So – we spent our 20th wedding anniversary in September at Disneyland. I managed to keep it a secret from the family until three days before we were supposed to leave. We had a phone call from Mickey, Daisy, and Goofy to the kids telling them how excited they were we were coming to visit. Everyone was completely flummoxed and then completely hyper about the trip. It was great!  We spent four days at the park and I have a bunch of photos and videos and such to process and upload. Four days was, umm, too long. Although, since it was the first time we had all been there it worked out really well. We were very ready to leave, and we saw and rode everything at least once (and a bunch of stuff multiple times). Apparently the second week of September is one of the least busy times of the year so there were hardly any lines for anything and we would get off of a ride and run around and get right back on. Next time I think three days max, and probably just two days will be right. We were disney’d out by the end of it. It’s a small world was closed (yay!) and so was the Haunted House (boo).

Favorite things – Tower of Terror, ToonTown, The Bug’s Life stuff in California Adventure, Indiana Jones ride, The Buzz Lightyear ride, the Toystory arcade ride, Dinner at the Blue Bayou, getting soaked with the kids on the Logride, the various 3d movie experiences were really fun, you could really tell the advances they made from the “Honey, I shrunk the audience” attraction to the Muppets and Bug’s Life attractions. The theatre for the Bug’s Life experience was awesome. I will try to post a more complete accounting of the whole thing at some point.

I was really happy and enchanted with the Bug’s Life land in California Adventure. I thought California Adventure itself was, on the whole, kind of sad and pointless. But it also contained some of my favorite things (Tower of Terror was awesome!). I had a lot of fun just wandering around and looking at all of the interesting design touches—everything is done as if you are the size of a bug. I took a bunch of pictures of this area and will load those up and give them the attention they deserve. The work of the imagineers who worked on that section of the park was wonderful and it really looked like they had the best time designing it all.

I wasn’t in a lot of the pictures from the trip since I was mostly the photographer. I think I was actually in maybe six or so of the many many shots we took. So these three are perhaps the only ones that will end up having me in them so I posted them. I love the shot of the whole family with Mickey Mouse that starts up this post. We went to his house in Toontown (another completely immersive and impressively designed land) and after touring his pad we watched some animated shorts and then got ushered into the Mouse’s presence. That picture is the only one that has all of us together in it so that makes it even more fun. In this shot Ashan is 14, Acacia is 18, and Jeshamon is 15. Jeshamon had his face painted over by the Materhorn and basked in the attention he got. Jiminy Cricket made a big ole deal about his facepaint during the Mainstreet Parade later that night. Anyway, this was the first vacation I had taken since 2001—UC Merced has absorbed way too much of my life and time—and although it was long overdue it was wonderful. I think we may have created a new September tradition.

Raspberry Etlingera
1 oz. Key Lime Juice
2.5 oz. Ginger-Infused Vodka
1 oz. Cointreau
1 oz. Chambord
1 oz. Vanilla infused simple syrup

Combine ingredients in cocktail shaker with cracked ice. Shake vigorously. Pour into martini glass. Flame Lime peel over glass. Garnish with lime peel curl.

So, yum! Etlingera is a “torch ginger” plant, and since I flamed the lime peel and used the ginger vodka I thought it was a decent name. I am trying out different recipes for a proposed martini party. Making my own infused simple syrups and vodkas. I will preview the different things I come up with here. I am a big fan of the girly martini’s and drinks, I will get someone else to try the more traditional martini’s (and since I despise gin and vermouth and olives they are welcome to it). Anywho. I could also do this one with Pama Liqueur instead of the Chambord and float some pomegranate seeds into the final mix. This might be a little sweet for those who like their drinks a bit more bracing – I would reduce the syrup and cointreau and add another  1/2 oz of the spicy vodka to reduce the sweetness. I will report back when I have someone who likes their drinks less sweet taste it.

I made my own ginger-infused vodka (3 oz sugared ginger in a bottle of Svedka – let steep for a week, shaking occasionally – strain solids). Very spicy! I had also tried cutting up a few slices of fresh ginger, muddling the hell out of them with a 1.4 oz of vodka (basically taking my mojito muddling stick and mashing the ginger to a pulp) and using that as the ginger flavor with good results. I had been doing a ginger/vanilla infused simple syrup but decided that I would get a bit more mileage out of just vanilla simple syrup. For the vanilla simple syrup I scraped a bourbon vanilla bean into 4 cups of sugar and an equal amount of water. Heated to almost boiling, dropped the spent pod in and simmered for 10 minutes or so – then poured into a nice bottle and refrigerated. I left the pod in the bottle to both up the flavor and to identify the syrup. The same night I made a batch of orange infused simple syrup as well: cut orange peel sans pith, simmered with the sugar, then supremed the orange and dropped the segments into near-boiling sugar mixture. The orange segments disintegrated and released all of the juice into the syrup. I strained the solids with a mesh tea strainer and refrigerated. I placed a long strip of now-candied orange peel into the bottle to mark the syrup. Both of these syrups have also been nice additions to my morning coffee.

All the self-imposed pressure to post pithy/witty/meaningful items has resulted in zero posts. That, and of course the pure laziness. You decide which was more influential. There also seems to be the issue that some of the most pressing things I am motivated to write about aren’t exactly the things I want people who know me to read.  That poses a bit more of a thorny problem. Ah well.

The only way to get posting is to get posting. Random thoughts.

As I sit here at the almost end of 2008, a craptacular year if there ever was one, I find myself horrified at the shenanigans at my job, appalled at the state of so very many many things personal and professional, and also generally hopeful about positive changes in most of the above. UC Merced is both a shining light of potential for the valley with wonderful dedicated people who care about doing the right thing and bettering the lives of students in the valley and a cesspool of backstabbing, lying, amoral, hypocritical, genuinely rotten people possessed of a pure incompetence and/or malevolence that is simply staggering.  Not really sure which of those is in the majority – although there are departments where the latter far far outweigh the former. UC Merced has also connected me with some of my very favorite people in the world so it isn’t all bad.

And Obama won. So there is that. But his selection of Rick Warren shows a certain problematic tone-deafness already indicated by his “marriage only between a man and a woman” stance. I know he won’t be everything I want him to be (there is no way he could be and still have been elected) but I do wish that supporting  justice and equality and basic rights for all of our citizens wasn’t something that seemed to be so easily encased in a big ole wall of “except for…

My favorite things this year (in no particular order): Wall-E; Dalja’s Spring; Lee Min Kee; Coffee Prince; Playhouse Merced’s Little Women; House; Mr and Mrs Edson Gonzales; Nell; introducing my kid to the Autobiography of Malcolm X and having him love it; Alex Kang; KeyLime Martini’s; Annie Lennox; Facebook; Theatre in all its various formats; my new Jupiter flute; Thinh Nguyen; Rain (Bi); UC Merced Students (well not all of them); Twitter; HTC phones; OBAMA; republicanimplosion; the end of freakin Bush; Be with you; Kim Ki Duk; Takeshi Kaneshiro; caffeine; Disneyland (and the Tower of Terror) with my family in September when there were no lines for anything; Stewie; watching people celebrate when Obama won; the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics; He Chong; Amy Sedaris on David Letterman; Gingersnap Latte’s; spring rolls; sushi; laughing in the black room; and my cat.

Random post completed.

well…got my own domain. Which, if you are reading this, you already know about. Quite the little adventure really, but the template wars of blogger got me frustrated enough that I just decided to bite the bullet and do it. I decided to go with godaddy and then used wordpress for my blog platform. A little php and linux hosting and well here we are. I have a lot of updates to do, and a lot of wedding stories and images to share. So look forward to that.

Okay, so…been one year and now two days since I last posted: and absolutely nothing has changed! Well, no of course that isn’t true. I was going to post on the one year anniversary of my last post and then be all responsible and keep it up and all that. But I went down this rabbit hole on trying to redesign the look and started playing with new templates and then new graphics and then when one didn’t work I went to another one and then that one was sort of what I wanted but it was IN SPANISH (the XML) so I thought, well let me just replace all that Spanish with the English and then that didn’t work out as well as I would have liked, so of course I decided that I didn’t like that perro template anyway so I started looking for another one and then it was 3:30am. The best laid plans. Anywho, so I did a new graphic header that I like, found a temp template that I don’t hate and so this is a little start towards the redesign. and it is only 3:18 am on a new day. *sigh*

Well anyway…

Well no Todd, I have no idea where your keys are…why do you ask? Oh? You think you left them hanging in your office door when you left work this evening? Really?

Hmmm…let me check…yeessss I think they are there…oh, no. I was mistaken. Nope. Don’t see them. Well I sure will keep an eye out for them! Yes! No problem. Yep, see you tomorrow. Darn those keys sure are pesky things to keep your hands on, aren’t they? Sure would be nice if your keys could be kept in a nice hard-to-forget container. Like this, perhaps:

But that would really only work if you could keep them in a nice, safe, place….perhaps something like this:

Yes sirree, that sure would be handy! Maybe somebody will figure out a way to do this one day. One can only hope.

So…this Veterinarian in Taiwan…yeah, his day didn’t go so well. See the rest of the gruesome gruesomeness here: Crocodile Skin Bracelet gone wrong

This happened on 4/11 — my birthday. I turned 41 (damn I’m old!) and I had a really really bad day during a really really bad week. But you know what? It certainly could have been worse.

So an arctic air mass has settled in over the Central Valley of California. It is freakin’ cold. Our pool in the backyard has frozen over, and not just a skim of ice, there is at least 3 inches of ice on it–completely crazy. I don’t like to go outside when it is below 50 degrees and our highs are in the 40′s and our lows are going to be in the teens! WTF? So needless to say me and the comfy couch and the down comforter are great chums right now. At campus the wind sweeping off the lake made for a ridiculous trip to the parking lot. Fortunately Edson was kind enough to shuttle me to my car at the Lake Lot — although we did have to run the gauntlet to the S&E lot so it was a bit like being in the Yukon.

Geriatric Melrose Place continues it’s ridiculousness in the ‘hood over here. Now the widow Bobbie’s home is being put on the auction block and she is leaving for Colorado. So strange goings on there, apparently some insurance money she was expecting got diverted to one of the deliverance stepchildren and there was some unpaid property taxes and other goings on…sooooo…somehow this ends up with the lovely Teenie becoming the proud owner of whatever random cast offs the widow does not wish to box up and take to Colorado. Thus far we are the proud recipients of a nose hair trimmer (I kid you not); a copy of “Jay Leno’s Police Blotter – Real-life Crime Headlines” required reading in the 4th circle of hell; one of these with the hilarious promo action shot:  

And the wonderful addition of a white wicker bookshelf/cabinet combo with matching white wicker plantation chair. Yay! White Wicker the ultimate in old lady decorating! I am not pleased.

We have also to look forward to a navy blue queen size sleeper couch (OMG) and oh who knows what else when all of this is said and done with. I have already endured the parade of dead guy suits (thank goodness he was a hefty short guy so nothing even remotely fit). SO more to come on that stuff, gosh, just what we needed more random crap to shove into the shed. Joy.

Who is this person? Dr. Steve Kang,  Dean of Engineering at UCSC. Why is he pictured here? Oh I don’t know, might have somethig to do with this: Somebody thought this woud stay a secret!

Silly rabbits…

Soooo…This is my semi-wish for the new year — Dems? You wanna lock in the Presidency for the next 16 years? Here’s your ticket. I don’t care which one is President first and for the first two terms–Just as long as they both get their two full terms in office. Clinton-Obama/Obama-Clinton — it’s all good. 

Brought to you by fun with photoshop.