My Suburban Destiny

What an oxymoron.  Anyhow, I’m patching my personal web server back to what it used to be.  I have about 10 domain names, some have websites behind them, some have plans behind them, some have broken websites behind them.

Maybe someday I get a website behind each.

General ideas–

Advertisement sites for my various language groups.  I have 2 of these.  They’re easy to make and have a measurable impact. Very satisfying work, although kind of hard to fillout with suitable content.

Calendar sites for my various plans to fill up my calendar with movies and potlucks.  Both of these are much more ambitious than any other site type I’m working on.  SocialAnimalsDC.com used to be an almost interesting site, but it’s down.

Blogs. I’m fed up with wordpress mangling my text, eating it, and getting hacked, but I don’t have time to move.  I’ve got 2 blogs, and at one point I had about 6 (not a good idea, easier to add a new category) Http://mistersql.com is worth visiting, although the domain name still isn’t fixed right.

Wikis. I have 2 wikis, but only one do I use much. Neither has attracted any collaborators.  Http://locavoredc.com is worth visiting.

So I’ve met my first goal of not dying young–I’m 36.  The next goal is shorter: not dying.

Goals work better if you go at them while staying true to who you are.  So a couch potato should be able to become one of those people that watch TV on a treadmill.  

So how can I get some technology into my exercise goals?

- Heart rate monitors.  Heart beats are easy to count.

- Pedometers. Steps are easy to count.

- Cybex weight machines are awesome and count repetitions, but only if you gym has that equipment

- GPS can measure how far you went.

And this feeds into that goals are supposed  to be measurable.

Well, enough blogging, time to go to the gym.  45 minutes seems like a good goal.

I have this crazy idea of trying to make icelandic pizza. It’s kind of like Mexican pizza, in the sense that it would be a recipe that never before had existed, least of all in Iceland.

Principle of Icelandic cooking-

If it is edible, you should eat it.  Þorrablót. Need I say more?
If it calls for flour, figure out how to use less of it.  Almost all flour is still imported and used to be so expensive, traditional scandinavian recipes had to be re-invented to use less flour.
If it calls for many ingredients of a specific type, re-do it to use few ingredients of a less specific type.  Icelandic grocerie stories used (and still) have a limited selection– you might night find 15 kinds of olives.
The icelandic index goes up a point for each of the following ingredients:
   Fermented dairy products (e.g. sour cream, etc)
   Mutton, Horsemeat (Yeah, I’m vegetarian and in the US animals commonly considered as pets are just about the only animals that the chicken and beef eating crowd won’t eat, but in Iceland mutton is a staple)
   Fish (Interestingly this is more of an export crop than a historical staple.)
   Blueberries, Rhubarb
   Cabbage, turnip, rutabaga and potato and other vegetables that could potentially grow in Iceland
    Rye and barley, because  it is one grain that can grow in Iceland
Further points for the following characteristics:
   If you can preserve it without refrigeration for 10 months.
   If it uses fermentation as a preservation technique (e.g. blue cheese and sourcraut would be in this category)

I’m still researching what are prototypical spices. I’m going to guess licorice, garlic, horseradish, mustard, dill, but only because those are common in Scandinavian and other far north cuisines.

Brand new french meetup was a success.  So if you send out 1000 invitations to join a French language study group, 3 people will show up, 7 will promise to show up.  There is a vast shallow interest in French. But of those do have interest, their French a  long way from “bonjour” and “merci”  It looks like I’ll have to re-do the planned format for my group– less of a textbook study group and more of a translation group. 

This week I had meetups for 5 days.  I wish I could have cancelled them all on account of a common cold, but so much work goes into getting one to happen at all, I’d loathe to cancel them.  So I’ve been doping myself up on cough suppressants and trying my hardest not to cough.  The hand shaking is trickier. You can’t win. If you shake hand you might give them a cold.  If you don’t shake hands, it’s unfriendly. 

The Pseudoephedrine I’ve been taking gave me two nights of lousy sleep with my mind racing on and on about trying to think in French.

Speaking of French, I discovered that Amazon.ca has a large selection of French books that look like they can be ordered reasonably cheap to the US.  Amazon.fr might be cheaper, I still looking in to it.  And fnac.com might be cheaper, too.  The US site seems to only have French books that ended up into the inventory by accident.

If there are almost no books in French available for US, this implies to me that the entire French langauge education project is probably failing.  Otherwise you’d expect to see people buying “Teach Yourself French” going to a few college courses in French and then going on to consume some fraction of their regular media in French.  That we don’t see the book sellers supplying this makes me think we must be doing something terrable wrong–even with all the resource we have for learning french, we haven’t gotten to the point where there is a massmarket for French comics!

Gouda cheese.

Square shape.

Veg toppings: pepperoncini, mushrooms

Icelandic toppings: beef, salt cod (harthefiskur?)

Buses are on full strike, so we are marooned on St Georges Island.  It was supposed to be  four hour tour!

We were going to go helmet diving, but the business said they weren’t open–they didn’t have their business license yet.  With the bus strike, we would have had a hard time getting there anyhow.

The skipper and the movie star are playing video games.  I’m going to watch Icelandic movies.

Also we saw our first tourist who fell off a scooter.  So the score so far is 2 people dead in car accidents and one road rash.

As a vacation, I guess the best part is that I’m doing no programming whatsoever. On the other hand, that is kind of like a week with all meetings, too.

We’re ready for the trip home tomorrow.  Got documents, got bread, jam, nut butters for making sandwiches for lunch/dinner on the plane and at the airport.

Bermudian is spelled with an i.  

Upper Crust has quite decent pizza, although it is breathtakingly expensive, event with the buy 2 get 1 free special.

Today we went hiking, we made it to the Whale Bone beach and park. The buses were on strike/work slow down, so we didn’t attempt to go anywhere.  

The son found a jaw bone on the beach and a huge snail.  We also saw and confirmed we saw a Bermuda Long tail.

Today, we went shopping–a experience the kids wanted, but I could have skipped.  All the Bermudan stores seem to draw on the same container load of souvenir kitsch from China, the same stuff you see in Florida.  There are some exceptions such as the locally made pottery, local jam, local barbeque sauce.  The Rum Cake taste good but has hydrogenated oils in it, so I won’t buy a box of it.  I do plan to go home and attempt to make some for myself.

We went all the way to the opposite end of the island, just in time for the museums to close.   Took the ferry twice, the bus twice.  

I’m also planning a restaurant food purchase with the same consideration one would give to any other larger purchase.  I’ve retained a buyer’s agent, toured all the restaurants on the island, taken out a loan against my 401k, updated my credit report.  I’m thinking maybe the “Upper Crust” pizza restaurant.

Speaking of restaurants, the guide books are hostile to the idea of vegetarianism, but many restaurants have vegetarian sections on their menus.

Yesterday we went swimming  and saw the caves.  Today we went on an incredibly late bus and an incredibly expensive horseback ride.    The bus was late due to a ‘union meeting’, which appears to have stopped service for 5 hours in the middle of the day.  We waited over an hour (maybe 1.5)  to get a bus.

On the horse ride the views on the beach were spectacular, but the camera lost power long before I got there.  

The son has behaved for the last two days.  The niece is well behaved on most issues unasked, but when you need to get her to co-operate, it isn’t worth the effort.  Most things can be tolerated for a week.  The son doesn’t get any slack, I have to be able to put up with him many more years.

3/4 through Icelandic TV show, Black Angels.  Anskot! Skit! I’m learning to curse.  

Got a bottle of Italian wine (250ml or so?).  It is almost as good as a Spanish wine, but not quite.

Next time you arrive in Bermuda, if you prefer public transportation, to get to your hotel, you’ll want to ask for a minibus.  They seat more than a taxi, fewer than a public transit bus and they permit luggage.

The public transit ferries are the single greatest bargain on the island.  For  the price of your bus pass, you can also take loop trips on the ferry.  We took the 1 hour loop around Hamilton’s harbor. 

Restaurant food is roughly +50% to double the price in Virginia.  As planned, we’ve been living off of ready to eat grocery foods, like cashews, peanut butter, rice cakes, etc.  We got a fancy soft british cheese that had a french name and looked like a french baguette! I thought it tasted like munster.  We also got some very good oat cakes with black pepper.  The niece refused to try one and refused to eat much of the other.

At the grocery store we found local vegetables, local honey and some bottles of locally processed barbecue sauce.  Chickens are all over the island. We also saw one rabbit.  There is a local beer, which is all imported ingredients, except the water.

Speaking of water, there are just about no public swimming pools.  I attribute this to the general scarcity and expense of water on the island.  When I let my hostess know the toilet had a slow leak, they were nice enough to upgrade our room so a plumber could take care of it.

The son is taxing my parenting skills.  I think teenagers are frustrating because they are so clumsy at navigating the negotiations on how to influence small groups.  They don’t know what is something they can influence and what is something they shouldn’t.  As a result to adult ears they come across as oafishly insistent or just plain crazy.  Adults have the experience to know if they’re trying to convince someone to let them play with matches. To my son, possibly, he thinks its in the same league as having different fashion sense or music preferences.