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loosecanon
loosecanon.
1) Do you enjoy or participate in any type of physical exercise you find enjoyable?
Depends on how "physical". :-) I enjoy walking. If I had a bike sized for me and taken care of by the magic maintenance fairies, I think I might enjoy bicycling. In more aerobic activities, I have enjoyed DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) the few times I've played it, and one of these days I may climb the learning and equipment-assembly curves to get my own copy. I sometimes enjoy dancing at SCA events -- moreso if it's Italian dances than ECD, and the French bransles don't do much for me.
I think my biggest challenge in this space is time. There are other activities I think I would enjoy (I'd like to try fencing someday), but not enough to give up other things I'm currently doing (and that happen to be sedentary, like reading). Bicycling, for example, would appeal because I can use it to go places (like walking, but more time-efficiently than walking).
2) Do you or D enjoy cooking? If so, what? What food do you
miss most?
I very much enjoy cooking. (Note: cooking, not baking.) I enjoy the challenge of turning a rough outline of a recipe into something tasty (bonus points for repeatable). I treat most recipes as "suggested starting points" unless it's either baking or a domain I don't already know reasonably well. I enjoy learning not just how to cook specific dishes but why they work; the latter allows me to generalize.
What do I enjoy cooking? Vegetables in various forms (stir-fried, roasted, as basis for vegetarian meals, etc). Eggs (you can do lots of things with eggs). Brisket, if I've got four or five hours to do it right. Fish, because there's so much you can do with it (and I enjoy matching a cooking technique to a species), though I have thus far mostly failed at "whole fish" in any form. At a higher level, I like putting together meals -- balancing types of dishes and flavors and degrees of "heaviness"/lightness and textures, and making it all work out timing-wise. I like cooking dishes and really like cooking meals.
The top of my "foods I miss" list is something I never learned to cook myself but ate out: eel as presented at sushi bars. Bacon is also high on the list. On the flip side (and to answer a question you didn't ask), keeping kosher has introduced me to foods I'd not previously eaten -- seared tuna steaks, pickled herring, gefilte fish that didn't come from a jar, and schwarma, to name a few. Fish, in particular, has become a much bigger part of my diet; I like the taste and it's not meat so I can eat it in restaurants. Eating fish three or four times a week forces me to find new things to do with it. :-)
3) What is your neighborhood like?
Squirrel Hill is a mostly-residential neighborhood with a non-trivial business district. The eastern and northern parts of the neighborhood are mostly single-family homes on quiet streets, often tree-lined. (The userpic for this post is Google's satellite image of my house.) The western part of the neighborhood (closest to Carnegie-Mellon University) has more apartment buildings. As you go south the houses get a little more packed in. (Mind, except on a couple premium streets they're never that spread out, but the feel does change as you get closer to the interstate at the southern border.)
The business district is one long block along Forbes Avenue and then several blocks along Murray Avenue, which intersects Forbes. (It's all walkable from my house.) While we do have some representation form chains (Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Giant Eagle, banks, and drug stores), most of the businesses are local outfits, a mix of retail stores and restaurants (mostly). In the last few years there's been some churn and a number of businesses have closed or relocated to the newest mall a few miles away; time will tell if this is a blip or the beginning of a problem.
Squirrel Hill is the "Jewish neighborhood"; while probably no more than half the Jews in the city live here, it's the largest concentration. (Mind, there are still more gentiles than Jews; this isn't Boro Park by a long stretch). I can walk to about 15 synagogues that bother to advertise, and there are a couple day schools, one kosher grocery/butcher (alas, only one), a Judaica shop, and a couple kosher restaurants.
It's a pleasant place to live. I don't know all (or even most) of my neighbors like I feel I should (and like I would if I lived in suburbia), but I don't feel unsafe here. People generally maintain the place reasonably well; we don't have too much of a litter problem, for instance, and no sign of the gang problems that have emerged in some other neighborhoods.
4) Have you always lived in the city you now live in?
No. I was born in another state and we moved to a suburb of Pittsburgh when I was three. I grew up in that suburb and then went to CMU (next neighborhood down). I stayed in the CMU area after graduating, first in Oakland for a year and then in Squirrel Hill for several years (as a renter). When I got ready to buy a house I moved to a just-outside-the-city suburb; when Dani and I got engaged we decided to buy a house together and sell mine, and that's when we moved into Squirrel Hill as homeowners.
5) What books do you read to relax?
It's such a hodge-podge, really. Right now I'm reading His Dark Materials (I'm in the second book), and I enjoy other SF and fantasy sometimes. I also read torah commentaries; flexing my brain is relaxing, not stressful. I like a good laugh. I read cookbooks sometimes.
(You said books, so I'm leaving out magazines and blogs.)
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2. You mention "sock puppets" as one of your interests. What's up with that?
3. Woods or beach?
4. Among all the art you've done, which project was your favorite?
5. What would you do with $1M?