mir's blog

I picked this name because it was all I could think of off the top of my head.I've since thought better of it and so this little shindig is moving down the hall to porkfish.vox.com. Thank you Stephan for introducing me to the word "porkfish."

When was the last time you had to speak in front of a group?  How did you feel?

I speakin front of small groups on a pretty regular basis as we bring groups of people through our facility fairly often. SPeaking in front of groups in more formal settings is something I do less often but I've gottenmore and more comfortable with it as I've gotten more familiarwitht he details of my work andprofession.

Yesterday I went salmon fishing in Puget Sound for the first time.  I've dropped a line once before but this was the first purposeful trip for fishing. I went with my boss and a couple of other coworkers, one of whom owns a nice little 18 foot bayliner all rigged up for trolling.

We got a bit of a late start, not hitting the water till just after 6 am. We haded out from Shilshole Marina as the sun came up.  It's ben a few years and I was a bit unnerved, at first, sitting all the way back as the boat bounced and skipped cross he water. I was overcome, however, by how gorgeous it was. The water was still, just a few boats out and the sun had just crept up over the horizon.

We zipped down to Elliott Bay, just across from downtown, and started trolling.  Early on we caught a king salmon, but it turned out to  be an inch too short to keep. The guy in  a

boat near us bagged a 22-pounder shortly thereafter.

Bastard.

After a while we gave up on trolling and started jigging and mooching. This fishing terminology means nothing tome but apparently they involve bouncing the lures up and down to try and entice the salmon, like using a stick with a string on it to tease a cat. This yielded us two (2) small flounders, which we tossed back.  They eally were pretty small and, while I'd eat salmon out of the Bay, I would prefer not to eat a botom-feeder from the most industrial and heavily-trafficked part of the Sound (the salmon were passing through on their way to the Duwamish River).

As an aside, I find flounder really freaky.  Like God let Picasso have a field day with one creature or something. 

Tasty. 

But still freaky.

After a several luckless hours, we pulled the lines and took off up the Sound to a spot near Bainbridge Island and started trolling there. I have to say that while I love sailing and just spent last Sunday out on the South Wind, there's something special about skimming across the open water at 35-40 knots, feeling the boat bounce as it skips across waves and wakes, the wind whipping by. 

Good times.

So, we spent some time trolling in a few spots up near Bainbridge but to no avail.  So, around mid-afternoon

we scooted back down to Elliot Bay proper to take one last stab at it. We saw an Eagle circlin and watched an osprey stoop and take a fish. I've seen it before but it always amazes me. I'm glad that we still have wild birds of prey right in and around the city.  One of the things I loved most about th Eastlake office location where I first worked in Seattle was that it was right on Lake

Union.  I'd be seating lunch in the conference room and watching an Eagle catch its lunch in the lake and then land 20 feet from me on a utility pole to eat.

So, with the day running short and the boat's gas tank doing the same we decided to call i a day and head back. One more last ride cross he water and it was over.  I would have liked to have caught more than a flounder and the idea of that fresh a salmon dinner was awfully appaking. Next time, perhaps. The main thing I would change next time is to bring sunscreen.  None of us had any and poke me with a pork 'cause I'm done.

What is your current computer desktop image? Let's see it!

I just ran across this image yesterday, actually, in the midst of a truly gorgeous set of photos by a fellow in Norway.

I've been having some excellent luck record-hunting lately.  Too excellent for my wallet but I do it anyway. This record is positively fantastic.  It's really vibrant and full of life and energy.  It also features a set of very young Pointer Sisters doing backing vocals on a couple of songs.  I'm not sure it's eadily available in any form but vinyl so I'm going to need to rip it to something more durable (FLAC comes to mind). Software recommendations are gratefully accepted. Actually, I have a whole stack of old records that I'd like to preserve digitally and that I suspect are hard to find otherwise (like a 1966 re-release of Rare Blues of the Twenties, Vol.2). If I can manage to rip it I'll post a sample.

Last night I made a rather lovely dinner for Lisa. It started with poking around Pike Place Market to see what looked particularly tempting and wound up as follows.

Prosciutto-wrapped melon to start.  Specifically, very good cantaloupe (not that pale supermarket crap) wrapped in strips of San Danielle prosciutto. Served up on a square japanese platter (thank you Goodwill) it looked surprisingly like sushi. I may have to explore this route further

Next was a small greek salad consisting of candy-sweet orange Sungold cherry tomatoes, chopped cucumbers, thin-sliced red onion and Greek feta, dressed with a mix of white balsamic vinegar, champagne vinegar, olive oil and oregano. The aim was for something light, summery and Mediterranean.  The Greek Feta seemed to have a particularly bright flavor and the champagne vinegar really perked up the otherwise somewhat heavy balsamic.Lisa doesn't like tomatoes but she found these to actually be pretty tasty, apart from their inherent tomatoey flavor.  Still, it's a start. I used to hate tomatoes too until I was forced to try some really excellent cherry tomatoes. Now the good ones are like candy to me. Or, at least, she was a good sport and ate a few of them anyway.

Following this was the main course consisting of lamb sirloin chops and roasted baby red potatoes. The lamb was coated with truffle salt, freshly-made an hour before by gating Oregon black truffle (carefully hoarded in my freezer from last fall) with very coarse sea salt and leaving i to sit in the fridge for an hour toallow the aroma to emerge, pan seared and then finished in the oven.  The potatoes were roasted with salt, olive oil and thyme.

Finally, there was dessert: wild strawberrys (again, forget that supermarket crap) dipped in Callebaut bittersweet chocolate.

It was fun and actually ready precisely on time. I'e been lame on the cooking front lately or else have fallen back on Lazy-Man's Random Stir-Fry far too often. I'm glad to be feeling a bit more inspired lately.

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

For now it's a little midi file of someslice of classical music.  I will change it at some point.  I was using it as my alarm as well until I decided that it was a bit too peppy.  My previous phone's ring tone was a midi file of the Beastie Boys' Sabotage.  It made me happy, even if it was just a crappy midi file.

While making dinner last night I was listening to the first cd of a 4 disc Pink Floyd retrospective called Total Eclipse.  I got it many years ago and it attempts to use unreleased (live, studio, etc) versions of as much of

the music as possible as well as hitting a lot of the really obscure stuff.  The first cd is the earliest stuff, startin around 1965. There's a song on it calld Point me at the Sky that is described as follows at the above link:

Point Me At The Sky (Waters) Their fifth single, released on December 17th, 1968 was produced by Norman Smith. It failed so badly in the charts that the Floyd did not release another single until "Another Brick In The Wall - Part II" in 1979. The promotional film for "Point Me At The Sky" features the Floyd flying in a yellow biplane, and photos from this promo film appear on the double compilation album "A Nice Pair". As he did with "Apples and Oranges", Roger Waters defended the song, blaming its failure on the poor production.

There's a line in the song that goes "and if I survive till 2005..." I'd never really noticed it before as 2005 approached and was left behind but Syd Barrett's death last week made it really stand out. The song is done by Roger Waters but I still found it very poignant.

Shine on, Syd.

What did you do this weekend?

This weekend has (like the last two) been all about quality time with a new friend.  Lots of Scrabble and lounging, a bit of media (Eddie Izzard: Glorious, Baraka and some Sealab). Now we're cooking up dinner: pasta from scratch with favas and zucchini.

Nummy.