kahunaburger

This is strangely amusing and interesting. Darlene, can you translate?

This is the situation at Betterment as of 11am today. Since May 2010 I turned $900 into $1000. A 16% return is a lot better than anything you can get in a savings account …

There’s an inch of snow outside and public schools are closed? WTF – Santa Fe! You would think a city at 7000 feet is a bit more prepared for snow.

I don’t know if this was “Inception” inspired or happened before, but recently I had the first situation where I realized that I was dreaming within a dream.

My dad and I were driving through Aldea and he was going too fast. We hit the side of a building, the car slid across the street and went down a hill to crash into the top of another building. The car fell through the roof of the building and I ended up in an apartment without my dad. I walked around, explored the rooms and noticed that a kid was there. I was scared of her and decided to leave the apartment. Her place seemed to be part of an institution where she was locked in her own place. Funny enough the entrance to her apartment was a small wooden door, where I could easily reach over and open the door from the outside. I left the place and was soon surrounded by a number of kids who seemed to be heading out for recess. Last thing I noticed in this dream, was the little girl heading towards me in a way that scared me. That’s when I woke up.

I was in my real bedroom and everything seemed to be normal. My wireless phone was on the floor and all keys were broken and spread out all over. Pia’s iPod was on my bed stand, but it looked differently. It was pink and its touchscreen was missing. I decided to get up and walked towards the kitchen. Next thing I notice was that the TV in the living room was on and that my brother’s kids, Tobias and Lisa, were standing in my living room watching the TV. Seconds later I noticed my brother and his wife sleeping on the couch. I woke them and was told they had decided to visit me without notice. We walk to the kitchen, talk some more and then I really wake up.

At that point I realize that I just had a dream within a dream.

Anybody want to come up with a dream analysis?!?!

Pia asked for a music instrument for Christmas. She gave me a few options and I went to a local pawn shop (that’s right), which is known for its musical instruments selection. I found a number of clarinets there and, not knowing what to look for, picked the one that looked ok and where the price was right. After we assembled it today, she had to take it for a test drive and I was surprised that we actually managed to get some “notes” out of the instrument within a few mins. I have a feeling that the dogs are not going to like it

And let’s see if you can spot the other present she got this year:

Christmas 2010

Merry Christmas everybody!

“Tron Legacy” was one of the movies I really looked forward to. Two days ago I saw it at the Regal 14 cinema. What a disappointment!

If you grew up around the time when the first Tron movie hit cinemas and if you liked the first one, then I think you will be equally disappointed. Yes, the special effects are awesome, but that’s about it. The story lacks. The dialogues sound like they were written by a 12-y/o. Everything that’s supposed to glue the visual components of the movie together is simply not there. And a Zen-channeling Jeff Bridges is the last thing I wanted to see. Bleech …

The kitchen is really getting a workout lately. We’ve cooked lots of different stuff in the recent past and it’s a lot of fun to try out new things. Weeks ago we had friends over for dinner and decided to give “Beef Wellington” a try (I linked to the first recipe I could find). A whole Beef loin gets covered with a mushroom paste and then wrapped in home-made puff pastry. The thing was served with a horseradish sauce, roasted potatoes and a mushroom/spinach mix. I forgot to take a picture in the evening, but snapped this the next day using the left-overs:

Beef Wellington

For desert we had a skillet apple tart. The apples, sugar and butter go into the bottom of a pan. The pastry dough seals the pan. Everything goes into the oven for a while and then gets flipped out of the pan for serving. It was served with rosemary infused whipped cream, which turned out to be a real hit.

Apple tart and Rosemary whipped cream

We also gave those Chinese pork buns a try, which I mentioned the other day. Here are the bun rolls rising and waiting to be filled:

Bun dough

And here’s the filling:

Filling for the pork buns

And the final result just before they went into the steamer. Very yummy!

Final buns ready for steamer

Pia helped a lot with the buns, but did not like the end result too much, because she saw that there were mushrooms in the mix and for some reason she really dislikes the tastes of mushrooms.

Another staple of the Chinese kitchen is roast pork. Pork pieces get marinated overnight and then baked in the oven. I found an old bottle of red food coloring in the pantry and decided to add it to the marinade this time. Here’s the stuff after it was finished marinating (looks a bit more red than it really was – i think lightroom went crazy on the saturation):

Marinated pork

And here again the end result:

Chinese roast pork

Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism? 40%? Are you serious? Are you telling me that there’s a high chance that my daughter is being taught that in school? Are you telling me that 40% of the people I meet are creationists?

This is one of the most disturbing things I read in the past week …

Over the weekend a huge quantity of Gawker/Lifehacker/Gizmodo/etc. usernames and passwords were leaked as a torrent file (along with other information like gawker.com’s source code).

How a company of Gawker’s size can still store (DES-) encrypted passwords in their databases instead of salted hashes is way beyond me. This shows almost criminal negligence.

Two days ago I looked for random cooking videos on YouTube and ran across this gem of a series: Cooking with Dog.

Yes, you see right: there’s a Japanese lady with her little poodle cooking for you. She does mainly Japanese dishes and is a pure pleasure to watch. Combine that with a hilarious male voice-over and you have an instant hit. We are going to try Nikuman (Chinese-Style Steamed Pork Buns) soon ….

Pia turns 7 today! I can’t believe how quickly all those years flew by. I swear it feels like I changed her diapers yesterday.

We decided to have a birthday party last Saturday, because next weekend is going to be busy with Halloween.

After filling up the kids with pizza (and the parents with sangria), it was time for some activity. Initially I thought we could do a scavenger hunt down in the arroyo, but after looking at the weather report we decided to do an indoor activity and carve pumpkins instead:

7th bday: pumpkins

Oh, and a note on the pumpkins: I believe I just bought my ticket to heaven with these. On Friday I saw humongous pumpkins for $0.39 a pop. After talking to Candice, I felt bad giving my money to Albertsons and instead bought them from the pumpkin patch at St. John’s United Methodist Church on Old Pecos Trail. At $4.00 each they were – uhm – a bit more expensive there, but then again if it convinces St. Peter …

Despite a parents’ concerns, we did not have to get the first aid kit and all the pumpkins looked beautiful. Next up was an enormous, delicious cake that Oakley had provided:

7th bday: cake

And what would a birthday party be without opening presents and uhhs and ahhs from the kids (I’m tempted to say that the Barbie-Activity-Briefcase was the winner):

7th bday: presents

Happy Birthday, pumpkin!

The kitchen has been busy lately and I like it. We made an attempt to marry bacon with doughnuts and while the result did not look like what we envisioned, it tasted just fine. The initial thought was to wrap doughnut dough around “round bacon”. I used two differently sized cups to form the bacon into submission and make it come out “round” from the microwave. Here’s what it looked like:

Round bacon

Unfortunately the rings were too small and we could not get enough dough around them to keep their shape. So we ended up breaking the bacon rings apart and mixing the bits into the dough to get the bacon-doughnuts.
The result looked a lot like “old-fashioned doughnuts” and was very tasty (yeah, there are some of Pia’s odd shapes in there as well):

Bacon doughnuts

A week ago I bought some Ciabatta rolls and liked them a lot. It’s certainly not the first time I had this bread, but I haven’t had it in a while. I decided it was time to try to recreate it. Saturday evening Oakley and I started to prepare the Biga from one of the Ciabatta recipes in an “Il Fornaio” cookbook. On Sunday we continued working on the dough and I baked two loafs late in the afternoon. Oakley did the same with the remaining dough at her house.

Ciabatta before it goes in the oven

All four loafs turned out perfectly and we only agreed on adding more salt the next time around. The most difficult part was getting the unbaked loafs into the oven and onto the stone. I decided to use a lot of cornmeal on a cookie sheet and slide the loafs off the cookie sheet onto the stone. Make sure you blow away the excess cornmeal before sliding the goods on the stone.

Ciabatta

The end result smelled delicious, was crusty and baked just perfectly. I don’t know how many slices I had with Griebenschmalz and Relleno Brothers cheese (which we picked up at the Black Mesa winery on Saturday), but half a loaf was gone quicker than I could say “Yum!”. Christina, you better watch your back (and, yes, I’m kidding)!

Early in June, I signed up for an account at betterment.com. Now that I’ve been signed up for a while, it’s time to see how well we are doing. When I logged on this morning, I saw this in the Betterment UI:

5.8% return in just a few months is certainly better than a traditional savings account. And with the addition of the “Automatic Savings Plan”, I can add a fixed amount on a monthly basis without having to do anything. Quite nice.

If you want to sign up for an account, please let me know, because you’ll get a $25 bonus if I refer you.

You’ve been through this as well: you check in at your hotel room. You put your suitcase down and start inspecting the room. You look at various items in the room and then ask yourself: “I wonder what people have done with this thing before?”.

Now you can add a whole new dimension to that question, thanks to George Egg, who abuses the water heater and the iron in his room. Watch:

(thanks SQUIRREL!)

To continue along the lines of the previous video, check out this one of some workers servicing a 1786 feet antenna pole. Holy!!!