Author: doug

The good news: I’m planning to restart daily Project 365 posts starting with this year’s Vineyard trip.  But first I want to post the few good photos I took this spring.

First up: We had a back patio put in this spring.  Here are the bricks.

Tuesday was our day off, primarily due to weather.  Here are a few sights from Whistler village.

We saw this unusual (to Easterners) bird.  My initial thought was cowbird, but in consultation with Lis and the Internet I think it’s a brewer’s blackbird.

 
We also saw this cool cloud formation.  I think this is where the alien ship punched through the cloud layer.

 
I took a walk through a local park with Michael & Sabrina.

On Monday, I skied with the big camera.  With smaller crowds and a clear day, it seemed the logical choice.

I awoke before dawn and noticed the holiday lights on our condo playing on the icicles outside our windows.

 
Here’s the view out our condo windows once the sun started to come up. We were near the lower end of the village walk, by the Whistler Olympic Plaza skating rink. I belive this is where they held some of the medal ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Olympics. You can see that we have a little fog / undercast on an otherwise clear day.

 
Here’s that undercast from the other side. The building is the top of the Glacier Express lift on Blackcomb mountain, as seen from near the Horstman hut and the Blackcomb summit.

 
We had lunch at the Horstman hut, and here’s the view in the other direction, from our table on the deck.  You can see some ski slopes on Whistler in the foreground, with the aptly named Black Tusk mountain behind.

 
After lunch Kat, Michael, and I skied Blackcomb Glacier, a 6-mile run that starts with an enormous bowl. That’s Michael to me left in this fisheye shot, and the two specks near the right side of the frame are Kat and an unidentified skier. The boulders jutting in a line into the center of the shot are car-sized.

 
We all stopped for a photo op at the bottom of the bowl section.  Only another 5 miles to the lift!

 
Skiing the glacier was fun. But it wore us out (only the second day, after all — gotta save some for later), and we decided to take the Peak to Peak Gondola over to Whistler for beer.

Yes, it’s now the last day of June and I’m just now getting around to continuing to post photos from Whistler in January. Sorry about that.

On Sunday, I skied with the little camera.  “Welcome to Canada. Have some mountains.”

January 19, 2013 
 
On Saturday we traveled to Whistler resort, 2 hours north of Vancouver, for a week of skiing.  Today’s post is some of the scenery we saw on the journey.

Clearly, there’s some feature kicking up the cloud layer under there.  Also note the circular reflection rainbow.

Mount Baker from the air:

 

From Vancouver, we took the Sea to Sky Highway as the sun went down.

January 5, 2012

During our kitchen remodel, we discovered that there is a hollow beside our chimney. I’m turning this space into a small closet with shelves in our foyer, with a built-in bench below it.

 
In two Saturdays of work so far, I have cut and re-framed the rough opening, patched a hole in the side of the chimney, cut off an old abandoned gas-light pipe, moved some wires out of the way, cased the opening, and built & installed a door.  I also put up new coat hooks since I had to take down the old ones.

Many more steps to come, which I’ll update here as I make progress.

January 1, 2013 

Sous vide is a method of cooking that maintains a water bath at a constant temperature, just above the target temperature of the food, which is sealed into a watertight plastic pouch.  It results in precise control of the final temperature (and thus doneness) of the food, as well as the ability to hold a food at a specific temperature for a long time, allowing precise control of certain processes, such as the breakdown of collagen into gelatin.
 
The equipment to do sous vide at home has been in the several hundred dollar range, but just recently some more affordable options have come to market.  I paid around $100 for a controller that cycles an appliance (in my case, an old multi-cooker) on and off to maintain temperature.  And since we already have a FoodSaver vacuum sealer, this small controller is the only extra equipment I needed.

The first experiment was soft-boiled eggs.  This link shows the result of eggs cooked to specific internal temperatures.  Since an egg is waterproof to begin with, there’s no reason to vacuum seal it.  I cooked these for 90 minutes at 145 degrees F.

 

Unfortunately, I found that while the yolks were perfect, the whites had a funny consistency: both set and runny at the same time. Since I like my white fully set, this is not the result I was hoping for. Next time I think I will cook them to a lower temperature, and finish in boiling water for a minute or so to set the white.

 
I’m sure to continue experimenting with sous vide, and so you’ll see more photos from this Project as time goes by.

December 24, 2012 

This isn’t a Project photo, it’s just Ferrous being adorable by hanging out with Lis while she naps.

December 1, 2012 

Here’s the first of the real Project entries.  Today I made a breakfast stout from a kit I bought some time ago.

October 18, 2012

Putting away our Rummikub set after a game tonight, Lis and I realized we’re missing a tile.  It could have been missing for some time now.

This is a photo of one of the old tiles, taken so we could send it to the company to see if they still make this style of tile.  They don’t so we had to order a whole new set.