International Bavarian Of Mystery

The Time: The last, desperate throes of the Cold War.
The Place: An untapped trove of biodiversity.
The Hat: What can I say?

Farewell S2

My lovely original Tivo, after over 8 years of faithful service and 2 additional hard drives, is finally dead and gone. Its transferred lifetime service will live on in my HD. For one final time I would like to thank all my wonderful ex-staff for the gift that made sure I've seen all 7,418 episodes of Law & Order.

Rationalist Rap

RDM turned me on to the rapper Baba Brinkman through The Rap Guide to Evolution. Nice animation!

Wall-E Cake

Here is the result of our visit to the cake shop. NDM produced this for a coworker's son's fourth birthday.
Everything was edible except for the wire holding up the stars.
My favorite parts were the roaches, which the children misidentified as crickets. I was not permitted to correct their identification.

Cake Crazy

NDM has drawn me off to downtown Orlando to wallow in cake supplies. While she runs down the aisles oohing and aahing, I thought I would see if I could blog from my new phone. What do you know?

Ultrasound #2

We had our second ultrasound today. Now the arguments about naming can finally begin in earnest. (I already have a Gmail address reserved in case my nominee wins out.)
Everything looked acceptable, from size...
...to the number of critical digits.

Fiat Pond

NDM's dream of a real koi pond have finally come to fruition. Four feet deep with a waterfall and a stream, the deed is done.
As many home improvements do, this one began with spray paint.
Here I am pretending to help dig the pond. In reality it turns out that I actually could have -- even four feet down there is nothing underneath the Saint Augustine grass but sand.
I liked the pond well enough as a simple quarry in our front yard, but we had to press on.
It took about two weeks from start to unlandscaped finish.
The top of the waterfall gives us a nice view over our HOA battlements.
Up close it still looks like a bit like construction zone, and it will clearly take us some time to naturalize in the pond's margins.
We have seven small koi in the pond right now. After a week acclimating they are just beginning to feel confident enough to show themselves.
The fantail makes it really obvious that these things are basically trumped-up goldfish.
So far we seem to have one day-blooming and one night-blooming pad. We'll see how many water plants we can stuff in there once the pond gets more established.

Thanksgiving (Chow)

We need to start having more people over for Thanksgiving. This year, despite the hardships of our rather crappy new kitchen with few if any workspaces for real cooking, we managed to turn out entirely too much food that we had no chance of consuming. Besides the turkey, it stuffing, and a separate vegetarian mushroom stuffing, we had a crusty creamed spinach, mashed cauliflower, baked potatoes and yams, roasted brussel sprouts, scalloped potatoes, home-made cranberry sauce, two roll variations, and some curried yams. I think that covers it.
Not to mention the obligatory French onion soup I have to make but wouldn't touch if you paid me. And then of course the leftover dishes...turkey chili, risotto, etc. Can't wait until our parents live close enough to eat some of this stuff!