Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

I was sorry to hear that Robert Asprin had died yesterday. He was a very significant fannish presence in the Midwest in the early years of my fannish activity, and a very entertaining performer. I liked his humorous fiction, but it was The Cold Cash War that actually felt to me like it had promise. He was also very nice to the Scribblies (including my wife Pamela) when they were working on the Liavek anthologies (not so long after the Thieves’ World series started).

Here’s a repost of the first report (the original being on a list I can’t find archived, perhaps not public).

And here is Robert in the masquerade at the 1974 Worldcon, in what I believe was the first appearance of the Dorsai Irregulars.

There ought to be other pictures in my files, but I’m not finding them. I’m reasonably sure he was at the party after Gordy Dickson Day, for example, but I’m not finding anything. Yep, here he is, on the contact sheet, ddb 377-15; it’s also marked “blur”, which may be why I don’t have a scan. And the good scanner is still down in Nashville visiting Oleg, so no new scans will be appearing tonight.

Today is the first anniversary of Civilization Day, an important human landmark that I think should be celebrated regularly into the future.

For me, it all started here last year.

Did a second try at the chicken tinga tacos I originally tried in February, making the change I most wanted (ditching the canned chipotle in adobo sauce) and getting pretty good results.

I boiled half or so an onion, two cloves of garlic, and 20oz of boneless chicken breast with 3 chopped chipotle peppers (these were actually labeled “Morita”; in any case, smoked red jalapeño), for a bit over an hour.  Just enough water to cover by the end (I didn’t have to top it up).  Drain, reserving liquid.  Don’t bother trying to separate the chiken from the rest if you started from boneless like this.  Some rough stirring towards the end will break up the bits nicely, too.  Still, full breasts or a full chicken would probably be better, I will try that when I’m ready for a big batch.

Then I sautéd another onion and a bit and 3 cloves of garlic in some olive oil, and added 1/2tsp ground coriander and 1/2tsp whole cumin seed.  When this was well started, I added a small can of tomato sauce.  This was probably too much, or the wrong thing; 1/2 cup of minced tomato would probably have been better, or sauce rather than paste, or less.  Too much sweetness came through to the end, and I think it was from the paste.

When the tomato paste was well mixed in I added the meat and mixed it around a lot.  I started adding the reserved liquid back fairly early, to get the texture “right”.   In the end I used about 3/4 of the reserved liquid.

Serve in small white corn tortillas, with minced onion.  (And coriander leaf if you like that, which I don’t all that much, and didn’t have any on hand.)

The result was good.  I’d have liked more spice and a bit more front-of-mouth spice, probably some cayenne in with the spices would have been good.  And probably a 4th chipotle into the boiling stage.  The smokiness came through decently, and another chipotle plus the cayenne should give about the right heat.  Definitely less tomato paste, or some other form of tomato.

Two dinners plus 4 units of leftovers again.

I think after one more decent batch, I’ll be ready to do a *big* batch and have *lots* of leftovers.

And it seems to have gone pretty cleanly (this is a big upgrade, looks like, including database change). And the new visual editor respects my page width, and generally looks like a lot less trouble (version 3.0 of tinyMCE).

So I’m heading out of town in a couple of hours after doing the upgrade; I guess we’ll see how that works out.

I’m leaving Sun, and going to work for a local company building internal systems for their business (Pine River Capital Management).  One of the downsides of this is that I won’t be visiting the Bay Area most months any more.  Another downside is that my commute will greatly increase (currently my bed is within 20 feet of my laptop).   Obviously I think there are enough upsides to make it worth it.