanilla bean as they should be mostly depleted and added ½ of a red apple cubed up to the mix. We shall see what happened.

The second batch I cut it with more Jim Beam. I then added a cinnamon stick and ½ a red apple. The cinnamon is coming out this week.

The first third I cut it with more Jim Beam. Next I added ¾ of an apple. Just to see what the difference will be.

Then honey bourbon was a spur of the moment buy and undrinkable which surprised me as Evan Williams is a good Bourbon and a fantastic White Dog. The honey is just too much though and is actually syrupy rather than nice like Jim Beam’s Red Stag (a Black Cherry flavored Bourbon). Live and learn.


The final thing we are trying is inspired by our Sombrero Diary trip. A tamarind infused tequila. Honey found 400 grams of seeded (HA!) tamarind at the local asian store and we added ½ of it (cut up) to 750ml of Jose Cuervo Silver. It is browning up nicely after the first day. Just 6 more to go!

Infusions are like playing mad scientist and Bob the baker all at once! Next is a cherry infused grappa (which is a really un-nice local one that is brewed up state). Looking back I am amazed at how much bad booze we have. Maybe we are just too picky! Oh well, wish us luck!!

Wow...

So it has been a heck of a week. We got our new windows installed this Thursday and they are making a noticeable difference in the temperature of the house! So now we just have to keep on plugging along pay them off! Next is the bathroom remodel with little bits of household stuff to do along the way like painting, and cabinets, and STUFF! HAHAHAHAHA!! So New Years was a standard boring event, pretty much the same thing we did last year but with a change up of the random girl along the way...but it was low on drama this year so that is a good thing!! (Opps spoke too soon!)


Well this year I am hoping for good things to happen. We are looking at friends coming by and visiting from far flung parts of the country, and the world! So maybe the Mayans got it wrong (OK I know they did...I mean if they knew so much then why are they out of the human sacrifice business? Yeap I went there.) So bring on 2012 I got a positive attitude and a skip in my step! I also have a backup plan involving guns, canned food, and camping gear in case the feathered serpent decides to rear it's ugly head. As far as I am concerned that sucker is always a good kill no matter what hunting season is going on!

My last project

So being inspired by the yule tide and the Datamancer website. I decided to do my first keyboard modification. If you can even call it that. It is more of an arts and crafts project. I mean what else would you call spray paint and superglue? My wife is a scrabble addict and a laptop user who is constantly bumping the mouse pad. SO what would be better than this? It isn't perfect but the old keyboard was a Goodwill find for 5 bucks and the mini scrabble tiles were found on ebay, so if you are going to take the chance of screwing up royally you may as well screw up cheaply! It turns out she likes it and it still works after a minor dis-assembly scare. So the beta test was a success! Next step is a real mod. Ohh what a catastrophe I foresee that being! 

Yaaay booze!

Last spring we (ok my wife) cut our blackberry brambles back...way back. Firstly because they are a nuisance and secondly because they are wild blackberries and are a little on the bitter side with lots of dead growth. She had read how sometimes a good cutting can add to the flavor even if they are wild. So she cut them back and watched them grow, and grow, and grow. So she next started threading them through the fence that keeps the great outdoors out of our lawn. Thank goodness she did too because they really filled out over the summer! So a few months ago the blackberry's along our woods were ripe and ready to pick. Sure we could have said forget it let the critters have them but where is the fun in that? Not to mention we are both frugal, to the point of being miserly sometimes, so why lose the blackberries to a bunch of birds who never ran a lawn mower in their lives?! So after clearing off a goodly section  we had a good haul of berries. Now wild blackberries have lots of seeds and these were no exception, but they were nice and sweet (yaayy baby!). So contemplating a bit I decided I would try something different with them.

Way back in 2009 we took a trip through bourbon country. Bardstown, Kentucky by name and found a little delight called white dog that we both loved. Growing up it was called moonshine but this is the good stuff! It is white whiskey before it is aged in new oak barrels (Google bourbon whiskey and you can see why bourbon is so lovely and why the only TRUE bourbon comes out of Kentucky!). So since white dog was not for sale at the time we figured we were out of luck in having any more the foreseeable future. You could only sample it in the factory tasting areas at that time. However a earlier this year I came across an article that said white dog was being sold! Hooray! So I went to the Washington State package store and went looking and finally found a bottle labelled white dog but bottle here in Washington State. HUH?! Well I am adventurous even if I am a purist and figured it would not be good. Turns out I was right. It wasn't good. It was as the French say, merde, so it sat untouched along a bottle of psuedo-grappa (from the same company). Until....

I took the blackberries and mashed them up and added sugar and let them  infuse in the white dog. Over two weeks it infused and was strained and sampled and re-sugar then left to age/infuse/simmer/percolate in the cool garage until tonight! We sampled it and it is yummy! So here it is! All we are waiting for is our guests to arrive in the summer so we can share it with them. Although a bottle is being reserved for my father-in-law who looks to be stranded in the far flung reaches of Switzerland this upcoming year. I think it will need posting to him by Saint Bernard...just to keep his spirits up!

Photos courtesy of my beautiful Bride!

Looks like Tamarind infused tequila is next! 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

So Santa came down the chimney last night and filled the stockings. Everyone went to bed at a semi-reasonable time and woke up ready for Christmas! So we opened up most of the gifts and everyone seemed very happy with their haul. I know I was very happy with mine! The kids biological father came over and we opened the last of the gifts. Then everyone Skyped and called over favorite people all over the world and I made a very late lunch that consisted of breakfast. The kids retired to the X-box and engaged in a little modern warfare while the Mrs. and I sampled one of my gifts. A bottle of absinthe! Now I don't like anise but I found out I like absinthe. It is a very nice tipsy feeling without the drunky, muddle headedness of other boozes. I have a crush on a green fairy! LOL!!


So nicely tipsy we started working on pupu's and supper. It was a major undertaking that my wife pulled off with aplomb and fantastic results. Pupu's were spinach dip a sour dough bowl and french onion dip and chips. Dinner was roast duck, smoked turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, broccoli and brussel sprouts with a sparkling cider to wash it down. Desert was an egg pudding delight that was cooked by the #2 boy that was taught to him by a nice German grandpa! Thank you!! Now for a long nights sleep....after a longer night of cleaning up. Thank you Santa!!


And yes Mom I went to church last night.

Ahhh the holidays

So my Bride has been a trooper lately. Work has been more stressful than necessary for her and it is time for her to chill out a bit. Unfortunately it is the holiday season and 2 weeks of having the all kids around will probably be a mixture of joy and frustration. Teenagers are horrible creatures as a wise woman said! But you know what? We are going to look on the bright side of things and enjoy the holidays! As part of the whole holiday experience I had my first roasted chestnut last night. How many times in your life have you sung the song? I know that I have sung the first line from the song countless times…mostly because I don’t know the rest of the song. However I never ate a chestnut until last night. You know what? They are awful things. OK not awful but they are not to my taste. A little too…chest nutty I guess. Mushy too, but mostly chest nutty. Well at least I tried it and that is what counts! Never get so old that you won’t try new things, no matter how chest nutty they are!

So I must confess this is the first Christmas in a long time where I am looking forward to opening my gifts. Sure there is always that nice feeling of getting something, but the real excitement has been gone for a while and I just took that as part of getting older. I mean adults don’t get nice toys and shiny bobbins attached to gimcracks and geegaws! Adults get socks, and clothes, and stuff that is needed. Gift cards and the like so that they can go out and buy practical things! Being an adult at Christmas is a pain! Now don’t get me wrong my Mrs. has done an excellent job of teaching me to open up to the Christmas spirit! I am eternally grateful for that too! Now I get joy from watching others get their stuff and I can go “Ooooo look! I did that, I made that smile!”

OK, sure that is nice but don’t you really want to look forward to getting you own something nice too? Luckily I have a wonderful wife who has been working hard to get that excitement back for me. It has only taken her 5 years, which is pretty much record time too as I am a notorious Scrooge!! The best part is that she has put that holiday spirit in me just in time for me to get excited about something the kids got me. You see I have a big thingy under the tree with my name on it! By thingy I mean it is big and round and wrapped up and I have no idea what the h3ll it is!! I know it isn’t socks, or clothes, or stuff like that, it is a big ole something and who wouldn’t get excited about THAT?! Also I have a bunch of stuff’s under the tree for me! Smaller thingies that are just begging to be opened! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! Also my Bride has a big ole stack of lil’ thingies for her to open! So do the kids! My baby boy has his thingy in the mail and should be getting it soon! I am so stoked for Christmas I could pee my pants!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well it’s not ticking…….

So I found a round tin of what appears to be cookies on my desk today. Everybody got them but I don’t know who they’re from. Rumor has it the boss got them for everybody but I don’t know that for sure. I mean it could be an assassination attempt. Poot has tried to kill me twice this month by grabbing my foot while I am heading toward the stairs and once while walking toward the glass coffee table. If not for my ninja like reflexes my wife’s dog would have ended my life, in a manner that would have looked like a complete accident, which we all know is the perfect assassination! I don’t know why Poot wants me dead but I suspect it has something to do with a ball, or food, or a ball made of food. But that is just a guess. It could also have something to do with the fact that the dogs stocking is empty. Last year their stocking was filled with goodies well before everyone else’s. It seems to me the ole girl may be feeling a little left out and is trying to grab my attention about it. I should probably find a way to tell her that killing me is a bad way to fill a stocking and it would actually put her on Santa’s naughty list! Ok it was just cookies! Turns out the boss here bought a big tin of cookies for everyone and they are this really nice ginger cookie that are thin and crisp and very nice to eat! Hooray for the holidays!

Happy Anniversary

So we pulled off our anniversary. A little late but well done if I do say so myself. It was a beautiful room in Seattle at the Pan Pacific Hotel (sorry no pictures). The staff was very accommodating and very professional (example of that in just bit). So just to review things a bit... it has been a chaotic time over the last two weeks and we had decided to forego our anniversary until  a couple of nights ago things get settled down and my Bride says she could use a big tub and some time away from all of the mess. So we sat down filled out some Christmas cards and looked on the internet for some deal on rooms with big tubs. Things were not looking good and we were starting to get frustrated and grumpy when we called an end to the search and went to sleep with me telling her to forget everything and I would handle it tomorrow when she was at her swim meet. So after a few hours of sleep my Mrs. goes to work and I get up a little later to do some last second mail, gift buys, kid planning, kid sleep over at her dad's, and web searches for a room with a tub. At about 2 o'clock things are wrapped up on my end. My wife gets home earlier than planned (YAAAYY!!) and we work on getting the kid/teens handled. We get on the road at 845-ish when the idea of obtaining a bottle of wine becomes a good idea for later in the evening. So we do what comes naturally....for us any way. We stop at the Circle K and grab 2 bottles of Boones Farm and hit the road! 

You see Boones Farm is an inside joke we had a very nice dinner in Crete and I brought a bottle of wine and a bottle of Boones Farm (Strawberry Hill) and pulled out the Boones like that was a good bottle of wine! I shortly brought out the "good" wine but all the Americans had a nice chuckle. Turns out the Greek, Swedish and French were confused and wanted to try the Boones Farm, which we did. After multiple objections by myself it was tasted after dinner with such unforgettable comments such as "I don't think this is good but I like it" etc, etc. I wish I could have taken a picture of our Blonde friend as she sat on a low step, wine glass in one hand, bottle of pink "wine" in the other puring and drinking, pouring and drinking until the bottle was empty. So there is the joke!

Anyway we grabbed the Strawberry Hill and the bottle of Drano colored Blue Hawaiian and headed to a nice room in Seattle. We checked in and the staff was pleasant and well mannered however when we got to the room and settled in we realized we forgot the "wine". So we called to arrange to pick it up from our valet parked car and the front desk said it was no problem and would have it delivered, Now that is service! Now this is a nice hotel. A hotel fitting of an nice anniversary and designed to cure my wife of her ills after 2 rough weeks it is also much nicer than I would ever prefer to stay in. Unless someone else was picking up the tab. So here we are, slightly frazzled and a touch sleep deprived, when the young man from the desk knocks to deliver 2 bottles of Boones Farm and some tic tacs in a plastic bag bag labeled Circle K. He smile politely wishes us a good evening and a happy anniversary and hands over the bag. I had to tip the guy! The Mrs. and I both had a good a good laugh because....well of everything! Well the evening was fantastic and far too short but well worth it! I applaud the Pan Pacific Hotel and their staff for making a rotten stretch into a very happy memory!