Hog Heaven

We are in hog heaven here this weekend because Scoob decided to make kalua pig. Oh. My. God. It's. Good.

I first had kalua pig when Scoob took me home to Hawaii to meet his mom 6 years ago. We thought kalua pig was one of those foods you have to be in Hawaii to enjoy; but we were wrong.

Scoob was out riding his bike about 3 years ago and as he rode through the park, he passed a group of Hawaiians having a bbq. He stopped and chatted them up as he does every time he meets another Hawaiian and he ended up crashing the picnic.

They had all the good stuff that Scoob hadn't had since he was back home: lomi lomi, "real" macaroni salad, poi, and so much more. You could tell all the aunties had been up since dawn putting on this spread. But best of all, they had the pig.

Now traditionally, kalua pig is cooked in an imu (an underground pit bbq). So here we were wondering how they managed to cook this pig in the Bay Area. Even if somebody actually had a backyard big enough to have an imu, we knew you wouldn't be able to, at least not within the metro area. About a year later, the guy in charge of making the kalua pig for their parties shared the recipe with Scoob. And now I share it with you.

CAUTION: This is not a diet friendly recipe. It is neither low-fat, low-cal, nor low-sodium. Oh damn but it is good. Do not attempt to make this with a leaner cut—you will be disappointed. We tried it. Once.

Kalua Pig

Cooking time: 15–20 hours (You'll want to start this the night before you actually want to eat it.)
Servings: 8–12

Ingredients

1 (4–6 lb) pork butt

1–1½ Tbsp Hawaiian sea salt

1 Tbsp liquid smoke

Directions

1. Pierce the pork butt all over with a fork. The more the better. Rub the sea salt all over and place your butt in a crockpot. (The pork butt—not your butt.) Pour the liquid smoke on top.
2. Cover and cook on low 16–20 hours.
3. Remove from crockpot and shred. You may need to add some of the drippings to keep it moist.

We usually cook up a bunch of pig, a pot of sticky rice, and get a head of cabbage. We then shred some cabbage and cook it in a pan over medium-high heat with some pig (no need to add oil, the pig's got enough fat for all of us) just until the cabbage begins to soften, season to taste with some pepper, then serve it over rice.

As it turns out, the kalua pig I had in Hawaii was probably also cooked in a slow cooker. The FDA and Health Departments don't allow kalua pig cooked in an imu to be served to the public.

Suburban Dreams

I've been talking a lot about Scoob and I moving at some point, and while we've had some debate over where we will move to one thing we've always been in agreement on is what type of place we will move to. We know we want cultural diversity, culture and arts, open spaces, and all those wonderful things, but we also know we want to live in the 'burbs. And while we technically already live in a suburb, the Bay Area metropolitan sprawl has really engulfed it.

It seems so strange to say we want to live in the 'burbs because the suburbs have such a negative connotation. That's why when I ran across this article on subrubiphobia in the Walls Street Journal, it caught my attention. (I don't know if that's even a word, maybe I should copyright it.) The short, short version of the article is that American art portrays the suburban experience as somehow inauthentic and homogeneous, being neither urban nor rural.

When I think of suburban portrayals in pop culture I think of The Brady Bunch, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched, and the like, images typified by late-1950s and early-1960s suburbia. (So sue me, I've never seen Desperate Housewives.) But Scoob and I wouldn't want to live in that version of the suburbs. So something doesn't match here; Either our perception of the suburbs is way off, or the suburbs have changed.

After a bit of Googling, I think it's the latter. The suburbs of today are not the homogeneous cookie-cutter developments of an earlier era. In fact, The Economist goes so far as to say the 'burbs are beginning to resemble city centers.

This article at USA Today seems to think that gas prices are driving this shift in the suburban landscape. And while I'm sure energy prices are a contributing factor, these new suburbs didn't just pop up overnight when fuel hit $4.00/gallon. I think it's been more of a matter of technology and convenience. I see this with Scoob.

He's been telecommuting for a few years now and I've seen the change in his habits. When he worked at the office, he used to go out to lunch with co-workers or take break at the coffee shop. He would swing by the bicycle repair shop and talk shop with other cyclists. Or he would just hang out at the bookstore.

Since he started telecommuting, he doesn't get together with co-workers as much as he used to even though they're also telecommuting and living nearby. When they do get together for lunch, the quality of restaurants they have to choose from is much lower. Their coffee shop option is pretty much limited to Starbucks. And the nearest bookstore is another behemoth chain and is clear across town.

As more and more people telecommute either part or full time, I think they're finding the same situations and more people are pressuring city planners for multiple use developments and sustainable communities. I think we'll continue to see this as we find new ways to apply technology.

I think another shift has been employers moving out of the city cores. In the Bay Area we've seen employers move out of high real estate areas and into the suburbs as a cost saving measure. We've also seen companies, like Sccob's, outsource so many jobs that they don't need to keep as many office parks open, and those that they do keep open don't need to be in such high rent areas. In addition to seeing tens of thousands of jobs from his company go overseas, he has also seen whole departments relocated from a first tier metro area (like San Francisco) to a second tier area (like Atlanta or Albuquerque).

This new American suburb is so popular in fact, there's growing demand from overseas, which is a good thing for builders given the current slump in new home construction.

An interesting cautionary article here, on the dilemma of repurposing suburban space once the landscape changes. I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more of this issue as the housing market shakes itself out.

Balancing the Books

I'm having a problem keeping the books. Or rather, I'm having a problem not keeping the books. While tidying up the house for the home appraisal last week, I ran across a few boxes of books in the garage and more than one stack tucked away in the darkest, dustiest corner of my closets.

I know why I have the boxes of books in the garage. Each one of those was connected to my college education, and I in my new graduate optimism thought I might need them for reference since I was probably going to find a job in my chosen field. I was a Native American Studies major, yeah. Not much work to be had in that particular field, at least not without a Master's in education, social services, or casino management.

But I can still identify which pueblo/tribe a piece of pottery/basketry/beadwork comes from based on materials and design, and I can still partially read a totem pole. As you can imagine, it's knowledge I don't call upon very often; but it's there all the same.

The other books I seem to have squirrelled away just about everywhere are from work. It was bound to happen working for a book publisher. Thankfully, now that I've switched the the travel guide arm of the company, I bring home far fewer books.

Anyhow, I've decided it's time to get rid of them. Well, most of them. I'll keep true reference book, cookbooks, and particularly meaningful book, but everything else is going to go.

Thankfully, books are pretty easy to get rid of, if sometimes heavy. But Scoob has a difficult time giving away something if he thinks he could get something for it. So I've come up with a plan of action: This weekend we will pull together all the things we need to get rid of and we'll give ourselves 3 months to do something constructive with it, or, at the end of 3 months, whatever is left gets donated.

My first stop for all those course books will be Half.com. I probably bought a good portion of those books on Half.com when I was struggling to save money as a student, so it seems only fair.

Beyond that I'll probably put the books up on Freecycle or donate them to the SF Bay Area's Prisoner's Literature Project. Unfortunately, the PLP won't accept hardcovers, I guess the inmates could use them as weapons. Just repeating what I was told. Anyhow, anything else still left will be sent to Goodwill.

Though I do like this idea at Bookcrossing--essentially you join their site (it's free) register the book you want to get rid of and give it a tracking number, then you leave the book in a public place for someone, anyone, to pick up. They then login the book and continue to pass it along and you can see how far your book went.

While my goal is to get things out of the house, Scoob is more interested in having something tangible after getting rid of things (you'd think a clean house would be enough). So for him we will focus on swapping. If I can't convince him to get rid of things, at least I can get him to trade them for things he will actually use. Scoob has a number of things I'm hoping he'll be ready to part with, mostly books, PC games, and DVDs.

He has traded DVDs in the past using Swaptree and PC games with Goozex (that's a "z" not an "s" I made the mistake of typing it in the other way first, and you know anything with "sex" in the URL is going to be adult in nature, though at least this wasn't NSFW). Scoob prefers the Swaptree system, but so far, Goozex is the only reliable trader we've found for PC games.

A few other book trading resources: PaperBackSwap lets you print your mailing postage from your home printer. BookMooch helps you connect with people who want the books you want to get rid of, though you need to source the postage. America'sBookShelf charges a $3.50 monthly fee, but this covers the postage on your trades.

Does This House Make My Butt Look Big?

Things have been a bit hectic what with the website launch on Friday. And Scoob has been trying to refinance the house. Apparently he thought he had signed a 30-year fixed loan, but it turns out it was an adjustable loan; so now we're scrambling. Don't ask. I've no idea how this happened.

The house is not in both our names, so I'm usually not involved in this process. But this time I've done everything I could to nicely say, "Don't sign a thing until I've at least read it this time." My name may not be on the house, but if we lose it, I've still lost a home, so I really kinda need to know what's going on there.

The good news is that we should be able to refinance and combine the 2 loans into 1. We won't really get much of the benefit from those super low "rescue" interest rates because we haven't actually defaulted on our loans. So anyhow, the home appraiser came by Friday morning to inspect, and now we wait.

One positive thing to come from all this is that we did a lot of straightening up around the house. All the tools and paint finally made it back downstairs into the garage. I finally put away the clothes drying rack that has been a near permanent fixture. Anyhow, the house looks so much better. Granted, a lot of stuff just got stuffed into any available space.

Scoob wants to keep the house just like this. I also want to keep the house looking like this, but I also want to dive into those closets and purge. So that was my project yesterday. Anything in my closet that hasn't seen the light of day in 6 months got bagged for donations. I didn't try on any of the clothes. I didn't hem and haw about whether or not I might actually wear an item again. I didn't say, "Oh, this will fit once I lose some weight." I was ruthless, and it felt so good. Now if I could just get Scoob to do it too.

Good Enough

Things have been a bit crazy back at work this week, but in a good way. Reality set in on Monday that we are launching our new website at work on Friday. Friday! Everyone seems to be in good shape for their specific area for launch, so it's really just adrenaline. We've only been working on this for about 18 months taking a static HTML site and transforming it into a dynamic, CMS database driven site with a complete design and functionality overhaul. It's been a major undertaking and it's exciting to finally see it come to fruition.

I'd love to post links to it, but I am trying to maintain some distance between work and this blog. (I will probably send out an email to you that I know in the flesh, though.) But I can't not talk about it in some way because it has been 18 months of my life, 8 or more hours a day, 5 or more days a week. I'm sure there will be plenty of bugs to work out once we take it live this weekend, and then there's always the next stage of development and content rollout, so it's not as if there will magically be no more work to do after Friday.

With all the giddiness at work, I realized I've been sitting on more than a few links for the blog. First things first. I think it's pretty safe to sweep out all those holiday shopping links at this point. Talk about a day late and a dollar short. I will pass along this one though.

So after my initial panic when I learned about one week before Christmas that we were exchanging gifts this year after all, I headed out that weekend for some marathon shopping. I had planned several stops, but I ended up finding a little something for everybody at Big Lots! I was honestly surprised at the variety of things they had and I'm happy to have rediscovered the store. Apparently, I'm not the only one. The Budget Fashionista has posted some helpful tips to keep in mind when shopping Big Lots!, the biggest of which may be to keep and open mind and be patient.

Before we completely leave the subject of shopping, I ran across this project today. This person has plotted the location and date of each and every Wal*Mart opening in the continental United States. It starts out slow but then it kind of resembles what I imagine blossoming bacteria in a Petri dish might look like. Funny, I think about the immediate backlash to even the rumor of another Wal*Mart opening out here on the West Coast, then I look at the concentration of stores in the East and realize that we really just have no idea what a significant influence Wal*Mart must have in the lives of so many. Here's hoping they use that power for good.

Okay, stepping away from shopping, but not entirely (I think I may have a problem), I spotted this article about decision making almost a month ago and it really rang true. It actually reminded me of something else I'd read a long time ago about being happier by learning to let got of perfectionist tendencies in favor of satisficing, but I can't remember where I read that.

I try to embrace satisficing a lot now, but how this relates to shopping is actually kind of key in our house. Scoob is an optimizer. He wants to know everything about every product and compare them to make sure he's getting the most perfect product at the best possible deal. Me, I'm a satisficer. I'll figure out what it is I need the product to do, find 2 or 3 that meet the criteria, read a few reviews, and make a decision. If it does what I need it to do and it is reasonably priced, do I really care that there's this other model that also glows in the dark? No.

On more than one occasion Scoob's optimizing behavior has stalled a purchase. Take, for example, the purchase of our vacuum cleaner. It's not accurate to the day, but it's also not a gross exaggeration to say that it took us 2 years to buy a new vacuum cleaner. Mostly because he would wait long enough between doing the research and making the purchase that he would either forget what model he decided to purchase, or newer models would come out and he needed to redo all the research. We don't play that game anymore.

To be fair, we actually balance each other out. I help him realize when enough is good enough. But on more than one occasion he has helped me see that something really wasn't good enough when I had thought it was. So because we're together, I usually end up giving decisions more thought and he usually gives them less than we would have on our own.

Another couple items that caught my attention, then I'm off to bed. Wired rounded up some of their favorite tech-related cartoons as part of their end-of-the-year wrap up. #9 is funny, #7 is unfortunately true, and from what I hear, so is #4.

I've been paying a bit more attention to photography articles since getting the new camera. This one is noteworthy in that it give a lot of non-photography tips for getting more out of your digital camera by using it in unexpected ways. Some of them are kind of out there, but several are surprisingly practical.

Was It You?

Was that you this morning, with your wipers on super sonic speed and driving 45 MPH in the far left because it was raining? If so, there were about 20 of you. Okay, I get that you want to drive a little more safely when it's wet out. I respect that. But please, don't do it in the far left lane, you're just forcing the morons who don't want to slow down to weave in and out of the rest of us, which creates a much bigger safety concern than you just driving the speed limit.

So please, if you're going to drive slow, don't be a road boulder (a term coined by Mrs. Roadshow, wife to Mr. Roadshow at the San Jose Mercury News). Move over so the idiots can pass without killing the rest of us. Because if the idiot can't see the sense in slowing down, I'm pretty sure that driver is also not the person you want doing word problems when your life is on the line. Because your brain is basically doing word problems every time you get behind the wheel, you know.

Car X is driving 85 MPH in the rain with gusty winds. Car X is 200 yards away from and approaching Car Y, which is traveling at 45 MPH in the same direction. When is the last possible second Car X can swerve into the next lane of traffic without colliding with Car Y or Car Z, which is 100 yards away traveling at 65 MPH in the same direction in said next lane?

Okay, now add Cars A through W to the equation, because they're also on the highway traveling at varying speeds and distances, and don't forget to factor in the potholes and any ongoing CalTrans construction projects. Yeah, that's what I thought. So please, move over.

Was that you this morning driving in the rain with your lights off? If so, there were about 200 of you. "But I can see fine," you say. Well this isn't about you, it's about the rest of us who can't see you through the road spray without your lights on. You should be turning your lights on in any inclement weather. It's in the California Vehicle Code (Section 24400 (a)(2)), and just about every other state's vehicle code too, I'd wager. And folks, just so you know, the vehicle code is a set of laws.

Well, because we here in California apparently require a Nanny State to tell us to breathe, we needed the state legislature to define "inclement weather". As of 2007, Section 24400 (b)(2) goes on to define inclement weather as "A condition requiring the windshield wipers to be in continuous use due to rain, mist, snow, fog, or other precipitation or atmospheric moisture." It should be pretty clear now. You're off the hook if you're smearing bird poo around with your wipers, but if they're on for pretty much any other reason, your headlights need to be on too.

So, what's it going to take to get you to turn on your lights, people? Then again, if you still can't see the sense of turning on your lights, I'm not so sure I want you doing those word problems either. Please, if it's still raining on Monday, leave the car at home and just take BART. Please.

For those folks who do turn their lights on in the rain (it's completely unscientific, but I would estimate that was about 60% of us on 880 around 10:00AM this morning), thank you. There's one caveat, though. When the weather is bad, you turn on your lights. But when the weather gets worse, this does not mean you turn your lights on brighter. I can see how this logic might make sense and apparently there's some confusion. That blue light on your dash? That means you have your high beams on. The only time you should be using these is when there is no one, no one, else around. M'kay? Cool.

For my part, this year I resolve to be more aware of my driving habits. I resolve to move the the right when not actually passing (i.e., to not be a Road Boulder), and I further resolve to use my turn signals when moving over, even if there's no one around. I also resolve to turn on my head lights in the rain. (Actually I just leave them on all the time anyhow, so that I don't forget to turn them on.) Please, won't you join me.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! It's 2009, and so far, it feels just like 2008. I tried talking to Scoob last night about things he wanted to accomplish in the new year. "More of the same," was his answer. So I guess I'm not the only one.

Actually, given everything that's been happening with the economy, more of the same might even be a blessing—we both still have jobs, we both have health insurance (I was able to get on my employer's plan), we still have some equity in the house, we can still pay all our bills, and we're still managing to set aside some savings each month. There are really a couple milestones we would like to achieve—we would like to get married and move—but neither of us feels that we have to get married this year, though we would like to move sooner rather than later. But it really feels like 2009 is going to be about making the effort to hunker down and maintain.

I've often used "hunker down" to describe how I felt about W's second term in office. But that was more like the keep your head down, don't rock the boat, observe and try not to say or do anything that might get you picked up by Homeland Security. This hunker down is different; it feels much more urgent. In both instances I'm confident that things will eventually get better, but with W, at least there was a timeline. I mean, I knew he couldn't be reelected after a second term. With the economy, it's much more open ended—there's just no telling when this may turn around.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be a pessimist, but I'm having a hard time mustering the exuberance of a true blue optimist. I guess I'm just trying to be a realist. Or pragmatic. Or a stick in the mud.

You know, one of the biggest adjustments in New Years past was remembering to put down the correct year when filling out checks. But I do nearly all of my bill paying online these days and I haven't even had a checkbook for about 2 years. Without that direct interaction with the calendar, I feel somewhat detached from the whole new year thing.

Anyhow, we had a mellow New Year's Eve. Fireworks started in the neighborhood around 7:30pm and I was bracing myself for a noisy night and trying to locate the tranquilizers for the cats, but things settled down around 9:00pm and it was a nice evening. I roasted a chicken for dinner (which took forever to cook) with a nice salad, then we snuggled on the sofa with popcorn and a movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I'm not sure that a break-up movie was the best choice for a couple on New Year's Eve, but I am sure that no thought was given to it in that context when he picked it. And hey, it was funny.

So Scoob and I really didn't end up making any resolutions other than to eat healthier, though I did find myself scribbling "move more" in the margins of a puzzle book. So I guess that really boils down to the same old diet and exercise resolutions.