Recipe Rescue

I have been making sourdough rye muffins, with buttermilk, every Saturday morning for several weeks. My father has been doing the same for most, if not all, of my life, and Rachel has enjoyed helping him occasionally when she's at his house, so now we make them too.

Last weekend, apparently, the recipe fell down between the oven and the cabinet. I guess Dawn knew it was down there, because yesterday when she wanted to make sure we had everything we would need to make them today, she started trying to get it back out.

Rachel was home sick from school, and had the idea to put a piece of tape on the end of a stick (that we normally use for getting the cats' toys out from under things) and getting it to stick to the paper. It was a great idea, and saved us having to move the stove!

Projecting Something

I've never really enjoyed project management all that much, but I'm starting to have to be more active about it to make things work well in my current job. As a result, I actually (gasp) created a project plan from scratch today.

In the process, I learned something kind of cool about Microsoft Project. We do our production deployments for one customer on Tuesdays, so when I put in tasks for deploying to production, I want them always to show up on the next available Tuesday, but I don't want to have to adjust it any time I change other things in the sequence.

I happened across a page somewhere that talked about 'task calendars', so I started monkeying around with them. Ultimately, I created a calendar called 'Production Runs' that has working hours only from 5pm to 11:59 pm on Tuesdays and assigned the production deployment tasks to that calendar.

Project complains when I do that the first time for a task that there aren't enough working hours, and I haven't figured out why, but it does what it should - as I change other things about the sequence of tasks, the production deployment tasks automatically shift to the proper Tuesday.

Now I just need to go back in and change the weeks when we'll be deploying late because of Monday holidays.

Keeping Track Of Things

So, one of my co-workers uses a notebook (meaning actual pen and paper) to keep track of things she needs to work on and notes about what to do and how and why. She finds it very helpful. For some reason, I'm perpetually amused by how much she writes down. None of this is to say I couldn't help myself by keeping better notes (or perhaps recapturing some of the really good memory I seem to remember having) as evidenced by this exchange today:

her: I just wrote that all down in my notebook for my next to-do list
me: You and you're notebook. I prefer just to forget things at random.

Tom, Meet Rachel

We took groceries over to our friends K & J's house and made dinner for them tonight; their son is 4 weeks old today, having been born coincidentally on our anniversary. We told them several stories, including this one Dawn told that I'd forgotten until she started telling it...

When Rachel was very young, maybe as little as 4 weeks old or younger, but certainly before 5 months, since we were still in the old house, we were showing her to Tom, or maybe showing her him. One of us was holding her down very low to the floor and he came right up and sniffed her, as cats so often do.

As he was doing this, completely and utterly without warning, she sneezed right in his face. One of those gooey sneezes that sends several tendrils of spit into his fur and whiskers. His ears flattened out, he lowered his body and flinched away from her, squinting. Then after a moment's stunned silence he jumped away and ran downstairs.

It was hysterical.

Experiments with Night Photography

I used my GorillaPod to take this shot with a 30s exposure. I probably should have bumped the ISO up to 800, but I'm pretty paranoid about noise after some of what I've seen at 1600 and 3200. I also might not have thought of it at the time, I suppose.

I really wish I'd had a regular tripod with me; I've only done a very little night photography before, and it would have been really cool to be able to set up in a position in which I could actually get some light on Dawn. Of course, she still would probably have been pretty fuzzy - it's not easy to hold still enough for a photo for 30 seconds!

My SLR, a Canon 20D, only goes to 30 second exposures, unfortunately; that's just long enough for this photo to begin to show the movement of the stars. I hope to get one of these very cool remote shutter controllers because it lets you set exposures for a lot longer (just shy of 100 hours, though I doubt I'd ever want to do that, and I imagine you'd have to have the camera plugged into continuous power rather than using a battery). It would have been fun to do an hour-long exposure.

I also wish I'd taken a few more pictures. Dawn was cold, so I cut it short and went back inside with her, and this 15 second exposure really would have been better after 30 seconds.

Free? Really?

One of our tires has a little divot in the sidewall; our Toyota dealer said we should replace it. Our neighbor, who could be a car mechanic if he wanted, said maybe we should rotate it to the back, but that it wasn't a problem. And the people at Goodyear said the same.

And then they rotated them for free, and checked the brakes, because they're Goodyear tires! How 'bout that?

Pop Culture Influence Begins

Rachel - eating breakfast, swaying in her seat, smiling.

Dylan: "What music are you hearing, Rachel?"

Rachel - smirks: "a song Gracie taught me."

Dylan: "Oh? What's it called?"

Rachel: "Oops, I did it again."

Thanks for nothing!

This post on Parent Hacks reminded me of a story my friend Brad told me years ago. His kids were given a very noisy fire truck, and it bugged the heck out of him and his wife, Sue, for weeks. Until one day it broke! Everything about it worked fine, except there was no more sound. Ah, the relief. Until not three days later:

"Hey, I got a friend at work to fix the fire truck!"

"Dear! Do you know how long it took me to break it!?"

Also Sit Down

My mother reminded me of a story from when Rachel was only around a year or so old. She has always been and advanced talker, but at one time if she was sitting and wanted you to sit with her, she would say 'also sit down'. One day, she said to my mother 'also sit down' and when I guess Carol didn't sit down fast enough, Rachel said "have a seat, Carol!"

A Classic Tip

From Rattling the Kettle:

First, if it’s a short trip, consider walking. Seriously, get off your lazy ass and get some fresh air. It’s good for your heart. And skip the ice cream. The extra weight you’re carrying is creating extra drag on the road.