Jthon’s Place

Starting early tomorrow I’m taking off for the land of the rising sun for my second time. This time around I’ll be spending two weeks in Japan though I’ll only be visiting Nikko, Kyoto, Nara, and Tokyo this time. I sort of wish that we could travel a bit more, but I’m meeting my brother who’s studying abroad and he doesn’t qualify for a Japanrails pass. Without the pass a lot of train travel would be prohibitively expensive, especially since he’s on a college budget.

But it should be fun in any case, I’m excited to see more of the Temples in Kyoto, actually make it to Nara, and see the National World Heritage site in Nikko. I’m also looking forward to some shopping in Akihabara, seeing the Tokyo National Museum, and the Studio Ghibli Museum.

Everything is booked/lined up for us except train tickets, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to get a ticket to Nikko from Narita with little hassle. My biggest concern is that the Hotel I’m staying at says the front desk closes at 10pm and the earliest I’ll be able to make it to Nikko is 9:42pm.  Hopefully everything goes well and I can catch the right train connections.

Anyways I plan to take a few notes of my adventures and take lots of pictures. Maybe I’ll post a summary of the trip here when I get done.

Tomorrow morning at 9:05am I fly out of SFO on my way to a 10 days in Rome and Venice, Italy. If you couldn’t tell from my lack of blog updates I’ve been pretty much just working long hours, sleeping, and occasionally studying Japanese since my last post. I’ve also taken up playing Dungeon’s and Dragons every other weekend which is suprisingly fun, and not too nerdy (I hope).

So right now I’m looking forward to the trip and spending time away from computers and work! (Sorry I doubt I’ll blog while there, but I might bring a notebook!) Even so I’m not going totally tech free on this trip, while the laptop will stay at home, I picked up 32GB of CF cards for my dSLR  and 4GB of cards for my point and shoot camera so I should be taking lots of pictures. I’m also bringing my PSP for some entertainment while on the airplane. Hopefully, I’ll have some fun photos or stories to share about my trip when I get back. I also might actually beat more than 2 mission in Final Fantasy: Tactics.

Also besides this big trip to Italy tomorrow I have a few other exciting trips planned. I’m going to a friend’s wedding back in WI in the middle of July, and in August I’m taking a couple days off to go to Blizzcon!

For Christmas this year my Mom and Dad got me a KitchenAid Pro mixer. I had been planning to get one of these for awhile since all I have for mixing is a wooden spoon. While a spoon works for many things, it makes baking more work than it’s worth.

Today I  cleaned up my kitchen a bit and made some room for the mixer. This thing is huge and takes up a large chunk of my counter. Honestly, I don’t really have enough room for this beast. Especially as I still have a deep fryer from my last cooking “experiment” sitting around.

Anyhow, after rearranging and wiping off my counter I whipped up a batch of pizza dough (recipe courtesy of my graduate advisor’s husband). Making the dough was a cinch with the new mixer. Just add water, yeast, flour, oil, salt, and sugar. Turn on the dough hook and wait 10 minutes. Of course I had to wait an hour for the dough to rise but at least I didn’t make a huge mess kneading it.

So once I got some finished risen dough I put it to use,  sadly I couldn’t make a pizza since I had no cheese. Instead I decided to make a few small balls of dough, and bake it up as a pizza dough twists to go with the pasta I was making.

To top the rolls I made an olive oil, garlic, basil, and oregano pesto like mix to coat the buns. Since I had no recipe I pretty much threw these ingredients in randomly. Sadly I put way too much garlic powder in. In fact I had enough the rolls had a bit of a garlic “bite” to them.

While the rolls were still good this is one case were I’d say I used too much garlic. Despite the overabundance of garlic I think my first mixer experiment was a success. I’m now considering starting to bake my own fresh bread since it was so easy.

On the recommendation of a friend I checked out the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time. I started by watching Season 1 via Netflix. While this is a great service it can be painfully slow while watching a TV show. So I did what anyone who has become hooked on a show does, I went out and bought all 7 seasons on DVD. What I discovered was that I missed a damn good show on TV from 1997-2003.

If you’re like me and somehow managed to miss this show the first time around I’d definitely recommend checking it out. Especially if you like Joss Whedon’s other shows like Firefly. The only downside to all this is that I ended up going through all 7 seasons in < 3 weeks.

It looks like Blizzard has decided to host a Blizzcon convention for the year 2008 down in Anaheim Oct 10th-11th. As I’m currently fairly active playing WoW at the moment I’m tempted to go to learn about their upcoming games, try out Starcraft II, and maybe meet some WoW guildies in real life.

I’ve never been to a convention like this and I’m not sure I want to go by myself. My “real life” friends who play WoW are all still at school and hitting up a convention is probably out for them. Anyone out there ever been to something like Blizzcon (Comic Con, GenCon or some other ConCon)? Is this something that’s worth going to by oneself or does it need to be experienced with friends. Something tells me it’s not worth going unless I can drag convince someone to come with.

Well the bay area has deceived me, it’s weather is not as perfect as one is lead to believe. It appears that the highs for the next few days are going to be record setting. That’s right the forecast calls for Sunny (Duh), a super high UV index, and highs of 97, 106, 97 for Wed, Thurs, Fri. Turning on that Intel Quadcore is going to be a bad idea.

I would worry about an expensive power bill if I my apartment had an AC unit, but it doesn’t. What I do have is a box fan and a small window room ac unit from a previous trip to CA. Too bad the AC doesn’t fit in the window and I fear dropping it 2 stories onto someone in the parking lot. Last time I was at the store they really didn’t have any other AC units in stock since it’s still fairly early in the summer.

Given these crazy highs I might have to hang at work or something until it cools off at night. The saddest part is the AC at work is probably cranked so high I need to wear long sleeves and a jacket, so much for shorts.

Been awhile since I’ve posted but I do have a few things in the queue.

I did manage to find more cheese out here in CA. In fact I did find cheese curds at the farmer’s market in Campbell.

With curds in hand I decided I needed to improve them by turning them properly molten. To that end I ordered a Deep Fryer off Amazon.com. In just under a weeks time I had everything I needed to transform the curds into molten goodness.

Deepfryer in hand I was now able to fry some curds. Just in case the curds didn’t turn out I also decided to make some french fries.

While the fries were frying I whipped up some batter for the curds.

Battering time! As you can see I froze the curds prior to this step so they’re all stuck together.

While preparing the curds the fries got done. Golden and delicious!

Time for the newly battered curds to take a plunge. At this point the batter is still pretty damp and dripping off the curds.

Fry time.

Fried curds all molten and golden. That light stuff floating around them are bits of batter that became detached during the frying. It seems my homemade batter was a bit thick and some of it floated off in the fryer.

Oops I tried to dump them out but I made the mistake of having runny batter on the curds when they went in. The batter has cooked itself around the fry basket and so the curds won’t come out. I did manage to eat the curds by hacking them out of the basket.

I also made some brats for a full WI meal.

Due to the batter melding to the basket I wasn’t able to actually fry all the curds. I ended up freezing a bunch of them for later. Using frozen curds with frozen batter works a lot better when frying. They still ended up as a giant lump since I cooked them to long but at least they came out of the basket.

While browsing around SaveMart today I came across this little transplanted piece of WI:

That’s right, you can buy spreadable cheddar cheese from Kaukauna, WI. Someone told me that they didn’t even sell this stuff out here but it seems SaveMart does. They even had 5-6 flavors of cheese.

Of course this stuff STILL isn’t that wonderful WI treat known as the Cheese Curd. I’ve heard a rumor the Campbell Farmer’s market has them so I need to investigate tomorrow.

This weekend I spent a bit of time doing my Taxes. Unlike what appears to be 90% of the population I don’t use those newfangled computer programs to do my taxes, I do them by hand. In general this isn’t so bad. Other than doing a bit of research to figure out what I could deduct from my move (pretty much nothing), I completed my 1040, and my Minnesota M1NR. Do to my Minnesota residency but employment in WI, I get a penalty this year for not paying estimated tax to MN. I probably should have thought about this ahead of time since I had the same thing happen last year. At least I don’t have to deal with that again.

Now I need to do a CA return which seems to be stupid complicated compared to the other ones. For some reason I have to file a Schedule CA 540NR which is not nearly as straight forward as it should be. I’m not sure why they really care about my 1040 wages since they only get a part of that, and you work out what you actually owe on a sheet you don’t even turn in.

Actually, the worst part of my tax experience seemed to be that I didn’t have any paper forms (well I had a 1040a but needed to file a 1040). The federal government and the states all offer PDFs you can fill in but there is NO WAY to save your work. The best I could do is print the form to another PDF which I couldn’t edit. This made the few Apple Preview crashes a pain since I lost all the stuff on the form a couple times. That and I had to retype the whole form if I want to make a change. After the first crash I moved to scratch paper.

They seriously need some sort of form where you can save temporary work. Maybe they can just let me fill in a form online and submit electronically without paying. But if they let me do that, then Intuit would go out of business. I’m not going to pay some third party $20 so I can submit my taxes online.

Also for fun I gave the free online Turbo Tax a try to see what it came up with. In about the same amount of time (almost more in fact) as doing it by hand Turbo Tax agreed with my hand calculations. The best part was that they wouldn’t actually give you tax advice on the free version. At least the IRS forms list what you can do for certain deductions. With TurboTax you get a blank box unless you fork over your cash. Frankly, I have no idea why anyone pays for that software.

Sometime between 9pm Friday and 10am Saturday someone smashed the front driver’s side window in my car while it was sitting in my parking spot. They did a pretty thorough job going through my car and stole everything in the glove compartment, and the roadside emergency kit that was in my trunk. They did leave the 3-4 burned CD’s I had in the car. Luckily, I didn’t really have anything valuable in the car that they could take. They did get my car’s manual and registration.

Since the only damage was to the window it’s well below my $500 deductible and so my insurance covers nothing from the break in. It also turns out they don’t cover any items stolen from the car. Now that I know they don’t cover stolen items I think I’m going to have to go find a different provider.

I’m mostly glad I typically don’t keep anything in my car, so at least I didn’t lose anything else. What really angers me is the $255 in damage to my window. I’m sure the items stolen add up to much less than the replacement cost, and it’s not like I really need that extra expense.

I thought I lived in a somewhat safe neighborhood but it looks like that’s not the case. My other worry is that there’s no guarantee that something like this won’t happen again. It’s not like I can do much to prevent someone from breaking my stuff again. Apparently, keeping nothing in the car doesn’t help.

I also attempted to report the whole thing to the police but apparently the Santa Clara police don’t really care. When I tried to call and file a report the officer answering the phone just forwarded me on to an answering machine where I left a message that never got returned.