Baked Eggs in Avocados

A few weeks back was my 17th wedding anniversary.  Though our anniversary fell on Saturday, I planned on taking Friday off so I could spend some time with my wife (try it, its way better than working).  The night before, my wife got this text message from her sister.  It served as the inspiration for our anniversary breakfast the next day.

Baking eggs in an avocado is pretty simple. Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees and put an egg into the hollow of an avocado.  Depending upon the size of your egg and the size of the avocado seed, you might need to scoop some extra avocado out.  I didn't do that and lost quite a bit of egg white in the over flow.  But then you get to eat some avocado early, as a preview of whats to come.

Season with salt and pepper and bake the avocado for 20 to 25 minutes. I think that baked eggs are really good, but they take longer to cook than you think.  When it's done drizzle with your favorite hot sauce, I like the sriracha because its thicker and holds its shape.

The texture of the avocado didn't really change with baking, as sometimes warm mushy things can be weird to eat. With some bacon and coffee (and the obligatory glass of water), it makes a great breakfast! 

You can use an avocado as a little bowl for all kinds of things.  I sometimes will make tuna salad and fill the avocado.  Let me know what kinds of things you like to put in your avocados!

Enjoy!

Making funny faces

My wife makes funny faces while she's at her computer. I think that its quite cute and over the years, I've learned to interpret her facial expression to let me know what she's doing. Sorry, there are no pictures of these faces, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Big cute grin
When my wife is blogging or, more importantly, responding to comments on her blog, she has a big cute smile. Its one of those smiles that just makes me happy when ever I see her with that face on. I like to ask her what she's doing when she's making this face, as its obvious that she is happy. Keep the comments coming over on her blog.

Concentrating face
When my wife is composing an email for swimteam car pool or PTSA volunteering or something like that, she is concentrating hard. Her lips are pressed together, thinning them to almost a line. She looks very stern - and knowing some of the car pool coordination problems she deals with, she should be. I'm learning to not disturb her when she's making this face. Its sort of like the headphones worn by cube workers to say Do Not Disturb.

Concerned face
This is a new face that I observed this morning (and which instigated this post). Her brow was furled, but she was intently watching her computer screen, only looking away when scooping more oatmeal from her bowl. I asked her what she was doing and it turns out she was watching Fringe on Hulu. The particular episode was about mutants and they were conducting an exhumation. She doesn't like shows about mutants in the same way that our daughter doesn't like zombies.

Writing this made me think of one other face she makes. She probably won't want me to write about this one (and get your head out of the gutter). Its her Focused Physical Concentration face. When she's doing something that requires a great deal of focus, like threading a needle or using a jewler's screwdriver, she sticks the tip of her tongue out of her mouth, just a little bit off center. This is another face that says Do Not Disturb lest I break her concentration.

This is not a strange phenomenon, as I do the same thing. Heather can tell when I'm in pain, as I have my pain face. I'm sure we all have faces that we make? What are yours?

Happy Valentine's Day

Yesterday, Valentine's Day 2009, I woke up at 5:10 am. Nope, I wasn't doing anything special for my valentine; we were getting ready to go to a swim meet.

My wife and I had decided that because of the swim meet, we would have a low-key Valentine's Day. We planned on just taking it easy after the swim meet and cooking dinner together. Heather really likes lamb (which I really don't) and I found a lamb recipe that seemed okay - shallot crusted rack of lamb sounds not too bad, and I'd cook lamb for my sweetheart. For sides, we had mushroom risotto, asparagus and braised leeks. We also decided to make red velvet cupcakes, which really look cool.

The dinner came together nicely, with just about everything coming to the table at the same time. We got a little later start than intended, as we watched a movie after we got home, so we ate a little later, too. But the dinner was enjoyable, I found the lamb to be acceptable, though Heather's lamb preference is the shank, I've now learned (or at least am cognizant of).

After dinner, Heather said that it was a classic Beau dinner. Balsamic reduction (on the crust), red meat and asparagus. She might be on to something here. But it was nice, a low key dinner with my family whom I love very much. It was a good way to spend Valentine's Day.

My kisses are electric

Tonight, when I kissed my wife, she jumped.

Don't sit there and tell me about static electricity.

It's my kisses.

Weird Al at the Puyallup fair

I've been awfully busy of late, but I really do have 3 posts that I want to write. Just so that I can at least get it written about with in 7 days of the occurrence, we went to the Puyallup Fair last Wednesday.

It was early release day at the schools, so we picked up the kids and headed to Puyallup. I even took vacation that day - real vacation - I didn't work!

We saw cows, sheep, pigs and horses (the photos are still on my camera) and were amazed at how clean the barns were. In fact, the whole fair was very clean and pleasant. I'll get the photos posted this week...

The concert that evening was Weird Al Yankovich and the grand stands were packed! A sold out show, for Weird Al... It was entertaining. But I'm not sure how we've set up our kids. My first concert was Metallica, Heather's was New Order and our kids, Weird Al. Not quite the same caliber...

Back to normal

So, our lives are returning to something more normal. Summer has drawn to a close and the kids are back in school. The visiting in-laws have gone home. Work has slowed down to a fast pace. The control that I have over my life is slowly returning. And I'll be able to return to blogging, too.

The visit with the in-laws went well. We visited places in Seattle we had already been to and places we hadn't. We really pushed them in their visit - we got back home from Friday Harbor at 2:30 am! Having our new HD TV was also nice, because they did enjoy just watching Comcast On Demand movies (although the choices weren't always the best for watching with your grand kids).

My work slowed down some and I was able to make dinner almost every night. That was really relaxing. I hate to prepare green beans and so I "involved" Heather's Mom in the bean stringing and she helped me skin beets later in the week. I was also able to finish up the pre-requisite statistics and accounting assessments for b-school.


We went back to Mount Rainier again, and her parent's spent the afternoon at the visitor center while we hiked up to Glacier Vista and up Pebble Creek until we ran out of time. The kids played in a snow patch at 6,225' and we turned around at 6,852' feet. I was the packhorse and carried everybody's jackets - I was beat that evening. I think I have to get in better shape for my backpacking trip to Camp Muir.

House guests

The in laws are visiting.


I have to remember to close the bathroom door when I pee.

New wifi access point, new KMFDM album

I didn't think I'd be writing a post like this tonight, but it fits.

I was out picking up pizza and I heard that KMFDM would be on the C89.5 Worldwide and so I called up Heather to see if they were having a show tonight in Seattle. No dice, just a radio thing. So when I got home, I kept the radio in my MINI on and ran to the entertainment center.

Heather asked me why the music was on in the car and I responded, "so I can have a seamless audio experience."

She didn't want to listen to the radio show, because she "doesn't like my music." So Parker and I sat in the garage in the car listening, while the pizza cooked.

Once the pizza was ready, I decided I would sit in my home office and stream the music. And that is were I am right now. Eating pizza, listening to KMFDM streaming online, downloading some very large work files and using my new wifi access point.

I finally upgraded to 802.11g and I am doing all this via wifi, without any latency! It is incredible. Just like the new KMFDM. The album is really good, lots of self-sampling (a KMFDM trademark), but the radio show is hilarious. They are having all kinds of technological issues with the phones (dropping callers) and quite funny conversations with the callers.

It's been a helluva week

This week has been a rough one. I'm no longer feeling exhausted, but we'll see how the weekend fares with 3 swimmeet sessions.

On Monday, I had a training event that I needed to attend at the local office, an infrequent occurance for a remote worker. As I left the meeting, I saw there were 8 missed calls on my phone. Something was up. It turns out that my daughter broke her arm on the playground at school. My wife had scheduled last minute doctor's appointments for her and was quickly directed to the Emergency Room at Seattle Children's Hospital. I was in Kent, she was on her way to Seattle and our oldest was at swim practice on Mercer Island. I waited for swim practice to end and rounded up our oldest and met Heather in the ER.

Chase's elbow (well, the upper arm right at the elbow) was broken and she was going to need surgery and some hardware to hold it all together. There were more pressing (emergent, in medical-ese) surgery cases, so they put her in a splint, scheduled an appointment for Tuesday afternoon and sent us home for the night.

We left the hospital late and once we got home and Chase mostly comfortable in bed, I worked late into the night to catch up from being out of the office all afternoon.

I was too tired to go to the gym Tuesday morning, so I didn't. I spent the morning re-arranging my day, moving my afternoon appointments to Wednesday. Tuesday was one of those days that I had planned to spend most of on the phone making follow up calls. Heather was at a PTA luncheon and the hospital called to see if we could come in a few hours early. We jumped at that opportunity, with the hopes that we would get her surgery done earlier. We arranged for a friend to take our youngest and pick up our oldest after school and we were off to the hospital.

We were admitted and promptly taken back to a waiting area. And we waited. There was no cell phone coverage either. Finally at about 4:30 pm (pretty much our original schedule), Chase went under the knife. Her procedure only lasted an hour, during which Heather and I ate at the hospital cafeteria. We were paged to come back to the waiting area and we did and waited. Evidently, Chase was sleeping off her anesthesia and after a few hours, they took her to her recovery room, where she and Heather would stay overnight.

I ended up leaving the hospital at about 8:45pm to go take our kids off our friend's hands. Once I got the boys in bed, I worked late into the night to try to keep my head above water at work.

Chase had asked me to come back to the hospital in the morning, so I had it all planned out. I would go drop our youngest at pre-school and then go to the hospital, stay for a few hours until I had to leave to pick up at pre-school. Seconds before I was going to shut off my computer and start executing that plan, Heather IM's me and says that they will be leaving soon.

Chase and Heather returned home and we quickly turned around to go to literacy day, so she could show off a book she had made in class and a neat PowerPoint presentation about the desert.

As I was returning from the pre-school pickup, my MINI lurched and had a loss of power. The check engine light came on and we limped home. I was able to schedule an appointment, unfortunately for next Tuesday. What was truly problematic was that I had a 6 am flight Thursday morning to go to Oakland. I arranged for a shuttle to take me to the airport and was set for the next day.

My shuttle arrived promptly at 2:50am Thursday morning. It was really quite early and we made 5 other stops on the way to the airport. I got to the airport on time, in fact early, but I was already exhausted and this didn't help any. Usually, when I travel, I stop at Starbucks (the first one on the B concourse) and buy coffee and a scone. I got there before they opened. So, I took a nap and waited for them to open.

I had a full day in Oakland and got a lot accomplished. I didn't get too much email, so on Friday there wasn't much catching up that I had to do either.

My shuttle back home only had me, so it was much faster and I only got home a few minutes later than had I been driving.

Friday I was still too beat to go to the gym. Even though it was only two days ago, I can't remember what I did. There was a swim meet and I do remember that there were lots of calls to our consultants that resulted in, "Can I call you about this on Saturday."

Saturday was another early morning, because we had a swim meet. I only got two loads of laundry done, some work and some reading. I think the best part of the afternoon was giving Heather a nice full body massage. She thought I had been practicing!

So, here I am on a Sunday, again at a swim meet (yep, 3rd time in a weekend). I've been catching up on blogs (pre-writing a few and staging them as drafts, so they are ready to publish during the week). I am about half way through Freakonomics and looking forward to dinner with one of my college room mates who is in town for a conference.

I'm definitely not caught up on rest, but I'm getting there.

My movie groove is back!

The first of several retro blogs


Recently, I tried branching out and trying new movie genres in an effort to please my wife (and no, I'm not talking about XXX movies, you pervs).

And as I've posted, it hasn't been all that successful. Wal-Mart documentaries and romance (didn't even watch that one). No such luck.

Last week, while I was out, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang arrived. We watched it after I got home Friday night. It was pretty good (4 stars) and Heather stayed awake for the whole thing. She must have liked it!

I've got my groove back!

Conversation with Heather

H: I fear for my sanity.
Me: Your sanity?
H: Nevermind, I found it.

I'm not so sure. I'll keep my eyes open.

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Daily writing

Writing is improved through frequency. This is something that they try to accomplish in elementary school with daily writing and home journals.

While we were talking with a teacher a while ago, I came to the sudden realization that blogging was just the grown up version of daily writing. I have a fifth grader who sometimes struggles with the idea of daily writing. The geek part of me says, "Start a blog for him." The Dad part of me says, "Do I really want to open up that part of the internet to him?"

Frequency is also important to blogging. Not only do you write gooder, but more posts drive traffic. Having good content is important too...

Now, that Heather blogs, there is friendly competition between us as to how has better stats. Usually she does, until I write something that she claims is boring, something entirely techno-geeky. So, in checking my stats on Google Analytics, I see a big decline this week.

And it is no ones fault but my own. I haven't posted for a few days. But I have been writing quite a bit. I have gotten into Yelp quite a bit and written several reviews (yesterday). It is funny how you often you go places that you can review.

I plan on taking my wife out on a date tonight - either to a place found through Yelp or one I'll Yelp about later. Maybe she'll make me yelp later, too!

She excites me!

Tomorrow is trash day. Maybe there will be some rushing around in a short nighty.

Heather is a hot blogger!

Civic processes

The city in which I live has been planning on building a Town Center for a while (in strategic plan from 2002) and is now in the public feedback portion of their development plan. Last night, I attended a public meeting to discuss... something - maybe the amount of retail space and the potential sales tax revenue. I dunno.

By the way, the Director of Community Development, Kamuron Gurol, is an excellent facilitator. I was impressed how he was able to respectfully answer people's questions even when he didn't have an answer or was walking back in the process many steps. I had a flash back to high school civics when he was explaining the length of the public feedback process to some woman.

But I digress. I really wasn't there for the Town Center project. My wife is somewhat interested and involved with it. I was there because we were planning on going out to coffee afterwards. Now that is a way to get people involved with civic processes - tempt them with hot dates with hot women!

It turns out that Sammamish rolls up the sidewalks at night. At 9:30 pm, most everything was closed! So, we'll try again for a date, but this time not one involving civic processes!