UPDATE: Comments are now working. They’re not displaying, but they are being submitted and stored. They’ll show up when the look and feel goes back to normal.

Happy birthday, coffee corner. It’s been ten years since I started blogging.

To celebrate, I thought I’d bring you all back to the original, Blogger-powered, wow-I-really-shouldn’t-be-a-designer layout. Compare to the web.archive.org copy – not bad for my first WordPress template, eh? Apparently, not using capital letters was all the rage. Or something.

Wow. A decade. Let’s see…

• In that time, we went from exchanging email addresses, to identifying ourselves by blog URL, to passing around Twitter names.
• In that time, I’m still with the company I hired into fresh from college.
• In that time, I went on a business trip to London that lasted almost two years. And met some really great friends, who I can blame thank for pushing me to meet Christine.
• Um, yeah. I’m now married, with a stepson who graduated high school, a mortgage, four cats, and I switched – partway – from PC to Mac.
• Ernie was the first person I can say I met through the internet. We’re still good friends today. There are innumerable others who all deserve a mention, but I won’t be able to do justice to it, only to say that I’m amazingly lucky to have so many people all over the world I can claim as friend.
• Gaming has given way to cooking.
• I started this blog as a group blog, before group blogging was in vogue. Chris is now a doctor in New England, while Stephen does amazing research foundation work in the Pacific Northwest. Both are married to amazing women, and have started insanely cute families. Amy is off doing, I believe, theater work in New York; I need to find out…

I can’t get away from this post without talking about food. I’ve been in early morning and long day workshops all week, and Christine hosted workshops at the studio, so I’m a bit off my game lately in the kitchen. For Father’s day, I got a new end-grain butcher block from Ikea (Exklusivt, for anybody who can speak Swedish) that you see in the picture above. Haven’t even had a chance to break it in properly yet. Putting the pictures together for this post, though, reminded me about everything that I’ve got lined up to post about, so it’s time to get cracking.

What I can tell you about is the salt-crusted eye of round roast I cooked last weekend. Our brains are very proficient pattern matching engines, so while salt-crusted roasts have been in my mental bookmarks to try for some time, I saw mention of it a couple of weeks ago and suddenly it showed up everywhere. The idea is simple – get a lot of salt a little wet, so it’s almost like a snowball to pack, and use it to encase a (herb-seasoned) beef roast. Really, a lot. I used three pounds of kosher salt for a two-and-a-bit pound roast, and that wasn’t quite enough. Since you’re not leaving it to sit for hours before going in the oven, the salt doesn’t make the meat overly salty; instead, as it cooks and dries it forms a hard crust that seals in the roast, its juices, and any steam that would otherwise escape. The result is easily the juciest and most tender roast I’ve ever cooked. Add some roast or sautéed potatoes on the side and a vegetable and you’ve got a great meal.

Traditionally, this method would be used on fish or other more delicate meats to prevent them from drying out and getting tough in the oven. Pork loin would be good for this as well. I don’t know about fatty roasts, like a pork shoulder, as I would expect to want to render out some of the fat.

I’ll close this post with the words that started it all:

Welcome to the coffee corner. my hope is that my friends and i can share coffee experiences, tips, tricks, et cetera with the rest of the world and hear your coffee stories in return.
a bit about me: i’m a software/web developer currently in houston, tx. originally from lexington, ky, i spent most of my high school years in coffee shops, particularly coffee times and common grounds. i came down to houston for college, and didn’t have much time to spend in coffee shops, but was rather dismayed by a lack of good ones that i could find. i’ve settled on diedrich’s as my home down here, but there’s a starbuck’s near where i work that’s good for an afternoon fix.
well, enough about me. on with the show.

Thanks for being a part of this adventure. Let’s see what another ten years brings!

I don’t have a picture to show – Christine is much more of the photographer than I am – but I can write a small memorial.

Murphy was put to sleep today. He had developed significant health issues including some fluid in his lungs and a severe loss of balance, as well as zero appetite for food or water. We took him in to the vet at the end of May, where he seemed to rebound on IV antibiotics and fluids, but since coming home had steadily declined.

Murphy was a part-ragdoll cat, about 10 years old, and very much Jason’s cat. His ragdoll tendencies made him ideally suited for being picked up, carried along, flipped over, and whatever other affections were shown to him. He was a very friendly cat (at the very least, he saw everybody as an opportunity to score food if he was charming) and warmed up to anybody who came to visit the house.

Jason has handled this very well, all things considered. While he is hurt, in his own words, “I don’t want to do it but I know logically it’s the right thing to do.”

Goodbye, Murphy. We’ll all miss you.

Rita’s a category 5 hurricane expected to smack into us late Friday/early Saturday. The family and I are heading to Austin either tonight or early tomorrow to stay with one of Christine’s friends. From there, we’ll play it by ear.

Cross your fingers, folks. Or, if you please, drink one each of these for us:

The Hurricane
The Margarita

Swirl them a bit, maybe, and have a Hurricane ‘Rita. If someone more versed in alcohol wants to venture into actually combining these drinks, please share the recipe.

Sorry for the impromptu hiatus. After the election, I’ve been working on us fleeing the country. (Ha, ha.)

Lots of mundane things have been going on at Chez Tremoulet for me; we had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my in-laws, great food and a few good games of cribbage to boot.

The big event is that, as of … thirty minutes from now, Christine and I will have been married for six months. They’ve flown by, and I couldn’t ask for a better partner (or partner-in-crime) than her. A few more pics from the wedding are up at her site; watch for more once we work out the sharing details.

(or “How I spent the night before my wedding”)

The wedding weekend went off quite well. The run up to the wedding was every bit as crazy and hectic as I expected; while I think we actually did a good job of visiting with the guests as much as we could, I’m sorry for everybody who I didn’t talk to quite enough.

I made it down to Galveston with two big guys and a whole lot of stuff crammed into my Golf, with seven minutes to spare before the rehearsal. It was a bonus treat that the timing worked so I could drive Chris, one of my best friends from high school, down to the island from downtown Houston. The first time I saw everybody from out of town in one place was at the rehearsal dinner later that night at Luigi’s, a fabulous Italian restaurant on the island. We surprised my aunt Charlotte, a nun from Florida, by asking her to say grace before dinner (hey, so we dropped a few details) which she did quite well. We had one usher who had to back out shortly before the wedding due to joining the Navy that phoned in his congratulations during dinner (and apparently, had started the celebration from afar in our honor). For my part, I finally understand (roughly) what Stephen does for a living and got a taste of “working the tables” for the reception.

Afterwards, back at the hotel, I pulled all the guys together to give them small thank-you gifts and to polish off a sentimental bottle of bourbon. Just after we’d poured the first round, I got the call from Christine that Kymberlie, who had not been feeling well and left the rehearsal dinner early, was writhing in pain in the room and needed to go to the emergency room. Poor Cari (Chris’ wife) had just made it into town, and her first impression of the bride was her speedtalking about Kymberlie’s probable kidney stone. I had given my card to the valet to go bring my card around and give me directions for the six block drive to the hospital, walked the pale Kymberlie out to the car, and left directions to finish off the bourbon without me, which the guys happily ignored.

To abbreviate this part of the story, we got there at 1 AM but didn’t get seen until 5 AM; although the waiting room was quiet and fairly empty, we had just missed the rush of trauma victims hitting the hospital on the holiday weekend, which had all the staff tied up. I really only got two sentences out of Kymberlie; “It hurts, it hurts real bad” and “Bedpan, BEDPAN” (don’t ask). Fortune smiles on us all at times, however, and Cari had brought along a deck of cards that Chris and I had asked for earlier in the day, so I had something to do for five hours. And that sums up the night before my wedding, spent in the ER next to a beautiful girl in amazing pain.

I did get about four or five hours of sleep, had brunch with the guys, and headed back to start getting ready. Heading down to the lobby began the steady stream of photo opportunities and picture posing that lasted for the next 36 hours. I must say, I have friends who can clean up quite well when needed, and Jason looked awesome in a tux. We got to the church about an hour and a half before the ceremony was to start, the idea being to get the group pictures out of the way beforehand. That ended up not happening, but we all got to wait in the somewhat air conditioned (it was, I promise!) church building. The ceremony was short and sweet, with really nothing major that went wrong and a few chuckles along the way, and then off to the reception.

I now understand what people mean when they say that that day is a blur. Lots of dancing, lots of talking, lots of pictures, and lots of fun. Instead of a groom’s cake (a Southern tradition, I’m told) we had Big Pink Cookies from Starbucks set out for friends – how apropos for us. The party went well into the evening, with a fantastic sendoff at the front of the hotel.

The next day, we got back into tux and dress and went out to take pictures on the beach. Late morning. Texas heat. Fully dressed up. The things I’ll do for love…. Seriously, though, we got some great pictures that morning and later that day (after driving in wedding clothes back into downtown Houston for even more pics). It was good to have brunch with the wedding party one last time, and say some proper goodbyes, before heading back to reality.

That’s about it for the wedding story. I can’t say thank you enough to everybody who travelled, everybody who came down from Houston, and especially to everybody who helped out in small and not-so-small ways.

Coming soon, the trip overseas! Also, pictures will be up soon; we’ve got at least 2200 to sort through so far – still waiting on more to come in.

We’re married.

[SO much more to say than that, but we're scrambling to pack for the honeymoon. It was one helluva party, and thanks to everyone for making it so special.]

So much to post, but the big news of the moment – Band Gap, Lager Rhythms’ 3rd CD, was released this weekend amidst much fanfare and celebration. Four years in the making. Wow.

T minus 2 hours 38 minutes…

Wow. WOW. We close on the house today. I didn’t get all giddy about it until I was driving to work today (I’m a slug in the mornings), but now it’s hard to focus on the work that I have to get done. We did a walkthrough last night, and as I’m not the best at envisioning furniture in the house, I just kept thinking “It’s (almost) ours”. [Rather, it's the bank's and will be for some time, but let me dream a bit here.]

We went up for an overnight trip to SXSW Saturday night, which was a total blast. Guerilla SXSW – show up, party, leave – isn’t a bad way to do it after all. I’ll put together the linkylove list later, but I’ll say that it was awesome to see everybody that was there.

T minus 2 hours 32 minutes…

We’re engaged.