We’ll be in Hannibal this weekend for my 10 year high school reunion and Folklife Festival, so probably no meals to post, so this one from last weekend will have to tide you over.
Pork steaks, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and fried green pepper. The last real meal prepared in our Swisher house kitchen!
For your amusement, I decided to take pictures of my attempt at frying some eggs last night. We’ve got something of a surplus from our chicken, so it was time to get rid of some of them. I’ve made scrambled eggs a few times now, and that isn’t a problem. A fried egg, on the other hand, is apparently more difficult.
The picture above is just to show you how nice these eggs look. It’s unfortunate we aren’t going to have a chicken anymore in a few weeks!
While it’s unfortunate we won’t have the chicken, it is fortunate that we’ll have Brooke back, as apparently, I can’t fry an egg to save my life. I probably had the range on too hot or something. This is four eggs. The stuck a bit. Didn’t end up as pretty as the first picture. Meg liked the toast, with butter and grape jelly…though much of it ended up on her shirt.
I think I’ll stick with scrambled eggs from now on. These still tasted good, though!
Ah, it’s like I said: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
— Quark, speaking the final line of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”
The third Star Trek series, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” is now on Netflix Instant Queue. I don’t want to dwell on the series or the franchise as a whole, but I do want to say that I’m looking forward to re-watching the series. I have seen all of “Next Generation” and all of “Voyager” twice (or more…) when they’ve been in re-runs over the years, but “DS9,” for some reason, hasn’t been re-played as often since it left television 12 years ago. At the time, I didn’t like “DS9” as much because, especially in the latter half of the series, they moved to more of a “serial plotline” structure where each episode tied into subsequent episodes. Back then, I didn’t like it, but now, in the wake of excellent shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica,” I think I may appreciate “DS9” more than I did. Today, it seems like practically every drama on television is doing it. As my Mom always says, “everything goes back to Star Trek”…
Nay, the real reason this post exists is because we visited St. Louis this past weekend. As has been mentioned before, Brooke has been living down there four days a week while Meg and I have been in Iowa, only seeing each other on weekends. This past Thursday, however, I went down to speak with a potential employer at Washington University. No details to write on that front yet, but hopefully it’ll pan out in the near future.
As part of the visit, I decided to stay down there through Sunday (with Meg, of course), getting a chance to see some people that I haven’t seen in awhile. Meg and I went by SLU on Friday morning, then I went out to lunch with some friends from there. We went apple picking on Friday afternoon (more on that in another post) with other friends, and then had dinner with them Friday night. We checked out a potential place to live (assuming I get this job soon…) on Saturday, then went out to dinner with Brooke’s family on Saturday night. And finally, we went to our old church, Webster Hills, on Sunday morning.
And that brings us to the apropos quote from above: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Things at SLU had definitely changed a bit. Some new construction, some new faces. Dr. Westfall will be retiring sometime late next year, so more changes are definitely in store for my old department. New progress on research that has carried on in my absence, which is the way of things.
Oh, and in news where change isn’t so good, it seems like every light on Kingshighway now has a “Photo Enforced” sign on it. Very bad. I’ll be doing my best to avoid those shenanigans.
At church on Sunday, though, in many ways, it’s like we’d never left. They did an acoustic “service in the round” where all the folks in the congregation were in a circle surrounding the altar area (this was our idea a few years ago, for the record). The music was mostly stuff we knew, but there was a newer one we hadn’t heard before. They also interspersed Bible verse readings between the verses of some of the songs: a nice addition. There weren’t many new faces there, but there were quite a few people there we hadn’t seen in a long time, so that was excellent. Basically, being there felt like “home” again.
I guess this separation of our family is just getting to me. While I don’t mind moving forward with life, getting to do “bigger and better things,” in many ways, I just want to go back to the life we had when we lived in St. Louis: just with a baby along this time. We ate out on the patio in Soulard on Friday for lunch and all I could think of was how I missed living down there. It was a spectacular day, after all, and with the leaves starting to change color, it made me wish I could walk home rather than have to drive 5 hours to get to my real house.
It will be interesting to look back on our time in Iowa in 12 years like I’m looking back on “DS9,” whether I will dislike it because of our most recent experience(s), or whether I will grow to appreciate it more. Right now, though, to continue the analogy, I just want to go back to “The Next Generation:” I was happy with it.
Switchfoot‘s new album is being released tomorrow, so in their honor, here’s my favorite song of the moment:
So, I realize not everyone wants to comment on these various posts (especially mine… :-P), but looking at traffic data, I can tell that more than a few people are actually visiting this silly blog of ours. Thus, I’ve wanted to set up some way for people to express something about a post without actually commenting on it. This solution has been available for awhile, but I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it.
Therefore, I have set up a “+1” button (for Google+ users) and a “Like” button (for Facebook users) at the bottom of each post. It will include the number of people that have “plussed” or “liked” each post, giving me some idea of whether people are actually reading anything when they visit the site.
Just a friendly public service announcement. 🙂
Broccoli-cheddar soup and homemade bread!
Roasted chicken (the precooked kind…they were on sale!), baked sweet potato fries, green pepper rings. The peppers were a last minute inspiration, but I think they turned out well. Kind of tasted like fried okra.
Andy eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches nearly every day and gets made fun of all the time (mostly by me). I think I would eat this every day if the ingredients were this good!
Fried egg sandwiches (eggs from our chicken who has been chowing down in the compost pile a lot recently, making her egg yolks even more yellow) with fresh, homegrown tomatoes, turkey bacon, and cheddar cheese. Also, chocolate-banana “smoothies.”
I have several dinners to post that Andy’s bugging me about getting up, so here you go!!
Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, home grown green beans. Perfect!!!
I’m not one to do “Top #” lists, but after today’s announcement that Google+ is now available to any and all, I thought it would be useful to recount a few of the features that I’ve been using on a nearly daily basis (well…some things…not everything, of course).
1). House Hunting – When we moved up here, I came up alone and brought along our Flip Video camera so Brooke could get a “feel” for the different options, at least in some virtual sense. This time around, Brooke is taking pictures with her phone, then allowing the Google+ app to automatically upload the pictures to her profile so she can share them with me. Then, I can comment on each picture and she can answer all my questions. This is done without anyone else having to see the conversation(s) or the pictures.
2). Gaming Communication – In the past, we have used Skype to make VOIP calls between Josh, Ryan and Mike so we can voice chat while playing whatever game we’re on at the time. Skype works well, but one person hosts the call and then has to call each person once they’re ready (much like a telephone). Now, with Google+ Hangouts, you can simply “Open A Hangout,” which is basically an open invitation with whatever group you want that can join in at any time. So, if one of us isn’t ready, they can join in whenever they want. Much more convenient, and the voice quality is nice, too.
3). Selective Sharing – I post a lot of stuff on Facebook. A lot of stuff. Google+ makes it easy with their Circles function, allowing me to share with people from Columbia, or people from Truman, or people from St. Louis, or all of them all at once. This is done really easily, both from the web interface and from within the Google+ Android app. Facebook has started adding in some of this functionality, but it’s nowhere near as helpful. It’s obvious it’s a “stop gap” measure to provide some of the same functionality, but is very much “tacked on” to their existing, convoluted infrastructure. Circles is just easier to use.
4). Full Integration with Picasa – I already use Picasa to post pictures online, partially for display on this very website. Because of the integration between Google+ and Picasa, any pictures from my phone are automatically uploaded, and then I can share them on Google+ with whoever I want. But also, they are made available under Picasa, so I can copy them into any albums I want, and either keep them private or share them. In short: it’s free cloud storage and organization for any picture I take with my phone (though, you can still manually upload them from a camera if you want).
5). Separated Streams – Right now, I have 287 people in my various circles on Google+. A lot of those folks are Gamers With Jobs people. There are times, however, I really just want to see the news updates from my Friends, rather than the GWJ crew. Thus, Google+ makes it easy to choose which Circle (or “news feed”) you want to view. Moreover, the Android App lets you set feeds so you just have to swipe from side to side on the screen to switch between feeds, making it much easier to follow the people you want without seeing updates from everyone else. Again, Facebook implemented something similar in recent weeks, and while their web interface works alright for this, the Android app just doesn’t have the same functionality. Believe you me, when you have over 500 people on your Facebook friends list, it’s a daunting task to scroll through everyone’s stuff every morning…
So now that Google+ is open to everyone, I hope more people check it out. Really, anyone that has a Google account for e-mail already has a Google+ account ready and waiting. It’ll get more integrated over the coming year, anyway, especially with Picasa (being renamed to “Google Photos”) and Reader. You may as well get used to it now!
Plus, you may find that you like it. 🙂
