Skiriki's Chaotic Pad

So! Today I got a new stove. The old one had developed chronic hottus loose buttonitis, which is mock-Latin way of saying that whenever the stove got hot, the temperature control knobs had a nasty tendency to suddenly come loose all the way through. So it was time to get a new one.

This one has a ceramic stovetop, hot air circulation, more oven-space than the previous one and it is supposedly self-cleaning. Yay!

Current Mood: bouncy

...with a glass of cranberry juice.

I've used computers for nearly 20 years by now, and for the first time in my life I turned into a complete butterfinger while eating in front of the computer: a glass of cranberry juice fell from my fingers on top of the keyboard and mouse.

A wad of hankies had fallen first from the upper level, and there was a soaked through lump of paper on top of the keyboard, while the mouse was swimming in a widening pool of red, which turned into a cranberry juice fall and splattered to the floor, on my clothes and feet.

I shut down my computer immediately, and began a salvage operation: I have the keyboard and mouse drying up, but the temporary replacements weren't any good, so I ended up buying a new mouse and keyboard. Argh. I'll open up the old ones tomorrow and see how bad the existing damage is and clean them up if possible at all.

On top of everything, my new mouse seems to be as depressive as the previous one: as soon as I had it attached to the computer, it tried to commit suicide by leaping down from the keyboard level to the floor.

Maybe I need to stop buying black mice. They seem kinda emo.

Current Mood: blah

So, this weekend we had a birthday party for two friends who share the same birthday (though different years; their combined age is now 70).

As I wrote before, I started cooking two days in advance, and had a furious preparation orgy on Sunday, getting everything else done in nick of time. And here are the results, right after LJ-cut!
( Yes! Show me the goodies! )

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Sister Machine Gun - Red

...cooking done, baking done, partying done, now shuddup and let me keel over and sleep the sugars and carbs and everything away...

Pictures shall appear later. Watch this blog.

Current Mood: tired

...cake #1 is now baked and cooling. Decorations for it have been created, though not finished. Now is time to chill and relax and hope that the brief pain on my back wasn't a new wave of kidney stones deciding to make their appearance tonight or tomorrow.

Tomorrow, a frenzied orgy of cooking awaits.

Current Mood: accomplished

...when cooking and baking for friends' birthday party begins two days in advance and continues on the birthday day as well.

Cake #2 was done today, tomorrow will be the day to bake the "main cake". And do the... decorations.

Heh, heh, heh. Gonna be epic.

Current Mood: amused

So, today I noticed that I had some tofu I should use away before it rots away. Since I was going to do wokkish dish anyway, I figured I could make this as a some kind of sideshow to the main dish. And since my wokking proclivities were filling up the entire stovetop, I decided to tuck it into the oven instead.

• A block of firm tofu
• Peanut oil
• Salt
• Optional: various spices. Whatever you like, such as soy sauce or paprika, five-spice etc.

1. Cut tofu into neat blocks, about 1 cm thick, and 2.5 cm wide and tall.
2. Spread the blocks on a cutting board, place a dry cheese cloth or some paper over them and top with an another cutting block and pile on some weight. Let drain for an hour or hour and half.
3. Heat oven to 225 C.
4. Spread the blocks of tofu to a pan, on baking paper.
5. Smear the blocks with peanut oil and sprinkle with salt. Spice as you like.
6. Put into the oven for 15 minutes.
7. Turn heat to 250 C, and continue roasting for 10 minutes, until the blocks are golden and puffy.
8. Eat with things you like.

Current Mood: giddy
Current Music: Joe Hisaishi - The Dragon Boy

Tadah! As promised.





Still rejoicing about it!

Current Mood: giddy

The apartment complex where I live decided to renew the kitchen doors and drawers, and today a handyman came over and worked for half a day, replacing the doors and drawers. The end result?

AWESOME.

It was the first combination of this door color and workspace levels with certain model of handles he had installed, and he was also surprised about how good it looked like in the end; the kitchen is now like a part of the whole with the rest of the apartment.

Just totally AWESOME.

Out of curiosity, I decided to ask for a price for the rest of the doors done in same style, and now I'm awaiting for the answer; I'm fairly certain that the price is pretty high, but I just want to know, if it is in any way within feasible range. I'm sick and tired of plain white doors with icky plastic handles that tend to break too easily.

Pictures will follow as soon as I find my crappycam and can get it recharged.

Current Mood: happy

I nipped to the city to do some bureaucracy and mail the prizes to the winners. coeli and nexan can expect to receive their goodies in seven to thirty days. Yay.

Had a good lunch. Bacon.

Current Mood: okay

Ingredients:

• 75 grams of butter
• ground black pepper and grated nutmeg
• 3 heaping tablespoonfuls of wheat flour
• 1 1/2 litres of boiling water or vegetable/chicken stock
• 1 vegetable bouillon cube and 1 chicken bouillon cube
• 200+ grams of smoky striped bacon (Finns: HK:n Amerikan Pekoni is the best for this)
• 150 - 200 grams of frozen chopped spinach or 500 grams fresh spinach (lightly boiled and chopped small)
• 150 - 200 grams of mixed Swiss and Mozzarella cheese, grated (Finns: Pirkka emmentaali-mozzarellasekoitus is the best for this)
• 6 hard-boiled eggs, chopped up
• 2 1/2 desilitres of thick cream (Finns: Lidl's cream in 5 dl package is the best for this)
• Optional: white truffle oil to season

1. Put butter into a good kettle with the pepper and nutmeg; heat until it boils and brings out the nutmeg scent.
2. Add flour, stir like crazy.
3. Add 1 litre of boiling water/stock, toss in bouillons if you're not using stock already. Continue stirring.
4. Chop up bacon (easiest to do with scissors) and add to the soup. Let simmer and boil on low heat for about 30 to 45 minutes.
5. Add spinach. Increase heat until soup boils again.
6. Add cheese. STIR! STIR! Add water/stock as necessary.
7. Add chopped up eggs. Keep stirring.
8. Remove from heat and add cream. Stir, stir, stir.
9. Serve. If you have any white truffle oil (and why not? It is the cheapest way of having a bit of luxury in your life and can easily last for a couple of years), pour some on top of the soup in bowls before serving.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Jean-Michel Jarre - Magnetic Fields Part 1

Bacona: Bacon-wrapped banana. Fried on a skillet.

That's what I just had for breakfast.

It wasn't as bad (or odd) as it sounds like; the banana was not too sweet to begin with (as it wasn't ripe), and smoky bacon added flavor of its own to mingle with the banana's own. It wasn't much different from the time when I had crispy bacon with maple syrup, maybe less sweet.

The only thing I'd change would be the method of frying (needs a slosh of oil) as the banana soaks up bacon fat and the bacon wrapping threatens to get stuck to the skillet and then unravel from its softening banana core.

Current Mood: contemplative

...is now over and once I get a shred of coherence/the flu goes away I will re-read every poem submitted and see who wins and what.

Breathe at will!

Current Mood: drained

I got a kukri as a Christmas present. And a camo stick as a bonus.

And a box of Green & Black's organic chocolate plus hand-made Belgian choccy.

Plus more awesome loot things...

...but I got a kukri.

Awesome.

Current Mood: giddy

Only one workday to go.

And it seems that I've developed severe insomnia thanks to holiday and work-related stress.

Blegh. But I think I should be able to even it out this weekend.

Current Mood: groggy

Weather has started to warm up, which in a couple of days means goodbye to snow.

Alas. Back to gloom, it seems.

Current Mood: annoyed

It snowed today. What a difference it makes!

Whee! Whee! Whee!

The world is a great deal less gloomy right now, what with the meager light we got bouncing off the whiteness that blankets the country.

And it is not just a thin frosting we got! Whee!

Here's hoping that it'll last!

Picture related:


more animals

Current Mood: rejuvenated

Some of you may have heard that two big sources of spam have gone down recently: McColo and an Estonian domain registrar famed for coddling spammers.

McColo's plug was pulled by the upstream after various ISPs ganged together and presented all the evidence regarding its activities.

Result?

I own two servers, and I receive all root/equivalent e-mails. Both servers push me e-mail about 200+ mails per day or about 10 to 25 mails per hour, out of which 99% is spam. My spamassassin daemon is busy tagging shit as spam, except starting yesterday, 6 pm, things have been.... quiet. I was wondering if something was wrong, if there had been a sudden mail blockage somewhere... but since normal mail got through and an occasional spam dropped in, I figured that the systems are just fine.

And they were: I read the news this morning, and it has been very, very quiet all day long.

It is kind of relaxing: most of the mail I have received today is actually mail someone wants to send to me (okay, so it comes from Ropecon's mailing list, but ANYWAY).

I want this to continue. I really do.

Current Mood: cheerful

Since everyone already knows how the elections in the USA went, I'll focus on a personal milestone.

Today I installed 1 TB HD to my desktop.

One. Terabyte.

In 1985 to 1987 I used home computers without any kind of idea about something called a HD; C-64 and Amiga 500 were 'it', and we were happy to use those floppies and C-cassettes to play our games.

I look back to year 1988, when I used a computer which was booted from a floppy (5 1/4") to either CP/M or MS-DOS, whatever the teacher told us. We used a central HD which was a 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot monster with 20 MB of space. I sneaked into various BBS'es from the school's computer class using 1200 bps modem.

In 1990, a friend of mine plugged a 10 MB HD into my Amiga 500 during a computer party (which later on morphed to things known as LAN parties -- back then, a null-cable was the best in business between two computers). It was a huge lump which was prone to overheating, and it had only 1 MB of free space available due to OS installs and his own personal data, but it was better than swapping 3 1/2" floppies. By now the modem in the school's class had been upgraded to 2400 bps, then to 9,600 bps and finally to 14,400 bps. BBSes were still all the rage and at one point the cable was confiscated to a locked drawer due to phone bills it racked up (ooops).

In 1994, I bought my first computer with its own HD: 486, 66 MHz, with 100 MB HD, MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. I connected to the Internet with a central modem of the vocational school (36,600 bps for the entire school) and used Mosaic. Gopher was still a viable protocol and HTML was in its infancy.

1995 or 1996, my SO plugged a 2 GB HD into his Amiga 4000; we split it into four partitions, out of which three were in use and fourth was a backup in case one partition went bad and we'd have to format it. We were never able to fill that HD with stuff. I connected to the Internet from the university's computer class or via modem from my SO's home: three of us (my SO, I and my brother-in-law) had to share that connection, and I confess contributing to pretty astronomical phone bills. Some things don't seem to change.

I'm sure that you can see the progression from thereon, and get the gist of the overwhelmedness I feel.

One. Terabyte.

It is a big word for something that writes so short and dandy, isn't it?

What prompted me to buy this HD was that my 500 GB HD was getting full.

And that has me boggling.

But I think now I need a faster Internet...

Current Mood: amused

Pictures after lj-cut!

( Read more... )

Current Mood: amused