FINISH STRONG, originally uploaded by Noladishu.

The end of the last float in the second parade today, after which everyone is going home to fix food for the superbowl... Where else do you scramble out of bed for 11am parades on superbowl sunday?

See also gold 67 mustang on the rust chronicles. It's as old as the team is. Hopefully it is still out there.

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flying pigs, originally uploaded by candice quates.

The saints are in the superbowl, and Clay is contemplating the tackiest (also largest) dress in my vintage arsenal. He's kinda wiped out from the parades last night so we may miss this event.

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stock almost done, originally uploaded by candice quates.

Now that it is back in the upper sixties, low seventies in the daytime here, I finally get around to the 2010 new orleans freeze stock experiment.

We were cooking to keep warm. The house was a crisp 50 degrees indoors when it was below freezing out in the daytime. No insulation. The neighbors, who insulated their identical twin house, say it only helps to about 60-65.

This stock, with a nice combination of cow necks and feet, came out so well it is practically an aspic. I made some great onion soup from it which got eaten too quickly to take pictures.

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I forgot to mention that I got a nabaztag for Christmas. It is a silly little programmable rabbit, which has a hosted API on the one side, (REST, simple) and a hacked madness french developer community with working server projects in case the company that bought the rabbit decides to kill their servers. It moves its ears and talks and blinks colors and gives me weather and news and likes old french techno.

When I was researching the specifications and the assembly language (it has a virtual machine) it was all in French. Technical specifications en francais are hilarious. Very glad I decided to take 4th semester French as an elective last semester to get a better working knowledge of things.

School starts tomorrow and I have not yet written any of the technical stuff I wanted to. Last semester I set up a virtualbox reusable sandboxing system for viruses with a fake network services component that was really nifty. Maybe I will post the presentation soon.

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2005's events left my life split in two, and 2000 seems like an
eternity now. So much so that I barely remember some of it.

To better years! I will not offer a toast because I have spent what
feels like the last week with a hangover and a headache, and got
a stomach virus today. Getting better.

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buttercream frosting, originally uploaded by candice quates.

So we decided to forego waiting until wedding-present season and spent christmas present money on a shiny blue kitchenaid. With the amount of creme patissier I make during strawberry season it sounded like a good idea.

I made frosting this summer with a handheld electric mixer and it was a bear. Took forever and my right arm hurt for hours. This? Less than ten minutes.

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Meant to post this picture quite a while ago. She sat in the driver's seat as well. Death by cuteness.

I am alive, got through the semester, nearly perfect (3.9) gpa. Lots going on, lots to discuss, hopefully will have time to work on/discuss my repeatable virus sandbox system that has been this semester's project.

Just now coming up for air; I don't even have pictures of our house's christmas lights - we have holly bushes along the front so I thought they would look nice - or any cars in a couple of weeks. Major car and food posts coming I hope.

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hallway chandelier, originally uploaded by candice quates.

So, we went to go see Spud play the Kingfish the other night.

This is subdued compared to the chandelier in the Blue Room. The whole place is encrusted with deco glitz. Gilded Age stuff ; "Champagne ambition on a beer budget" sort of thing. Everyone in the Sazerac Bar, young people included, wears suits or similar.

And Kingfish was great, but it has since moved to the InterContinental, since they apparently weren't expecting so much demand? It was hilarious. Go see if if you're interested in Huey Long or Louisiana politics in general; it takes a lot of material from the definitive opus on the subject, T. Harry Williams' Huey Long. Tickets/info here.

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I'm taking thirteen hours, working four or five days a week and trying to make it to ballet. I took three hours of ballet this past wednesday and it was killer. Learned a lot from Diane about Pointe, but school the next morning with all of its walking and flights of stairs was about the death of me.

Despite all this, and the wedding planning, I still feel like I need to do more. My career is in a different place than it was when I went back to school after Katrina, unemployed, off of a two year not-well-paid consultant's gig, still doing a lot of sysadmin.

I've really fallen into programming, debugging, fixing things - I still have some sysadmin work but I turn down offers for it otherwise, being responsible for one company's servers' wellbeing is enough.

I want to build something of my own but what I find that I'm best at is taking things apart. I discovered taking Golden's Reversing class in the spring that I do still like security - I just hate policy work and securing systems, which is what security work consists of down here for independents other than some forensics, which I haven't done any of.

I suppose I will leave this open ended, as to where to go from here?

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cast iron onions, originally uploaded by candice quates.

This is actually just one onion. a one pound, five ounce onion, mind you.

This is my great-grandmother's cast iron dutch oven. I hope to see this pot's 100th birthday.

I estimate it and it's sister, a no.5 cast iron frying pan to be 80-something. My next oldest pans are in their 60s, I think.

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1963 Chevrolet Biscayne. These are all Garden District cars,
now that I live there and have started taking shortcuts through
the various blocks I find more.

A beautiful 1960s Mercedes 280sl. Almost on the "blessed" corner.

A 1981 Porsche 911. This is one of those lucky pictures which could
have been taken twenty years ago. Though I'm not sure what this
block looked like then.

1981 Honda Prelude. Around the corner from the Porsche. I assume
the Porsche has a safe hiding place, the Prelude I see out a lot.

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So, here we are again in the rain and the heat. Summer - the
time away from classes - was cut in half by going to summer school,
which leaves me now with two weeks left before it starts again.
Not sure what to do with myself without homework.

The above is from city park, on a wedding-locations scouting trip
in 98-degree June heat. It's started raining daily since then.

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Counters covered in stock, originally uploaded by Noladishu.

This is the results of our recent stock making experiment. We took the darker stock on the right and made onion soup out of it.

The problem with making onion soup is that all of the recipes seem to call for random quantities of medium sized onions. Most of the onions I like here are enormous vidalias and texas sweets, which are approximately the size of a softball.

So I put a few things together and made my own.
Serves 2 with leftovers for the next day, 4 if you only count on one bowl each at dinner.

2 super-huge onions
1/2 stick butter (salted or unsalted, your choice)
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 quart dark stock (this was beef, use whatever you have.)
1 bouquet garni. (parsley, thyme, I throw the bay leaf in alone.)

Slice onions into thin half-moons. Melt butter, brown the onions (don't stir them too much) in it, and this takes forever. Minimum 20 minutes. Pour in the balsamic vinegar, use it to deglaze the pan, add the stock and the herbs. Add some salt and pepper. Cook at least forty five minutes or so. Fix up with some variant of bread and melted cheese.



I finally got around to buying cute soup crocks, so I actually did it this way recently....put into crocks, toast up some french bread, float it on the soup, mound a pile of grated swiss-type (Gruyere anyone?) cheese on it and brown the tops.

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DSC01607, originally uploaded by Noladishu.

This post is partially to remind me to use up the stack of peaches sitting in the kitchen. It is also to remind me to post the -rest- of the pictures my dear food photographer took of all of the madness going on lately in our kitchen.

We made stock - in the middle of summer - partially in celebration of the fact that I now have an air conditioned kitchen for the first time since Katrina. And a washer and dryer -- indoors! And a dishwasher for the first time since 2000.

The peach tart is incredibly simple. Make a partially cooked pate brisee tart shell, arrange peaches, put lots of sugar on top, bake. Eat.

The part of me that has a french final on Monday is fussing at the lazy half of me for not putting the accents on those words.

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Another uptown resident. Even has a current brake tag and parks
on the street. Post here.

Also, we put the truck up recently to get more work done on it
than can be accomplished on the street. Fortunately for us the
neighbors seem to like her.

For now I'm just grinding through to the end of the summer semester.
I even have a French test on Bastille Day.

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