Scattered Points

Paraphrase of the Day:  “Traditional farming methods use 10 times less water, 10 times less energy and produce 5 times as much biomass per acre as does modern mechanized farming.”  — Vandana Shiva

Back at kung fu practice today, after a week and a half off due to a bout of sickness.  In the beautiful world of crazy coincidences (and also in the world of there are no accidents) one of our Shi-Bo just so happens to be visiting the Bay Area and just so happened to be out walking at night last Tuesday and just so happened to cross the road in front of the kwoon and just so happened to see the class practicing Sun Style Tai Chi and chose to come in and watch.  And, since she is our Shi-bo, she trained with Sifu and our Shi-Gong Sun Jian Yun a decade ago.  Really awesome, she’s staying here for a couple of months and will be joining us for classes and already she has been an outpouring to couple with Sifu and provide observations and illumination.  She only speaks Mandarin, which makes for some fun listening, observing, and waiting for one of my classmates who speak Mandarin to translate for me…

I bought the soundtrack to Wall-E (DRM-free digital music, woo!).  Very interesting soundtrack, very different from most other soundtracks.  There are some 38 tracks on the album, and each cue is very short, most only about a minute or three.  Which, in thinking about it, makes perfect sense, given the mostly dialogue-less nature of the film — the music is what does some of the speaking.  Each cue truly does relate to a scene or chapter in the film.  Very nifty, and cool for the great musical range of the many cues, including a couple (EVE, and the sort-of reprise in Define Dancing) that are truly very beautiful and instant shiver-material.

Railway tracks have a particular smell to them, it turns out.  Maybe it’s the (probably nasty) oils they put into the ties to weatherproof them.  Discovered this today while walking home, and interestingly I found it a pleasant smell, likely as it brought back many pleasant memories from my youth.

A couple of weeks ago I bought six copies of The Art of Possibility, and gave a copy to each principal and each associate in the office.  The office manager saw me do this, and we had a small conversation and I’m now scheduled to introduce it to the office as a whole tomorrow at the staff meeting.  Ordinarily I think I would hide out and not tell anyone about this, so that if it doesn’t turn out no one would know.  But here I lay it out, I’m brining what’s in this book to the office, and taking on altering the disempowering conversations that are inadvertedly created on a daily basis.  And out of seeing those conversations return our work and our environment (and most importantly our experience) into the realm of creativity, inspiration and excitement.

current possibility:  living life full out

Tasty topic

Yes, it is about food…. hooray!

Friday I discovered (all hail google) a nearby restaurant that served nothing but brown rice sushi. I wanted to head over to a camera store nearby so Rev and I tried it for lunch. Small hole-in-the-wall place that totally lived up to the reputation of hole-in-the-wall places. All the vegetarian rolls I ordered were excellent: the asparagus, the amazingawesome umi, and something I have no idea what it was I ordered but it was star shaped. Very tasty and different and definitively seemed on the traditional side of sushi cuisine… I’ll be going back there.

Today I fired up my slow cooker for the first time and made myself a tasty split pea soup for coming lunches. I don’t think I had a grasp on how much this would make — I now have eight portions in my fridge/freezer, which is four weeks worth, woo! To quote Darth Vader: “All to easy.”

Oh heck, here’s a Darth Vader gratuitous but interesting link: Manga vs Comic adaptations of Star Wars.

Bookended by food

Wow the rest of the week went quickly.

Friday Dave and I went to Chez TJs, joined by Vicki.  Since my last visit, Chez TJ has garnered a second star from the Michelin guide (out of three) and certainly the food did not disappoint.  The big standout for me came with the appetizer, a cube of delicate sea bream  (IIRC) nestled between two cubes of foie gras, atop a slice of cucumber.  One of those types of dishes that you might not be able to taste-picture by the description, but paired together was exquisite.

Saturday Dave and I hit the Planet Granite in Belmont for a solid few hours of climbing, with me climbing well some of the tougher climbs since I’ve gotten back into it, and Dave conquering a couple of 5.12As (and making it look easy).  Relaxing and mirth rounded out his visit.

Hmm, I’m considering getting a slow cooker…  any suggestions?

Wicked trip

Back home am I after my good vacation home in the land of the snow! Great trip — the fun in the snow, spent good time with my parents, saw lots and lots of friends both near home and up in Ottawa, including some I hadn’t seen in many years (hi to all of you!), watched some interesting films, watched Ratatouille a few more times, did Tai Chi a bunch, ate some fantastic food, read some great books (The Art of Possibility, A Separate Reality, a bit of The Principles of Effortless Power, re-read bits of The China Study, and the reference classics book China), worked on the Bloodstone Campaign some, made a mask that turned out awesome, set up my parent’s new computer, took the train, relaxed a bunch…

While in Ottawa we climbing at my old, er, stomping grounds(?). Well, the gym where I got my start climbing, Coyote Rock Gym. And boy, what an interesting time — certainly something about the climbs there vis-à-vis the climbs here at Planet Granite. A climbing friend had said to me, years ago, that there is a difference in the way easterners rate their climbs compared to west; basically the western routes were generally rated more difficult. Can’t be sure if this plays in here or not, as I’m only comparing two gyms, but the climbs at Coyote’s were certainly different. The walls are shorter there, and the climbs are much more technical, with smaller holds and a much greater reliance on body positioning and crux moves than what seem to be at PGs these days. (I do seem to remember the old PG location in Santa Clara not seeming all too different when I began there after moving, so it is possible they’ve mollified over time) I could get the 5.9s pretty easily, but as soon as I hit the 5.10s it was like hitting a wall (pun intended). Wow, good stuff. There were some moves I just couldn’t get my body wrapped around (needed to bring more Tai Chi to it, I think), and some where my fingers simply looked at me and said “What? Oh! You want to hold on! Haha, too bad.” Must get more climbing time in! I’m looking forward to hitting it again in the future after I get more back into the swing of it and seeing what comes out of it, it was a great afternoon of fun challenges. I even declared some routes my nemesis, but they’ll be changed by the time I return…

My flight home from Toronto departed right at about sunset, and during an overcast sky. As we took off, we went through, in succession, three layers of cloud cover, treating me to a succession of gorgeous and varied sunset tableaus, climbing steadily until we broke through and glided over a sea of clouds. Coming into Chicago, as we descended closer to that sea of clouds, again I was treated to scene after scene of the orange/red rays of light playing across the cloud tops, mountains of cloud rising like Mont St Michel from the cloud sea (also catching the light), and most interestingly, views through open pools in the illuminated cloud tops to the city below, where night had fallen and the city lights were on. Stunning, dazzling and magnificent.

A great batch of holiday wishes to all!

Wine, Woot and Warriors

Mmm good day of climbing today!  Still working my way back up and still remembering why I enjoy it so.

It’s been quite the while, but we gathered for a Food Fu on Friday.  True to one of its original purposes, this one was to help clear out space in my wine fridge, thus it was, in reality, a Wine Fu!  A spread of snacks — foie gras, cheeses, bread, tapanade, raspberries, and a nifty salad by moi — was had and nibbled.  The wines we tasted included a nice French white (that reminded me of a German Riesling), a merlot by Farrlon Ridge, some champagne and a pomegranate wine I found that was most interesting.  From Armenia, it smelled kinda odd, but it tasted very very fine.  Much conversation, relaxing and munching was had over several hours, and it was great to catch up and just hang out with the gang again.

On the way home today from climbing I picked up Ratatouille (hooray!) and a new toaster oven;  a rather nice and fairly large toaster oven (also hooray!).

Last week (getting whiplash yet from all the timeline jumping?)  I had a chance to see the Kung Fu episode of Human Weapon.  I haven’t watched any of the other episodes of the series, but was keen to see this one.  So how did it turn out?

Hobbling good time!

Wow. Been a while since I’ve had the soreness that comes from a good weekend of workout. “Hi, how’ve you been? Welcome back! You remember the way to my muscles, right?”

What brought on this soreness, you ask? Why, nothing short of a great day of climbing, running a good distance at a good clip and a good kung fu and tai chi practice the next day. Mmm. Good all-body-all-over workout. And more ought to be on the way — a former classmate of sorts got in contact with me to run some conditioning classes for him once a week.

No gaming this past weekend, but did go to an Ethiopian restaurant, only the second time I’ve been to one, and that was darn tasty.

And in a somewhat countervein, I found this interesting: It’s not quite a small world.

Ratatouille pour vous

It’s Pixar. It’s about fine food. It takes place in Paris. Did I mention it was done by Pixar? Is there any way that I couldn’t like Ratatouille?

(Potential Spoilers Ahead)

OMG, poutine

LotD: Poutine in the New York Times!. “Its going to stick without a doubt,” said Mr Bennett. No pun intended indeed…

(http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com if you need to…)

Growth

Eco-farming ‘helps world’s poor’ — increases yields by up to 79%. Link to story here and to the scientific paper here.

Merry Food!

I’ve gotten an upsurge in spam lately, and it’s most interesting — there seems to be a trend lately for clusters of nearly identical spam messages coming in droves of droves. I’m guessing it’s banks of spambots spewing it out in chunks, but it’s amusing and weird. Every few days a new batch… most recently it’s been of the same word, but with the name of the person in the From: header. As a technique I have to question it, really — even if you were fairly green, you’d think 10 messages like that would tip someone off, no?

At any rate, I broke down and further set up my procmail rules to sort out my known friends, a whitelist of sorts, to reduce the chance of accidentally deleting messages in a quick scan of ‘yes, no, yes yes yes yes, no yes’ of my emails.

This post comes post-xmas, and I trust that everyone created for themselves a fantastic holiday. I didn’t get a chance to go home this year due to late time-off-requestness and my parents came down to visit instead. We had a fantastic time, and got to hit a couple of very nice restaurants. Food bloggage ahead…