A couple of weeks ago, for a contest at work, I created a full 360-degree panoramic picture of our backyard. I used Hugin to stitch together over 140 shots from our dinky little Canon point-and-shoot. I decided to convert it to a “little planet” projection (also known as a stereographic projection) because I think it captures the sensation you get of having your own little world in our backyard on these beautiful Saturdays.
This weekend, I teamed up with Laurel (swimmer extraordinaire) and Debbie (cycling master) for a sprint triathlon at Lake Barryessa. Besides getting up at 4:30am to make it to the start line, it was an awesome time. We took 2nd place in the co-ed relay division! As a bonus, I also ran my best 5k ever at just under 21 minutes. Here’s the team soon after our glorious finish:
Debbie has more pictures on her flickr page.
Well, we raced and survived again! The car performed beautifully with no mechanical problems and the drivers did even better, with only a few light touches and one black flag for the entire race. Here’s a pic from just after the checkered flag; more to follow soon. Can you guess our theme?
This made my day: Kathack. It lets you play Katamari Damacy on any webpage. Katamari overt now!
Last night we tried a new-to-us place in Piedmont: Baywolf. It’s been around for over twenty years, and on our list for at least a couple, so it was high time.
I think they are going for mediterranean food, although if you hadn’t told me that I would have guessed it was just the usual worldly Californian that you see so much around here. I liked the way the restaurant was set up: An old, many-times-refurbished craftsman house with a modern, enclosed deck added to the front for extra seating. Although we sat inside, the deck looked and felt really pleasant.
We started with a grapefruit, avocado, and mango salad with miscellaneous greens that seemed to be spinach and arugula. It was my least favorite dish of the night, mostly because it had this creamy cumin dressing that totally dominated the way everything tasted in my mouth. I get the combination of avocado with cumin, but the sourness of the grapefruit and mango just couldn’t stand up to the aroma.
We also had “duck liver flan” which as far as I could tell was purely a euphemism for foie gras. It was delicious as usual, and served with a nice selection of little pickled this and that (cornichons, shallots, olives).
For the main course, we shared roasted duck with peas, fava beans, artichokes and pancetta. This was the star of the night for me: the duck was perfectly rare in the middle, with a nice crusty coating of fat on top, and the rich, mild combination of vegetables and pancetta was a great accompaniment.
(Not my picture; taken by Flem J. off Yelp, and of a slightly different duck dish. But that’s what the duck looked like).
We also had the Bomba di polenta: polenta layered with short ribs and fava bean greens. The flavor base of this was wonderful, with a great pan sauce covering the plate and smothering some random mushrooms (shitake, and even a few errant chantarelle chunks). The main event though was kind of disappointing: the polenta cakes were all chewy at the edges and I could barely find any trace of the short ribs (though the chunks I did find were darn tasty).
Overall, I’d eat there again, but not before we get through a few more of the east bay places on our list.
Well, things are winding down here on our birthday week at tahoe. We skied our last day today at Northstar, our sixth, with one day before that at Sierra. I think my body is finally demanding a break, so it’s probably for the best. As usual, a pictorial record of all the fun can be found at the gallery.
Clare sent me this hilarious animation created to accompany a real transcript of a call Lyndon Johnson made to Haggar to request a few custom pairs of pants:
We’ve reached the point now where we get all our TV and movies from the internet, and so we don’t have a cable subscription. This setup is fine except for every so often when we want to watch something live–sports or awards shows (okay, when Leslie wants to watch awards shows). In these cases we head to a friend’s house or a bar. But not anymore!
It occurred to me that it couldn’t be that complicated to corral some radio waves into my TV’s built-in digital tuner. Right? So I plugged an old FM antenna and I got some pretty crappy reception. Thankfully, the internet was ready to instruct me how a piece of wood and six coat hangers was all I needed for HDTV sports utopia. You can see the result above.
The thing works great! It enabled me to watch the Rangers get crushed live and in person. Hooray! I guess.
Doug got to borrow a Tesla Roadster last week, and he brought it by Clare and Andrew’s place to show it off. We were clearly pleased.
We spent last week with friends in Maui. Just, wow.
Days were mostly spent recreating Corona commercials, snorkeling, and eating huge quantities of food. Check out the gallery for the full story.