If you'd asked me four or five years ago what I thought of my culinary skills, I'd have responded with one of the few praises of myself. If you were to ask me today about my cooking skills four or five years ago, I'd respond by saying that I was a goddamn simpleton at best. I could follow a recipe, but I wasn't making the best food I could make. It wasn't until the pandemic and a lot of food experimentation (and a lot of tips picked up from Hello Fresh) to come to this realization, but I'd say the food Kayla and I make now is of a much, much higer quality. I may not have her natural ability to come up with the perfect mix of spices, but I get by pretty okay these days. In the spirit of late night brevity, here are a few tips we picked up over the course of the last few years.

Salt - My parents (and generations before that) grew up in a world that demonized salt because of health research at the time. As such, I grew up eating a lot of underseasoned food. Shcokingly, salt is very important. And I'm not talking about table salt, which is an abomination that nobody should use. No, I'm talking about ensuring that food is adequately salted while cooking it with a quality kosher salt (I prefer Morton; it has the best flakey properties). Properly salting is the difference between a bland meal and a fantabulous meal. Just be sure to taste as you go. Tasting is important.

Garlic powder - This one Kayla and I discovered for ourselves, but when you season with salt and pepper, add some garlic powder as well. This adds a delightful little bump of flavor to pretty much anything.

Avocado oil rocks - Most would tell you the best neutral oil is extra virgin olive oil. My problem with olive oil is its low smoke point. Kayla tipped me off to avocado oil, which you can use as a drop in replacement. It doesn't impart any flavor but has a high smoke point. Any time a recipe asks for oil, regardless of the application, we reach for avocado.

Roasted veggies - Growing up, the veggies we had were basically reheated straight from a can or frozen and "seasoned" with butter. Let me tell you about a magical way to prepare fresh veggies that's easy and also delicious: roasting. Take your pick of vegetable (pretty much any vegetable), reduce said vegetable into smaller pieces, throw on a baking sheet with salt, pepper, garlic power, and then toss all that together with neutral oil. Roast in a 425F oven for ~15min or when the tops of the veggies start to char, and you're having a good time. Preparing vegetables this way has basically unlocked that entire genre of food to me.

Embrace kitchen gadgets - I was a big fan of Alton Brown growing up, and one of his platitudes was to stay away from the uni-tasker. I'm here to tell you that some uni-taskers are so good at what they do, they deserve to stand alone. The two off the top of my head are the air fryer and the pressure cooker. That bit above about the vegetables? Do that same thing in the air fryer and those vegetables will be just as awesome in less time without pre-heating the whole oven. It also makes the best frozen tater tots. The pressure cooker is like a slow cooker on steroids: all the simplicity in a tiny fraction of the time. I've been making the old family roast recipe straight in the instant pot and we're eating delightfully tender meat in about an hour, not ten. Oh, I'll also toss in a good word for the toaster oven. I actually probably use that more than any other kitchen device.

There are a few of the ways our kitchen ways (or my own preconcieved notions) have change over the last few years, much to the improvement of all the food we make.

I like being outside. This is probably rooted in the amount of time I spent outside as a kid. Whether it be trying to set the backyard on fire or heading down the street to the playground of the nearby elemnentary school, my youth saw a lot of time in the outdoors. A great way to be outside for extended periods is to walk. My life has had various periods of time spent walking. When the family car broke down, we spent a lot of time walking to and from various places in the course of daily life. The store, church, the library. When I went to college, I walked to and from school every day since I didn't have a car. My first job, I spent a lot of time wandering downtown. This was only increased when the TV station gave all the employees and encouraged everybody to average 10,000 steps per day for some amount of time. There was even a counter on the sidebar of this blog for a while. This began my era of very long walks; 3-6 miles was pretty common. And when I moved to California... I kind of fell off that.

Now, when I was out and about, I still didn't mind putting in miles walking where other transportation would be annoying. Namely, doing anything up in San Francisco. Driving up there is not my favorite thing, so I'd opt for taking the train and walking wherever I needed to go. But, the every day long walks disappeared until I joined SurveyMonkey and my lunches were no longer spent with the usual lunch crew. I started walking around the block, then started walking around the mall, and just kept extending the range. As this continued, I needed footware that was actually suitable for walking. Wanting to make sure I got something that would best support my feet for long walks, I did some research and it turned out the best shoe for walking was a runnig shoe.

Took two whole paragraphs to get to the title's topic.

Armed with a pair of running shoes and a newly found zeal for working out thanks to encouragement from friends and coworkers (and also meaningful weight loss), one day I decided "hey... maybe I should try running?". By this point, I was living next to downtown San Mateo and was walking three to four miles every evening, on top of whatever I would do at lunch which itself had evolved beyond just walking. So, trying running was just another type of exercise to keep things mixed up. Also, devbus had been running for a while, so there as an added social aspect. All those sentences to say, one day instead of my walk, I attempted a run instead.

It sucked.

But, it was a start. I don't recall running being what I considered my "primary" form of exercise, that was probably more in the HIIT/weights area. But, looking back, I was definitely trying hard to get better at it. My early attempts were in the fall of 2018, and by 2019 I had signed up for and completed my first 10k, a lovely run through Bend which I had encouraged devbus to join for. The regular running was kept up and improvements were made, more races were run, but I don't think I actively enjoyed the sport yet. At least, not consciously.

That mentality held for a while, up until I signed up for the Star Wars half marathon in Disney World with devbus. I heralded that this race would be the end of my running career... that race was scheduled for April 2020. Don't have to tell you what happened there, but without anything to train towards, I fell off the running bandwagon for a while. During the WFH phase of the pandemic, I picked the long walks at lunch back up, only occasionally running.

Not really sure when it happened, but somewhere in there I realized that I was actually getting enjoyment from runs. I didn't balk at putting on the shoes as much, didn't curse every second of active intervals. It was enjoyable being outside, listening to a podcast, and having that good feeling of accomplishment I had when the run was done.

While there were no active races being held, I did a number of virtual ones just to dangle a little carrot in front of my face. That continued all the way to the Disney Princess virtual half marathon that I ran in February this year. This time, however, I never planned on stopping. I've continued to run (or maybe jog; my times aren't anything spectacular) and will continue to run. Not only for the in-person Disneyland half marathon devbus and I managed to snag spots for next January, but because it feels good.

And I need every drop of dopamine I can get.

While I struggled to find a narrative format to talk about being a supportive husband a father in the three phases of pregnancy (prepartum, partum, and postpartum), I'm gonna go on a small rant about Kayla's "power pumping" show that I so graciously let her put on the TV while milk is sucked out of here boobs for an hour: Glee.

My first encounter with Glee was actually when the show got caught stealing Jonathan Coulton's version of Baby Got Back in an episode without attribution. All I really knew about the show itself was that it fit into the vein of High School Musical-like media happening at the time. Even now, it seems like a really strange and extremely niche genre of entertainment. Schools where you're in danger of getting caught up in a flash mob at any moment? Hard pass.

While this notion is not entirely off the mark, this show is full of so much more fuckery than I ever could've imagined. To set the scene before I add my commentary, the main plot is about a high school glee club trying to win nationals and avoid being dissolved by admin. Honestly, though, calling that the main plot is almost a stretch because there's so much other shit going on.

The Characters

Holy god, where to start. I think it's best to compare the characters in this show to something like Seinfeld or Always Sunny; shows whose core conceits revolve around a cast of characters that are iredeemably bad. But in the case of those shows, that's where the comedy comes from. The characters are comically awful and do comically awful things and are never painted as having the potential to improve. We're laughing at them, never with them.

In Glee, pretty much every character is self-centered and awful, but we're supposed to sympathize with the plights of these people. That's ignoring the fact that these people commit multiple felonies per episode. In the pilot, the teacher in charge of the fledgling glee club, the show's main character blackmails a student into joining his club by planting weed on said student. His wife pretends to be pregnant, going so far as blackmailing her OB/GYN into perpetuating this lie. The other main teacher - who is in a hell-bent war with glee club teacher - racks up a very long rap sheet that (partially) includes: physically assaulting students, tripping another teacher down a flight of stairs, being insanely bigoted right out in the open, and blackmailing the school's principal by roofie-ing him and either banging him or just staging photos of such an event. (THERE'S SO MUCH BLACKMAIL IN THIS SHOW!) But, we're shown she has a soft spot for people with downs syndrome because her sister has downs and she cares for her. Sorry, way too little, way too late.

Keep in mind that these are the ADULTS of the show. There's another dozen students that are also mains that I won't bother to cover. They're bad, but less so? I suppose that any of them are allowed to get away with their shit honestly probably falls back on the shoulders of the adults.

The Story / Music

You can't really separate these two items from each other: the music is really the tail wagging the story dog. Every bit of story is set up so that an episode can cram as many musical sequences in as possible, regardless of their merit to anything that's actually happening. I think what really bothers me the most, though, is how convoluted the story can get, while also being forgetful of its own rules. This is a show trying to operate like a long running serial, but have the amnesiac consequences of something episodic. Things that should have long lasting impact may never be completely resolved and quickly forgotten by the next episode, but there will be a confusing back and forth of the balance of power that persists for most of the show. Honestly, the storylines that revolve around the glee club are the biggest offenders of this. They can't keep their shit straight, they don't follow any kind of real world logic, and it's just a huge mess. The character driven storylines are an improvement, like Mr. Glee's wife and her fake pregnancy, or the teenage actual pregnancy of one of the students. These are fairly well presented, if not totally bonkers in some cases. To the point of pregnancy, I don't believe a single writer on this show has ever been an expectant parent. Having been in that world very right now, it hurt to watch "oh, I just found out I'm pregnant after having sex last week and IT'S A GIRL". No... I understand you're working on a compressed timeline within the confines of a show, but no. It doesn't work that way.

I think the broken logic is what really gets my goat. The glee club is in a constant battle for more funds, which supposedly they have paltry amounts of. AND YET they'll have five costume changes per episode for whatever random number they're throwing in on whatever locale. People seem to move about various locations (including into locations they shouldn't have regular access to, like other schools) with little regard for how that would work in a real-world timeline. It's like watching Star Trek '09 all over again; my brain gets hyper focused on the narrative contradictions and it just hurts after a while.

The Musical Numbers

They're a'ight. The band does a good job of mimicking the sound of the songs being covered, but the vocal performances are just too clean. They're good, just... vanilla and bland.

Conclusion

Do I hate this show? No. Do I enjoy it? Maybe? It's frustrating for all the reasons of logic and shitty character I've mentioned, but it's like watching a well produced draatic train wreck. (Seriously, the budget on this show had to be insane). It's enjoyable enough to watch with my wife as our child sustaining sustenance is sucked from her body. There are worse things I could watch, I guess.

Off-hand I can't think of any, but I'm sure there's something.

That headline is misleading. You thought I was talking about my wee baby boy, not what I'm actually gonna talk about.

Frequent readers of this blog (heh) will know that, for the last several years, I've run a couple of fairly successful reddit-adjacent websites: one RedditBooru and AnimeBracket. But, very soon, that chapter will finally be closed.

RedditBooru I shut down last year due to rising costs in storage. Turns out my $200+/mo Amazon bill was not transfer, but the price of storing oodles of terabytes of anime related images of varying levels of couth. I hadn't been active in the community for quite a while, so the plan to drop it was really just finishing something I'd already started. I wouldn't say it was easy, after all, that consumed quite a lot of time and was something I was proud of. But, the rising costs and trying to stay ahead of an aging tech stack that really needed to be rewritten was too much. A phase out plan went into place, the main site was shuttered, and I moved a bunch of data around so images could continue to be served much much cheaper. That's where it stands today. Technically, I had a sunset date for the image serving too, but forgot about it and just kind of let it go. I'll turn that faucet off some day... In retrospect, I was way ahead of the curve in shutting that down, because the recent reddit API changes would've forced me to do it anyways. At least I could've blamed u/spez for that one...

That leads to baby #2: AnimeBracket. Of these two sites, this one was the most technically sound. There are bugs that need to be addressed, but it largely hums along by itself with little intervention. The folks over at r/anime have been using it with large audiences for years with only occasional investigation on my part (timely investigations, but occasional). The biggest issue is the UI and admin tools: they're not user friendly, so I've spent a bunch of time correcting data for folks' brackets, which is all manual database queries. Not fun. The issues/suggestions list just keeps growing, and I can't find the time or energy to actually delve into it. And now with a wee baby, there's less of both and... honestly, I'm kind of ready to just be done with it. So, hopefully, I'll wind up handing it off to somebody in the r/anime community so they can keep having their brackets without any time on my part. Also, that's a bunch more money per month in server costs that would just disappear.

Hard to believe that it's been over ten years with these two things, but it's been a good run. There's a lot to be proud of for sure, and part of me misses their peak when I loved working on them and working with the community. But, that time is gone and it's time to move onto new things.

Like an actual baby.

And maybe an electronics YouTube channel?

Occasionally, mia madre and myself enter into a pact wherein we try to churn out one blog post a day for a month. This is one of those months, as it turns out. Given recent developments in my life, I have lots of thoughts to get out. But, as a warm-up exercise, I'll start with what I generally blog these days: publish and comment on a letter I wrote to myself in the past. A bit over a year ago, I decided that in addition to the end-of-year letter to myself, I'd do a birthday one as well. So, here's that:

FutureMe's persistent push for engagement has worked this time. Writing a letter to yourself twice a year roughly six months apart is an intriguing notion. You do always boast about how you get presents twice a year, why not a present from yourself?

You've been married half a year now, that's exciting. Baby plans have been put (temporarily) on hold for various reasons, which does open up the possibility of squeezing in some additional world galivanting (as "the COVID" allows to permit). Disney this weekend, Bend the next, Maggie visits after that, a cruise in August. Hoping for some Japan action, but we shall see.

You'll probably remember this, but playing pretend boss is no fun. Management track has never had appeal, but you have to try everything once, I suppose. Glad to be doing it on a trial basis, because I would not want to be doing it full time. No thanks, gimme code. (The ultimate irony will be 37-year-old me is a Sr Eng Mgr...)

Hope you open a dope ass Etsy shop with the laser (once that office room gets cleaned up). Thanks and Happy Birthday!

Going off of paragraph one, the middle of the year letter was hardly my actual idea and FutureMe suddenly being very annoying about sending emails. I've since unsubscribed...

It's interesting to read paragraph two, because it all seems so far in the past. The all consuming situation of getting ready for and then having a baby has been... all consuming, and it seems like that's been the mindset for a very long time.

From what I remember, last summer kind of sucked and was the beginning of me starting another wave of burnout, work being the biggest pain. Not only was I playing pretend manager for my boss who was on paternity leave, but I was also filling in as tech lead for another manager who'd bopped to a different team, and also acting as the point of contact in the stead of my director while he was out on sabbatical. On top of that, I was mentoring an intern. That's a lot just on the surface, but it's doing a lot of things that are very firmly outside my zone of comfort. The managerial things eventually bled away, but the tech lead role stuck firmly. A new team was grafted on to ours, doing work that I had a lot of intimiate knowledge of. Unfortunately, due to various departures, I was really the only one who had that level of experience, so was the person everybody continually leaned on... pretty much up until the point I left for paternity leave myself. To be fair, I was also heading up a big project, so was expected to be making some of those calls, but it just felt like continually thinking for myself and my own work, but also others all at once. That's quite a lot...

That was the biggest stressor of last summer, for sure, but even the fun things had their own amount of baggage... which is probably a shitty thing to complain about. Oh, woe is me. We're going to Disneyland. And then we're going on a road trip to Bend to see Weird Al in concert and drink beer. Then my sister is going to visit for a week where we bop around and have fun. Then we're going on a cruise, boo hoo. (A cruise I wound up getting COVID from, mind you.) But, when one's brain is already over-taxed, the lack of down time and constantly having places to be and things to do is just more taxing. Mind you, I enjoyed all those things we did in retrospect, but I recall being very drained at the time. Also, that was when we were ramping up the baby making plans, so that was it's own layer of stress on top of everything else.

Of course, doing all that stuff and being mentally drained didn't leave much in the tank for doing things with my new laser at the time, but I've since made pretty good use of it. It's one of my favorite toys and I'd like to make even more use of it... for, like, a YouTube show about how I make things or something...

Circling back to the emailing myself mid-cycle idea, I didn't this year. Mostly because of exhaustion and prepping for baby. I think I'll just leave that to December me. I've already got enough words I have to type in my future...

One down, thirty to go...