wolfhound668

Ok, I made my second attempt at sourdough bread this weekend. This one I'm calling a success. Mmmmmmm :)

So I was driving home from work last night and stopped at a red light. I was the first person in my lane at the intersection. I've pulled right up to the line and am waiting for the light to change.

Suddenly I hear honking from behind me. I check my rear-view mirror and it's the guy two cars back. He keeps honking and is now shaking his fist out his window. Weird. After a few more seconds he sticks his head out and yells, "pull forward asshole!".

Whatever, I inch forward as much as I can and dummy comes flying up on the right. He pulls up next to me and yells out his window, "way to go numb-nuts!" before flooring it around the corner (almost hitting a car coming from the left). Huh?

So I glance at the car next to me and even the teenager in the passenger seat gives me a "what the hell was wrong with that idiot?" shrug of the shoulders.

Whatever.

Well, I made some bread that I'm considering an experiment in how many things you can do wrong with sourdough and still have it come out ok. I didn't let the sponge proof long enough and let the second rise go on way too long (I set it out before going to work). The rise fell and the outside was dry.

The taste was fine but the consistency wasn't what I was shooting for. A little dense and flat.

This morning I made pancakes and they turned out perfect.

I'm planning on making a starter for Amish Friendship bread. :)

With wolfspouse's 45th birthday coinciding with our first summer in the new house she has demanded that I fire up the smoker and make a turkey on Saturday. The bird is soaking in a brine for the big event.

For a side-dish I found a recipe for baked potatoes also made on the smoker. Any recipe that starts with "coat the potatoes with warm, soft bacon grease" is a must try in the wolf household. :)

Hey Viv! You and the family still coming? ;)

Last week Viv gave us some 40 year old sourdough starter. This morning the spouse made her first sourdough pancakes. Very good. Next week she may try sourdough bread (if she doesn't I will).

So the wife had a bad day at work yesterday. One of the bitches women in her group sent a derogatory email around the department about my wife. She was in the middle of a fairly clean rant about it last night when the almost-five year old pipes up with, "mama, you let me know the next time they are mean to you and I'll come in and tell them that's not nice".

Chip off the old block.

The good news is the guilty parties got reamed in a department meeting today. *Then* my wife's boss got involved. My wife's boss is the head legal consul for the corporation. Not a good idea to piss off the head lawyer of a Fortune 500 corporation. The Top Shark was in a nice long meeting with HR today.

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

We've got several trees on our new property. Among them are a huge maple that leans over the house a little and a nice somewhat-smaller maple in the back that's brushing the house and we thought would need to be trimmed back. I want to get rid of the huge one.

Besides that we've got some "junk" trees all growing on top of each other in the back corner that have to go.

Yesterday we received the first of three quotes for tree-work. The nice one in the back has a crack bad enough that the guy insists on removing it. The huge one? "No need to remove it. We can cut it back some so it's not over the house. It's nice and healthy". Oh, and it would cost more than all the other trees combined to remove.

So I'm getting ready to take a shower so we can go to Little Wolf's 5th birthday party when Wolfspouse stops me.

"Reilly says that he's frustrated because he loves me. I don't think he knows what 'frustrated' means".

So I go to talk to him, "Rei, what do you think 'frustrated' means?".

"Frustrated is when you try and try and try then you get frustrated".

Back to the wife, "Hon, he's got an excellent grasp on 'frustrated'".

[smack] :)

The move is winding down now. We've got most of the boxes unpacked and the few left are "get to it when we can" instead of "honey, where's the pots and pans?".

I've been doing the little projects that need to be done to make the place home. For example, who in their right mind lives in a house for 35 years and doesn't have a doorbell? Also, did you know it is possible to fill a 35 gallon garbage can with maple tree seeds while cleaning the gutters out?

Doing projects I've found myself with a lot of time for reflection. Remembering my childhood we lived in six different towns before I turned 13. That's about a house/apartment/two-flat/four-flat every other year. From what I can tell it wasn't for convenience to work (every move put us a little further north when both parents worked on the south-side), sizes fluctuated so I can't imagine is was a mortgage thing.

No, I've come to the conclusion that one or both of my parents were certifiably insane through the 70's and 80's. :)

Heck, I've been so busy the last few weeks getting ready to move I forgot to post that we're moving. :)

We had the house on the market for six months last year and couldn't sell (we had several offers but none solid). We took it off the market last fall and put it back on in March. We only had it on for a few days this time and it sold. A little less then we wanted but more then we paid for it. In this market that's rare. :)

The house we're buying we're getting for quite a bit less then it was listed for a year ago. It's a decent sized house in a good neighborhood on the same block as my wife's cousins (little wolf's 'adopted' grandparents). It also puts me exactly five miles door to door from VivianC.

It's come right down to the wire. We just finished packing the last box (other than some odds-and-ends like my computer). The movers will be here in about 11 hours to move us out. Unfortunately we don't close on the new place until Tuesday but the moving company gave us a good rate to store our stuff on the truck until then. Being a holiday weekend they're even going to back the trailer into the warehouse and lock it up there until we move in.

I've told wolf-spouse that when I die she can have me cremated and scatter my ashes in the garden. No way I'm moving again.

Since it seems that Esbita hasn't posted to her LJ in over a year can somebody point her this way, please-thanx. :)

Conga-rats!!!!!!

The little guy was looking at himself in the mirror and making comparisons between him and I. He pointed out that our hair is the same color but he doesn't have the same eyes as me. I mention that we both have blue eyes. He points at his forehead and says, "yeah, but I don't have lines over mine".

I reply, "yes, they're called wrinkles and a few years ago I didn't have them either". :)

Bad news is I found out today that I'm at least a year or two older than my new boss. Good news is that looking at him I would have pegged him at five to seven years older than me. I guess he just hasn't aged as well. ;)

This morning I woke up about ten minutes before my alarm went off. Not exactly a rare occurrence. Usually when this happens I'll be on the tail end of a weird dream so the first thing I'll think is, "what the hell was that about?".

This morning I couldn't remember the dream but woke up with the phrase, "you need to know enough about eggs to make people believe that you know *everything* about eggs" ringing through my mind.

Not exactly deep but I'd love to know just what the dream was about that I would have been conversing with someone about eggs. :)

Funny how things seem to run in cycles.

My first professional IT job was at a local hospital. One of the major projects I did there was to evaluate, purchase, install, and maintain an anti-virus solution for the hospital's systems. Back then you had your choice of McAfee or Norton.

My new job is working for one of the major hospital conglomerates in the Chicago area. The group I work for supports all of the out-patient centers and a couple of the hospitals. I started on Tuesday and what's the first project I've been assigned? Evaluate, purchase, install, and maintain an anti-virus solution for the group's systems.

They currently run Symantec Endpoint Protection, which I know from my last job is a dog. Boss has already told me the Symantec contract ends soon and he'd just as well not renew it. McAfee is already out of the question because they played a licensing game with them several years ago. I'm currently looking hard at NOD32 or Kaspersky.

They also run a bunch of Sonicwall firewalls. I worked with Sonicwall for about five years at my job-before-last. They're also a strictly HP shop which I've worked with forever. Talk about walking into a familiar environment, at least technology-wise.

First impressions of the people are pretty good. Everyone seems friendly enough. At least no one has walked up to me yet and told me they hate me for taking so-and-so's job like at my last company. The guy in the cube next to me is a goofball from Dallas. I'd forgotten how good it was to be able to laugh at work.

Heard back from the guy that started with me at the last job. He says the place went to hell after I left. They promoted the worthless helpdesk guy into my position and they already had to bring in a temp to help him. My friend called in sick yesterday and they already had 200 email pages by the time I talked to him at noon for issues that weren't being responded to.

Two events that make me happy.

1.   I received (and accepted) a job offer.  Nice bump in pay.  No more answering  "Priority One, must drop everything and take care of now!!!!one eleven" help desk tickets that turn out to be stupid, should have been taken care of at the actual help desk issues. VP was out Friday so I'm giving my notice on Tuesday.

2.   I played bass in a band for about 13 years.  The band broke up a couple of years ago while in the middle of recording our second CD.  I was approached by the drummer a while back about a reunion show.  Wednesday was our first practice together again and other then being extremely rusty it was like we never broke up.  Anyone out in Rockford Illinois on October 25th we'll be at the Speedway.

My reputation as the Rain-God is safe.

Every time I go on vacation it rains.  I don't remember ever going on a vacation where it doesn't rain.  I've made it rain in the desert more then once.  I've made it rain in North Carolina during a drought. 

So this weekend the wife wanted to go camping with some friends.  It was decided to go to a campground near Rockford (about two hours from the house).  I've been watching the weather forecast several times a day for the last week and a half.  77 and mostly sunny all weekend has been the forecast the whole time.  Even as late as yesterday afternoon that was the forecast.  We went out yesterday afternoon and set up the tent. We had fun and went to bed late last night.

This morning we woke at 6 am to you guessed it, rain.  We hung around until about 9:30 then struck camp and came home to sunny skies.

Sorry Rockford.  :)