Touching Life Deeply

braemblerose and I have had a very intense past six months. While I could write a long post about each event, this post is about the overall level of change in our lives. Since the start of the year, we've experienced these major events:

• she is pregnant (I helped)
  
• we went on a silent meditation retreat
  
• I have a new job
  
• I no longer have an appendix
  
• we went to my grandfather's funeral
  
• we remodeled and sold my old house
  
• we bought a new house
  
• we went to Burning Flipside
  
• we had a wedding and are now married
  

We certainly experienced heavy stress at times, and I found great irony in being too busy to meditate. However, the way our relationship weathered these events strengthened my desire to spend the rest of my life with her.

We decided to have a small wedding with close family only, but as our lives are settling back down we'll be looking for opportunities to celebrate with friends.

Of course, our lives will get intense again in about three months :)

In my dream this morning, I was at an outdoor gathering. Tall trees shaded the picnic tables as Sam ran around with the other dogs. Three wise women appeared, bearing love and healing. One of the women held me close to her breast, and I was forgiven.

For the past two weeks I've been spending massive amounts of time working with Responsible Growth For Northcross to fight against plans to build the largest Wal*Mart of Central Texas in our neighborhood.

This upcoming week will be the most intense, with City Council having an opportunity to suspend the site plan while they conduct an audit of it. The site plan has serious flaws, such as the traffic impact analysis (you can't plan to build a three-story parking garage and then claim there won't be a traffic problem), and part where the City Manager is married to an employee of Wal*Mart. However, the land developer is lobbying hard to convince City Council not to even vote on the issue.

There have been so many times in my life when an issue that I support has come up, but I've made excuses and not done much about it. This time it's in my neighborhood and I'm not making any excuses. Huge thanks to everyone supporting me.

So if you're wondering why I'm not on LiveJournal, this is why. I likely won't be reading for the next couple weeks either, so please contact me elsewhere if you have something major going on in your life.

I've created a brewing album in my photo gallery, and uploaded photos from the two batches coreblue and I started two weekends ago, and the all-grain brew he started today.



Credit for the photos of us from two weekends ago goes to lauraleanalle; I took the ones today.

Enjoy.

Two weeks ago (Oct 29th, for the record) I started another batch of mead. This is my second batch since I've lived in Austin.

I used the same ingredients and procedure as the first batch, with a few variations. For starters, we had warmed up the yeast for use on Friday night rather than Sunday night, so I made a starter with two cups water and half a cup of honey to keep the yeast happy. Also I've been using coreblue's equipment, and we now have a large kettle and propane burner so I pasteurized the honey in about four gallons of water. The other major difference was I steeped a large tea ball full of spices between the pasteurizing and the chilling. Oh, and I used an orange blossom honey :)

Spices:
7 sticks cinnamon
1 handful corriander
3 handfuls cardamom
7 whole cloves
1 pinch ground nutmeg

For these measurements, a "handful" was a comfortable amount in the palm of my hand, not as much as I could possibly hold in my whole hand. Maybe a little more than a tablespoon. I ran all the spices in a food processor to coarsely grind them, but it didn't really work that well.

I pasteurized at around 186F (the recipe calls for 180F, but I had the heat too high) for 15 minutes and then let the spices steep (with heat off) for 13 more minutes. I'm thinking next time I could just put the spices in at the beginning of the heating and combine both steps into one. The hot honey gave off beautiful aromas, but I'm thinking of ways to keep more of that flavor in the final product next time.

After chilling I topped off the water to five gallons and then measured an initial gravity of 1.117 at 75F.

this side of
the bed you slept in
now holds me

I played around this evening with pushing my camera in very low light, to get a feel for what my limits are without use of a tripod or flash. I made this photo of my dog:

[640x426] [3456x2298]
That's 1/4 second exposure at f/1.4 at ISO 1600, pushed two full stops and then corrected in iPhoto.

me: if you'd like, I'll explain man-in-the-middle attack to you sometime
her: will you explain it naked?
me: yeah we need more naked whiteboard time!
her: more? I didn't think we'd had any
me: that was an additive "more", not a multiplicative one
her: oh ok

her laptop
glowing on the couch
is still warm

As she just posted, braemblerose has left the jungle and is now back in Iquitos. She called me last night, for the first time since she left for the jungle, and this morning we exchanged our first email messages since then. We're rapidly catching up on a backlog of communication, and looking forward to magnitudes more when we're together again this weekend.

I was able to call her at times, and when it worked the underlying technology was amazing to me. Here's the path for asking to speak with her:

1. translated into spanish
   
2. spoken by me
   
3. in to the microphone on my laptop
   
4. through Mac OS X to my Skype client
   
5. back through Mac OS X and out the 802.11g transceiver
   
6. through a few walls as a microwave radio signal
   
7. into the wireless access point side of my router
   
8. through NAT and out the WAN side
   
9. over 100baseT ethernet
   
10. through my DSL modem
    
11. out the window, by way of RJ-11 cable
    
12. directly into the small NID on the back of my house
    
13. over POTS cable to the central office 23,300 feet away
    
14. through the DSL modem on their end
    
15. somehow to my POP in Dallas, Texas
    
16. out onto the internet backbone as TCP/IP
    
17. routed to a Skype server somewhere
    
18. converted from VOIP to regular voice traffic
    
19. on to the voice telephone system in Peru
    
20. to a satellite transmitter
    
21. up to a telecommunications satellite
    
22. down to a solar-powered satellite phone
    
23. to whichever villager was nearest their one phone
    
24. hollered to whichever kid was nearby
    
25. down a dirt path by foot
    
26. to Braemblerose
    

Of course the routing protocol and transport layer of those last four steps was the most reliable of the whole transaction.

I decided to go with option 2 of my previous post and switch to business-class cable for my internet connnection and keep my server in my house. I switched DNS for my server over last night, and then early this morning discovered a loose cable from shifting things around. So last night my email and websites were down, but it's all back online now with a much faster and more reliable connection.

Thank you everyone who helped me explore my options.

Two weekends ago I volunteered at the Texas Independent Game Conference. I had several good conversations with people about what they're working on and what technologies they're using. At the end of the first day, I realized that the time has come for me to end the project I've been working on for almost ten years and start something new. This decision has been due for several years but now I'm ready to let go. I feel sad about it right now, but know that this opens up new opportunities for my energy. On the second day of the conference I was able to be fully present, not judge my work against other developers', and really enjoyed the conference.

I've now officially marked the project as inactive and sent a message to the mailing lists.

( email message announcing my decision )

[I composed this the morning of May 18th, but never posted it and I've been feeling it intensely these past few days.]

your clothes here
seek the warmth of your
nude body

This morning I changed my journal title from "Random Thoughts" to "Touching Life Deeply". I've also started adding tags to my entries, and I figured out how to give you guys permission to add tags to my entries (and please do). My "personal growth" tag feels a bit absurd--every day is about personal growth--but I'm using it anyways to mark posts that are particularly so. Similarly, I haven't quite found my usage for the "geeky" tag although some of my entries are certainly more technical than others.

[meta meta post: argh, &emdash; is so sexy, but LJ escapes it]

Last night I bottled a batch of mead with help from coreblue and harlequinmayhem. We bottled it into 27 x 22oz bottles, with a #8 tapered cork in each. I read the gravity at 1.014 at approximately 70F, making it around 13% alcohol. I still need to make some labels, and I'll officially name this batch then.

Later last night lauraleanalle joined us and we all had a glass. It could certainly benefit from more time to age, but I think it's nicely drinkable already.

For the record, I started this batch in March, racked it in April, and racked it again on June 4 according to my calendar. I didn't log the second racking, but did record the gravity at 1.012 at whatever temperature Coreblue was keeping his house at then. The second racking left behind lots of sediment; after that there was hardly any, which influenced my decision to bottle now rather than rack again.

The company I work for laid off a third of the workers this afternoon.

I had this conversation with a stranger as I was getting into my car last night:

her: hey, can I borrow fifty cents for a phone call?
me: no, sorry
her: you got a cellphone I can use?
me: sure
[I hand her my cellphone]
me: you having a rough night?
her: it's getting better :)
her: but yeah someone stole my sandals
[she makes a phone call]
her: you up for anything?
me: no actually I just bailed on my friends to go home
her: you have a good girlfriend?
me: yes I do
her: cause I'm bored and horny
me: good luck with that :)
[she smiles and wanders down the street]

I recently rediscovered a few photos my dad took of me last fall, and decided to make a new userpic out of one of them. I didn't much care for the color, so I decomposed it into RGB and then selected the blue channel.

Anyone else play around with unusual ways of making a grayscale image from a color one? The obvious way of desaturating an image is to average the RGB values and use that as the gray value. I'm interested in doing a weighted average instead (in this extreme case I gave all the weight to blue), preferably with a user interface that updates a preview as the weights are adjusted. This could give a similar effect to shooting black-and-white film with a color filter over the lens, but with the advantage of doing it in post-production.

talk with me
we will find answers
together

rising heat
sweating out toxins
cleans the soul