entirely safe and fun

Don’t know why he’s so irritated… he didn’t have to carry a baby up a mountain or anything.

New photos are up, tagged with their date of upload (20080516). Among the many adventures depicted therein: on Mother’s Day, Punam and Dante and I, along with Dante’s baby friend Ella and her parents John and Tammie, climbed most of the way up Marin County’s Mt Tamalpais, stopping at the West Point Inn for their pancake breakfast. It was a pleasant hike, and the various native irises were at the peak of blooming - you’ll see quite a few pictures of Douglas Iris (Iris douglasiana) in there.

And there’s more! Several adventures are documented, including Dante’s VR grapefruit encounter, mysterious tomatoes, and yellow (not Coldplay). Enjoy!

Documented here, the continuing saga of my attempt to master microfoam. Also, the awesomeness of ImageMagick. I was able to make that little montage with just a few keystrokes, by putting just the sixteen pictures I wanted in a directory by themselves, changing to that directory, and saying…
md small
for %i in (*.jpg) do convert %i -resize 100 -filter Lanczos small\%i
cd small
montage *.jpg -geometry +1+1 ..\montage.jpg
Note that “convert” and “montage” are two of the programs in the IM suite. I do have one small complaint about IM — why is it that I can’t take all the results of a batch transformation and “pipe” them into a multi-image operation like montage? The support for piping single images is incredibly handy, and it would be awesome if it could be generalized.

As you can plainly see, Dante is still very cute. His cute overflowed, in fact, requiring a cute trim! He’s been trying really hard to sit up — he can do it with a little help, in fact — and he rolls and wiggles about, an obvious precursor to crawling. However, he has an idiosyncratic method of rolling. Consider how you, an adult, might go about rolling from your stomach to your back: probably, you’d do it by pushing up a bit with your upper body, then reaching across your torso with one arm and pushing with that arm (you might instead do the same thing with your hips and legs). Dante prefers to pull his legs under himself, stick his butt in the air, and then lean, giving a more catastrophic character to his movement than would be expected from something as gently named as “rolling”.

Lots of new pictures are up on my Flickr page, tagged “20080129″, and there are more in the “yearzero” tag.

Now that we have cool weather again, I have resumed brewing. Punam got me a thoughtful Christmas gift, an immense, 8-gallon clad-bottom brewpot with two threaded ports, which we’ll also use for canning. It went to work a day early, when, on Christmas Eve day, and with the help of my friends Chris and Carolyn, I made another batch of my German-Belgian hybrid wheat beer. I decided to change up a few elements of the process this time. Most importantly, since it was the beginning of tangerine season and our tree is bent under the weight of its fruit, I substituted three full ounces of fresh tangerine peel for the usual half-ounce of dried orange peel. To accentuate the citrus flavor, I bumped the reinforcing coriander by 50%, changed the hops to the unassertive, floral/pine-woodsy variety Challenger, and lowered the amount to keep alpha acids approximately constant. I then took the fermenter outside, brewing at ambient temperatures, which stretched fermentation time to just over two weeks. I brought the fermenter inside once bubbling had come to a virtual halt, to make sure fermentation went all the way to dry… and did it ever! The final gravity was noticeably lower than usual, at about 1.010, pushing the upper limit of attenuation for the yeast strain. Final product is precisely what I anticipated, the citrusiest (is too a word!) beer I’ve ever had, delicious and nutritious. Some extremes are easy, I guess.

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged “month four”. My favorite is this one, which is festive and seasonal and smiley, but there are others… with some of Dante’s baby friends… Rule of Cuteness #12. More babies = more cute. The relationship is not linear, either, but rather exponential, until you can’t resolve the individual babies anymore.

The boy acts so much more like a tiny person now than he did before. He takes conversational turns with his noises, occasionally decides to mimic facial expressions, smiles and giggles, and has taken to making a pretty wide range of sounds, with four or five different vowels now. It gets harder each week not to try and interpret what he’s saying as underformed English, no matter how many times I reassure myself that it’s impossible that he would be producing meaningful signals of any sophistication. He’s also become more demanding of attention, as he rolls around now and has become a potential danger to himself and others. The scariest moment so far was the first time we found him sleeping face-down, nighmare-provoking after all the back-to-sleep coaching we got over the course of Punam’s pregnancy and during Dante’s perinatal care. Of course, babies sleep just fine on their stomachs, have been doing it since the dawn of time, etc, but the power of the modern culture of scaring new parents to death cannot be denied.

29 Aug ‘07, 9.09pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Literally everything. I didn’t do anything else! Challah, strawberries, fresh figs, brie, and fresh red currants, too good to do anything but serve it forth.

25 Aug ‘07, 4.59pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

They has a flavr… not so gret, aktully.

28 Aug ‘07, 3:46pm PDT PST by ccreitz

Such mad skillz I have. You may despair at being my equal now.

Update: this post is just a demonstration for phone-to-blog-via-Flickr workflow. In other words, I made the entire thing from my phone, no other technology required. Still fixing the way these posts will look, but the principle is pretty cool.

Meanwhile, back at the Rancho…

Dante managed to be born in the middle of tomato season here at the (notional) Lazy P Rocking C Rancho. After a mind- altering tomato experience last year, I decided to go with organic and dry culture this season, which is to say that once I had gotten the transplants established using a normal watering schedule and two applications of worm castings, I stopped watering the vines, other than a quick mist on the five or so very hottest days for temperature control. The theory, drawn from enology, is that we lower yield to concentrate sugar in the remaining fruit, which we force to be made with as little water as possible.

We planted five varieties of small tomato: some bog-standard Roma, an odd green striped heirloom, cherries, grapes, and tiny pear-shaped yellow ones which looked cool on the nursery tag. This photo doesn’t make the scale very clear, but picture the largest tomato (the green one) as being about three inches across. The fruit is turning out perfectly, the best I’ve ever had under any circumstances, and it’s beautiful too. The grape tomatoes, in particular, are meaty and strawberry-sweet, perfect sliced in half with a heavy dusting of black pepper on the cut side.

This posting is mostly directed at my future self, as a reminder to be patient when growing tomatoes. Good soil maintenance, good transplant management, then laissez croître.

I maded you a latte, but i drink’d it.

I remember, back in 1996, making a trip to Seattle and getting my first really expertly-prepared coffee drink at some random coffee place. It had a beautiful leaf pattern formed from the interaction of the foam and the coffee, a silky texture, and both milk and espresso in every sip. Sadly, I had already left the store before I had a chance to realize what I had in my cup and to go back to see how it was done, and my subsequent efforts to match it all fell short. I stopped getting milky coffee drinks almost altogether — not that there’s anything wrong with plain espresso, but I didn’t get a lot of variety in my coffee diet, and I drink a lot of coffee.

When I came to Silicon Valley back in ‘03, the stars began their slow trip to rightness. My employers have a really top-notch prosumer espresso machine, a Pasquini Livia 90 semiauto. This allowed me to begin experimenting with coffee extraction and with the purchase of better beans; occasionally I would essay to steam some milk, usually poorly, with a big ol’ pile of bubbles on top.

Then, Punam and I met Anna, and Anna introduced us to Barefoot Coffee Roasters, where her friend Avery (of “post-industrial folk noir” act Corpus Callosum) worked and still works. Barefoot is no Seattle-chain, manned with untrained high-schoolers; it is an artisan roastery, and a place where coffee is Serious Business. Every drink that involves steamed milk and some pigmented liquid gets “latte art,” a little heart or leaf or other flourish. Even a macchiato, a drink with virtually no milk at all, gets a nicely-formed spot in the middle. And there’s the Whim of the Barista — putting your life in the hands of whoever is behind the bar, with the only guarantee being that whatever you’ll drink isn’t on the menu… excellent.

At any rate, Avery occasionally teaches a class (it should be noted that it’s a hands-off class, consisting of Avery talking and demonstrating) on how to make a latte the right way. Since I attended that class, and the stars came right, I have gotten pretty consistent at making latte art myself. It’s one of those skills that’s just about impossible to pick up by reading *, but not too tough to get by watching. Avery asked for feedback when attendees saw him again, and I’ve told him that I learned what I needed from the class, but I figured that twenty pictures were worth twenty thousand words. Sorry for the quality — they’re all phonecam pictures.

*But here’s how it’s done: For the moment, we’ll assume you’ve got the espresso extraction part down. Use a cold steaming pitcher - cold pitchers and cold milk mean more time to foam. Put into a reasonably sized pitcher about 4-6 ounces of milk. I’ve had my best success with milkfat percentages between 2% and 6%, but skim (for the Flavorless Latte) and half-and-half (for a breve) have worked OK too. Purge liquid water from the steam wand, then turn off the steam. Put the steam outlets just below the surface of the milk and tilt the pitcher to give yourself plenty of surface area. Turn on the steam and establish a whirlpool effect. Do not blow bubbles! It’s OK if the milk surface occasionally goes up and down and puts a bubble or two into the milk. Monitor the pitcher, and when the temperature gets to about 120°F, plunge the steamer wand into the bottom of the pitcher to finish warming the milk to whatever temperature you find tastiest. No more foaming at this point! Turn off the steam when the milk is warm enough, say about 130°F. Swirl the milk in the pitcher. If you’ve done this right, there should be no pile of foam in the middle, but a smooth silky foam that climbs the sides of the pitcher along with the milk. Rap the pitcher on the table to work out any large bubbles. Now, to pour. Tilt the cup with the coffee already in it to about 45° and aim the spout at the middle of the cup. Pour until there’s a white spot. As soon as you see that, start vibrating your hand to keep the foam pouring out. Swing the pitcher slightly from side to side and slowly untilt the cup, so that each pass of the swinging pitcher pushes back the previous bits of foam. Once the cup is horizontal, bring the pitcher to the center of the cup and run a line back through the back-and-forth lines. This will make either a heart or a leaf, depending on how aggressive you’ve been with the back-and-forth and with the push back.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GOOSE?

Seriously, not dead.

First, I’ve got up a Flickr set of our trip to Kauai (for more photos, see the larger set). The photos there will be acquiring notes over the next few days, too. Everything in the Bestof set has a narrative comment already. Thanks to Michael and Daniela at Marjorie’s Kauai Inn for their attentive hospitality! I’ll be pulling together a more comprehensive blog post on this adventure, probably using Flickr’s syndication features, soon.

Second, beer. It turned out excellent and I’ll be repeating the recipe soon, probably next week, but with a couple of small changes to address the things I would have preferred to turn out differently. The hops will become Nugget and I’ll chop the amount down a bit, compensating with a bit more bitter orange peel. At bottling, I’ll rack off the sediment more aggressively, and I’ll be using a little more corn sugar, as well, to increase carbonation.

Finally, two neat websites I’ve started reading lately:

• Boot Legacy Law Blog, a strikingly well-written legal blog on matters related to IP, property, and jurisdiction issues. Way cooler than it sounds, in no small part because of the parts about treasure hunting, and because it’s so well researched and chock full of linky goodness.
• Epidemix, a public health blog… reassuring to me because I was worried that I was the only person actually reading the CDCP’s (pardon the pun, but…) vital Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It’s news you can use to avoid catching a reportable illness.

Check ‘em out on the blogroll (over there on the right, unless you’re in a feed reader or some commie mutant thing like that).