You Say You Want a Resolution
Before January actually ends, I feel like I should note the resolutions I've made for the upcoming year. There aren't too many, and they're probably boring to anyone but me.
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Make a little bit of progress on the house each week.
I don't have the illusion that I will be able to, or will want to, work on our house project everyday. However, I think it's reasonable to think that I get something accomplished every week, whether it's painting a wall or stripping some woodwork or whatever.
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Stay on top of household chores.
One of the excuses I've made for myself with regard to our queue of projects is that it's a full-time job keeping the house clean and tidy. I don't believe that's actually the case; by spreading the tasks out over a week, it should be possible to keep everything neat with an investment of less than an hour a day.
To this end, I need to revive my chart of chores to be done each day. It worked for me, even if it didn't have 100% buy-in from the other stakeholders. (ahem)
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Shed stuff.
In my closet, in the basement, on virtually any free horizontal surface—we're collecting a lot of stuff. Things we don't need or care about are piling up. One can tell we don't need or care about them by the way they're stuck in boxes (or piles) in rooms we never go into.
I'm going to strive to take one box of stuff to Goodwill or to be recycled per week.
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Work out a schedule that allows for aikido study.
This will be a little tough, because it might mean fighting my meat.
I usually get home from aikido practice at 10:30. After that I need to
come down
from the practice high and get ready for bed. I hope I can train my body and mind to go from total alertness and excitement to ready to sleep in about an hour, which means bedtime is 11:30. Likewise, I should establish a consistent waking time, and 6 AM seems like obvious choice.The immediate task, then, is to establish a ritual that puts me in bed—lights out, eyes closed—at 11:30.
When that's done, it's time to hit the mats again.
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Study more Japanese. The details for how to accomplish this aren't clear yet, so that's the place to start. Answer this question: How?
Here's a quick answer: study kanji and write.
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Continue practicing Hyoho Niten Ichi Ryu. Attend a seminar again this year.
Get the manual. Get together the study group. Try not to whack the crap out of each other—any more than necessary.
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Continue to work on assertiveness.
Be confrontational when it's appropriate instead of looking for a way out or just ignoring the situation.
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Be cognizant of when I'm seeking entertainment for escape rather than edification.
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Keep better track of personal email.
Mostly this is a matter of sorting and spam dectection, so examining my .procmailrc file and upgrading SpamAssassin will help.
When I've got searching working for my blog, which it is mostly, I should set it up for my email folders, too.
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Figure out if I can do a better job of managing personal information, dates, contacts, etc.
I had been using an online calendar for managing appointments, but I broke that system when I upgraded firefox to a version that wasn't compatible with the calendar extension. I guess I should just download sunbird and call it done.
Finally, I should revisit this list regulary and, most importantly, in January 2007 to check my progress.
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Happy 2006
It seems odd to have to think about going back to work in the morning. Saturday night, we had a number of choices, but we decided to go over to Marin and Brian's. We expected hors d'oeuvre night, but it turned out to be Indian food night instead. I proudly placed my vegetarian sausage balls (a recipe inspired by the vegetarian sausage balls served on Christmas days over at Shannon and Curt's) on the table next to sag, dry potatoes cooked with mustard seed, tomato chutney, Gujarati-style green beans, and naan.
Despite my recipe yielding five dozen sausage balls, and it being Indian food night, there were none left to take home for breakfast. (Aside from being generally popular, Caitlin found a deep appreciation for the savory nuggets and made a pretty good dent in them herself.)
Everything was delicious, and at midnight, with Elvis Costello
finishing up Austin City Limits and U2's Achtung Baby starting to play
on the stereo, we cracked a bottle of Domaine Ste. Michelle blanc de
blanc. I'm not a big fan of (little c
) champagne as a rule, but
this was tasty. It was dry without being astringent, with hints of green
apples. Barbara and I chose this as the bubbly to serve at our wedding
reception eight years ago; it was good then too, but I don't think the
happy occasion is coloring my assessment too much.
I'm working on the back end for the search feature of this site. As
usual, perfect
is the enemy of good enough
. I'm writing it
in the form of a pyblosxom plugin, and, as long as I don't try to make
it too good, it'll be finished Real Soon Now™. Mostly, I want to
encapsulate the SWIG generated python API on swish-e. There are things
(search objects, error handling, iterating over results) that scream to
be more pythonic, but I'm fighting that urge in favor of getting it
working.
I've also ripped I bunch more discs onto juke. It's working great,
though there's one little problem I haven't figured out yet. The first time
I press play
after starting rhythmbox, I get two error dialogs:
ALSA device error
, and Unable to pause playback
. After
dismissing the dialogs, if I press play again, everything works as
expected. Still looking into this...
Sunday, we spent the afternoon with my brother, Steve, along with his girlfriend, Amy, and his kids, Emily and Taylor. We grazed on cheese, crackers, dips, and chips all afternoon, chatted, and set up his new computer. I installed Firefox and Thunderbird, and managed to transfer Amy's email data from Lookout Express on her old machine to Thunderbird on the new one...a good thing, too, since the old machine was clearly on its last legs. The power supply fan, when it managed to spin at all, mooed like a cow.
I was a little surprised to find that Thunderbird couldn't import her Outlook data directly. It has an Outlook Express import mode, but I couldn't get it to work with files I was bringing over from the other machine on my thumbdrive. To successfully import the data, I used DbConv to convert the Outlook .dbx files to mbox format, then imported them using Thunderbird's Eudora import mode. I'm glad I could get it to work; I was sweating that my much-evangelized free software was not living up to my evangelism.
I spent part of today looking into the WMF vulnerability. I've been surprised at the level of the rhetoric being used by security specialists. I've hardened the Windows box under my care using this information.
Vegetarian Sausage Balls
- 2 cups biscuit mix (We used Cooper's
Quickie
Biscuit Mix, but Bisquick or whatever will work just as well.) - 8 oz aged cheddar cheese, grated
- 1 package (14 oz) sausage style
Gimme Lean
- 1/4 cup finely chopped onion
- 2 or so healthy pinches poultry seasoning
- Black pepper to taste
Allow sausage to thaw. Preheat oven to 350°F.
Crumble (well...smoosh really) the sausage into a large mixing bowl. Add the other ingredients and mix by hand. The mixture will seem dry at first, but will come together after a few minutes and form a big ball.
Form mixture into balls about an inch in diameter. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes, until they just start to turn brown. Serve hot. (I made them in two batches. Putting them in a bowl covered with a towel kept them warm.)
Yield: around 60 balls.
[Sat Dec 23 23:24:46 CST 2006 Update: I used to use Boca sausage patties in this recipe, but I've switched to Gimme Lean. It's less expensive and just as tasty.]
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