Ultra-Chef's Fantastic Epicurian Cookbook!

Springing forth from a series on Recipes for Real Men (and Women), Chris and Mel have compiled a fantastic collection of 200 delicious repasts.

From Andouille Guiness Chili to Millions of Peaches there's some yummy goodness for every ambulatory two legged carnivore!

It will have at least 200 full-color pages with preparation pictures including:

* Death by Chocolate Cake
* Stuffed Pork Chops (better title pending)
* Mel's Infamous Cheater Chicken Soup

Meanwhile here's the reason you MUST buy one of these fine cookooks: Chris and Mel are in an extended, torturous, international custody battle over her girls, and need Legal money - so much so that Mel is to the point of, taking everything but my primary carry piece and selling it tomorrow. Ye-GADS! Don't let it happen!!

Chris and Melody just need a minimum of 200 preorders to do the first print run. Buy the book!
Ordering Instructions

How California is run - straight into the ground.

And don't forget the whole General Motors/Gubb'mint Motuary job-killing part about Teh Union's permanently upward-negotiated contracts and wages. If Obama bails-out CA, then taxes go up in MA - all the other states will pay. How's that for taxation without representation? Sorry guys.

Experiment in Terror

My Wi-Fi Fu is weak, decrepit even - but it's free (for now). I'm going to try somethign with Powerline Ethernet. I doubt a new DSL provider will improve things wirelessly as we're surrounded by a thicket of ten other secured, home wireless networks.
That's up from about only four just a few years ago. Now everybody's got to have one, and the air is cloying with humming bytes and buzzing bits.

Busy-busy weekends in a row

The hot-hot weather of the weekend-before-last precipitated a steamy cloud of crisis that could only be solved by the strenuous use of this leaky bastard:

The carpet cleaner came out of the closet. So, once we had recovered from the sopping labors of Hercules, the hallway and living room was largely reborn - and smelled nicer too!
But space here is always an issue, and with my bike parked in the dining room and the other under a useless cover on the balcony we turned to the Last Great Hope, the Garage.

There were a few pieces left of the track-stuff I had put up, and a decision made to install the rest and move a few things around - made easier by the track itself.
And to whom much was already had, even more was required - so we went shopping for more, and then set-about drilling pilot holes, measuring studs, and screwing the hell out of every-last-thing in sight. And now it's no longer Garage Mahal beautiful, but it is functionally better.



The bikes have a corner for themselves, the walls-o-tools are better organized, and now the golf clubs have a place of their own - and I don't have to lug them however infrequently up and down the stairs - and their absence upstairs means we have more closet-space!
And out on Balcony #1 we transplanted two giant birds of paradises.

CA voters voted to dry up the insane spending...

....and we sure hope it works - but it won't kill the lizards and cockroaches in Sacramento.
It's dry all right but not that hot, I practiced off-hand today.
Nature drys things up and we can't stop that any more than we can cap a volcano to halt greenhouse gasses.

It is Mans fatal hubris to think He's responsible, and then while blaming someone else ("It wasn't me, Jimmy started it!"), claim to be able to fix it. Yeh right, it's another political extortion racket. I'm not sure how to fix Sacramento without sending in a Vet in to really fix the "lawmakers" who steal our money every time they open their mouths, but that would be a most satisfying exercise.

Now HERE'S a Foundation

Piss on the VPC and their Joyce Foundation supporters who do nothing but provide a megaphone for a shrill minority of ill-considered ideas and small-minded lickspittle weenies. A Foundation should do better than that -- now THIS is a megaphone:


A B-24 and B-17 are visiting Moffett Field this week on the Wings of Freedom Tour.



This pork Spendulus-driven recession is smacking my economy good though, so I have not planned a flight like last year or the year before.

You can hear them pretty good when they fly over AND they got a little buddy with them again.

Riding Around

Since getting back home I've gone for about an hour's ride every day - I need the exercise and I hate running. My new bike has forks and some seat-post suspension - and I like the brakes.
The bike path where (in spots) the kids make their own whoops and jumps is down at the end of the street, and goes for miles - all they way out to the Bay. We also have some new stuff going up around here, a bridge over Moffett Drive out towards Hanger-1, and further path extensions up Steven's Creek in the other direction, on the other side of El Camino.
Sometimes it looks foreboding but if you look closely on the left there's a soundwall and a freeway on the other side, not woods and more woods.


We're actually lucky to have a creek at all. In neighboring towns (*cough Palo*cough*Alto*) all the creeks going to the Bay have been turned into cement-culverts for the water district guys. Back in the day the priority was runoff-management and the answer was civil engineering. When Silicon Valley got going the land became too valuable to just let nature take its course - and what didn't belong to one city or another belonged to the Naval Air Station.

Looking down from a bridge, in a kinda derelict area over behind an old oil-company, that's the creek - and another sound-wall where Hwy 237 curves around it. It's bone dry, not much happens after the rain stops in April.


The new bike/pedestrian bridge is pretty cool. There must be a bunch of Stimulus Pork "Murtha-Money" in that earmark - count on the well-connected around here to get it done.
At least it eliminates a hazardous choke-point where pedestrians try to cross an ill-defined intersection and sometimes get run-over. It's gonna open in June.

Out past the bridge is a tunnel underneath all eight lanes of busy Highway 101, heading on out to the Bay and Shoreline Ampitheater where the rockers and deadheads play, and the backside of Moffett Field that's all old toxic Navy junk - and some weird structures where cops and firemen play.

Meanwhile the creek has ducks and other wildlife - cow-birds and herons mostly. I don't think there's been a fish in it in fifty years. It runs right out past the north end of the airfield.

That's Hanger-1 and the NASA wind-tunnel complex. They say it's all shut down now (the wind-tunnel) but I swear sometimes late at night I still hear it. While I was enjoying the evening breeze a Blackwhawk flew over...

More Glass

Related somewhat inversely (invertedly?) to Brigid's post on wicked weather, we had another day of glassy seas when the Vog came in.
Southeasterly "Kona" winds came up and halted the Trades that normally blow two-thousand miles of clean air through, and the noxious plumes of Pele descended - sulfur dioxide and other gases emitted by the blister Kiluea on the flanks of Mauna Kea - obscuring the island of Lana'i. The sea went flat in the normally raucous channel between Maui and Lana'i, and we drove across on glass.


The calm waters enabled us to see much more as we circumnavigated the island on the Safari Boat. The first marvel of the quiet passage was the ability to approach within touch of a Liberty Ship wreck -- the story being that, rather than being sunk at sea in deep water as commanded, she was driven ashore by a captain who couldn't bear to see her go to the bottom. The cladding the ship is concrete, probably built in Richmond CA by all the Rosie-Riveters working at the boatworks of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser - also coincidentally of Kaiser Cement fame (and a lot of other things)...

More...

On the Way to Honolua...

Where the Jungle Girls will move ya'...

Wind and Water

The water here today is from a hundred miles away, and tomorrow it will be gone - and the Tradewinds do the same, traveling two thousand miles before brushing the cane covered slopes and beaches. Sometimes a Kona winds blow up from the south and bring fog from the volcano to thicken the sky - which describes last year's obscuration of Kauai where visibility dropped to just a mile or less.
The water only goes one way, rushing in thick swells across the Pacific, and threading between the tall mountains that rise from the bottom and pierce the ocean's sky, and then rise to catch clouds and rain in ours.
With the water come the itinerant, pelagic fishes that travel along - they're not from here and they're gone again to Tahiti tomorrow. Ono (wahoo), Mahi-Mahi, Ahi (yellowfin tuna), and Marlin follow the deep ocean inclines of temperature and sub-auquatic shores, moving from Mexico to Hawaii to Indonesia and onward. They thread between the underwater mountain flanks that are these islands.
To catch them the trawlers imitate their favorite bright sparkly food - other fish and squid - and drag lures across the surface to bring them up. It's a random act of moving in zig-zags across the water. Fishing not always catching.
A just-married guy named Reed from Wisconsin caught a 30-lb, 40-something inch Ono, which Johnny the Mate is holding. His bride would not attend as she is a self-described puker and doesn't eat fish. But this streamlined deepwater seadart is quite simply not what can be thought of when one thinks generally of "fish."
The freshness of the catch is absolutely incomparable. The sashimi is translucent with no "fishy" smell or flavor whatsoever, and melts like butter in the mouth. If you don't stick a knife in it, an Ono this size sells for about $200 to a restaurant, which will quadruplee or more as the chef prepares a macadamia crust and other various specialties - including drinks - and ends when the satisfied patron leaves a hefty tab behind. In a few shops, fillets so fresh you can get them nowhere else go for $19.99/lb.
Anything a day or two old or frozen - goes to make tacos that are sold at the fluffy-drink tourist feed-bags along the narrow shore, served by waiters and waitresses from land-locked states who hope to change their luck.
And a day or two later the fish and the water is another hundred miles past and heading for the Kiribati and the Touamotus - but more are approaching.

Fisheses

 

So far the Pentax Optio W60 does a good job of keeping the water out of its innards, and has a wide variety of features that enable things such as panoramas and underwater color compensation.
But I've taken just about as many pictures with the camera in my phone, including panoramas - I just forgot the cable to suck them out and put them on the Asus WEeenie...