I went out this weekend.

So very many posts across the (shudder) blogosphere seem to begin this way, but this one matters! To me, in any case. newdrunkdrivers and I enjoy going out together, or at least we used to, but now we get out of the house in the evenings sans bebbeh very rarely. It is actually surprisingly difficult to find people who are willing to come over, watch your tv, play your xbox, and help themselves to good booze under the guise of "babysitting". As it works out, the aforementioned child is fast asleep upstairs by 6PM, and so the only burden incumbent on said sitter is to, as also aforementioned, entertain themselves with ESPN or zombie games or Wii Fit or even the intertubes, as we also supply that. In considering the matter, I really think people ought to be paying us! Anyway...

So, a friend's birthday was Saturday night, and she and her husband are child-free and extremely hip people. The birthday party was scheduled for early evening at a lounge and late evening at a martini club with a friend who "spins". I am peripherally aware of what this is but do not make it habit to affect easy familiarity with it.

Luckily I am just familiar enough with DC that Rouge was old stomping grounds for us, so at least I knew where the bar was. What I did not know is that there is a back room for private parties. This room (see right) has couches and pillows and SNAKESKIN ON THE WALLS. How sleazily awesome is that. In deference to my yawny self, and in part to stake an early claim on the (unreserved) back room, the party started at 7. newdrunkdrivers insisted that I should attend; he was still recovering from stomach flu and was happy to be the dude lounging on the futon watching West Wing reruns.

I have NO CONCLUSION whatsoever to this story, and in fact the entire story is just set-up anyway.
I dug out mascara, and used it!
I left the house after dark and went somewhere!
I couldn't find a nice shirt that didn't have baby snot or whatever stains on it, but I put on a jacket!
A bartender made me a drink that was not on the menu!
I chatted! (I even served and vollied, when assorted drunken jackasses decided "Hey, it's DC, let's talk about women in politics.")
I was awake til midnight!

Remarkable things, hence, remarked.

Not her first christmas, but the first time she will receive a present. What a present it will be! Thank you Inhabitots, for pointing me to the must-have best-ever seriously fantastic ABC blocks in the world.
A – Appendages 
B – Bioengineering 
C - Caffeine
 D - Dirigible
E – Experiment 
F - Freeze ray
 G – Goggles 
H – Henchmen
I – Invention 
J – Jargon 
K – Potassium 
L – Laser M - Maniacal
N - Nanotechnology
 O – Organs 
P - Peasants (with Pitchforks)
Q - Quantum physics
 R - Robot
 S - Self-experimentation
T – Tentacles 
U - Underground Lair
 V - Virus
 W - Wrench
X - X-Ray
 Y - You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow 
Z – Zombies

Sort of taking a break from warcraft to work on a warcraft novel. Yes... it's true. I'm writing fanfic. Though technically I'm not so much writing it as talking about writing it. And huddling in a pile of blankets in a corner, bemoaning my fate.

The tiny germ-bringer has done it again. I'm at work, but I told them I was taking a sick day and not to bother me plz.

Miss H is just on the verge of walking. She's a little slow on walking and talking, but seems to be cool on doing her own thing. She's still small; got in a fight at daycare the other day with a much larger child. I was impressed -- she got jumped by another kid, and whipped out some street fighting moves -- defensive grappling, a few headbutts. How does a 15 month old learn these things??

She remains as generally happy and charming as the day she was born though. Yesterday we went to the cocoa bar for a latte (for me), and sat outside on the patio. She sat fairly patiently in a chair and people-watched. I need to check on whether wifi reaches the patio from across the street. It would be a great place to hang out with a laptop in the evenings.

Things that Baby H does not like:

- being wiped down with water and having her hair scrubbed
- cold stethoscopes

That is all. She likes everything else.

Luckily she has no memory and after screaming her lungs out from the vicious shampooing, she got wrapped up in a hippo towel and fell asleep.

Funny that I got the urge to post independently from newdrunkdrivers but within 24 hrs. I had no idea he'd just posted a summary of house/family stuff.

To echo... the kitchen in our new house truly is terrible, almost to the point of unusable. Everything in the oven comes out uneven, burned on the bottom or the top, uncooked on the inside. The counter space is laughable. The cabinets are out of reach, or too low to reach comfortably. There are black holes where things disappear. The sink is the unpleasant white porcelain that stains instead of the nice stainless steel that does not. The appliances are ancient, the fridge fills with standing water regularly, and the dishwasher, though new, is located in the spot where the range should have been. We are surviving it though, and kitchen remodel isn't a priority until other things are paid for and we've settled into the house for a couple of years.

I'm looking forward to maternity leave.

newdrunkdrivers built me an herb garden, which is doing wonderfully, and I'm slowly working through plantings for the rest of the area. The west side of the house functions as a giant solar collector right now (it is amazing how, as shelters from the elements, modern houses are really poorly designed) and so I have been working on ways to mitigate the problem that the nursery upstairs, in the southwest part of the house, is usually boiling during the day.

As such, I ordered three varieties of hops ("Willamette", "Centennial", and "Sterling"). The vines don't do a lot in the first year, though the bare roots look like they have healthy sprouts, but in the 2nd and 3rd years, it's not too hard to get the full 18 feet of length out of them, and they prefer vertical growth -- perfect for a two story house -- shade in the summer, and dieback for solar collection in the winter. Added plus... homegrown hops. I got them in the ground today, but at 35 weeks, I can't do a lot of garden work without getting out of breath very quickly.

I like this one even better. "Of course, just seeing the warning might be enough to decohere them."

The rest of the warning signs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/87547772@N00/sets/72157594323393196/

This is so Snow Crash!

The whole set of modern warning signs is genius.

This weekend was a balmy 55F degrees, and while I couldn't make myself do anything useful on Saturday besides veg, Sunday was sunny and beautiful.

I started the day by trying to make some .jp food for breakfast. I made the rice cooker recipe for sweet rice with adzuki, which was interesting -- a little bland -- but I screwed up on the adzuki beans and didn't cook them until they were completely soft, so the texture was off. I also made miso soup, but then didn't realize that the shiro miso we'd bought was quite salty, and the dashi that I made for it was also quite salty. The fairy ring mushrooms in it were tasty, but the saltiness of it really didn't work. Thank god for Turkish coffee; it never fails me!

Mr. Neshura helped me out afterwards in the great outdoors; in exchange for buying him dinner, he put his manly muscles to work single-digging and aerating a 6x2 foot garden bed, as well as weed-eating and cleaning up around the front yard.

I planted five varieties of heirloom garlic in the new bed: "Red Janice", "Transylvania", "Zemo", "Ail de Pay Gers", and "Sakura Japanese" (N to S). Next to the front gate I put in some more garlic, a variety called "Siciliano". Two other basically unused garden beds got "Red Rezan" and "Oregon Blue" (also N to S). I'll be curious to see which of the areas is most preferred by the garlic. It will overwinter and grow slowly, to be harvested in mid-summer. These are all hardneck garlics, not available in your local Megamart; I haven't tasted them but the flavor is said to be superior.

I also threw in some daikon seeds here and there around the beds, along with an overcoat of white clover seeds and some here-and-there brassicas for greens. I don't know if any of them will sprout, but they weren't doing me any good sitting in seed packets. We'll see!

More wedding photo goodness as it filters in from around the internets:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35468136171@N01/sets/72157594317449593/

Thank you h0mee!

Assorted Highlights
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cior/sets/72157594290367625/
http://picasaweb.google.com/neshura/MacphistoAndNeshuraWeddingHighlights

Raw Photostreams
http://picasaweb.google.com/Mousie777/AmandaAndScottABeautifulWedding
http://picasaweb.google.com/neshura/WeddingAtGlenBurnieElaineSCamera

Got married, Sept 16, outside, weather cooperated. I am seriously still so tired that I need a second honeymoon just to recuperate from the wedding and first honeymoon.

Photos are floating around the Net.

Indeed, I understand the general idea that cheap energy has allowed us to ship things all over the world to meet demand on the margin and create markets where previously there were none. That this is entirely subsidized by the force of large armies (military or not) backing a global economic freak show, I also understand.

Seriously though -- 100 mile radius? Must I put on a bear suit when I forage for huckleberries and sumac, snuffling through the forest to find the first shoots of poke or the sweet tangy ramp leaves? I mean, a bear suit might be handy to protect me against stings from wild bees when I steal their honey, but will it protect me from the millions of other people who live within 100 mile radius who also have their eye on that honey? As a hobby, it's fine. There are enough wild plants in my yard to feed about a quarter of a person, so I have to supplement with cookies right now.

Within 100 miles, I could in fact join a box scheme and get a week's worth of veggies delivered. I was going to do it, but I couldn't decide between them, because the transparency of the pricing information was...not so transparent.

Thankfully for the state of the world, cheap energy has not just subsidized the exchange of food, but the exchange of culture too. Food IS culture, or at least a subset of it. I don't want to accuse the hundred mile diet of being some sort of slippery slope into a dark ages of parochial conflicts over resources, like in the actual dark ages, when the shining lights were the people who ventured outside the hundred mile boundary in armed caravans and brought back pepper, turmeric, tea, monkeys, and dusky brides. That would be a little bit hysterical.

But to indulge the hysteria for a moment, what's next? No books produced outside the hundred mile radius? Certainly books are heavy, and we could save a lot of energy that way. How about travel? Cultural exchange? But people weigh even more than books!

The fact is, nobody treads lightly on the Earth if it is tastier, more convenient, and quicker to tread heavily on it. A democratic society in aggregate is ruled by the individuals who make decisions about their own futures, not the future of society.

I put my hope in technology and ingenuity.

It was newdrunkdrivers's idea to procure a gaiwan for each of us. Mine has butterflies on it and is currently full of tasty jasmine tea!

This idea was even more coherent after we saw The Tea Film, which follows the progress of a humorless son of Marin County wandering through China in a white linen suit buying tea directly from poor farmers and battling the evil tea factory cartels (who turn out to be genuinely evil!)...the subject matter was enthralling despite the somewhat strident filmmaking, the environmental colonialism, and the presence of one of the most pompous tea-tasting aficionados I've ever seen onscreen. "...shards of angel wings..." my ass!

Check out Silk Road Teas for their catalog of teas though. Dude seemed to know what he was talking about.

I'm fascinated by a recent topic introduced to me in #evil-wire by h0mee and jacobian, and thoughtfully discussed in various forms and metaphors by Kragen: dominant assurance contracts

It's a relatively new theory invented by Alex Tabarrok, as refinement of one way to address commons problems. Check out WP discussions of the tragedy of the commons and the free rider problem for some well-written background.

Let's start with a bridge as a common good (brings benefits to everyone that outweigh the costs to everyone, like cultural exchange and tourism). Instead of raising taxes to build a bridge, let's explore an alternate private financial arrangement, in which only the contractual obligation is administered by the government, not the actual monies.

Everyone pledges to pitch in some money for the bridge. If the contracted number of donors isn't met, all the money is refunded back to the donors. That way, there's a much greater incentive -- if you give money and your neighbors choose not to, then you don't get screwed, you get refunded. That is, very briefly, an example of an assurance contract.

The problem with an assurance contract is that it still gets free riders; as a donor you must go shoulder the burden of the time-transaction-opportunity costs -- whether writing the cheque, reading out your credit card number over the phone, or even clicking a mouse -- and there is still a fairly decent chance that a quorum won't be raised and thusly your money will be refunded. In the meantime, however, it will have earned you no interest and the time you spent picking out and funding the contract is wasted.

A dominant assurance contract basically adds a refund bonus to the arrangement: if the quorum is not raised, you get your money back, plus a little extra. If the quorum IS raised, the project goes through, and you've paid just a little extra to the entrepreneur who would have paid you if it failed. This arrangement in its particulars is complicated but in general is compelling; you win either way. The fact that you win both ways creates an environment where everyone wants to participate...and thus no one needs to shoulder a disproportionate burden (except the escrow agent holding the contract and risking the chance that they'll have to pay everyone back, but then, they reap financial profits). *As a note, I'm not certain what happens with the money if the quorum is raised but the project fails -- still gets refunded with interest? Dunno.

It's a great idea for getting a group together for big purchases that everyone shares in but nobody wants to spend all the money on. Got free-riding neighbors who take advantage of your desperate loneliness to watch boxing on your projection TV? Sell the TV and use the proceeds to seed a contract for a joint plasma TV in a communal area -- your friends have to all opt in for $100, if they want to watch any TV at all. If one person opts out, nobody gets TV, but anyone who opted in gets $115 back -- not enough to buy a really good TV, but enough to make it worth their time either way.

Check out Fundable for an example of an assurance contract escrow agent. I don't know of a dominant assurance contract escrow agent yet, but it's a damned interesting idea.

A "movie-in-a-box" product service system.

Pack a digital camera, software, digitized books on filmmaking, some royalty-free stock music footage on DVDs, some plans for DIY dollys, booms, etc. -- into a padded box.

Create a group to share it around. Write a joint screenplay. One person films one part, another person films another.

Or schools can sign up to put down a deposit and rent it.

Or it could be like Netflix, with anonymous users who do their own thing, but they have to put down their credit card and a damage deposit.

I have been pondering exercise recently, given that I don't get enough. I really miss the vigorous walks that came with working at Sputnik. It's very cold here, and there's no train to Herndon.

What is really needed is a console MMO that incorporates live action. I've killed a lot of zebras, wolves, wyverns, and pig-men in the past couple of weeks...I bonk them on the head with a large hammer, or hack at them with an axe.

Were I to be physically swinging a foam axe or shadowboxing in the comfort of my own home, simultaneously working my back muscles and leveling my orc hunter, I suspect that I would be well on my way towards cardiovascular fitness (or possibly a slipped disc).

Crazy, or crazy like a fox?

Lovely flowers, yay! Tasty cheese and cocktails yay!

Dinner out at Restaurant Eve, disappointing. Talk about style over substance!

The food was good, it was perfectly fine. There were a few standout dishes -- for one, the "Yin and Tonic" with Castille gin and homemade tonic, and for another, the chocolate truffles. But let's just say that the price-to-deliciousness ratio was completely out of whack.

As a couple of examples --
Heirloom carrots served with dinosaur kale over carrot puree. Good carrots: quite tasty, sweet and fresh-tasting. Carrot puree: fluffy and lovely. Kale: quite excellent. Salt: expensive sea salt and too much of it.

Warm broccoli soup with spring garlic: pretty good.

Parsnips stacked up like fenceposts with shavings of black truffle: pretty good.

Just pretty good. Not stunning, not magnificent, not even remarkably delicious.

For what the bill came to, I have expectations that were not met. Then again, I have standards that could be considered unreasonable in the middle of winter in suburban Virginia.

Thus, the standard-bearer of perfect food remains, in my heart, Millennium. I like a place where I taste the food and, vegan or not, I think to myself, "How the fuck did they manage to coax that level of flavor out of this food??!" There aren't a lot of places where the food lives up to, and then far exceeds, the mouth-watering literacy of the dish name.

(e.g. Grilled Abalone Mushroom Paella:
spicy seitan sausage, sauté of root vegetables & baby artichokes, saffron scented tomato broth, cumin & thyme spiced rice, toasted almond gremolata)

*drool*

September 16. Save the date.