| Thanksgiving cruise |
[Nov. 25th, 2011|09:43 pm] |
Heidi's parents were out of town this Thanksgiving - a family friend is heavily involved in the Mars Rover project, so they've been invited down to Florida for tomorrow's launch - and knowing it was just we three, and that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) sioneva's birthday fell on Thanksgiving this year, we opted to bypass the effort involved in cooking our own dinner and booked seats on the Thanksgiving Cruise. The cruise is an annual event put on by Argosy Cruises, and it's something we've done twice before, although I forget the years now. The cruise started around 2pm, so we set off downtown around quarter to one and started looking for a parking spot. Places under the viaduct were surprisingly few and far between - presumably people drawn to the various restaurants on the waterfront - so it took a while, but we found a couple who were leaving their spot once they had fed their kids.
 thedoughnut was getting anxious, so I took him over to the ticket desk at Pier 56 while Sio waited to park the car. In the event we were ready in plenty of time, but Sio was unfortunate enough to be walking over from the car just when the most torrential rain of the day came down, which is why in our boarding photo she looks somewhat drenched. No matter - once we'd got our coats off we were taken to our seats on the middle deck, where we'd been fortunate enough to be assigned a semi-circular booth to ourselves. Sio's sister had also treated us to some sparkling cider to accompany the meal, which C attacked with gusto once he realized just how much he liked it.
The appetizer was potato crusted goat cheese served with a pear hazelnut chutney and a balsamic reduction. We'd had this chutney on one of the previous cruises, and it's the only preparation of pear I really liked - I polished off mine and then had the last of C's for good measure (he had one cracker with cheese, which he liked, but he was saving himself for his main course). By the time we were done we were setting off on a leisurely tour of Puget Sound, although it was foggy enough that it was hard to tell exactly where we went. The second course came, a baby Field greens salad tossed with stone ground mustard and rosemary vinaigrette, apples, dried cranberries, crumbles blue cheese and candied walnuts and cinnamon swirl raisin bread croutons. It was fairly tasty, but as someone with a tendency to like my salad drowned, it could've done with a bit more vinaigrette and lots less walnuts - they have no place in salad.
C decided the brown spots in the mustard were bad bits, but he ate the greens and apples, then slumped back in his chair holding another glass of (non-alcoholic) apple cider in a fair imitation of a drunken sot. He wanted to go out on the deck, but we prevailed on him to wait on the next course, which duly arrived. Sio and I opted for the traditional turkey and sides, but C, ever so much the PNW boy these days, got the salmon and rice. We each managed to eat about half of our serving, and then C and I put on our waterproofs and headed outside. "It's a bit blustery," was his verdict, and he wasn't wrong: we went twice around the upper deck, by which time my trousers were approaching saturation point. There were only two others who were ... brave enough to venture out in the open, and they only stayed up there a minute or so. We followed them back inside in short order.
Dessert came at a leisurely pace, a pumpkin cheesecake with rum caramel sauce. Now I'm not a fan of pumpkin - I find it much too overpowering as a feature flavour - but it's tamped down enough in a cheesecake that it's perfect. Not that I managed to eat it all, but I gave it a good shot. By this time we were bimbling back across the Bay for some gratuitous city shots as the sun set, and then we were back at the pier, which necessitated another trip out as to watch as the boat docked. It wasn't raining so much by then, and C got a great deal of inexplicable joy from hearing the ship judder alarmingly into position. The waterfront was mostly empty as we headed back to the car and, thanks to my magnificent navigational skills, drove right the way to the far side of town to get back on the freeway home. |
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| Games games games |
[Nov. 25th, 2011|08:27 pm] |
For someone who rarely plays games, I own a ridiculous amount of games: I have games on Steam (157 at last count, of which only 27 have ever been installed); games in boxes that are so undisturbed that I just wiped away cobwebs from the ones in the corner of my shelf; and games for consoles, not all of which I even own. Even when I do play games, it tends to be polarised between those that only require 5-minutes of my attention- most recently I've been playing the excellent (and free) Stealth Bastard, where most of the levels can be completed in less than a minute - and those that require so much time to play through that there's none left for anything else (OpenTTD being the main culprit).
It seems like most people that the problem is I find it hard to resist a real bargain, and even when you're being selective, Steam's semi-regular sales have made it incredibly easy to pick up quality games for low prices. I calculated not all that long ago that I'd spent less than $400 in total on all of those games, which was around 1/3rd of their total regular price, or about $10 a month. We're not talking average games, either, as apart from my penchant for indie titles, most are GotY contenders or winners, so it's not exactly a vast expense. It's certainly cheaper than my Ancestry subscription, anyhow.
I don't say this to boast about the richesse of gaming options, however; quite the contrary, it's somewhat embarrassing to have bought so much for so little reason. At one, now long-distant point I determined (and I know I"m not the only one to have done this) to implement a play-one-buy-one policy, and accordingly set out to play through my library alphabetically. I put hours into Anachronox, hours! And then, around what I now understand to be about 2/3rds of the way through, I had a hard drive failure. I'm pretty sure I have a backup of the savegames somewhere, but I just haven't had the heart to go back to it.
But there, also, lies the other side to this tragic tale: it took me so long to get that far because with a few notable exceptions, I really suck at games. In the time it took me to trundle through Anachronox, those whose gaming skills are ... more honed, let's say, would've already churned through contemporaneous epics like, say, Baldur's Gate and be most of the way through defeating the Taiidan Empire. The one time I played Command & Conquer, I managed to fail the tutorial mission. Why do I like OpenTTD? Quite apart from the fact that it's child-safe, I can turn off all of the AI opponents and sandbox it for hours on end. Not having competitors makes business so much easier.
( Case in point )
So yes, though my desire be strong, my gaming-fu be weak, and I need practice. I have no doubt that like anyone who's left the student life behind and/or acquired a child, time is a genuine factor, but I need to make inroads in an effort to finish something other than Half-Life or Portal. If I do, I'll probably post something about it here. Although I see Portal 2 is on sale right now... |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 11th, 2011|09:50 pm] |
The funny thing when you're doing genealogy research is that you can search diligently but fruitlessly for, quite literally, years trying to find the tiniest clue, the key you need to unlock another generation of long-deceased ancestors. And then one day a random Gooogle search pulls up page 934 of a 1257-page tome from its public domain archives and suddenly there it is, the piece you've been looking for:
It turns out this document's on Ancestry as well now; I assume it's a fairly recent addition to both since it's never shown up before. For a tiny paragraph it's remarkably informative, though: it gives me the marriage location, details of the parents and siblings, and a good idea of where I should be looking next. On the downside, the way the book's written makes it somewhat impenetrable in getting further information out of it, which is a bit of a shame when there's a letter in the Appendix from one Count Ferdinand von Hoechstetter of Austria that indicates that that particular branch is likely traceable all the way back to 1390. |
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| @ironychan |
[May. 27th, 2011|08:52 am] |
Heard on the radio today:The garden centre near me is selling ex-Blackpool illuminations, e.g. a 10ft Holland's Pies truck and an 8ft My Little Pony. |
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| Long shot |
[Feb. 15th, 2011|10:46 pm] |
I just installed Semagic again after about 2 years. Still does the job, I guess.
Anyhow: about 12 years ago now, during my first trip to the US and a snowy week in Northampton with the now dear wife, I stumbled across a set of buttons in a fabric store that were so nerdy that I had to buy a set. Come this evening, I went to look for them and could find only 2. I'm therefore throwing out an absurd request: if anyone can tell me where I might buy something at least similar to the item I found in a single shop over a decade ago, please let me know. Because "circuit board buttons" doesn't work so well as a Google search.
(I did find one set on ebay, actually, but they were blue. And bulbous. And kind of meh. I'm after flat metal discs if possible, about 1" diameter; the circuit board design is really optional, I just want something vaguely similar.) |
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| Guess the lyrics game! |
[Feb. 10th, 2011|04:22 pm] |
Crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 2nd, 2010|01:22 pm] |
I saw this pic in an article on the Beeb News. Am I the only one who thinks Jacobs' hed is pastede on yey?
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 28th, 2010|08:46 pm] |
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sioneva mentioned a short while ago that she didn't listen much to the Beeb's From Our Own Correspondent podcast because all the stories were negative. I can see where she's coming from, but I wanted a closer look, so I took a sample of stories from October and November to get an idea of how they ( really panned out ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 27th, 2010|08:51 am] |
I'm reasonably sure it was unintentional, but at least one part of SCOTUSblog's summary of the Landrigan execution in Arizona was a truism:Chastising a federal judge for delaying an execution based on “speculation” about the lethal drugs to be used, the Supreme Court by a vote of 5-4 on Tuesday night cleared the way for Arizona to carry out the death sentence of Jeffrey Timothy Landrigan [...] Landrigan, 50, was executed not long afterward, by lethal injunction. |
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