Saturday, November 22, 2008

Roast Turkey! No...BBQ Beef! What? Outrage!

The #$$#@! Stove Story, well it goes like this...I personally with malice and forethought killed the lovely self-cleaning GE Signature in-wall stove by totally FRYING it's gas igniter device to the point it could not even be replaced! No shit! The self=cleaning feature always worked so well, I didn't do it often but maybe once every two months. I LIKE evenness in stoves so had inserted a large 18" square 1.5" thick ceramic kiln shelve as a heat sink. I did this on the very bottom and it was the maximum size I could fit in the box that was this particular stove. I enjoyed it very much as it was capable of >500 degree temps within a 1/2 hour and at that temp I could do quite good homemade pizzas and breads. The large ceramic surface was the cooking surface and heatsink for the oven little did I know that it had blocked the heat vents from the gas burner underneith. I used it often and did the self-cleaning feature about every other month to cleanup my messes. Last March I made a terrific mess in the stove with a lassagna thaT OVERFLOWED IT'S DISH and thus did a cleaning cycle afterwards, the one that fried the ignitor and left the stove unable to light at all. Damn. I called in a repair guy when I couldn't free the ignitor from it's receptacle. He worked for 2 solid hours trying to extracate the bloody ignitor thing to no avail. I paid him his 70 dollar fee and gave up on it. So we went to France knowing we would replace it when we got back. In the first week of October we orderred a new replacement oven, one very similar to the now dead GE only made by Maytag. It was to come from Michigan. It arrived about three weeks after it was orderred and upon Kelly's inspection the rear corner was bashed in, not just a little, it was totally uninstallable. So we refused the thing after calling the company and reporting the damage and the trucker left with it. Goodbye stove, goodbye pizzas. The company reassured us that a new one was being orderred and we would see it in about three more weeks...in time for Thanksgiving. Sure I thought and thus planned the meal I told you about BBQ'd beef instead of turkey. Time went on, two then three weeks and then another big rig arrived. This time was different, the driver saw the box from the hydralic lift gate and said himself..."You gunna refuse this one too I imagine", sure enough, the entire front end, glass doors and all were smashed and hanging inthe crate. Shit. (French word Merde...mare-duh). So I signed the slip of paper he presented and wrote as I did a few weeks before "Refused" across it. This time I called the company and asked them to personally inspect the bloody thing there before it got here...and double crate it and I would happily pay for such, the reassured me that the WOULD do these things THIS time and here we are. I will BBQ the beef tomorrow and hope the damned thing arrives sometime before Christmas in one piece. We shall see.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Computer Chatter



I dunno if anyone cares but my whole working life was a curious mix of the computer industry, IBM (yes), a small company in Long Island, NY called Potter Instrument Company and my last one Control Data Corporation. I worked in an IBM plant in San Jose, CA right out of the USAF and during this time wound up getting trained as a field engineer working in San Francisco and environs. Not just a job believe me, thoroughly entertaining and at times impossible. The City (As SF is known locally and elsewhere) was a bustling place full of people, cars, buses, noise, dirt and panhandlers. I was a young man with a starter family who lived in Stinson Beach about 25 miles away along the northern coast. I loved it there. We moved there shortly after my son Michael was born, from Campbell near San Jose in the fall of 1968. It was a small (660 sq. ft!) ex-tent house from early in the 20th century. Built on a platform flat on the sand. It became a house at some time in the past with 4 tiny rooms and thin walls coverred with lath and plaster. The outside was lap siding which we painted grey with white trim, our elephant look. It remained cool and wet most every day and suited both my mood and need for refuge from the chaos of the Streets of San Francisco sans Karl Malden from the TV show of the same name.
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The computers that challenged my patience and intellect at that time were room-fillers to be sure, huge 7 foot tall black boxes that roared with the sound of fans and gears. Complex beyond belief and prone to both errors and outright failure at any time. One spent a goodly portion of each working day in study of the modes of failure and in acts called Preventative Maintenance aka PM designed to stem the flow of Incident Reports aka IRs to the main office. My friend SC worked at the same location that I did in downtown SF, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company aka PT&T and we grew to be best friends and co-workers. Days were spent cleaning filters, vacuuming the frames and checking voltages of the 360/50 and 360/65 processors and thier related periferals. Huge racks of reference books in dark blue matching covers lined the edges of the equally huge main room. It was always cold therein, these things needed airconditioning just to stay powered up as they had extensive heat sensors to detect overtemperature conditions in each section of the machine.
Humans came in second in this multi-million dollar computer facility thus we froze except when we roasted.
More to come...

Life in The Center of France...NOT!

I'm missing my friends in France, the comaraderie, laughs, concerns and, of course the random gossip. We said "two weeks" when we left, smiling and waving at A&R at the train station as we pulled out like a scene from an old movie. Then once back in warm, golden California (it's the weeds that are baked golden folks!) France faded into a lovely memory of warm afternoons with friends over a local wine, our ex-pat studded dinner parties and drives to the weekend brocantes (junk sales). Even now though if I open my Picassa application and see the France label my tale wags. Open an image and stare at it like a kid at a candy store window. Oh the flowers, the green hills, the forests, the old men and their loaves of warm bread, the old women brooming off their front steps. I'm here but part of me is there. I now spend some minutes every day looking up fares from San Francisco to good ol' CDG hoping for the oh-so-rare bargain fare. No luck yet. A return date is hard to pin down now too as we have decided that we will move into the Little House at 907 Suisun Street when the current tenant vacates which will be who-knows-when-though-we-are-trying. That last mouthful is because the lovely tenant failed to pay any rent this month (was due on the 1st and now it's the 20th) and we gave her a 3 day notice last week to pay rent or quit...that's what it's called here to no particular avail.
Actually we enlisted the services of a lawyer to do the job for us at a cost of about 1 months rent, so now we are poorer by 2 months rent. They presented her with a Unlawful Detainer summons tocourt on Tuesday which gives her 5 days to answer to the court in person before they hail the Sherrif (not of Nottingham but of Solano)
to evict her and her wares from our new living place. Complicated isn't it? It's really terrible, I don't know what has gone wrong with her life but something obviously but she never answerred our phone calls or pleaded anything to us in mercy of her situation so we did what we have done. I don't like it, she's been in the place and taken good care of it inside with new paint and repairs as she went along these last six years. I balked at first at the action but now...it's done and I'm getting excited to move in and fix up the ancient old place! We LOVE projects! It will be one that's for sure. Unlawful Detainer...hmmmmmm.
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Oh...cool new site feature: http://kukuklok.com/ an online alarm clock for all you that keep your machine on 24/7. Simple to use, set the wake up time, choose which alarm you want...cock, clock, electronic or metal guitar and as long as the bloody machine doesn't belly up or the electricity fails you will have an ontime alarming experience. Lute says 4 Stars for this simple but very cool and useful net app!

Monday, November 17, 2008

Bread Making Madness


I grew very tired of 4 dollar whole wheat bread at the supermarket. It was preposterous. So we checked out bread machines on the good ol' iNet and learned quite enough to make a sound purchasing decision. We struck out to search the local used goods thrift stores for a suitable one in good shape. The first we went to had none, not a one...the next had one but it looked like it's best baking days were twenty years ago so on we went and at the lovely Thrift Center on West Texas Street in Fairfield we found one that looked as though it had never been used! No manual but we figured correctly that the manual would be available on-line from the manufacturers site. Kelly then found a dynamite whole wheat recipe and away we went to make delicious, homemade whole wheat breads for far less than the 4 dollar price the market wanted. Cost per loaf, about $1.35. Cheap these days.
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Then I gre curious about the making of sourdough breads. Why? Well here in The Bay Area sourdough bread is endemic, found everywhere in all kinds of forms, bagettes, rolls, pizza dough, bagels (really!). Thus I have undertaken the creation of my own starter ( 1 cup of bread flour, one cup of water ) and at this very minute have the beginnings of tonights hamberger buns becoming dough in the bread machine. So far it looks good, nice round all togther wonderful shape. Next to allow it to rise in the machine, drop it out, shape it into rolls and bake. We shall see. Sourdough, according to experts, takes much patience, more than ordinary bread making as the yeast is slow to burp thus making the bread slow to rise. I'm going to let it rise in the bread machine itself as it maintains a warmth that is beneficial to the rise time. Home after a quick trip to the store and a round about town to check out foreclosure-looking sales posted on houses...not many about at this time. The dough just sat there while we were gone, I saw no doubling or maybe even 10%...but it is pretty and I hand cut the dough into quarters and formed them to make hamburger buns, we shall see. May be hockey pucks when they are baked.
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Sometime later...
We have hockey pucks! Rise? What rise? Except one that had trapped air in it and blew up to a small round object that looked deceptively like a loaf of bread sort-of.
Alas upon sawing it open the hole was discoverred and the texture was that of so much flour and water cooked to a consistency of hard rubber. So much for sourdough bread making for the Unthanksgiving lunch upcoming this Sunday. Back to whole wheat for now.