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browngirl, who is way too good to me. Photos of the lovely decorations will be posted after Shabbat.dvarin, here.merle_). Be sure to read the reviews.When I last went fish shopping the person at the counter informed me that they no longer carry grouper (a versatile fish that I like to cook with), but that what they label as "basa" (not bass) is the same fish. Google tells me that both names are used for the same fish, so I guess this means they've changed their source and the sources used different labelling. My basa fillets were a little thinner than the grouper fillets I used to get, but otherwise it seems to be indistinguishable.
This was good: take basa fillets, put in a lightly-oiled casserole (I used olive oil) and drizzle oil on top, coat with "Auntie Arwen's fish blend" (assorted herbs, garlic, onion, I think paprika), bake at 425 for about 10 minutes, then add thinly-sliced havarti cheese on top and bake just until melted.
I went surfing for a recipe for cold cherry soup (not being satisfied with the one I know) and found something that mostly worked. (Dani has previously described a cherry soup with sour cream; the key word seems to be "Hungarian".) Boil water, pitted cherries, and sugar for a while until the cherries soften; in a bowl beat cream (if the cherries are sweet) or sour cream (if not) with a little flour, stir in some of the hot mixture, and then pour everything into the pot and simmer (don't boil). Chill well before serving. The flour's job, I presume, is to thicken the broth, but even though I beat it with the cream for a while, I got little globs of flour in the resulting soup. Maybe I used too much flour? (I had non-sour cherries, so I used cream. The recipe didn't specify the type of cream; I used heavy and will probably try light next time.)
Tonight after Shabbat Dani wanted to go to Longhorn, a steak house at the waterfront (don't know if that's a chain or a local instance). They have two non-shellfish fish dishes, both salmon. The grilled salmon was very good, and the steamed broccoli was tasty and not overcooked. The seasoned fries were reasonable, though I failed to procure brown mustard for them and had to settle for yellow. I didn't see anything vegetarian on the menu, but I like salmon so I'd definitely go there again.
But next time we'll sit at a table, not a booth. This isn't the first restaurant I've been to lately where the seats in the booths are really far from the table. In some (like Gullifty's), if I sit all the way back my feet don't touch the floor. So I end up having to sit on the front of the seat, with no back support at all. I'm short, but I don't think I'm farther out than one standard deviation. Are restaurants now planning booth layouts around very large people? (Ironically, the very large people I've had occasion to observe seem to prefer tables with chairs.)
Sunday night we joined ralphmelton (birthday boy),
lorimelton, and mrpeck at John Harvard's
in Monroeville. Dani and I ordered a beer sampler to explore the
options; we got the smaller one, which is five five-ounce glasses
(your choice of beers). They deliver the sampler on a placemat with
a key (so your glasses go on specific places on the mat); I hadn't
noticed that the list was ordered from less to more hoppy/bitter until
they lined ours up on one side of the sheet. :-)
Tonight's dinner was almost a case of "grandfather's axe": I followed the recipe on the can of coconut milk, except that I used chicken instead of shrimp and broccoli instead of asparagus and onions instead of bell peppers, but it's still the recipe on the side of the can. (Verdict for next time: needs spices; try ginger.)
Dani and I talked about making reservations for an upcoming SCA event (war practice) tonight and we both realized that we're going entirely on inertia. Neither of us is actually drawn to this particular event this year; we're just running on auto-pilot. So we might not do that. Don't know yet. (It was actually Dani who pointed this out; I've become less active in the SCA and am being careful not to influence him in that direction, but he's feeling "eh" about this one on his own. We were just at an event a couple weeks ago, and that seems to have satisfied us both for the nonce.)
At the shabbaton I talked with someone who's currently taking private Hebrew lessons, and she suggested that we share a lesson slot and pair up as partners. I think she's more advanced than I am and I pointed this out, and she said that's fine. We'll probably start this after the ulpan. (Different teacher. She doesn't like the one I'm currently taking classes from and she says her tutor is much better.) This should be quite helpful, and if not, I can drop out and she can go back to what she was doing.
Saturday night as we were trying (and failing) to go to Chaya for dinner, we walked past a new restaurant called Susheli. It looked open and not busy, so we walked in. They said they weren't actually open yet; they'd be open in half an hour but if we didn't already have reservations we'd have to wait. So, some other time -- but does that timing strike anyone else as odd? It did to me, so I looked at the hours posted on the door -- closed Friday for dinner, open Saturday an hour after sundown (demonstrably not true, by the way, but that would be quite ambitious if my guess is right). Could it be? I looked at the menu posted in the window; it included entries like "shrimp (mock)". No immediately-obvious certification, but Dani was getting impatient so I figured I'd check later. So I'm not yet certain, but it's possible that there's now a kosher Japanese restaurant in Squirrel Hill! Whee! (I failed to look for a mezuzah.) Currently, the only place where I can order a sushi platter, as opposed to individual pieces, is Chaya, because they understand kosher versus non-kosher species. But part of the appeal of sushi is letting the chef choose appropriate combinations based on what's fresh, his own creativity, and whatever else. I miss that at restaurants other than Chaya.
I wondered about the name. "Sheli" means "for me" in Hebrew, so if "su" meant something (that implied good food) that would have been neat. But according to Dani, "su" doesn't mean anything, so I guess it's "sushi for me" but only sort of. Assuming that they're trying to do something clever with Hebrew, of course.
After dinner we went to a party at Chez Melton (lorimelton
and ralphmelton). We had a good time. There weren't as
many people I already knew as at past parties; the Claritech crowd was
largely absent (us and two others). It was good to see Kevin again;
since the end of the D&D game I almost never see him.
We ended up in a large game of Apples To Apples, which is a good party game. Each player has a handful of cards with nouns on them; in turn, each player draws and plays an adjective card, and other players each pass in a noun that goes with it. The person who drew the adjective chooses the noun he likes best, and the person who played it gets a point. Iterate until a score threshold is reached. It's a fun game that usually moves pretty quickly. This was the first I'd played with the expansion sets, though, and I think they are a net loss. There were a lot of rounds where I felt I didn't have anything plausible and tossed junk, and it was clear this was happening to others too. I suspect that the original game was well-thought-out and then in the expansions they just threw more words into the mix. Part of what makes the game fun is seeing all the clever or funny submissions that show up; when half the submissions are, essentially, discards, it's not as much fun. But even so, a fun game (and we should pick up a copy to have on hand when we host gaming days).
This morning our power went out again, with no obvious reason, but we found that it was out for several blocks, so it wasn't just us. This time it was out for almost two hours. Dani recently deprecated a UPS (not big enough for the computer/monitor he's currently using), so I appropriated it for the VCRs. I've had to reset the VCR clocks three or four times this week; this was the first outage long enough to also take out the programming. (Apparently the model is that the VCR will just get the time from the cable service, so it doesn't need to dedicate battery power to that. But I don't have the right kind of cable service for that.) I wouldn't buy a UPS for the VCRs, because that seems extravagant, but with it just sitting there, neglected... :-)
Most of my bulbs have sent up green bits, it seems, but no crocuses in bloom yet. It seems late for them and early for everything else.
But all was not lost; it has been replaced by a Thai/Filipino restaurant. I wouldn't have thought that a natural pairing, but shrug. The place is Sweet Basil; there is (the waitress said) a Sweet Basil in Lawrenceville and this is their second location. They opened last month. (For Squirrel Hill old-timers, there is no relation to the Sweet Basil on Forbes that was replaced by Zeb's, which was replaced by Zen Garden (the all-vegetarian restaurant that made me happy during its brief existence), which was replaced by the much-inferior Hunan Kitchen, not that I'm bitter.)
We enjoyed the food at this Sweet Basil. Dani got a Filipino sampler that included something chicken, something beef, and something shrimp; I got fried tilapia cooked in chili paste with vegetables. The fish was very good, and the portion was quite generous. They asked me for a spice level and I said 7 (this is my default for new restaurants that do numeric spice scales), and I thought it was a bit mild for a 7 but perfect for fish with chili paste. (I have a side rant about numeric spice levels having nothing to do with this restaurant, but it won't fit in the margin of this entry.)
Dani said his food was good; the portion appeared less generous than mine, but that may be the sampler effect. (Maybe you pay a premium for variety.) The presentation on his was generic -- nothing fancy, nothing bad. The fish was pretty, topped with some sort of small dried noodles and some sort of greenery on top that was arranged, not just dumped. The vegetables were nicely arrayed around the fish. I usually don't notice stuff like this (except in sushi places where they generally make an effort), but this stood out.
We both had soup. I had the tofu-vegetable soup (explicitly noted on the menu as a vegetable broth, so I didn't have to ask). It has a hint of lemongrass in it, and the green vegetables were cooked but not mushy. Dani's soup smelled good (a chicken soup made with coconut milk) and he said he liked it.
Dani's sampler came with ginger tea. We both thought it should have been steeped longer, but it was nice otherwise. They brought a small pot of tea, not hot water and a teabag and not a pot with solids (or leaves) in the bottom.
We both had flan for dessert. It was light (not dense) and neither overcooked nor undercooked. This, too, came on plates with attention paid to presentation.
My fish dinner was $15. Most of the vegetable entrees were about $10; it looked like the meat dishes hovered around $12-15. (I didn't spend a lot of time looking.)
Service was mostly good, except for a false start where our waitress apparently forgot about my soup for a long time. Every table was full when we were there (around 7:00). I hope that's a positive sign and that they'll be around for a while.
They had two specials, black sea bass and a gnocchi dish, so we decided to share those. (Each was around $27 -- not something we'll do often. Pasta dishes on the menu were around $15; I didn't look at the meat dishes.) Each special came with a (specified) appetizer, along with the choice of soup or salad that accompanies all their entrees.
I got the minnestrone soup (after confirming that it was vegetarian) and Dani got the mushroom soup. We both thought our soups were quite good. The gnocchi (in a tomato sauce with basil and cheese, though I forget which cheese it was) was tasty. The two appetizers, foccacia with cheese and peppers and red peppers stuffed with cheese and parsley (I think it was parsley) were decent.
The fish special was, err, unfortunate. They brought a whole fish (black sea bass isn't very large, it turns out; I'd be surprised if it had as much as 6oz of meat on it), which left us with the bones problem. I don't recall how they described the flavoring (they certainly claimed some), but what we got was very bland. It was supposed to come with asparagus but they ran out, so we got green beans instead; I thought they were ok and Dani thought they were decent for green beans (which he isn't generally fond of).
All portions were on the small side for the prices being charged. Overall, we've gotten better food, in better portions, at slightly lower prices, from Il Viletto in Oakland. And that's still in the space of "fancy enough that you'd take guests there", rather than some of the lower-end tasty places around.
Service was somewhat inattentive and clueless. Each entree came on a huge platter (inefficiently used, and they weren't making that up in presentation); there was no room on the table for both platters and anything else. (Our waiter moved the bread, the flower vase, and a couple other things onto an adjacent surface.) We'd said we would be sharing (the menu suggests this), but they didn't bring plates for us to use on the first pass. The fish and beans were part of the same special, but more than five minutes elapsed between getting the fish and getting the beans. (I started to eat the fish so it wouldn't get cold; Dani waited for the complete meal.) It took somewhere between five and ten minutes for Dani to get the hot water to go with the teabag they brought him right away. The gnocchi came without any utensils. We were offered "mineral water" when we sat down (presumably this had a price), but we were not offered just plain tap water. It took a while to get the check. Overall, while I didn't especially feel badly served, I did feel ineptly served. (Also slowly, but some of that appeared to be a kitchen problem rather than a waiter problem.)
The restaurant is smoke-free, which is a pleasant surprise. (It's small; they're definitely under the threshold where they're required to provide a non-smoking section.) The decor was inoffensive (which is all I ask for). One thing I don't usually notice, though: I sat in the most uncomfortable chair I've experienced recently. (And we were there for about an hour and a quarter, alas.)
I wonder how long they'll survive. Squirrel Hill isn't cheap, though I gather that commercial rent for the first year is deeply discounted.
Last night Dani and I went to the Coldstone Creamery for the first time. (Yeah, we're slow -- but let it never be said that we are slaves to fashion. No, I don't think you were going to say that anyway.) The ice cream was good but maybe not as good as the price would suggest. We couldn't help thinking that while it would defeat their gimmick, a blender would speed up processing of the customer queue.
Seen at work: "Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Today was our company's annual retreat, where we close the office and go do company-focus-building stuff in a secluded cabin or the like. It's a good idea, but I don't think we actually needed to go as far out of the city as we did this time. (This was a new location for us.) It took almost an hour to get there. I'm really glad I hitched a ride, because some of the signage was quite poor and I probably wouldn't have found the place on my own.
We actually have budget for conferences; I wonder what it would be most beneficial for me to attend. (I didn't get my act together for SIGDOC this year, which is happening as I write this.)
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Saturday we went to the AEthelmearc Academy (SCA event), which was held at Seton Hill College (universtiy?) in Greensburg. It's a really pretty campus. (Looked to be pretty unfriendly to wheelchairs; I'm glad a local member who was using a wheelchair last year isn't using one now.)
Dani spotted a poster on campus advertising a field trip to Giant Eagle and WallMart. The campus is not exactly downtown, so while you could walk to those locations, it'd be a shlep and you wouldn't want to do it carrying groceries. So this makes sense, but it never would have occurred to me.
The event was pleasant. There weren't many classes that particularly interested me, but I ended up at some that were pretty decent. One of the classes I specifically wanted to attend got cancelled, unfortunately (instructor didn't make it to the event). The overall feel was pretty casual; I've seen university-style events that were higher pressure for the instructors, but this didn't seem that way.
The school provided the food. It was very good for catered food -- not really medieval in content or ambience, but no one expected it to be (given the catering) so that's not a problem. It did look like they ran out of some things before everyone got through the line; I assume this is due to the too-common SCAdian tendency to take large portions.
At the end of the day they put out some fruit and bags of potato chips/pretzels/etc, and there were a lot of leftovers. I noticed that our college students were grabbing some extras; when the autocrat announced that people should take the leftovers home, they went into full starving-student mode. It was kind of cute -- kind of like Halloween, sack and all. :-)
The event ended around 6:30 (no feast). We failed to find a local restaurant without a long line, so we just headed back to Pittsburgh. (Well, first we bumbled around a little, because the directions to the site didn't reverse neatly and, ahem, some drivers just won't ask for directions. But we found the highway entrance and all was good.)
After we dropped off our passengers Dani and I went to Indian Oven, a newish restaurant in Squirrel Hill. It replaced Platters and is, alas, no longer kosher. It has a significant vegetarian and adequate vegan menu, though.
We both got samplers (meat for him, veggie for me), and we both liked the food a lot. Service was a bit slow due to a sub-optimal waiter:customer ratio. But I'd definitely go back. The vegetable korma (ordered at a spice level of 7) was nicely zippy and not mushy. The mattar paneer (one of my standard benchmarks) was nice but not excellent. The raita was very good, as were the green and red chutneys. The spiced tea (with cream) was evocative of chai.
This afternoon I finally took down the sukkah. Sometime before next year I'm going to take the vertical poles to be cut down a foot or so (a friend has the relevant power tool for cutting metal tubing), so that next year I won't have to do awkward things involving a ladder to put it up. I don't need my sukkah to be 8 feet tall; 7 would be fine.
Tonight was a pleasant dinner with ralphmelton
and lorimelton. Dessert was a nice pumpkin
cake with whipped cream; Lori mixed some powdered ginger
into the cream before whipping it, which added a nice
effect. I'll have to remember that. (Ok, whom am I
kidding? When's the last time I whipped cream rather
than buying it that way? But hey, I might...)
The morning torah-study group reached the part in Numbers where God gives prophecy to the seventy elders so Moshe won't have to do everything himself (this is near the end of chapter 11). The text tells us that in addition to the seventy, there were two men -- Eldad and Medad -- who also got in on this, though they didn't join the others at the tent of meeting. Joshua hears about this and gets upset, apparently because they're encroaching on Moshe's territory or something. But since prophecy is clearly something that is done at God's instigation -- or, at the very least, with God's cooperation -- how could that be? I don't see anything in the text to imply that Eldad and Medad did anything; it's not like they were stow-aways or something. My read is that they were in the camp going about their business and -- blam -- they were prophesying. We didn't get to most of the commentaries today, so we'll return to this next week.
This probably means we`'re going to also talk about the people gorging on heaven-sent quail next week, because that's next in the text. My rabbi pointed out the coincidental timing with Halloween. :-)
Someone said that the Christian denomination whose members sometimes "speak in tongues" are basing that on this. Apparently (and I welcome correction here!), the idea is that when God talks to you it transcends language, and you say things that sound like coherent text to you but gibberish to everyone else. I'd heard of speaking in tongues before, of course, but didn't know it was tied to the idea of prophecy. (I wasn't sure what it was.) I always thought the point of prophecy was to convey God's words to everyone else (the prophet is just a vehicle), which would require doing so in a language your listeners understand. If this description of speaking in tongues is correct, that seems to be something that's about the speaker personally (and God), not about a message to the community.
Tonight after Shabbat we went to Hunan Kitchen, the successor (or reincarnation, or something) of Zen Garden in Squirrel Hill. It's no longer a purely vegetarian restaurant, but there are still plenty of vegetarian dishes on the menu. The meal was good except for the sizzling-beef incident. Someone at another table ordered something that comes sizzling in a skillet; apparently something went wrong and the dish emitted a great deal of smoke only after it got to the table. Everyone in the place was coughing. It was actually kind of funny, as the cough migrated outward from ground zero. (We weren't affected for the first minute or so, but then we were a little.) I didn't notice what happened to the dish in all this.
It turns out that Bob is the chair of next year's conference, and the theme is "documenting and designing for pervasive information". He would like to see a paper submission from us. Now maybe he says that to all the writers, but it's worth thinking about. (And the conference doesn't conflict with the high holy days next year either, so I could theoretically go.)
After the reception a couple guys from SAS in Raleigh and I
headed out for dinner. One of them had been to Memphis before,
so we let him guide us to Beale Street. It's hard to tell from
just tonight's data points, but my tentative conclusion is
that vegetarians are just SOL in this town, or at least on
Beale Street. (I haven't looked into the hotel restaurant yet.)
The hotel is pretty spiffy, especially for the price ($95 plus tax). I have a two-room suite with microwave and fridge, though there are no dishes so I assume the microwave is intended for frozen dinners or something. There's a TV in each room (which is two more than I need but there's plenty of space so I don't care), and free network access (wired) in the room. The one downside is that my room is just off the lobby and it's noisy in the outer room, but the noise doesn't seem to carry into the bedroom so I don't care all that much.
This laptop is much worse than the one I borrowed this summer in
one respect: legibility. More specifically, I can't find any
controls, physical or digital, that affect contrast and brightness,
and the defaults are harsh (to me). Dell laptop running XP Professional,
in case anyone's got ideas. (The "native" resolution is also high
for such a small screen, so I've got fonts cranked up both at the
OS level and in my apps. But still, the brightness makes it hard
to use.)
Last night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)
After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.
One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing
persistently in the early mornings (around 6am),
almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's
11 years old and this is a recent change (last
couple months). I have been unable to correlate
it with anything else going on in the house.
His last physical was in January and he was fine,
and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the
kitty psychologists in my reading audience have
any theories?
Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.
Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.
I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.
Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.
ommkarja, a fine alto, to the west coast.
Hope your drive out is going smoothly!)
Sunday night we joined a crowd at Joe's Basement for dinner to celebrate Ralph's birthday. Mmm, good food. It turns out they no longer take reservations for the Pope Room and our party was too large anyway. I forgot to hunt it down so I could find out what the fuss is about. Given the level of kitsch in the rest of the place, it's got to be pretty impressive!
Sunday morning I was beginning to think thoughts about window air conditioners. Sunday afternoon the temperature dropped more than 20 degrees in one hour. Today brought frost warnings. Ahem. Someone failed to read the spec; this is not normative spring weather.
Someone I know just returned from an assignment in the middle east, where he encountered a peculiar weather phenomenon. He observed that there was a lot of dust in the air and that there was impending rain, and that the latter should take of the former. Well, yes and no -- it rained mud. :-)
I now have evidence that my intermittent "monitor" problems are actually graphics-card problems. I'm guessing the connection is a little loose, because I have found a reliable place on the side of the CPU case where a gentle rap fixes the problem. It's nice to know that the monitor I just replaced (for other reasons) is still in good shape, though. Eventually I'll sweet-talk Dani into carrying it down two flights of stairs and it can replace the definitely-flaky, smaller monitor on the file server. We have VNC running on it so it's not that big a deal, but still...
ralphmelton and lorimelton)
was a great success. The
fondue was easy to manage, neither too hot nor too
cold, and we had vast quantities of food. We also
got to see dr4b, visiting from Seattle,
which was nice. Note for next year: it looked like
a pound (or maybe a pound and a half) of chocolate
bunnies will suffice. (I think we had another three
pounds or so that didn't get melted down.)
Saturday night at a restaurant we were given a "pager", a gadget that would flash when our table was ready. (And this was with reservations. :-) ) The pager is a hunk of plastic that also serves as a coaster; it says so right on it. (I guess they want you to go into the bar and wait.) While waiting, we read the advertising on the coaster, which said that such-and-such brand (yeah, I've already forgotten -- not very effective advertising) was the perfect pager for restaurants, bars, something else, and church nurseries. Church nurseries?? Dani tried asking the hostess (she said she'd be happy to answer questions), but she had no enlightenment for us.
Saturday's mail brought a letter from my health-insurance company with a $7 coupon for Allavert, an OTC allergy drug. (If the coupon is for $7, I shudder to think what the stuff actually costs.) The letter first said that OTC drugs are better than prescription because you don't need to see your doctor -- and then went on to say that before changing medicines you should consult your doctor. Their spin-meisters need some remedial training. Of course we all know that the real reason they're doing this is that OTC drugs don't involve any insurance pay-outs. I think I would have respected them more if they'd pursued a "...and that helps us keep your rates down" line of reasoning, but they didn't.
We've now (re-)watched B5 through the end of season 3. I suppose you could say it ends on a cliff-hanger. :-) We have B5 season 4 and West Wing season 3 DVDs waiting for us now. We tend to be pretty busy and only see a couple episodes of anything per week, so this will last a while.
Short takes:
The
bachelor and the dust bunny, via metahacker.
"There's an amazing variety of things to do in Pittsburgh.
It's just that all those events share the same three
parking spaces, and two of those spots are staked out
with folding chairs." -- ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif){kind=small}
innerbitch_rss.
lorimelton! We just
returned from a celebratory dinner.
RoboHelp is probably not the doc tool for me, but I've got another 14 days on my evaluation copy to decide. It becomes increasingly clear that if I want to improve the feature set for my documentation, I'm going to need to venture into the land of DocBook. I hope they've got one well-documented, simple example somewhere in all of that information.
I am taking advantage of everyone else's holiday to banish the marketing-ish overview in my doc set to its own doc set (named "marketing"), so I can replace it with one more suitable to a technical audience that has already bought the product. I haven't really deleted anything, so anyone who wants to take over the new document and make it even more marketing-ish is free to do so. In fact, I encourage it. I think my change will be a fait accompli before the proponent of the marketing-uber-allis approach notices. Bwahaha.
There was no choir practice last night, so we went out to Chaya for dinner. (I might have cooked if I had remembered tonight's outing, or if I had found out before 8:15 that there was no choir.) Mmm, good sushi and a chef who understands the directive "kosher species only". It's rare that I can order a platter instead of a-la-carte at a sushi bar. We saw a couple of my coworkers, though they didn't notice me until Dani asked who I was waving to and I named names. Then we went home and watched two more episodes of Babylon 5. "The Long Twilight Struggle" just gets better every time I see it.
Tomorrow night we're going to see RotK. Should be fun.
ommkarja and I had lunch at Mallorca today. I would like to figure out how to replicate the tuna with pepper sauce (pepper like in black, not like in bell). The fish was very moist and tender; I wonder if it was pan-seared rather than baked.The descriptions of dishes, while being passed, suffered some signal degradation: "one of the lamb dishes", "vegetarian something-or-other", "meat, um chicken?, with spinach", and so on. Fortunately, we were all somewhat aware of what had been ordered, so we only needed to disambiguate, not fully specify.
Later my mother called to try to figure out when we can get together. (Her birthday is Saturday.) This turned out to be challenging:
Her: Saturday?
Me: It's Rosh Hashana. Sunday?
Her: Your father has [schedule conflict]. Next Sunday?
Me: Well, Yom Kippur is that night, but we could do lunch.
Her: If that's a problem, what about Saturday the 11th?
Me to self: Do I want to explain to them about eating in the
sukkah?
Me to her: Um, that's Sukkot. Let's go back to that previous
Sunday...
Her: What's Sukkot?
Me: One of several holidays that are going to complicate this
exercise for the next few weeks. :-)
Later I ended up explaining Sukkot to her anyway (quickie version) and she said it sounded neat, so if we decide that next Sunday doesn't work, they'll come out for Sukkot lunch or something.
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