fredrikegerman

We've been making a lot of this lately. desireearmfeldt; asked how I usually went about it. Fairly simple:

• 2c steel cut oats
• 5-6c water (2.5x - 3x)
• Salt, before cooking so it ends up in the oats, not on the oats. Less than 1/2t
• Sugar, 1/2-1T; not too much
• A bit of butter if you're going mad with power

If you use the butter, melt it down and maybe toss the oats in for a bit. Then put the whole thing on high pressure for 6min. Wait 10min after it's done and release the pressure and take off the lid. Give it a stir (it may be wet on top) and let it steam for a few minutes to vent some of the cooked corn smell (this seems to be worse for the gluten free oats). Then put it away once it's cooled down and stiffened up a bit.

We re-heat this for breakfast during the week.

I just shoveled 3/4" of nearly weightless, powdery snow. Nice change from the slushy crud that's fallen the rest of the winter. Of course it all fell in about a 15min squall that was the subject of 3 emergency broadcasts.

We were supposed to launch our thing today at work, involving actual PR folks doing actual PR and a full-court press with an industry group. But that's been pushed back two weeks as the industry group needs to get its act together. The joys of trying to cooperate rather than just go it alone. Meanwhile we've started planning the next really complicated bit.

Meanwhile I'm trying to beat myself back into some semblance of physical shape, hampered by not getting enough running in lately and missing basically all the Wednesday sword practices. I'm finally getting my low stance back. I've also been working on my Schielhau, and it's gotten miles better.

Let me tell you about Schielhau, because it's such a big part of the sword work I do.

The Liechtenauer longsword system from the 1400's tries to keep things radically simple – four basic guards and five strikes. (Contrast this to later humanist-era masters who build ever more elaborate taxonomies of guards and strikes. If you've read Rabelais you know where this sort of thing ends up.) You'll immediately recognize two of the guards: Zornhut Guard of Wrath) is the "Ogg crush" guard where you hold the sword high over your head or shoulder ready to chop the heck out of any bastard who gets in your way, probably with a Zornhau (Wrath Hew) which is the giant diagonalish cut you'd do if you held a sword like that and I told you to swing it. Pflug (plow) is the guard where you hold your hands at your waist with your sword pointing at your opponent's face or chest. Schielhau (Squinting Hew) is designed to break Pflug by cutting downwards with the false edge (two edges are much better than one), thus putting your sword definitively between your opponent's sword and your body as you chop them. If you can't chop them, you're generally in a good place to either stab them through the torso or binding with their sword. Binding is good, because from then on you know exactly where your opponent's sword is and have a lot of control over where it is going.

I started working on this with Eddy, probably the fittest and fastest member of our club – he has a very low stance and is able to quickly come around the sword if you don't deal with him properly. I couldn't figure out what what I was doing wrong and went off to think about it for a week. The following Sunday I ended up working on it with Andy and Matt. It turns out I was too worried about binding the sword and not worried about chopping the opponent. I was also obsessed with stepping off line to get a nice sideways line of attack – this is all well and good, but Schielhau actually works better if you go straight in or actually step off line towards your opponent's sword, because then you're effectively pinning it down as you cut in. If you try to go around it, you actually leave them open to bring their sword around and back into you.

I seemed to be doing much better on this count when sparring with Eddy this week. Which isn't to say he didn't make short work of me in most other important respects...

I've been slowly reading my way through the piles of novels I received for Christmas last year. That generally takes me a while as I also get quite a bit of nonfiction and do quite a bit of other reading as well (magazines, technical papers, and so forth). The previous novel I read I described to desireearmfeldt as "my potboiler". I handed it off to here when I was done as she was curious. The next day she said she'd given up as it was so horribly written. It read a bit like this. But it was a Cathar-vs-Catholic holy grail conspiracy involving Carcassonne rather than Rome.

On Sunday I finally got to pick up Bellman & Black, which I absolutely loved. Great bit of historical fiction – a nice feel for what it means to run an early industrial cloth mill, or what it takes to get a cow out of a ditch without the benefit of machinery. And we are reminded – oh, how we are reminded – of the constant presence of death and mourning in a world of scarlet fever and undiagnosed cardiac disease.

In the end, of course, it's really about the modern obsession with workaholic capitalism. Our hero uses work to escape the need to live and to mourn. And he is able to monetize the gothic in the most apt manner.

I look at the bookmark I placed in the pages – a 1969 Erie Lackawanna pass belonging to my father – and worry that I, too, ultimately became too busy to mourn. I pick up Michael Frayn's My Father's Fortune, which I gave as a gift some five years ago. Opening: 1969. Father, going deaf, walks in the door wearing his hat. I look again at the ticket, and take time to remember.

And with apologies to mathhobbit for stealing her "things I make with the farmshare" title.

We had a mess of turnips and beets with their greens. What to do with all that ere it goes all wilty? Why, make a pilaf with the quinoa that desireearmfeldt bought! It turns out quinoa makes a fantastic pilaf, and you can cook it up in a rice cooker. This is great, because I find quinoa on its own kind of oppressive.

I ran across this big bottle of dregs from my Berliner Weiße sitting in the fridge. Could I use that to deglaze a frying pan, and substitute it for broth? Why yes, yes I could.

( Recipe-ish thingy )

My shock at the Marathon Bombings has given way to an undirected anger. I suppose in the absence of a direction to point that anger I will have to hold it in reserve.

I walked over to Mass Ave and Commonwealth Ave with three colleagues from Google – part of our Reach the Beach Relay team – to cheer on a fellow team member as he passed by (Matt finished in 2:45, faster than I could ever dream of). We knew some other friends and colleagues were still out there on the course, but it was a work day and we had to head back.

It was just before a 3PM meeting that I heard that there was talk of explosions at the finish line of the Marathon. I was pretty worried and more than a bit distracted through the meeting; by the time we got out at 4PM it was clear things were pretty bad.

desireearmfeldt phoned me to tell me that my mother had called; I was still pretty shaken at the time, and told her I'd just found out about what had happened. She was a bit surprised, as she'd thought I was at work; I explained that a few of us had decided to head out at lunchtime to cheer. Then I chatted with Mum while trying to make a nice calming cup of tea. A co-worker was tapping away at her laptop and looking as distressed as I must have looked myself. I told her I still didn't know if everyone was all right. It was over an hour later before I felt comfortable that everyone I knew was safe.

Three images from the subsequent coverage really stick with me. The first is the overhead picture of the empty, blood-spattered sidewalk in front of Marathon Sports which drives home the enormity (I mean enormity, not enormousness) of the act. Second was this video of the blast and its immediate aftermath taken from the finish line. I was astonished at how quickly the crowd flees the blast site. But I was even more struck by the sight of the first responders immediately leaping the barricades, and ultimately working to tear them down so that they can get help to the injured.

The final image, the hardest to take, has been suitably edited by the media. It shows a victim, ashen grey, being rushed from the scene in a wheelchair by a cop and what look like a couple of race volunteers. The original image (widely circulated but not linked here) makes it clear that he has lost both his legs, horrifically.

One of the prices of living in a free society is that from time to time it is possible for the crazies to perpetrate this sort of madness. I hope that they are brought to justice. I hope that the justice that is meted out prevents the next round of crazies. And I hope against hope that we do not lose our freedoms in a vain attempt to keep those crazies at bay.

This was just too amusing not to pass along. Someone must end the madness!

In other news, I seem to have contracted whatever's going around. Nothing like a 101°F fever to make you huddle under the covers in a wooly sweater. Two wooly sweaters, actually.

The morning of Labor Day I'll be running the Bad Habit Productions 5K. This supports a great little theatre group in Boston that among other things was responsible for the production of Stop Kiss that justom was in last year. If you can finish a 5K, you should join me. The course (over on Soldier's Field Road by the Publick Theater) is about as flat as it's possible for a course to be, so pretty non-intimidating for the newbies. On a related note, anyone have info / reg links for any of the Davis Square races?

Meanwhile, I've been very quiet lately because I've been training for the Reach the Beach Relay in mid-September and the Harwich half marathon in early October. Suffice it to say that I still haven't been running enough, though I can at least complete the distance comfortably at this point. My times kind of suck, though.

Just got back from the annual jaunt to Maine. The vacation was much-needed; I've been coding like a mad weasel for the last few months here at Google.

It has come to my attention that it's been a while since I posted last, and there's quite a bit of catching up to do. Indeed, I feel like I've been struggling to catch up quite a bit lately. ( The high points of life: new job, travel, LARPing, and a 5K )