Reminiscing

I don't think that there is anything that takes me back to my youth as well as good homemade chicken soup does.

Just sayin'

I guess I should be flattered

One of our supervisors down here has come up with the most incredible - in his opinion - Halloween costume for this year.

He has purchased a Chewbacca costume, and is combining it with a pair of my coveralls and a laptop bag (slung over his chest like a bandolier). Considering that for the last year people have been making wookie-like noises whenever I'm present, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised.

Important update! - Nothing interesting has happened!

Meh. That about sums it up, really. Some of the larger producers down here sponsored a shale gas expo last weekend. I've been to a few expos like this one before in other parts, but this one was by far the most enjoyable. Probably the main reason was that the people attending were genuinely interested in what we (and other companies down here) do rather than just looking for a scapegoat. It's nice to talk to people who don't automatically assume that because you work in the oil patch you're some kind of moustache-twirling villain.

That said, yesterday put me in a nearly psychotic state. I think that I've mentioned one of our customers before, who never shuts up. I was in the field for about 10 hours yesterday, most of that sitting next to him, and all of that time had him talking. Not about anything relevant. 90% of what he says is just to hear his own voice and he seems to assume that since I'm also an engineer I must actually care about his ramblings. By the end of the day I was torn between wanting to gag him and wanting to cut off my ears. Now I know how the protagonist in Sounds Like felt. Still, at least the guy's not an asshole. He's just really, really, really annoying.

Also, since I haven't mentioned the wildlife recently, a story: I was driving home the other day and saw something crawling across the road, so I swerved to avoid it. It was a spider.

Let me repeat that: It was a spider. Large enough for me to notice while driving, and kick in the "avoid hitting that thing" reflex. Specifically, I think it was a tarantula of some type.

I can't swallow this tripe

I consider myself a pretty adventurous eater by western standards. I've gone to Chinese restaurants and ordered pig intestine, I was all too happy to try a durian milkshake in Singapore, and one of my favorite things to order at Dim Sum is tripe.

I may or may not have mentioned it before, but Arkansas is a bit of a culinary wasteland. There's plenty of barbecue places and more than a few steak houses, but if you want to step out of a western comfort zone - culinarally wise - you're pretty much S.O.L. There's one good sushi place within a decent driving distance but that's about it.

So I've been craving good asian food - especially dim sum - lately, and the other day I was wandering through the Wal-Mart grocery section and I noticed that they actually sell tripe there. What's more it doesn't look like "larry's discount tripe" - it's actually clean and relatively appetizing. I pondered this for a day or two while I searched for recipes* and then returned to purchase it with the intent of making an at least passable attempt at recreating some of the flavors I had missed.

Thus did I return home and put the trip in a pot of water to simmer for 2 hours, as most of the recipes suggested. I quickly determined that this might have been a mistake, though, as my kitchen almost immediately began smelling like a feed lot. Still, I persevered, convinced that the end result would be worth the minor inconvenience of a bad odor.

Two hours later, I removed the offending offal, rinsed it and cut it up. I then placed some to steam with ginger, green onion, and sesame oil in the same fashion as the dim sum style. The rest went into a frying pan with another sauce. The smell didn't really improve. Undeterred, I plated my creations and tasted them.

As I said, the odor was like a feed lot. If you could translate the odor into a taste, you'd get the flavor in my mouth. I managed to try one bite of each, and then promptly tossed everything in the trash. It was by far the worst thing that I'd ever tasted.

Tonight I'm going to try something a little less daring - pork chops, or maybe lamb if I can find it.
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*I was very surprised how few recipes I was able to find when searching for dim sum tripe recipes. Maybe my google-fu is just weak.

Whoots!

I got home yesterday and found that I had received a letter from APEGGA. Said letter informed me that I had passed my professional practice exam. All I have to do now is file the paperwork and I should have my P. Eng status. Yay me!

Back to reality

That was an excellent vacation. I got a lot of personal stuff taken care of, saw the Riders win two more times (once live, even!), got to see everybody in Calgary, saw Tim & Rhea on their way through Calgary, and got out to Vancouver to see Siochain. Most excellent. It may not be be the most exciting or original vacation but for me it's not the location, it's the company.

After visiting Vancouver, I'm really interested in the idea of quitting engineering and opening up a restaurant. Nothing fancy (at least, not at first), just a small kitchen in the back, room for about a dozen tables out front, and a small menu serving up fresh - and preferably local - food. I think that it could work*. Of course, there are problems, such as the fact that I don't have any idea how to run a business - let alone a restaurant - and am not sure I could handle the commitment needed to start one up. The other problem being that, as a rule, I hate people. I enjoy (hell, I absolutely love) cooking for my friends and family, but I'm not sure if I'd actually like cooking for a pack of howling jackals**, most of which wouldn't know good food if it was shoved down their throats.

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*Of course, it's probably more likely that it would make me bankrupt by 35.

**ie the general public. I had my fill of them working restaurants before I got into my current career. I'll grant you that almost all of those restaurants were chains or might as well have been, but the thought of some of their opinions and sense of "taste" still makes me shudder.

I can see clearly now, the brain is gone...

I've been putting off getting my eyes lazored for a couple of years now, and finally got around to scheduling it into this trip. There was a certain amount of irony when, after my initial consultation, they had to reschedule because the doctor that was in for the week I was scheduled couldn't do the Zyoptix technique that I needed. It was rescheduled to yesterday, which was fortunately still enough time for me to recover (barring complications) before I flew back home.

Surprisingly simple procedure - I knew that it only took about 15 minutes, but I was still surprised at how routine it was. I spent most of yesterday worrying that my vision wasn't going to clear up, but here I sit (at a computer, which I suppose I really shouldn't do) with 20/15 vision the day after. Nifty. I imagine once I'm allowed to walk around without the sunglasses on it's going to be really strange. I've been legally blind without my glasses since third grade. It might take some doing to be used to going without them.

They've found me out...

Is it a bad sign when the bartenders at the airport recognize you on sight?

It's been a rough couple of weeks. I don't know what it is, specifically, but I'm pretty much at my wits end right now. It isn't the stupidly long hours that I've been pulling - I'm pretty used to those by now. It isn't the pipe that burst above my office, collapsing the ceiling and flooding my office with a mixture of water and mouse feces - I wasn't in the office at the time, and no important paper got ruined. It isn't the idiocy that I face every day - I'll rant for a bit, have a drink, and then I'm fine.

Whatever it is, I've just about had it. I've really lost the drive for this job, and I'm not sure that I want to be down here much longer, and I'm also not sure if I want to be in this industry much longer. Financially, it's great. Regarding everything else, I'm not so sure.

Anyhow, at the end of the week I'm back to Calgary for two weeks to write my APEGGA exam and get my eyes lazored. While I'm lying around blind, I think I'm going to do some serious thinking about what I want out of life.

Happy National Celebration!

I would have posted a Happy Canada Day, but it's been a week of 12-16 hour days. Those do crop up from time to time. I can't really complain since despite the hours I was working, some of our field guys have been pulling longer hours. My only real complaint is this: Why are so many engineers complete assholes? We had an engineer out here this week (not from our company, thankfully) with only a year of experience, telling us to do stuff that will damage our equipment all so that he can save some money. When we told him we would not do that and why, he did an incredible impression of a 10-year old sulking about not getting a toy he wanted.

The upside of the week is that I've now got a three day weekend. It's a complete downpour right now, so I think that I will cook alligator tonight, and if the rain dies down later I'll celebrate the fourth of July by blowing stuff up.

These are not the critters you're looking for.

Set the trap up again last night and found an opossum in it this morning. In a move that I'm likely to regret I let him go, since he's not my main annoyance right now.

Surprisingly, he was a lot less placid than the raccoon, despite being about a third of the size. He wasn't violent but he was rather "growly". He also didn't want to leave the cage. I had to open it up, upend it, and shake it before he decided to let go and run for the trees.

Warning: Geek content ahead!

As most of you know, I have two real hobbies: cooking and gaming. These hobbies rarely overlap (even less so since I moved down here where most people haven't even heard of an RPG unless I'm talking about rocket-propelled grenades), so when I find something in which they do I must share it with everybody.

Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd.

And people say that Saskatchewan's flat?

I've been in Midland, Texas, all week at a conference. I swear that the place looks like it's right out of a Sergio Leone movie. Flat, dry, and nearly featureless.

The conference was good. I learned a lot, and then realized how little I still know when I listened in on a discussion my bosses were having. C'est la vie. I also was nearly impaled by an umbrella, which was really neat. We were sitting on the patio watching the lightning pass by (spectacular lightning storms down in that part of the country. Not much rain, though) when a gust of wind blew over the only open umbrella on the patio. When the bartender came out the fix it, another gust blew it out of his hands and impaled it in the wall about a foot from where I was sitting. As I said, nifty.

The flight back was not so nifty. There was a thunderstorm in Dallas, so my flight there was delayed by three hours. By the time that I got in I had missed my connection and another one had been canceled, so I checked myself in to stand by while I waited for my coworkers to come in on their later flight. I was number 43 on the list initially. It didn't get a lot better. My coworkers made their connection, I didn't. I waited for another 4 hours to try to make another repeatedly delayed connecting flight to Little Rock, at which point they delayed the flight for another hour and a half. At that time I decided to get a hotel and try again tomorrow.

You know, I think that after Maguires in Saskatoon, and my own home, I don't think that I have have spent so much time drinking in one place as I have in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

Oh well, it could always be worse.

Raccoon: 5 - Steve: 1

Every man has his limits. I finally reached mine and declared war on my local raccoons.

I've tried to be nice about it. I've tried to buy bird feeders that they can't get in to. The raccoons just tore them apart. I tried sprays that are supposed to keep them away. The raccoons just ignored it. I'm left with no choice. Fortunately raccoons are unable to resist tasty, tasty bacon.

I'm have no idea how many of these buggers that there actually are. Hopefully it's just a couple. I'm also hoping that once they get released they don't find their way back to my place. I've heard of these critters pulling their own miniature versions of "The Incredible Journey". If that happens I'll have to start looking at lethal alternatives.

You know, if somebody had told me two years ago that I'd be living in Arkansas and trapping raccoons on my property I'd probably have had some serious concerns about their mental health.

Things have calmed down around here substantially since my last post. Everything seems to be going pretty well down here lately. I'm busy, but not overworked, the weather is starting to hit the low 90's (possibly a little too warm), the tornadoes have stopped (although we still have the occasional wind storm. The picture at left is the result of one that blew through town on Sunday. These people - like most in town - were without power for 20 minutes. My little subdivision had a 7 hour blackout) and my backyard is in full bloom - I need to drink mojitos on a daily basis to keep up with my mint. Yeah. Life's tough right now.

I was up in Calgary last week for a "manager's meeting" (read: 3 hours of the brass talking about how well the company's doing & where we're headed this year followed by golf and serious amounts of drinking) and managed to cram in some visiting with family and friends. It seems that I can't go to Calgary now for just business or personal reasons. It has to be both. Granted, fitting the personal into business isn't nearly as stressful as the other way around.

And it now occurs to me that now that she's in BC, if I phone Siochain on the weekend I'll have to wait until about 2 in the afternoon if I don't want to wake her up.

The more things change...

My life down here has definitely changed changed from what it was in Canada. Some of the changes are good, and some of them are bad. Still, I find it comforting on most of the occasions when something crops up down here that is so familiar to how things worked up North.

Our salesmen still thinking that the world revolves around them? Not so comforting.

Hypothetical Situation #1: Salesman A gets us a contract awarded on Monday for a significant amount of work. The first job is to go at the end of the week. A normal person might actually inform some people within our company of this immediately so that equipment and logistics can get sorted out ASAP. A salesman won't think anything about waiting two days to tell people.

Hypothetical Situation #2: Salesman B doesn't like the numbers coming out of the lab for a certain blend. Rather than discussing his (valid) concerns with the people who understand the chemistry and trying to come up with a solution together, which is what a normal person would do, a salesman will instead discuss the issue with another salesman and then unilaterally change the blend, inform the client of the new blend, and then ask the lab to run tests on the blend to make sure it works.

They just don't seem to live in the same world as us.

Still alive... Again.

So there was another tornado in Arkansas on Friday. 8 people were killed. Fortunately for me, I wasn't among them. The twister hit about an hour northwest of me. Still, thanks for the concern from those that have phoned to check up on me. Apparently you're paying more attention to the weather than I am, since I don't seem to find out about these things until people call to check up on me.

On the one hand, this is kinda nifty, since I think in the last few months I might have leapfrogged ahead of R:tAG and Amy in the "natural disasters in your state that prompt people to check on your health" category. On the other hand, the sudden frequency of these twisters is bothering me a bit. After all, I didn't really have to worry about them for pretty much all of last year, and now it's seeming like every couple of weeks there's another one. Ah well.

The cops down here are so nice...

Yesterday I got a call from one of our computer vans. Seems they were having a software problem. Unable to figure it out over the phone, I decided to high-tail it out to them, about an hour away. At the time I left, it was about 9:30 a.m. On a typical day, we've already got one job done by that time. Time was a-wasting and I was in a hurry.

I knew that I was pushing it. I kept looking at the speedometer and and as far ahead as possible to see if there were any cops. I was only about 2 miles from my turnoff when I finally got pulled over by a state trooper.

It was a lovely little conversation. We exchanged pleasantries. He told me he clocked me doing 85 in a 55 zone and asked for my license and registration. After I gave the paperwork to him, he asked me why I was going to fast and I told him the truth: We had a computer van down, a customer waiting, and I knew I was speeding but was hoping I could get away with it. The trooper took my info back to his car while I sweated it out, wondering how much the ticket was going to be.

I got a warning. For doing 30 mph over the speed limit. Even I feel that I should have been crucified for it. I might have to send the trooper a Christmas card.

In other news, I'm officially fed up with my raccoon problem. I finally spotted one of the buggers last night. Fat he was, and hairy. And apparantly strong (or heavy) enough to rip the bottom out of another bird feeder. As a humorous side note, my new neighbors dog (a little bichon-esqe thing) whom seems to think that my yard is also her yard (barks incessantly at me whenever I'm outside) also seems to take exception to the raccoon. I'm curious to see how that little battle plays out. Unfortunately, I don't hold a lot of hope for the dog.

It was a good weekend. The weather was warm, I got my mower back from being serviced and finally got the jungle cut down. The hummingbirds returned, mojitos were drunk, and all my herbs that were killed by the frost earlier in the week were replanted. I also planted more foxglove in my front flower bed, baked bread, fixed my oven, and finally saw the Grey Cup.

A very mundane, and rather satisfying weekend, all in all.

I'm gonna need a bigger tub

Thursday saw me sitting at home, feeling only moderately better than I had felt the previous day. Late in the evening, the rains come again. A wonderfully powerful storm with lots of wind, thunder and lightning. Thor was having a good night. Around the time I decided to go to bed, I figured it might not hurt to check the weather station to see how bad the storm was, as I had noticed earlier that there were tornado watches in some counties (not mine).

So I learn that there are tornado warnings in southwestern Arkansas, and the storms are moving north east. In fact, at the time there was already planes flipped over at the North Little Rock air port. Eventually, the storm made it to Cabot, a town about ten minutes south of me, and the station said the residents should seek shelter immediately. At that point it seemed a pretty safe bet that it was going to hit Beebe too. Apparently, if you don't have a proper tornado shelter then the next best option is hiding in the bathtub with a mattress over you.

So about that time I lose my satellite (not really surprising), and go about dragging a mattress from the spare bedroom into my bathroom. It doesn't fit particularly well, but I managed to get the tub covered, for the most part. After about another ten minutes of waiting and not hearing a tornado siren I said "screw this" and went to bed, leaving the television on in case the satellite reestablished itself in time to give me some decent info.

About ten minutes after that, the weather station came back on and the first thing I heard was "...and the storm is now over Beebe, so if you live in Beebe seek shelter now." Pretty good timing, if I do say so myself. So I dragged my ass out of bed and curled up in the tub. Or rather, I tried to. You know, it never actually occurred to me that my entire body would not fit into a bathtub. I think that it would be more comfortable to do a trans-atlantic long haul flight in coach sandwiched between to 500+ pound people than try to fold myself up and fit entirely into the tub.

Anyhow, the storm blew over and after a few minutes I managed to crawl out of my little "hidey-hole". By the looks around town the only damage seems to be a lot of trees blown over.