1. Ride my motorcycle
2. Start building bookcases
3. Hang out with friends
4. Go to the Monday CrossFit workout

Things I did do this holiday weekend:

1. Finished installing the new baseboard
2. Made lavender simple syrup
3. Took the wife out for a lovely lunch at Salt
4. Cleaned up the garage just a tiny bit
5. Cooked a bunch so we’ll have lots of easy leftovers
6. Went to the Saturday CrossFit workout and still can’t walk straight

I call that a win overall.

Luckily for me, I was recently “promoted” to the title of Chief Mixology Officer at work. We also now host a monthly gathering of geeks with drinks known as Ruby on Beer, so I thought I’d sneak something other than beer to the next party. Since I’m not the type to fly blind, I took the opportunity last Friday to make a batch of Fish House Punch for the office, just to try things out.

The results were definitely positive. Some folks were big, big fans, but I thought the flavors needed some rounding out. There were some sharp lemon notes and a big pop of sweet that required some smoothing.

Since the next Ruby on Beer is this Thursday, I felt like I needed some more practice. Today I started into making something when I realized I didn’t have any brandy or cognac in the house (I’m generally not a big fan, so no surprise, really.). Rather than make a run out to the packy to pick some up, I figured I’d just make something up.

I broke a few “rules” by using bourbon in my mixture, but it turns out I’m pretty good at making stuff up. ;^)

Punchin’ Judy

• For the oleo saccharum, peel four lemons and muddle the rinds in a cup of small crystal raw sugar.
• Let the lemon peels sit in the sugar for at least half an hour. The sugar will draw out the oils in the rind.
• Add the following to the oleo saccharum:
  • 1 cup lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup orange juice
  • 2 oz orange liqueur (Cointreau, Triple Sec, etc.)
  • 2 cups dark spiced rum (I used Kraken)
  • 2 cups bourbon (I went with Jim Beam)
  • 4 cups black tea steeped medium-strong
• Remove the lemon rinds and let sit in the fridge for at least an hour or two (I failed at this step)
• Serve with a big brick of ice and lemon wheels floating in it

This punch is delightfully easy to drink. Perhaps also dangerously easy to drink, because it definitely packs a wallop!

Pile it all into a shaker and shake until the cider ice cubes, which are soft, completely disintegrate.
Poor into chilled cocktail glass.

Ignite Boulder 11 was pretty awesome.

Great crowd, amazing venue, and pretty high level sparks, too. (The one about MS being a plumbing problem rather than an auto-immune disease was a jaw-dropper for me.)

Check the pics and stuff.

I had known about Hush for a couple months probably, but my first attempt to get on the mailing list didn’t work for whatever reason. Then just recently a newsletter from The Infinite Monkey Theorem Urban Winery (of which I have been a big fan for about a year) mentioned that they were hosting the next Hush, so I hopped on their site and signed up hoping I’d be in time to get invited to the winery dinner. As luck would have it, I was and I couldn’t be happier with the result.

The evening started off at about 6pm in the winery’s new courtyard sampling a surprisingly good rosé. We did some milling about, mostly keeping to ourselves, though a few brave souls did approach us. By the time we were told to move in to the winery’s Quonset hut for dinner, though, we had buddied up with another couple with whom we would turn out to have a lot of strange similarities. We had a real blast dining with them and hope to see them again soon.

Dinner itself was A-plus. The food was prepared by Kate Horton, chef at Black Pearl in Denver, and her team with each course paired with a different offering from the winery. Needless to say, I was totally geeking out the whole night.

Then to take the geek factor to warp 11, I met a guy in the line for the restroom who owns a Tesla. We went outside so I could pose next to it and instead he told me to hop in! We took a screaming lap around the block and went back to our tables. The Wife said something along the lines of “What happened to you? You were gone a long time.” to which I grinned with nerdy pride “Oh, I just went for a ride in a Tesla.”

More great food, awesome wine, and fantastic company followed.

So, two lessons:
1) If you’re in Denver, make the effort and go to a Hush event it’s worth the price and and all the underground cloak and dagger effort. If you aren’t in Denver, you might want to look around and see if there’s anything similar in your area.
2) I seem to “learn” this one over and over, but don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. You might find people that love the strange things you love and have great stories to tell you about them.

Congrats to Phil at Hush, Ben at IMT, and Chef Kate. I’m a big fan of all three now.

Goals are much easier to actually accomplish if you break it into steps. I haven’t done the Googling, but I assume tapering with the help of patches or nicotine gum is a much more successful method of smoking cessation than cold turkey. Fitness improvements are almost by definition something to work toward one step at a time — you can’t just go from the couch to running a marathon, you need to run around the block first.

This all came about from me lying in bed thinking about some things I’d like to accomplish this year and trying to come up with ways to keep track of my paths toward them. A lot of this is based on my use of the Physics Diet web site for tracking my weight. Even when I’m not succeeding, I love having the data in front of me. I can forgive myself a big red spike if I then come back with some green afterward.

I want something like that for other goals, so I started bending my brain around it a little. Physics Diet depends on daily weight and body fat measurements, and each day your “goal” (in most cases, at least) is to weigh less than you did the day before. How do you break other types of goals into similarly measurable “micro-goals”.

I think the main crux is how you formulate your goal.

Suppose I want to be able to run ten kilometers this year. The first step is to get out and run – period. That means running once in this next week is an improvement from the previous state of not running at all. Then if I get to the point where I am running consistently three days a week, I need to change my metric to something like distance covered or even time if my distance covered is the same as before. Obviously, this just got a lot more complex than a weight chart…

At least there are still obvious metrics, though – in the example above you have frequency, distance, and time. All of which you can easily measure and compare. You might even be able to make a pretty chart/graph to show progress/regression. Even without the chart I could track progress in each of the metrics and use that data to motivate myself toward my originally stated goal of running 10k within my time frame.

Here’s another one: I want to learn to play my Fluke ukulele. How the heck do I “chunkify” something like that? Well, I could rephrase the goal to something more like “I want to practice the ukulele every day.” That give me the frequency metric again. I could also perhaps measure a duration metric, too. Those will definitely be helpful to me at the start, but after a while two hours of plinking tunelessly will become a disappointment, and it’s a big jump from counting how often I practice to counting something like songs I’ve learned to play….

Perhaps this illustrates a lack of knowledge — I might not actually understand what it takes to reach my goal.

Maybe that’s OK, though. Maybe tracking data on these small metrics is just a way to get me off the ground for some goals, while with others – like running or other fitness goals – it could be a long-lasting habit.

Besides, there are other things to track. Perhaps some goals are better broken into a sequential checklist of milestones — when you can check something off, you have made progress. This sort of goal wouldn’t really have backwards progress, I suppose, aside from stalling out on time.

What do you think? Is this likely to be a useful tack for achieving goals? Am I just using the idea of tracking data as a procrastination tool? (Thanks to my experience with Physics Diet, I’m quite certain this isn’t the case. Tracking measurements takes very little effort and thinking out your goals is never a bad thing.)

And of course faster is better, right Chief? That straight line between points A and B must also be the optimal route. How could it not be?

Well, I have come to the point in my life where I am developing an appreciation for the winding road. In my mind, actually firing up the stove trumps bringing up the Pizza Hut iPhone app to get a pie and some wings (although there are still close calls on that front, to be honest). If a 50 year old hunk of metal gets the job done as well as the modern conglomeration of plastics and who-knows-what, this guy is probably going to go for the antique. I can – and will – go on…

Build Something

A great example of what I’m talking about is home repair and/or home improvement. These days most folks run the numbers and decide their time is worth more than the cost of hiring a guy to come do the job for them.

The truth of the matter is fixing or building things around the house is super intimidating and sometimes actually difficult. These points are especially true if you have never had any training or experience with this kind of work. That said, however, the resources are out there for you to quickly gain the knowledge you need to give it a go. Go learn how to do the thing you need to do and give it a try.

Remember, even if you really fuck it up, you can hire that guy on Service Magic to fix it, but odds are you’ll do fine and you’ll have the satisfaction of having done it yourself.

Make Your Own Food

This past year, the thing I’ve done that has excited me the most is our raised bed garden. Even though it didn’t get finished until very late in the summer, we grew our own food in our own back yard. Talk about satisfaction!

Even if you don’t want to grow food, though, it’s worth putting in the effort to cook your own meals as much as you can. People who say they “can’t cook to save my life” are both lazy and lying. Cooking is one o the the most easily acquired skills there is in this world. Your food will be better than most things you’d go out to buy and there’s a high probability that it will even be better for you.

That Straight Razor Thing

The three of you who read this thing have already heard a lot about my obsession with straight razors. At this point I shave almost exclusively with a straight razor. Sometimes that means I only shave once a week, though, which doesn’t do me any favors. At that point my technique suffers and I am more likely to cut myself. I might actually have a very faint, but permanent scar on my face now… For real.

I still love it, though.

Shaving takes a long time with the straight razor. First, I strop my razor and prep my lather brush; then I hop in the shower for a long, hot one; once I’m dried off, I make some lather and start shaving — I usually do at least three passes at around 10 minutes each. The whole process takes 45 minutes or so, and I enjoy every single one of them. I play music I enjoy and just spend quality time with myself. More people should find something that allows them to have that kind of time with themselves.

Boozing

Learning about and mixing classic cocktails, and even trying to concoct my own new recipes, give me a lot of joy, as some of you may have noticed. There’s not much more to say about that, really. It’s just another hobby that requires a bit more effort than the average Joe puts into it.

Your Way?

Now, let’s be truthful, I’m not the King of the Hard Way by any stretch of the imagination. By no means do I always shun the efficient or the easy. Even the things I’ve listed above aren’t exactly earth shattering, but it’s an attitude I’ve been pondering lately.

So, how about you? Tell me about something you do the “hard way”. What is an activity that give you more satisfaction when you do it by hand rather than with some kind of “modern convenience”? I’ll bet some of you are doing way more interesting things than I am.

At first blush, it looks totally and insanely awesome. We’ll see if I hold with that opinion over time… Or more importantly, whether it’s worthwhile considering how automated I already have things.

Have you seen my crazy chest tattoo? It’s finally finished!

Posted via email from Jake Sutton’s posterous

I love geeking out over my last.fm stats. I play my ipod all the damned time, and I have been “scrobbling” my tracks to last.fm since 06/06/2006 (awesome date, eh?). Anyway, I felt like doing some musical naval gazing. Perhaps the folks out there (all four of you?) will chime in with some music they are loving right now…

I pay way too much attention to my artists rankings, I’m sure, but it’s something fun for me and it keeps me listening to music, which is a good thing, if you ask me. As an example, and to get the topic of conversation started, take a look at my top artist list for the last week:

My top artists list for the last week

Some highlights and reasons behind the list:

• I fell hard for Frightened Rabbit (Amazon) after hearing a song of theirs on the NPR All Songs Considered podcast. The show in question was a review of the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, which sounds like it was pretty damned good.
• Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears (Amz), Eli “Paperboy” Reed & The True Loves (Amz), and JD Thompson (Amz) are all suggestions from my brother-in-law. All three are awesome and recommended.
• Al Green (Amz) and Leonard Cohen (Amz) are good cuddly bed time music. Badly Drawn Boy (Amz) is good sleepy bed time music.
• Loch Lomond (Amz) opened for Blitzen Trapper (Amz) when we saw them recently.
• Tom Waits (Amz) is friggin’ Tom Waits. He’s my all-time #1 artist. Period.
• Fanfarlo (skip Amz – buy from them) is a recent discovery that I haven’t put down yet.
• Modest Mouse (Amz) has some new-ish stuff on the wires.
• Portastatic (Amz) and Neutral Milk Hotel (Amz) are things I decided to revisit after hearing the All Songs Considered show commemorating the 20th anniversary of Merge Records — one of my favorite labels.
• The Dodos (Amz) was something else I thought I should give an extra listen.

That’s the stuff I’ve been playing a lot recently, then. There’s also a very long tail to this chart because a lot of the time I just play a playlist I have set up called “Been a Long Time” which is automatically filled with music I haven’t played in the last 3 months. That playlist — or my “The Best Stuff” playlist featuring 5-star tracks — is probably responsible for some of the Tom Waits tracks, actually.

So what’s the longer picture? Let’s look at the past six months:

My top artists list for the last 6 months

I’ll be honest, things start getting a little watered down at this point. I have several stand-by artists and playlists for bed time listening and a lot of them top the charts in the long run.

• The Decemberists (Amz), Andrew Bird (Amz), Leonard Cohen, Bon Iver (Amz), and Loney, Dear (Amz) are sleepy time artists, but also got boosted because we saw them live in this time span.
• Others in the bed time rotation: José González (Amz), Elliott Smith (Amz), The Avett Brothers (Amz) (though some of their songs are a bit too energetic), Van Morrison (Amz) (Holy crap! Van the Man’s official site gets blocked for malicious software! Wikipedia linked instead…), Townes Van Zandt (Amz), Iron and Wine (Amz), and Bob Dylan (Amz) (mostly “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire“).
• Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen are also just regulars in my rotation. I’m surprised Joni Mitchell (Amz) isn’t on the list.
• José González, Alice Russell (Amz), The Avett Brothers, and Loney, Dear also show up because they are all recent discoveries that I really latched onto for extended periods of time.
• Public Enemy (Amz) just should be there. I’m glad they are.

And finally, let’s check the overall picture since the middle of 2006:

My top artists list for "all time" (since 06/06/2006)

Some of these (The Innocence Mission (Amz) in particular) are definitely over-inflated due to the bed time effect, but I actually tend to and fiddle with this chart occasionally by playing an artist I feel deserves to be higher on the list, etc.

Tom Waits, Elliott Smith, Bob Dylan, Luna (Amz), Van Morrison, Pixies (Amz), Buffalo Tom (Amz), Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen are legitimate favorites of mine. I really know their music. The others are maybe not the intimate favorites the others are, but they are definitely favorites.

What are your favorites? Right now or all-time, let me know. I’m curious.

• The Green Fooder — We order pastured eggs, grass finished meats, and some other sundries from Mitch and love it all. Seriously. It’s well worth it in our opinion. I just hope he sticks with it.
• Home made lavender simple syrup and the Southend cocktail — I was all about this on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s worth mentioning here. Super good if you switch to Hendrick’s gin, too.
• Speaking of booze (and since I’ve decided my online — if not real life — personality has morphed into a strange combo of Dean Martin and George Carlin: booze & cussing!), you should get a copy of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them if you are into that sort of thing. The Sazerac formulation therein is a fave.
• Chef’s Planet cruets — Just got these today and they are the best thing I’ve encountered for counter-top cooking oil / vinegar storage.
• You know what I put in one of those? Spanish olive oil. Check it out. Whole Foods actually has some good olive oils under their 365 brand for reasonable prices.
• José Andrés — This guy’s “Made in Spain” show on PBS is what got me to grab some Spanish olive oil and makes me desperate to travel to España. The food looks sooooo jummy!
• Michael Ruhlman’s blog — I picked up three of his books because his blog posts are such high quality. He’s a fun follow on Twitter, too.
• Growing herbs — We have a nice little container garden outside our front door with mint (for cocktails, mostly), Italian parsley, sage, rosemary, oregano and basil. Of course, we also have lavender in the back yard. It’s totally awesome.

And just to go totally off track, I’ll also add one work/geekery item:

• Pair programming — It’s really, really, really good. For many reasons. I’m stoked we get to do it at my work these days. Now if only we could get our heads around proper testing…