No pictures?

It's temporary. Really. My pictures have been moved to a new server. Most folks will be able to see them, but for others, the domain will not have propagated in their location so the pictures will not be there yet.

It's just one of those things.

 

posted by taming at 22:46 | link | comments |
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Elections in the Spring?

Although I have lived here for 6.5 years, I'm still too new to Canada to really understand the ins and outs of Canadian politics. That being said, I can still recognize the silly season when it begins.

Yesterday, the Harper government made good on its promise to have an open vote in Parliament to consider whether to reopen the issue of same sex marriage here. I don't imagine anyone was surprised when the decision was to let this particular sleeping dog lie. Six of Harper's cabinet members voted against the bill. So did thirteen liberals. The end result was that with a free vote, the percentage of MPs acknowledging the fact that sex marriage is a protected right here in Canada was even greater than it was when the Liberals required its members to follow the party line.

The vote under the Martin regime was 58 to 133. Yesterday it was 175 to 123.

The social conservatives are going to have to live with it, and the Liberals can no longer lay claim to this as one of their defining issues. I know that some of the reporting, particularly in the states, has made this out to be a Conservative defeat. I'm thinking, ummmm, not so much.

As an American (soon to be a Canadian citizen), it's been good to see a conservative party in action which was not beholden to the religious right, at least not to the extent of the Bush regime. And whilst some of the big thinkers in the conservative movement here have been urging the "big c" conservatives here to learn from the organizing principles of the US Republican party, I'm pretty sure this last US election reinforced the idea that whilst acknowledging the values of the far right might help get them into office, absolute power still continues to corrupt, absolutely.

It will be interesting to watch as Steven Harper's government tries to balance it all out. If he is willing to take the chance that some social conservatives will stay home on the next election day, he is going to have to move just close enough to the middle for there to be some crossover from voters who traditionally vote liberal to offset those losses.

From the Globe and Mail:

Social conservatives are not likely to turn to the Liberals, said Mr. Ben Ami, but they can stay home on voting day.

The loss of those voters was likely weighed by the Prime Minister in recent days. But Conservative sources have said it was his plan to dispose of the issue so he could make a more moderate pitch to middle-class voters and diffuse attempts by the Liberal Party to paint him as a socially right-wing ideologue.

The vote yesterday, which fulfilled a Conservative election promise, marked the sixth time since 2003 that the House of Commons has decided in favour of same-sex marriage.

And from Bloomberg:

 Lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage in June of last year by a margin of 158 to 133, when Harper was opposition leader and Paul Martin of the Liberal Party was prime minister. Last year's vote didn't reflect the will of Parliament because Martin forced some of his legislators to vote for the law even though they personally opposed it, Harper has said.

Yup, the silly season.

 

posted by taming at 07:22 | link | comments |
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This Is How Old I Am

In addition to roasting and tech nonsense, I have been trying to read Night Sins, a novel by Tami Hoag. She spins a good tale, but oh puhleez, enough with the pron (that is web 2.0 for porn) already.

I get it: you are a woman writer; you can write about strong, multiorgasmic, het, women better than most men.

Move on. Tell the story.

 

posted by taming at 14:06 | link | comments (2)|
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Coffee to Roast Before I Sleep

We've had company since Sunday, part of RT's extended family. They were in town because someone in their family, not ours, was in the hospital in town.

She died yesterday, quietly, surrounded by all six of her children, their spouses, and some of her grandchildren. It was a good death, I suppose. I'd prefer to be run over in the street, at 100, whilst making passionate love to RT, but once you exclude the ideal, passing away in the hospital, pain free and surrounded by people who love you is probably as good as it gets.

CNET editor James Kim probably didn't die yesterday, but his body was discovered then. He had frozen to death after leaving his broken down car, and his family, to go looking for help in a remote area of Oregon. By my lights, that's not a good death.

In any case, it's been odd to read the on-line guest book that friends of the family created so people who never really knew James, or his family, could send messages. All over the web, people were moved by their plight, and followed closely the search for the family, the rescue of Kati Kim and the young girls, and the recovery of James' body. It appeared to be all so public, but only because we, no matter how moved we were by the story, were only onlookers.

I suppose, when you get right down to it, we're always onlookers, except when we are the one who is dying.

I don't mean to be morose. It's just that death seems so much closer now than it did just a few years ago. Part of it is my age, but a bigger part of it is that I feel so more, I don't know, committed to living. On some level, I guess I feel like I have more to lose. I have grandchildren to meet, assuming one of our kids gets going in this department, and I have this deep in the bone relationship with RT, a relationship that came into our lives in our late 40s, and turned us both upside down, in the very best of ways.

And while I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about this sort of thing, yesterday's events, in combination with my involvement in various end of life related things with a very close relative over the past few months have me thinking about it at the moment. The more-or-less emotionally healthy part of me doesn't let this thought process take over too much of my life. My worry centre seems to have an override, that gets me going in a different direction.

If I'm lucky, that other direction is a really good one, like major housecleaning. It's just as likely to be in the direction of some half-assed techie project, which is what has happened to me today. If sometime over the next few days, you surf over to this page and find the blog looking strangely imageless, it's my problem, not yours. I am in the midst of moving the domain that serves up the images on this weblog, and although the transition as the nameservers update should go smoothly, one never knows. The reasons for making this change are complicated, and way too boring to write about in any detail. At the end of the day, we'll save ourselves some money, and all will be well.

In the meantime, we're having a heat wave, and I can roast coffee outside without dressing up like an arctic explorer. It's hard to be preoccupied with death when there is a world of good coffee waiting to be roasted and a sunny Alberta sky under which to do the roasting.

If you don't have websites to move, and coffee to roast, then you might want to take a look at some of the roasting projects being done by some folks who are bigger ditherers than I am. I've put up a google page with a listing here. It's also linked from my left sidebar.

 

posted by taming at 12:12 | link | comments (2)|
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Bread Machine Roasting Update

Well, I'm now 30 or so roasts in to using my unmodded bread machine, and it seems, an update is long overdue.

First of all, I find myself going to great lengths to use the BM/HG roasting method instead of my IR2. I'm pretty sure the roasts taste better in the bread machine largely because of my ability to control the ramp up to first crack and then to prolong the time between first and second using the heat gun.

In any case, some of my roasts, now that the cold weather has set in, have been done at -20C in my unheated garage, and as long as I wave the heat gun around the very cold bread machine, for a bit, it works just fine. Yes, I know I could carry the bread machine into the house after I'm done and avoid this part, but I am a lazy roaster.

I'm using a very inexpensive heat gun, with only two speeds. I half expected this to be a problem, but it isn't. In fact, it is much lighter than some of the better heat guns, and I find that very advantageous. It has survived several drops onto concrete.

What seems to work best for me, is to bring the beans into first crack using the heat gun on high (the 1500 watt setting), and then when 1st is really popping, bring it down to the 1000 watt setting. My goal is to maintain the temp, but not really increase it for a bit. After about 4 minutes maintaining (this varies with the bean), I then turn it back on high, if I am going for a darker roast, and finish the roast.  If I am going for a lighter roast, I never get to that part, and will stop the roast either shortly after first crack has truly finished, or at some other point along the way.

My first roast was done with 3/4 pounds of beans. I routinely roast with almost twice that amount now, and just to see if it could be done, once did a kilo roast successfully. The only thing to remember is that as the roast pan gets fuller, as the beams expand, I have to adjust the heat gun position so that it never gets too close to the beans.

I was somewhat concerned about the dough cycle giving me a long enough window to roast larger quantities. If I let the cycle finish, the roaster does not want to start a new one right away. However, if I briefly turn off the machine (I am talking 2 seconds or there about), the cycle simply resets, and I am good to go again. When I roasted the kilo, I paused it about 6 minutes in, let it reset, and gained more than enough time to do a FC+ roast.

I also took my heat gun with me on holidays, and successfully roasted in a number of other bread machines. I did check to make sure that each of those machines had an all metal stirring apparatus, as some bread machines do not.

I am so pleased with this method of roasting, that I have asked for the things I need to roast this way inside. I have a fairly good sized closet in our lower level, with a window. The plan is to install a good kitchen exhaust fan in that closet, and vent it out the window. Then I will put the bread machine on a swing out shelf (think about one of those things meant to mount a CRT-style TV). When the roast is done, I will swing it away, thus revealing my fan cooling setup that was lurking beneath the movable shelf and the exhaust fan.

Santa is supposed to be bringing me the pieces parts for this. I think I have been good enough to get them ;). I'll post pics when I have it all set-up.

PS: Did you hear the one about the short woman from Central Alberta who got up at 4:30 in the morning, trundled out to the unheated garage, and roasted three 1.5 pound batches, back to back, in her bread machine because they got (lots of) unexpected company, and at just a tad under freezing, it was as warm as it was supposed to get for a week or so.

The pictures of said roasting (long underwear, boots, down jacket, scarf, and hat) will never make their way onto the net

 

posted by taming at 08:24 | link | comments |
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