A Successful Move
I am writing this entry from my new office on campus, which is a pretty exciting development. I’ve got my monitor and computer set up (that was a pretty quick thing) and now I’m going to unpack my few boxes of things and try to make this place seem a bit more like home.
I’ve already discovered that the filing cabinet doesn’t seem to have the rails to hold hanging files, so I’ll need to do something about that. But one exciting new thing is that I have actual desk drawers again. What a revolutionary concept! Somewhere to put pens, pencils and all that kind of stuff.
My desk is extremely tiny, but I think I’ll be able to make it work. And I do have a nice desk chair, which is pretty awesome. Finally something that has real lumbar support and isn’t just a cast-off from god knows where. All in all, it’s pretty exciting.
Yes, this is in fact what passes for excitement in my life these days. Oh well.
Renewed existence
I appear to have regained my identity with the university. Apparently this actually happened some time ago but almost simultaneous with my reinstatement, my password expired (I of course did not receive warning of this because my email wasn’t working) which meant that my account still didn’t work, but now for a different reason.
So the good news is that my email now works and that I can once again access the university wifi. The bad news is that I may have lost two weeks (give or take) of emails which may simply have disappeared into a black hole or may have been bounced back to the sender.
My appointment is still technically through Biology (rather than my new department) which is leading me to believe that my existence may suddenly cease at some point (with no warning, of course), and I’m basically giving up on using my UMD email account ever again. It’s all gmail for me from now on.
Ongoing complaints
UMD still hasn’t reinstated my directory ID, meaning that I don’t have my email address or wifi access back.
How incompetent is this bureaucracy? Clearly this isn’t going to get resolved properly until my new job starts.
And my shins are still unhappy, although I feel like it’s currently at a manageable level. However, this means not running as much as I’d like, and I’m beginning to truly loathe the elliptical machine. I just can’t seem to get the intensity and quality of workout I would running. If only they had an erg at the gym 
Instead they have a mouse, apparently. Good stuff.
Reading the Bible
So I’ve been listening to a lot of iTunes University classes over the last year or so, which has been really interesting and I’ve enjoyed learning a ton about all kinds of different subjects.
One of my favorite classes to date has been an introduction to the New Testament, from Yale’s Open Yale Courses. This led me to buy an annotated Bible so I could actually do the reading for the course. This is actually a newer edition than what I got (it’s brand new, I guess), but I recommend it very highly.
Anyway, following listening to this (and thus reading all of the New Testament), I thought “I’ll do the same with the Old Testament, how hard can it be?” There’s a corresponding class from Yale for the Hebrew Bible, so I thought I’d listen to that and read along in the Bible.
I somehow hadn’t really looked at the fact that there’s a lot more material in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible than in the NT. And also just how much extra time it takes to read if you’re going to read all the footnotes. So my planned read has taken rather longer than I anticipated it might. But I’ve now read most of it, actually and only have a few books left.
There’s a big difference in the ordering of the books in the Hebrew Bible vs the Old Testament, so I ended up reading things kind of out of sequence of either, but I’m sticking mainly with the Hebrew Bible order for my reading, except for a few deviations.
So far I’ve read the Pentateuch/Torah, Joshua, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, The Twelve, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Ruth.
This leaves me with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon/Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther.
So why am I doing this? Well, I guess I feel like the Bible is such a major part of our cultural history that it’s interesting to actually read the whole thing and understand it in textual and historical context (this is where the footnotes and listening to the podcasts are extremely important). And I keep coming across expressions and thinking “So that’s where that phrase comes from” and feeling kind of ignorant for not having previously known it.
Once I’m done with these, there’s still the Apocrypha left, of course, but I’m going to hold off on that for a little while, I think. I was getting a little burned out a couple hundred pages ago, but now that the end is in sight (really, less than 500 pages to go) I’m picking up speed again.
Once this is done I can get back to reading The Great War for Civilization, by Robert Fisk. Some day I may even start reading regular fiction again…
To exist, or not to exist
That is the question, at least as far as the University of Maryland is concerned. Because the university decided over the weekend that I no longer exist as a person. I couldn’t log in to my email account and emails sent to my umd address actually started bouncing (which seems a bit extreme).
When I called OIT (Office of Information Technology) to ask what had happened, I was informed that my ‘position with the university had been terminated’. Huh, I thought.
Because while I’m moving from one department to another (which will technically require a new appointment), my current position doesn’t run out until the 21st or so. And even if it had ended now, I feel that the approach of turning off someone’s email with no warning is… what’s the word I’m looking for here. Silly. They tell you a month and a half before your password is going to expire (with seemingly weekly reminders after that), but they don’t tell you that your University existence is about to end? That seems more than a little foolish. Particularly when they don’t even have the option of forwarding email from my address here.
This situation is supposedly being dealt with by the Biology department giving me a temporary appointment to last through the 21st. However, the wheels of this were set in motion on Tuesday and I have yet to detect any change in my actual status, so I’m not exactly holding my breath on this. I suspect things won’t really be cleared up until I start my new job (at which point the temporary appointment will no doubt turn out to have some kind of dire consequences meaning that I can’t get health insurance or get paid or something like that).
Tasty Pig
So yesterday Beth and I went to our friends Doug and Kelly’s wedding reception. They’d gotten married back in April but didn’t have the party until now. It was a fantastic affair, very low-key and with some of the best food you can imagine. Doug is a chef (working at a very nice gastro-pub downtown) and the main feature was pork served seven ways.
There were also a variety of side dishes, all of them delicious, but I must admit that I focused most of my attention on the pork and the dessert (amazing cupcakes).
So how does one do pork seven ways? Well, the first two were different sausages. One was rather like a traditional banger, although with more garlic. The other was a chorizo recipe, a bit spicier, and incredibly tasty. I could easily have gorged myself just on these, but there was so much more to try.
One of the finest things there was porchetta. You can read all about this fantastic dish on wikipedia, but to summarize, it’s the loin and belly of the pig with the skin rolled around it (with a variety of tasty spices and herbs in the mix) roasted until it’s gorgeous and crispy. Now I was originally calling it por-CHET-a, but it’s apparently pronounced por-KET-a. Either way, it’s one of the tastiest things in the world.
Then there was a seemingly innocuous bit of Canadian bacon. This was far tastier than any such thing had any right to be, as well as being incredibly juicy and flavorful. I ended up going back to this again and again to eat little slices because it was just too tasty.
Another powerful contender for tastiest dish there was the pulled pork. Bursting with flavor (I still don’t know what they put into it), it was utterly delicious on its own or (probably better) on a roll.
And of course there was the pig’s head which was prepared as slices of terrine, I guess. Intensely flavorful, but perhaps a bit much for some people. I certainly enjoyed it greatly but it was not my favorite of the dishes.
The pork bellies were on the fatty side, although this obviously made them all the more tasty. Particularly because they were grilled with a fantastic maple glaze that really combined beautifully with the taste of the meat (and the accompanying fat).
The side dishes were all fabulous as well, but I must admit that I didn’t eat very much of them, as I wanted to be able to focus my attention on the glorious pig. The potato and macaroni salads were tasty (I sampled them), as was the couscous and coleslaw, but the highlight for me was the amazing pickles. There were bread and butter pickles, pickled zucchini, pickled onions and pickled beets. All of them were fantastic, although the beets were probably my favorite just because they were bursting with flavor in a way that I was unprepared for.
And there was a watermelon salad which had the unique (in that I’ve never heard of this as a concept before) feature of having feta cheese in it. I would never have thought to combine feta cheese and watermelon (balled), but it worked fantastically well, particularly with the blueberries also in it and combined with the chopped mint leaves that rounded out the list of ingredients. If you’re trying to think of a way to make watermelon more exciting, I definitely recommend this dish.
And then there were the cupcakes… Four amazing varieties starting with a plain vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting/cream on top, and then with a touch of Malden salt on top (dyed pink). The saltiness offset the sweetness of the cupcake fantastically leaving a perfectly balanced dessert.
Then there was the strawberry shortcake cupcake, which was also vanilla but filled with chopped strawberries, topped with sweetened whipped cream and garnished with more chopped strawberries on top. And it had a splash of vodka in there somewhere as well (presumably in the whipped cream or with the strawberries).
The most popular choice (based on there being less of those left at the end) was a chocolate cupcake with a beautiful swirl of chocolate frosting on top. It was very chocolatey and not too sweet, making for another wonderful combination.
Finally, the most impressive (I think) was the lemon meringue cupcake. A vanilla cupcake filled with lemon curd (I think), topped with meringue which was browned using a blowtorch.
The maker of all these delicious desserts was the pastry chef from Againn, who was apparently a little disappointed that she didn’t get to make more challenging and ambitious cupcakes. I feel a visit to the restaurant coming soon so I can taste more of her creations.
So there you have it. Gourmet food served in a casual way (on paper plates with plastic utensils) combined with excellent beer, great company and perfect weather. I’m actually salivating just thinking about it…
I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a party with such high expectations for the food, but neither have been so overwhelmed by the quality of what was there.
The Who
I find myself wondering, every now and then, how The Who could have never had a number 1 hit song. I mean, you would think that somewhere along the way this seminal band would have had at least one song that was at the top of the charts. Apparently competition was a whole lot stiffer back in those days than it is now. Because, seriously, they were a seminal rock band.
With an emphasis on ‘were’. Their performance at the Superbowl this year was just deeply depressing. They would have been a great half-time show thirty or forty years ago but as it was it was just depressing. I swear when I saw them play at Madison Square Garden some years ago they still had it and that it’s not just me imagining things. But okay, I guess that was eight years ago now. Wow.
Hot Town, Summer in the City
It’s hot here in DC. I mean, this does have a tendency to happen around this time every year, but in the past week it’s just been ridiculously hot and unpleasant, which has left me extremely appreciative of having air conditioning. A friend of mine doesn’t have it (she lives in Charlottesville,VA) which I think is pretty much asking for trouble. Either you won’t be able to sleep, or you’ll have heat stroke, or something along those lines. Sure, in Ithaca it was fine to not have AC, since it never really got that hot, and even when it did, it would always cool off at night. Here, it’s a different story.
It does tend to lead to people living like they’re in space, though. You run from inside to your car with AC, and then from your car to your work or the grocery store, and then back home in the evening. And of course it makes everyone sedentary, because who wants to exercise when it’s like this outside? I went for a couple of runs last week when it was nice, and it felt quite good. But the idea of running in the current soup just seems silly. Yes, it’s cooled off ten degrees from yesterday to today, but even so.
This of course leads to the difficulty with excess air-conditioning. I understand that it’s nice to feel a cooling breeze when you walk in the door of somewhere, but cooling buildings to 65 degrees, as often seems to happen in a lot of institutional settings, is just ridiculous. Having to keep a sweater at work for the summer is just plain stupid. It also leaves you with a difficult choice when it comes to clothing: Do you pick something that will be comfortable inside but cause you to roast when you go outside? Or do you try to be more comfortable outside and risk feeling cold whenever you’re in your office?
When I was at Origins a couple of weeks ago, I opted for the ‘wear warmer clothes and tough it out in the heat when you’re outside’ because I knew I was going to be inside the convention center almost all the time. Our short excursions to the North Market were unpleasant, but I managed to feel cold inside even with long pants, a shirt and a fleece on. Not a good place to wear shorts and a t-shirt, certainly.
I guess the theory is that your clothing shouldn’t have to change depending on the season, so you can wear whatever you want inside? I just find that kind of silly and absurd. We do live in a climate, no matter how much we may try to avoid it by staying indoors.
/end rant
Updates or something
So I haven’t written anything here in a long long time. And I’ve also stopped posting to my main message board. And I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is.
And lo and behold, I’ve come up with some kind of answer. Because I think I’ve found what I do instead. Which is to chat with friends online. Basically, I feel like chatting online is really my perfect medium. It lets me formulate my thoughts in a slightly more detailed and considered way than I would in conversation (and utilize the written word rather than the spoken, with all the delights that offers), but it’s still spontaneous and quick and fast. It’s more about wit than about carefully crafting something. And maybe it’s that I don’t have a long enough attention span to really craft a carefully worded blog post that will contain deep and meaningful content. But I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s okay. And that I’m going to allow myself to just write blog entries more like how I chat online. Which is to say free-form, without extensive editing.
If I really want to write something that’s meaningful, I can obviously edit it and make it better. But if I’m just writing some simple observations about stuff, then I think I can just do that without needing to feel much pressure. And hey, it should be better than writing nothing at all, right? That’s my hope, in any case. Because so far, the alternative has been to just leave this sitting here and write nothing whatsoever, feel vaguely guilty about it, worry that I should try to fill in all the empty space from whenever I last posted, try to write entries about things I promised literally years ago but know I probably won’t ever and thus feel more guilty about that, and end up doing nothing about it thus perpetuating the cycle.
Yeah, so I’m done with that. That’s the idea, at least.
More Amber
Well, my Amber game is continuing. It’s a little bit difficult because my players are completely new to the setting and I’m not sure I have done a good enough job of explaining it all to them beforehand. The dynamics of the family are a complicated thing, when you get down to it.
I had thought that it might be simpler by my choice of running a pre-Chronicles era game, but I’m now seriously doubting that decision. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the case. The problem is that some of the characters are fairly (on the order of a century) old, and so should be reasonably well versed in how everything works in Amber. But if their players are not, it makes for awkwardness. And I’m not sure whether the best thing to do is to go extremely slowly, explaining everything in a sort of tutorial type way, or whether to just proceed and let things fall where they may? The latter approach seems like it’s likely to have a lot of potential negative outcome, and so I’m inclined against it, but the former seems like it would just be… painful. I’m guessing there must be some kind of middle path, but I’m not sure what it is. I certainly don’t want to end up doing retcons, although I’m already dangerously flirting with having to do one as it is.
So what do I do? That is the question.
This of course doesn’t even get into the questions about the actual game, which are a completely different matter 
