bonnie & jason

Happy Wangsgiving

We hosted a small gathering of folks for Thanksgiving this year. Bonnie made a “fruit turkey”, a cranberry mold, salad, and layered jello. I made garlic mashed potatoes (Alton Brown recipe), wild rice stuffing (made up based on what I remember from a recipe from 2 years ago), a 16 lb turkey (Alton Brown influenced), and giblet gravy. And of course, all our guests brought even more food. Ham, korean short ribs, meatballs and sausages, apple pie, cookies, sweet potatoes, dim sum, creamed corn, 7 layer brownies, cake, potato salad, mango pudding, and probably a few things I’ve already digested and forgotten. It was an obscene amount of food for the number of mouths available.

Needless to say, everyone stuffed their faces but barely made a dent in all the food. So everyone also did a good job taking lots of leftovers home.

Turkey turned out pretty well. I brined it for a day before roasting. And I also used the techniques Alton Brown recommends in order to keep the breasts moist while still making sure the thighs cook through.

Here’s Bonnie’s “turkey.”

Sisters – pictures from the point and shoot

Amanda’s army crawl:

Ashley’s real crawl:

Daddy’s nasty Cornell hat:

Carving the pumpkin (I realize this is a little late.)

Peekaboo!

It’s been chilly…

… so Amanda and Ashley have been bundled up the last couple days to make sure they don’t get cold.

Grease monkey ninja

I’m not one to cross post stuff, but I saw this on autoblog.com and was impressed enough to share it here. I think mostly I just wish I could work on cars all day and have mad grease monkey ninja skillz.

Twisted Pear Audio Buffalo 32S high end DAC

I finally finished another one of my projects. This is a build for a friend. It’s a DAC (digital/analog converter) from the folks at Twisted Pear Audio.

Here are the specs:
INPUTS:
1. Toslink optical
2. USB
3. Coax S/PDIF

OUTPUTS:
1. K1000 balanced
2. XLR balanced
3. TRS single ended
4. RCA preamp

ENCLOSURE:
1. Custom machined Par metal case with solid birch front panel

POWER SUPPLY:
1. +/- 15V Dual mono bipolar power supplies for the analog sections.
2. Dual 5V power supply for the digital sections (Toslink, 4:1 Mux, Buffalo)

MISC:
1. e24 relay circuit triggered by an LED ring Bulgin momentary switch.
2. Man hours: Probably about 100 all told.
3. Birch panel was cut and then routed for the radiused edges and milled for the center stepped hole. The hole was stained with a pecan finish before tung oiling the remainder of the piece and then sealed with a few layers of polyurethane with light sanding in between coats.
4. It sounds fantastic!

Still little

Ashley and Amanda had their 9 month appointment last week. No surprise, they’re still on the small side. Ashley was almost 15.5 lbs and Amanda is a little over 14 lbs. Seems like they’re going to be babies forever! (The fact that they’re still not sleeping through the night doesn’t help.)

Alissa, on the other hand, continues to test us with the terrible twos. I don’t have any other frame of reference so I can’t tell if she’s just very stubborn, or if she’s spoiled, or if we’re just too distracted with the twins, or what. I do know that I’m looking forward to the day when she can be reasoned with. When is that… 19? 26?

Of course, the trials and tribulations of parenting three kids under the age of three are occasionally overshadowed by glimpses of hope and respite. For example, watching Amanda breaststroke her way around the house is very entertaining. And Ashley has a way of brightening your day with her smile. And Alissa… well Alissa can pee and poop in the potty. And she calls popcorn, “copcorn.” And she confuses tomato and potato. And finally, when the stars align, all three kids sleep at the same time. Thank God for that!

Halloween party at Tommy and Phyllis’

We went to Tommy and Phyllis’ beautiful new house for a Halloween party. They had great decorations, food, and provided a safe and enthusiastic neighborhood full of houses to go trick or treating.

Here’s a picture with the grandparents before we left.

Amanda fell asleep during the trick or treat walk:

Phyliss’ salad with carmelized “brains”:

And her eye-meatball sandwiches:

Plus stromboli (can’t remember what the scary name was):

She also made a really good french onion soup and had punch and dip. That plus all the desserts everyone brought made for quite the feast. We brought a pumpkin cake that I forgot to take a picture of. I did a bad job with the frosting so it wasn’t all that pretty anyway. It did have a Hoho stem that was pretty funny though… till Terry broke it off and ate it.

I’ll have to get some pictures from the other folks who were there. I’m getting worse at photographing everything… need another set of hands to take pictures while holding babies.