As I unloaded a bunch of pho­tos to Flickr yes­ter­day, I real­ized I haven’t posted here in a while.  It’s about time for a catch-up post.

Elec­tion! Yeay!  What more can I say that oth­ers haven’t already said much more elo­quently than I could come up with.  The orig­i­nal plan was to go to the Doug Fir to watch the elec­tion.  The Mer­cury was there as well as Sam Adams (the mayor-elect, not the beer), but the place was too packed.  The gang went a few doors down to Rontom’s.  Despite the rumors of coke-dealing in the bath­room, it was a decent place that I had never been to before.  The whole bar is pretty much a big open room and a pro­jec­tion screen was set up at one end.  The sec­ond Obama was announced as vic­tor, every­one screamed and that scream­ing rever­ber­ated around the room.  I had to cover my ears for fear of my eardrums!  I tried to take a few pic­tures, but didn’t want to be that-annoying-guy-with-the-flash.  I cleaned them up a bit in post-production, but they’re still pretty dim.  Here are two, but feel free to click through to more…

After that, the gang went to Mon­tage / La Merde for some cajun food and half-price bot­tles of nice Chilean wine.  When it was time to depart, Kim and I ran, ran, ran, ran, ran to catch up to the #14 bus.  When it hit the Bag­dad area of Hawthorne, the bus had to keep away from the curb.  Peo­ple were spilling off of the side­walks, yelling and cheer­ing and set­ting off fire­works.  You would have thought it to be New Years!  Heck, maybe even Y2K!  The blue vot­ers in Ore­gon barely out­weigh the red vot­ers, but we’re all here packed into PDX whereas all the red folks are rid­ing trac­tors in the rural rest of the state.  Yee-haw.

Pig Heart! The other night, I had a pig heart as part of din­ner.  (That’s a rather graphic link of a raw heart.  I didn’t include the actual pic­ture inline for the sake of the sen­si­tive vegetarians/vegans out there.) It was mar­i­nated in red wine with gar­lic, var­i­ous spices, and lemon, then fried up in olive oil.  It tastes sort of like liver, but with a rub­ber con­sis­tency rem­i­nis­cent of octo­pus.  You might like it if you like liver.  You prob­a­bly won’t oth­er­wise.  Kim had a lit­tle centimeter-sized cube and needed no more.

Tele­phone? I know that in this cellphone-carrying world that pay­phones are becom­ing obso­lete, but I kind of thought that phone­books at pay­phones have long since been extinct.  I guess I was wrong.

The heat­ing ele­ment on the old grind-n-brew cof­fee maker finally got to be erratic enough that it was time to get a new one.  When deal­ing with a piece of equip­ment that can poten­tially burn down the house, “erratic” is not exactly the best adjec­tive in the world.  After hear­ing some sug­ges­tions in response to my post a few weeks ago and doing a lit­tle research, I set­tled on another grind-n-brew, but made by Capresso and has a burr grinder instead of a bladed one.  It arrived today and I have made a cou­ple of test batches.  Good stuff.

There was some­thing more I was going to say about com­put­ers and desk­tops and lap­tops, but it’s pretty lengthy and I’d rather just save that for another day.

Work has been… odd.  Pre­vi­ous to a few months ago, I would be deal­ing directly with the pres­i­dent of the com­pany fre­quently — maybe not daily, but at least a cou­ple of times a week.  As the com­pany grew, a man­ager got inserted in the chain.  He’s a great guy, and more­over acts as a buffer between Engi­neer­ing and the pres­i­dent.  The big boss can be a lit­tle abra­sive at times, but the man­ager knows how to han­dle that well.  This week, the man­ager has been out and I ended up hav­ing to deal directly with the boss.  Has this been months ago, there wouldn’t have been a prob­lem — but I found I was a lit­tle out of prac­tice in my communicating-effectively-with-abrasive-boss skills.  I was unpre­pared and it caught me off guard.  Every­thing worked out fine, but it made me pause and be thank­ful to have an effec­tive and intel­li­gent manager.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. “Still dark out­side the window/F’ing alarm clock, start the day in fear”
2. Office Rant­ing
3. I GOT THE DIGITS!
4. Win­dows Horizon
5. Com­pli­ca­tions, as heard on NPR

Tagged as: election, heart, lemerde, montage, PIG, pigheart, politics, rontoms, Work