It seems like I’ve been up late a lot. Usually we’ll get the kids in bed around 8:30, then head down stairs and Annie will watch one of her shows and I’ll catch up on the days tech news on Engadget or Gizmodo. I’ll head up to bed and check email, and since I’m working with teams in Germany, Romania, and India, I often just get caught up in work.
Sometimes, it is not the geospatial issue- I’ll just look at what’s coming up for the next day or two and get a head start on it, and next thing I know it’s 1 in the morning and I have a 7:30am meeting I need to be at!
So instead, tonight, I’m up at 1:10 in the morning blogging. Don’t know if that’s any better than working, but I’ve been a deficient blogger, so wanted to catch up a little.
I’ve had a great car over the past 14 months, a BMW 540i sport. When I bought it, I wasn’t really looking for that kind of a car. We had just let mom use my Maxima and so I was looking for maybe a newer version of that, maybe a little nicer, something like a used Acura, or maybe even an older Lexus with low miles. In the course of hunting around, I came across an ad for that BMW pretty far below blue book so I checked it out. There was some serious rumble coming from the wheels, and I assumed that was the reason for the discount. The guy selling it said he’d been sitting on it for a month and no one had taken it, and now he had to pay the note on the auction, so he had dropped the price. I bought it, put some new tires on it, and the rumble disappeared. Luckily, it wasn’t wheel bearings!
Well, I put serious miles on that car, and it was up to 105k and things, little things, were starting to go wrong. So I started hunting around for something else, and came across another screaming deal, well below blue book, on an awesome car. Having been spoiled with a fast German sedan, I am now a bit of an addict. I am now about to go jump in my new 2003 Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG. Yes, yes, when this car came out five years ago, it was the fastest vehicle in the world with four dours. And yes, it does have 516 ft/lbs of torque coming from its supercharged V8. But it is a refined car. As the old commercial says, “anything else would be… uncivilzed”.
I was laying in bed tonight and my thoughts turned to all of great work that Annie does for me and the kids and I started to get really emotional about it, so I figured I’d blog a little about her while the thoughts were fresh.
Annie has been up with the kids for the last five weeks as they passed around a bevy of illnesses including stomach flus, fevers, nasty coughs, colds, etc. Through it all she’s managed to keep food on the table, laundry clean, dishes done, and get relief society lessons ready all while keeping a smiling face when I get home. Over the past two weeks she has even started a pretty massive “de-cluttering” effort in her “free time”.
This week, just as everyone is finally getting back to health, I have to go out of town for business, and so she gets the 24/7 job of taking care of everyone and everything on her own, basically a single mom, until I get back.
Sometimes I think I have a tough job, until I think about the hours and drudgery that Annie happily submits to as she honorably and lovingly defines what it means to be a mother in Zion.
Adobe saw fit to order me a sweet new Macbook Pro laptop, so I’m writing this post from there. I’m liking this machine so far, super easy to set up and I can still run Windows from it for applications that just flat out work better in Windows (like Outlook for email).
We just got back from a two week family vacation. We drove down the west coast from Seattle to Southern California, then over to Arizona for Christmas, then back up through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, then home in time for a New Year’s Eve gig. Whew!
I just got back from helping a group of elders remove a truckload of moving-leftovers type of junk from a friend’s house. Three quick observations:
We had six guys show up at 8am on a Saturday morning. For free. Amazing.
I played a gig that got over at 1:45am in Seattle and still managed to stagger out of bed and get over there on time. The “snooze” button on my alarm is supposed to go off every 9 minutes, but this morning, I remember hitting snooze at 7:53, dozing back off, then waking up again to the alarm going off and looking over, thinking I’d overslept, only to see that it was still 7:53. There are two alarms on that clock, but one is set to go off only on weekdays. Malfunction? You be the judge. Amazing .
With the six of us, it only took 24 minutes to fill a commercial grade lift truck all the way up with old boxes, couches, desks, chairs, tires, trash, etc. It would likely have taken the family several hours to get rid of all of that stuff, if they could do it at all (several heavy couches and things like that). Amazing.
The family that we helped had moved to another state on Monday morning and had a few piles of junk that they didn’t have time to get rid of after the movers were done. I had been their home teacher for the last few years, and probably had more opportunities to be of service to them than I had had with any other family I’ve ever home taught.
It was kind of odd standing in their empty house with them gone. One memory they left was the smell of their cats. I’m fairly allergic to cats, and I used to always came home from monthly or other visits with cat hair all over me. It tended to keep the visits relatively short, which is probably just fine.
I also wandered into the back yard, and was reminded of the service project a couple of years earlier to clear out these huge mounds of lawn debris that had stacked up.
As I walked back around and up through the front door, I remembered the standard greeting from their four year old boy T, when he’d answer the door for visits and immediately zap me with his imaginary fire ball, which I would of course eat, grossly overact a burned mouth, jumping up and down and fanning my open mouth. This was always followed by extreme laughter and kind relief in the form of another zapping, this time with an ice ball to allay the suffering.
I’m sitting here at my desk, the same place I was sitting a year or so ago when I received a phone call from B, the father of the family, who is my age, telling me that his brother had just died. This was followed by a swarm of activity - trying to do all we could to love them with meals, visits, tearful conversations with both B and his parents, who called me from CA to make sure that I was taking care of them, all of this culminating a few weeks later in B and his wife K finally being sealed in the temple.
Now they’re gone though. I’ll give B a call to make sure they got in ok and that everything is going all right for them in their new home. I’m no president Monson, but I’ll try to imitate him - once a home teacher, always a home teacher.
I was at a fireside the other night where the stake patriarch addressed the young men and young women. He told several VERY cool stories about his experiences as patriarch, which I don’t feel I should talk about here. He and I know each other somewhat since we had been seminary teachers in the same stake for four years. He has been teaching seminary for decades, and only accepts new callings if they’ll let him keep doing it. Normally, you are not allowed to be an early morning seminary teacher and hold a regular calling in the ward or stake.
After the fireside, we were chatting and in the course of the conversation I mentioned a recent lesson I had taught in the priests’ quorum. The lesson included a discussion of a pattern that occurs in the scriptures leading up to visions or revelations. Nearly always, visions or revelations are preceded by the individual studying the scriptures, pondering gospel principles, and prayer. There are countless examples of this, and I had mentioned both the first vision of Joseph Smith and the revelation contained in D&C 138. In D&C 138, Joseph F. Smith was pondering the scriptures and the Atonement, when a scripture popped in to his mind in 1st Peter. He re-read the scripture and while pondering on it received the revelation contained in that section.
I remarked to the stake patriarch that it is so common to think of our scriptures as something that happened long, long ago. But the introductory section to 138 shows that this revelation occurred in Oct. 1918. Then I realized that when the revelation occurred, President Hinckley was eight years old, and recently baptized. The patriarch it a bit of an expert on the lives of the general authorities, and told the following story:
While at work, I had an appointment to help an older man named Hyrum Smith. At the beginning of the appointment, I couldn’t help myself: “sorry to be intrusive, but based on your name I have to ask - are you LDS?”. The man replied in the affirmative. I asked if he was related to the prophet’s brother, and he told this story:
In January 1918, the apostle Hyrum Mack Smith, son of Joseph F. Smith, grandson of Hyrum Smith, nephew of Joseph Smith the prophet, and a 16 year veteran of the quorum of 12 apostles, died at the age of 45 of a ruptured appendix. Shortly after his passing, his wife Ida B. Smith visited her sister. She told her sister that she was newly pregnant when Hyrum passed away, and that she would need her to take care of the baby after it arrived. The sister, thinking Ida was just distraught, asked her why. She replied that Hyrum had told her that as soon as he passed to the other side, he’d come to get her since he couldn’t stand to be apart from her. Since she was pregnant, she assumed Hyrum would be coming for her as soon as the baby was born. The sister didn’t think much of it, since she had just undergone such an emotionally devastating experience. The baby was born later that year to much rejoicing. A few days later, the sister’s daughter (Ida’s nephew) came in to the house and told his mom that he had just seen uncle Hyrum walking down the sidewalk. She told him “but Uncle Hyrum has been dead for several months, honey”. Just then, she remembered what Ida had said and she sprinted down the road to her sister’s house where she found her. She had passed away a few minutes earlier.
I was the baby”.
The patriarch related that when Joseph F. Smith was pondering the atonement and what happened on the other side of the veil, it was under these circumstances: his son on the quorum of the twelve had passed away ten months earlier. His daughter in law had passed away a month earlier, leaving the brand new grandson to be taken care of by the family. There was no conference that year, as there was a widespread flu epidemic. World War I with its 20 million deaths was drawing to a close. This gives so much more detail to what he was thinking about at the time and why the vision was not only important to the church in general, but why it was a direct answer to his prayers and concerns.
It is such a cool thing to think of the degrees of separation:
Me - Stake Patriarch - Hyrum Smith III - Joseph F. Smith - Joseph Smith Senior.
Also, President Hinckley - Joseph F. Smith - Joseph Smith Jr.
At 97, Pres. Hinckley has so much direct connection to the great figures of church history. It will be a great, great loss of that connection when he is eventually taken to the other side.
I’ve always been competitive. Probably a result of always feeling a bit underdog (I was a scrawny, brainy kid) and being one of six kids, five of them boys. I always felt a little guilty about it, but then I read “Now Discover Your Strengths”, took the test, and found it is my number two strength. I learned to embrace my competitive nature and try to keep it in bounds.
Well, tonight there was a ward activity called “The bite of K4″. This is a competition/potluck, where folks bring dishes and then a vote is held for the best in each category and the best overall. I love to cook, making up my own recipes and experimenting with different things. The bite is a perfect union of my love of cooking, my competitive nature, and an opportunity to hang out with friends from church.
Two years ago, I made my chicken pasta, a favorite of our family, but one of the problems at the bite is that it never starts on time. If it “starts” at 6:30, by the time everyone trickles in and a prayer is said and people make their way to the food, it is 6:50, and so anything that relies on being warm and fresh is now pretty much out of the running. That was definitely the case that year, as my delicious cream sauce cooled off and started congealing and the chicken got cold. That year, I didn’t even get a lot of people trying it as it probably looked not-so-good when it was cold, and was not a winner.
Last year I tried to make something that I could keep warm, and made fajitas with flour tortillas, chili beans and spanish rice. I was able to put these in a nice dish that kept them warm enough long enough. Being from the Southwest, I make my fajitas with some zing. I discovered that Seattle-ites fear spice. At least in Mexican food. That one didn’t win either.
This year, I decided to try a Cuban dish: Pulled pork with black beans and rice. I was down in San Jose yesterday for the day, and so I had Annie get the black beans and soak them starting last night. Today I came home from work at 1pm, stopping at the grocery store on the way. I picked up some nice basmati long grain rice, a good pork loin, and some thick bacon ends. I also got some fresh onions, limes, thyme, garlic, some plantains, and a really nice fresh olive oil.
When I got home, I started by dicing up half the onion (it was a really big sweet Mayan onion), heating up some olive oil in a big saucepan, and cooking the onions with some minced garlic until they started to get soft. I added some fresh sea salt, ground in some peppercorn, and tossed in maybe 1/4 or 1/3 lb of the bacon and let it fry up for a minute. I drained the beans which had been soaking overnight and added them on top, adding chicken stock and water to cover the beans by about an inch, bringing them to a boil. These simmered for the rest of the afternoon, until about 6:10 when I pulled them off the heat.
In my All-Clad sauté pan I got another couple tablespoons of olive oil going, then stripped the fresh thyme sprigs into the hot oil - what a great smell!. I then put the pork loin in a little casserole dish and rubbed it down with salt, pepper, fresh minced garlic, and some Lawry’s seasoning salt. I also added two or three tablespoons of fresh honey. I got the olive oil and thyme pretty hot and tossed the pork in to brown it and seal all its juices inside. After a few minutes of browning, I dumped all the contents of the pan in a little casserole dish with a lid. There was a lot of good brown stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan, so I added some chicken stock and scraped that stuff off, which made a delicious smelling paste, and I added that to the dish on top of the pork loin. I also tossed in some more fresh diced onions (another 1/4 or so of the onion), and some more honey. I juiced a lime and added that to the mix and put it into the oven at about 325.
The next hour or so basically involved stirring the beans in between tossing the football around with Samuel in the front yard, getting Aaron’s scooter to open up, and various other fatherly duties.
After that hour, I pulled the pork out of the oven and started to shred it up using two forks. It wasn’t as tender as I wanted it yet, so I poured the whole thing in a 4 qt saucepan, added some more chicken stock and some water, and brought it to a slow boil. Another hour or so of tending the two pots had the beans tasting great and the pork VERY tender, falling apart. I left everything on a simmer for the next half hour or so.
I got the rice going in the rice cooker, along with some salt and more diced onions (very finely diced) at about 5:30. I found a really nice, large crystal platter down stairs to serve it on and cut up the plantains and limes.
At about 6pm, the rice was done and I just left it in the cooker on “warm”. In a frying pan I heated up some olive oil, added the last bit of diced onions, some more garlic, another juiced lime, some salt and freshly ground pepper, then drained the juice from the pan o’ pork into a bowl and tossed the pork into the frying pan to give it just a touch of crispiness. I let that fry up and asked Annie to tend it while I started another frying pan with regular vegetable oil and fried up the plantains.
The plantains got nice and golden brown in just a few minutes, so I pulled them off the heat, added the juice back into the pork in the frying pan and let it simmer for five minutes to reduce all the juice out of it. I spread all the rice out on the platter as the foundation. By this time, the black beans were perfect - no liquidy sauce, just soft beans with a nice thick coating. I spread that in a circle on top of the rice, leaving an inch or two of rice showing. On top of that, I added the shredded pork, again leaving an inch or so of black beans showing. I took the plantains and placed them around the edge of the plate, adding a 1/8 lime wedge every three plantains or so. I took two leftover sprigs of thyme and weaved them in between the plantains and limes towards the back of the plate and placed one plantain in the middle on top of the pork, a nice bulls eye to the target the dish looked like.
I was extremely happy with how the dish looked and I knew it tasted good. We jumped in the car and headed to the church, arriving at 6:35. Everyone was really impressed with the presentation. Throughout the dinner, I heard lots of compliments and enjoyed many of the other dishes. Lots of friends were there, and I had a great time just hanging out.
At the end of the dinner, I ended up winning both “Best main dish” and “Best of the bite”.
.