(no subject)

It has been a quite couple of days here at the Villa Sternberg. Friday came and we attended the Elementary Play at Kouryou-chan's school. Kouryou-chan had declined to participate, so I wondered what the point was of going, but in the end it was good fun and the kids did well. They need to learn to Project! their voices, however.

I spent Saturday morning cooking. First pancakes for the kids, then bread for Oloteas. Y'know all those things they say about the precision needed to make really good bread? Bullroar. I wanted to make four loaves, so I needed twelve cups of flour. I ran out around nine and a half. I through in whatever I could find: a cup of whole wheat, rounded it out with a cup and some of pastry flour. I was low on yeast: I needed 10 tsp, I had nine. With water the right temperature I threw in the yeast and a pinch of sugar to wake it up, and let it sit for longer than was recommended. I forgot the salt during the initial mix, so I sprinkled it into the dough with every fold during the kneading. It took thirteen minutes to knead that much dough.

Bread and Fire
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

After all that, there was only one minor disaster: my oven isn't big enough to handle four loaves. The bottom two came out beautiful, the top two had their crusts badly burned. I did remember during the baking process to open the oven every five minutes and spritz a mist of water into the oven to give the bread a crispy crust. Still, cutting off the tops, the bread was still delicious. When I put it out at Oloteas the ingredients list read "Flour, Yeast, Salt, Brute Force." My arms were killing me after that. Yamaraashi-chan seemed unimpressed with the idea that in 100AD Rome was feeding a million people a day with that kind of muscle.

Oloteas was nice. Yamaraashi-chan's mother showed up, apparently because we let slip that we were going. When Omaha explained to Yamaraashi-chan what the Mayday jumping over the fire really meant, she decided she'd rather go back to the swimming pool. Kouryou-chan continually tried to give me a heart-attack by overexerting herself in the swimming pool. She's not drownproof and has zero bodyfat so she sinks like a rock if she runs out of energy.

I flirted (was it flirting? It felt like flirting) with a woman who was new to the whole place. We talked about poly and how it seems to come with expectations that people rarely live up to; even less so than the expectations of modern marriage. She had broken up with one of the stereotypical "they say they were poly but he had jealousy issues" relationships just recently.

Not much else to say. Life went on. Omaha's ankle went out and she skinned her knee and was in pain and grumpy when we got home. We were both so tired we went straight to bed.

Okay, she's gay, but... yum!

Y'know, if Velma were really drawn like this, [link SFW, but other pages on site probably not] those rumors might be stronger than ever, but her fanboys would care even less!

Vaccination Madness

One of the things that happened this weekend was I got to listen to two people, one a parent of a very small child, discuss the relative merits of vaccination. The parent had joined up a mailing list of local parents in the area, the purpose of which was to alert the entire list if any one child caught a common childhood disease such as chickenpox or the measles, so that all of the children could be assembled into a big party and allowed to catch the disease.

The other man immediately commended him for his decision and started to deride all vaccinations as unnecessary and even dangerous, started ranting about mecury in vaccines, and went on for ten minutes in this vein. It seems the other conversant had stepped on one of his favorite subjects.

I held my tongue. I shouldn't have. There are three reasons why I think the father's decision is madness. First, there's no thimeresol (the mercury formulation used as a preservative) in the chickenpox vaccine. None. Pediatric vaccines are packaged in single-use preloads these days; the only vaccines in the US that contain thimersol are influenza vaccines, and that's mostly a function of the necessitated speed with which they're produced. Secondly, the risk of injury or illness from the chickenpox vaccine is less than one percent the risk of injury or illness from chickenpox itself. Chickenpox has a death rate, and it's surprisingly high for children under the age of 9, over 50 deaths a year. The vaccine, so far as we know, hasn't killed anyone.

More to the point, the anti-vaccination nuts put my kids at risk. At some point, when enough kids aren't immunized, you hit a tipping point where epidemics can rattle through an entire community and the viral impact load can be enough to make even the immunized kids sick.

If you want more of this, go read Respectful Insolence and in his search column type "vaccines". He deals with these people on a pretty frequent basis, and I must say he puts up a better fight than I do.

Terroism on our soil

Our dear leader has proudly proclaimed that since he took action on September 11th, 2001, the United States has not seen an act of terrorism on its soil.

Which, of course, explains this IED found in Austin, Texas, last week.

Oh, wait.

Yeah, between this wacko and the Animal Liberation Front and only the FBI knows what else, we've had only a few cases of arson and bombing, not a terrorist attack.

Sunday

I had to go to work today. That sucked. After running down to the store to buy the girls some donuts for breakfast, Omaha and I did some of the household paperwork that seems to pile up eternally, and then I drove into town, worried that I was going to be spending the better part of the day there.

As it turned out, all of my patches had been accepted by the code review team and no new bugs had opened up over the weekend, so I was able to do all the paperwork for each bug. The paperwork is insane: once I find the bug, I make a patch. I submit the patch to the reviewers. I wait for it come back. If it's accepted, I then apply the patch to a clean branch, re-install the branch, and run the unit test. If it's good, I submit the clean branch to the repository. I then have to clear the review from its queue, clear the patch from its queue, update bugzilla (a major task in itself), update the quality assurance notification file, then update the status on the internal wiki. There's a lot there that should be automated. The paperwork alone is about twelve minutes. So, it took me an hour to get it all done.

I got home in time to be tasked with making egg salad sandwiches and doing more paperwork while Omaha took the girls to the park. When they got back, Omaha and I fragged briefly (that is, played Quake) and I won this time (yay!) before we resumed our outdoor housework. We managed to corral the girls outside too for some vitamin D time. Kouryou-chan went readily but Yamaraashi-chan is nose-deep into the Xanth series (*sigh* I may not be able to get her to read something else for a while). I mowed, weaseled and seeded the front lawn, then cleared out the brush and did the back lawn under the orchard. The pear tree Omaha cut down last year is trying to come back; there are fresh shoots coming out of the stump. We'll have to pull that sucker soon. The apple tree, too. Poor apple tree. So loved, I wish we could do more for it, but it's fallen over and bent down.

I also cleared our deck and scrubbed down the grill (man, that was yuck!) for the first grilled dinner of the year. Hamburgers, of course, but I also tried something new: I made thick-sliced potatoes and parboiled them for ten minutes before oiling them and putting them to the flame. They were crisped on the outside but soft and mushy the way fries ought to be. Needless to say, the kids hated them. They weren't store-bought french fries. Whatever.

After dinner, Omaha kicked my butt in another round of Quake. The girls had ice cream. They complained mightily about bathing, but were patient while I brushed the knots out of their hair after they washed. And they went to sleep with relatively little difficulty.