Lately, most of our evenings are spent making dinner together, playing with Karl, and then reading books before bed. We haven't watched "real" TV in months, except for the occasional PBS Create Channel that inspires us with various cooking shows. We have been so occupied with other interests that we are even considering doing without the television and internet at home. We'll of course, instead, get one of those fancy phones with wireless. Maybe they make a cell phone that is rotary? Probably not.
Karl is also enjoying our family time and as most of his electronic toys are car toys (placed specifically in a vehicle for maximum entertainment on long trips) he spends most of his time playing with blocks, balls, and books. He also loves this little toy I bought for $1.00 at a yard sale when I was pregnant.
Erik continues to garden like a crazy man and much to my chagrin the 'Topsy Turvy' is producing amazing results with our tomato plant. Our traditional potted & staked plant is falling behind in growth. 1- Erik 0- Claire. Erik gains another point because he has started making sourdough bread at home. Every day I am blessed to get a delicious smelling house and then I get to try the results. I'm sure he will post on this sometime soon.
Erik also recently convinced me that we need to stop buy microwave popcorn because it's full of chemicals. We rarely indulge in popcorn any way so I wasn't too sad not to eat popcorn again. THEN! He informed me that we can still have popcorn, but we'll just have to pop our own with our brand new Air Popper! It's pretty awesome and the popcorn is perfect with just a dash of salt.
Needless to say, family time beats out all others. I hope you have found a life that makes you happy as well :)
Or, "how I learned to stop worrying and love the railgun":
Everyone today in nerd world (where I live) was talking today about the penultimate US space shuttle launch, trying desperately to save their 'end of an era' chatter for the final launch of Atlantis. It's days like this that I often think of the scene in "Phenomenon" with John Travolta, where he is frustrated that he's got ideas with no outlet. Little does he really know at that point that the more frustrating thing is not even getting other's to listen to your ideas, but making them believe in them enough to contribute time or money, or making them happen before someone else gets to it, or in a cost effective way if at all. All those bits are much more tricky and frustrating. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Well in the spirit of American manned space exploration - or global manned space exploration, here's a free idea for America, and for the world. The problem with rail guns, you see, is the acceleration. Even Jules Verne knew that unless we could overcome that, it would kill us, or damage whatever components we need to transport. Ballistic technologies are limited to the softly accelerating oxidizing fuel rockets, expensive as they are. But we get to use words like "turbopump" so that's cool.
But there's another dimension to this - the part where we accelerate out of low earth orbit, LEO, and head for the stars. Here's how we could make that part cheaper.
Start by launching a slug into space. The slug is a metal jacketed piece of ice or liquid water. The slug goes up into leo and is captured by an unmanned satellite. The satellite unfurls it's big 'ol solar panels, and gets to work turning water from the slug into gas - H and O - using solar energy. When I was a kid, I asked my dad "how did you breath on the submarine?" He said that they used electrolysis and split the water up with electricity from the nuclear reactor, and dumped the hydrogen overboard. I asked why they would dump perfectly good hydrogen overboard when they could burn it for electricity, and I'll never forget the look on his face. "Well then we'd just have more water again."
We'd still need to get people and equipment into leo the old fashioned way - rockets and stuff. But we wouldn't have to wait for something exotic like a space elevator to bring some of the costs down, and we'd finally have a use for that kick-ass rail gun technology that we've been working on since old Gerald Bull tried to sell his supergun to the Iraqis. People have been talking a lot today about America and manned space flight, and maybe what we really need is for us all to open up our intellectual wallets a little and reach for the stars.
Today marked my second mother's day and we celebrated it in style! Delicious pancakes, flowers, a nap, and dinner out with Erik's mom. Karl has even been letting us watch a movie tonight while he plays in the dog crate. What a nice evening!
Here are the two mother's ready to head out for dinner:
A family evening :)
Also, we thought you might like a to watch a video of little Karl talking.
Probably the main thing I inherited from my dad is a pancake recipe he made every weekend. When he was dying I was pretty much in denial, so I had to be prodded to go ask for the recipe. It was a surreal experience, to admit to myself that I didn't know the recipe, and that I was desperate to preserve it. He didn't seem surprised that I asked.
So it's not really the recipe that I've inherited after all, but the will to simply make pancakes that we all inherited from DOD (he often styled himself as Dear Old Dad in emails as a bit of humor @ the department of defense). I've been horrified to learn that my brother and sister often use a box mix - Bisquick, and I prayed dearly for their lost souls. But honestly I can't blame them, my dad's recipe is kind of a lot of trouble and isn't as good as I somehow remember it. People are often disappointed in in their blandness in comparison to the high-salt, high-fat affairs found at breakfast restaurants.
I've been especially suspicious lately that the recipe is partly based on his sense of cheapness, for which he was renowned. For instance a split of olive oil and canola oil? Chemically these act on the final pancakes in the same way, but the olive oil is better for you and the corn oil is cheaper. A tablespoon of each is a bit of a cut corner IMO. Also, I grew up eating pancakes made out of cheap flour while taking flintstones vitamins. In my adulthood I sort of see something perverse about eating food lacking some of the vital ingredients of "food," like without the flinststones we'd all be at risk for rickets or scurvy or something.
After experimenting with ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg for the last year or so, I finally decided to try some more extreme experiments. It helps to imagine Christopher Kimball is in the kitchen with you when performing these experiments. Claire and little K were so pleased with the results yesterday that I was asked for a repeat, and today I doubled down on my change. The problem with buttermilk pancakes, is, in my considered opinion, the buttermilk. It's never around, and if it's in the fridge, it's usually bad. But how can you even tell? It smells terrible in it's original state. And the pancakes get a bitter aftertaste from it (which I usually cut with a bit of ginger) making it almost unpalatable with a strong cup of coffee. Cultured buttermilk... what else is "cultured..." wine, cheese, bread, beer.... yogurt!
Whisk together:
1 egg (God's eggs aren't uniformly white)
4 oz of fruit flavored yogurt(yesterday pear/squash, today apple/sweet potato)
4 oz of 2% or whole milk (whole milk is like 3% milkfat. If you can get milk that's not ultrapasturized, I think that's better because more protein is intact, but this is hard. Also 8oz of yogurt and no milk will work too, but I had to keep my dad's sense of cheapness in there somewhere...)
Almost 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil (you can probably use as little as one)
1 heaping tblsp full of granulated sugar
1/4 tsp of koshering salt (that's 1/8th tsp of small grain table salt!)
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1/2 tsp of baking soda
1 cup of AP king arthur flour (1/2 cup at a time)
Cook on medium heat - an iron skillet is best but pretty much anything works - use spray olive oil that smokes in the pan before making 6in diameter pours, and flip when you get more than 1 or 2 bubbles that pop. I use two pans at once so the process doesn't drag out forever, and stick them on a plate in a 170 degree oven until there's a respectable stack to serve. In case you didn't know about the salt thing, bigger grains have more air between them so if you want to cut the salt, start by using koshering salt in smaller amounts.
Top with the same fruit as your yogurt flavor, and stay away from syrups with HFCS (good luck with that!). Chronic consumption of fructose is bad for you, so don't eat it!
Erik continues to garden like a crazy man and much to my chagrin the 'Topsy Turvy' is producing amazing results with our tomato plant. Our traditional potted & staked plant is falling behind in growth. 1- Erik 0- Claire. Erik gains another point because he has started making sourdough bread at home. Every day I am blessed to get a delicious smelling house and then I get to try the results. I'm sure he will post on this sometime soon. 
Needless to say, family time beats out all others. I hope you have found a life that makes you happy as well :) 
