Ketchup Post

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.

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