A few months ago I decided to take a leap of faith and apply to exhibit at next years Momentum Oklahoma City, sponsored by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. Momentum is an exhibit that features artists 30 years old or younger. I was very happy to find out that I was one of three people chosen as spotlight artist for Momentum 2012, and I had my first meeting with OVAC, the curators, and my fellow artists today. I am very exited about the next 3 months, traveling through Oklahoma for my project, working with the curators, and being able to see the finished projects of my fellow spotlight artists.
Speaking of which, my fellow spotlight artists are Samantha Lamb and Margaret Kinkeade. Their projects sound very ambitious and should be very impressive when they are finished. Momentum OKC 2012 looks like it is shaping up to be a great exhibit and I am looking forward to having my first exhibition. Looks like I am in great company.
Well, not really surviving because it missed us after all, but is was a close call.
The day started when Mrs. D-USA kept on interrupting me with phone calls from work simply because "coworker X is married to meteorologist Y who said that we are supposed to have really bad storms today!" After refusing her offer of hanging out at the hospital where it would be very boring nice and safe, I decided to return to my trusty game of World of Warcraft. I did heed the warning of mysterious meteorologist Y and turn the TV on the local station to keep an eye on the weather.
Throughout the afternoon my loving wife kept on bothering me displaying great concerns about my well being, and made sure that I was watching the news. I kept on playing WoW while watching the news until the first Tornado touched down in Oklahoma near Hinton. I did attempt to save the lives of various strangers by proclaiming on WoW "Any folks from OK who are too busy playing instead of watching the news, there is a Tornado on the ground!" before turning off the game and focusing on the news. The initial tornado was still a good distance from our neck of the woods, but it was heading in our general direction. But it did look like it should stay clear of our area and miss us by a good stretch.
I spend the next hour picking on my brother who loves storms, but moved from storm rich Oklahoma back to storm poor Germany, on IRC while keeping the world up to date on Twitter and Facebook. Of course this tornado decided to pick up speed and strength, jump around a bit, until eventually all the news stations agreed that it is about 30 minutes away and heading straight towards my house...crap.
Meanwhile Mrs. D-USA is holed up in the basement of the hospital since she is in line of the same tornado as I am, and I decided that it is time to prepare the trusty standby of any Oklahoma tornado season: The BathtubShelter(TM)! You see, Oklahoma might be the capitol of severe weather, but that is no reason to bother building houses with basements! Of course for some dumb reason that I cannot think of, we also decided not to spend the few extra $$$ to install a shelter when we build this house. What is an extra thousand bucks when you can finance it into a 30 year mortgage? But now was not the time for regrets, now was the time for survival!
Minding my priorities, I made sure that the cats were safely secured in bathroom #1 with some food and water, a glowstick in case the power goes out, and a comfortable blanket. Although the cats did not seem to appreciate my concern and complained about being locked up the whole time we rode out the storm. They spend most thunderstorms under our bed, so being locked up did not seem like a good idea to them.
For myself, I covered the bathtub with a fine selection of couch cushions, because nothing protect from an F5 (according to the news) tornado like soft foam stuck inside some cloth. I made sure to grab some glow sticks because nobody likes to die in the dark and entered my pillow fort tornado shelter. But I am also a Pirate, so in addition to my shelter I made sure to grab my laptop, my cell phone, as well as my photo and video camera. If I shall die a horrible death, I will update everyone on Twitter and stream it for the world to see. My brother had a picture in his head, about me sitting in a bathtub, all the way sucked up into the tornado, twittering "sucks, bathroom integrity test failed!" In the end, this is how I faced my most certain doom:
While I was sitting in my death tub, I listened to the weather people talk about how the Rose Creek addition will be hit next. Rose Creek is 1 mile from my house, which means that the path of the tornado hit my neighborhood next. But in the last minute the storm turned north and missed my house by a hair. Disaster averted. The skies were blue, my house was standing, and the cats were still pissed when I let them out of the bathroom. Mrs. D-USA was stuck at work a little bit longer before they decided to let everybody leave, but she made it through the storms without any problems as well.
Now it is time for the Oklahoma State Fair, so we can look at tornado shelters!
After many nights standing in line at Wal-Mart and Target, wondering why only 5 out of 30 registers is open, I started to think about buying vegetables and fruits. In addition to only having a few registers staffed, I think another reason why the lines take so long is that each piece of fruit or vegetable has to be placed on the scale by the cashier, then they have to remember the actual code for the item, punch it in, wait for it to calculate, realize they don't know the code, spend 30 seconds looking through the flip chart to determine what kind of apple this is, and so on and so forth...
When shopping for groceries in Germany there are scales placed in the section for fruits and vegetables, and unlike the scales in the US you push a button when you weigh your veggies, print out a label, stick it on your baggie, and put it in your cart. When it comes to checking out the bar code on the label is scanned at the register just as fast as all your other items. No waiting on the scale to read, no looking up codes, no punching in the same number 3 times by the cashier.....just scan & put it in the bag.
I have yet to figure out why the Wal-Marts, Targets, and others in the USofA have not adopted the same system. The stores try to cut down on the number of cashiers, and try to have as many people as possibly go through all the lines quickly, so having customers weigh and label their own groceries seems like it would help them out. My guess would be that a main concern is that dishonest people would weigh & label 2 apples, then place 3 in the bag. Interestingly enough the American tradition of "free refills" has run into the same problem in Germany, with German companies worrying about 1 person buying a small drink, and then having 4 people share the cup and the unlimited refills that go along with it.
But maybe the mistrust is placed the other way, maybe Germans want to know exactly how much money that lemon is going to cost them. And we all know that unless you brush the dust of that melon the scale the cashier uses can't be trusted. Of course the shoppers in Germany are also used to bagging their own Groceries, so including an additional step of self service is not really that unusual.
About 6 years ago we purchased a used washer & dryer from a small business on Britton Road east of Broadway Extension. I don't know if the guy is still around, but if he is we would highly recommend him to anyone looking for a cheap used set of appliances. I think we spend about $200 on the duo, and for almost 5 and a half years they ran without any problems. But about 6 months ago the washer started to sound a little rougher than it used to. About 4 weeks ago we noticed that after washing a big load of laundry, the drum would still be half filled with water. Looks like we figured out what we will spend our tax money on this year. While I hate buying new appliances, I have to say that almost 6 years without incident for a cheap used washer/dryer pain was a pretty good run for our money. The dryer still works fine, but if you buy a new washer, you HAVE to buy a new dryer as well. So after spending way to much time looking at way to many washers & dryers we found our match.
Hello new friends!
The d-usa household has joined the rest of the world, and we are now proud owners of a front-load washer. And we once again have earned the favor of our dear mother earth by becoming more energy efficient. After replacing all the light bulbs with energy efficient halogens, installing a programmable thermostat, and pooping in low flush toilets; we now are using up to 75% less water to do our laundry! And that does not even include all the fancy electricity we save with this expensive purchase. Maybe the energy saved will offset my plans to purchase a gas-powered lawn mower, the old-school push mower has a hard time with my tall grass.....
I still remember one of my first great disappointments shortly after I arrived in this country. Here I was, a young 16 year old guy, on the other side of the globe, far far away from home. In wonderful Burns Flat, Oklahoma, right in the center of nowhere, surrounded by cows, pasture, fields, and nothing else. I barely spoke the language, and was just trying to make it through 6 weeks of freshman year at a new high school (where I barely spoke the language, did I mention that?) before summer break.
Not Goulash!
So while I was in the lunch line, thinking of home and wondering why I moved over here, I realize today's lunch is Goulash. One of my favorite meals from home, delicious Goulash. My young heart skipped a beat with joy and I was looking forward of having a taste of home to relieve my sorrows. But when I reach the lunch lady I realize that my joy was misplaced. What arrived on my plate was a weird macaroni/ground beef/tomato mixture. Something you might be able to call a version of spaghetti at its best, but certainly no goulash.
It appears that the majority of Americans have never had the pleasure of enjoying a proper Goulash. Instead of enjoying a delicious soup or stew, most people here make a version of Goulash in the form of casserole/macaroni dish. Over the years I have found one goulash mix at Target that makes an OK Goulash, and I have tried a few recipes that were not bad either. I could not find the one recipe that I really liked, so the other week I threw together some ingredients the best way that I could remember and it turned out pretty good. So today I decided to make this recipe again, and actually write down everything that I did to make sure that I could make it again in the future.
So if you are interested in making some delicious D-USA style Goulash, you can find the recipe here. Get to cooking and enjoy some real goulash.
Well boys & girls, turns out that part two of the Snowpocalypse didn't turn out to be a Snowmageddon after all. The snow was pretty late reaching us last night, and by the time we went to bed at 2300 nothing was happening in north OKC. In the morning we had a decent amount of snow on the ground, it was still snowing, and the wind was blowing pretty good although not nearly as bad as last week.
Driving to work was not that bad, there were some slick spots, but overall it was decent. Snow that has turned to slush was more of a problem than anything else. It's now 11, the snow is barely blowing anymore, and it looks like this snowstorm was a bust. Better luck next time mother nature.
We finally finished thawing out from the great Oklahoma Snowpocalypse today, and it looks like we are on track to get hit by another storm tomorrow night. We are about tired of being stuck inside the house, and after a few days of freedom, we might be stuck inside for a few days again. At least I was able to head out to the driving range today and hit some golf balls for a bit.
I'm not sure how much snow we are supposed to get this time around, the actual amount of snow was not that bad last time, only about 12 inches (or about 30 cm), but the problem last week was that the wind was blowing the fresh snow around and making big thrifts. So we would have areas where the street was clear, and 100 feet down the road we would have 3 feet of snow. It also took 3 days for the snow to start melting as well, so as long as it starts heating up after this next snowstorm it should not be so bad. I will try to remember to actually use my camera & video camera to show everyone what it is like.
Here are a few pictures of Snowpocalypse I, let's hope Snowpocalypse II turns out less severe.
A few years ago I discovered the most delicious way to prepare the Thanksgiving turkey. After many attempts at roasting the bird, which usually did turn out well, I decided to smoke the thing. Smoking the turkey turned out to be a delicious idea, and I have smoked quite a few turkeys since that first attempt, so I thought I might share the fundamentals of my technique.
Let's get smokey!
The main problem for me is that I don't have an actual smoker. But what I do have is a typical Weber Kettle grill. That's the standard round small charcoal grill made popular by suburban neighborhoods across the US. I have been known to make interesting uses of my little grill, even managing to bake homemade pizzas on it. So if I can bake a pizza on the grill, I should be able to smoke on it as well, or at least that was my thought.
250, just perfect.
Turned out the little kettle grill is perfect for smoking. Using only 20 coals at a time (10 on either side of the pan) it makes great use of indirect heat and allows you to smoke your food low and slow. I try to keep the heat inside the grill at around 250 degrees, and I made some great turkey, ribs, and brisket on it. Every 30 minutes or so I simply add 2 pieces of coal on each side together with a few pieces of wood chips. This keeps the temperature constant and gives just enough smoke to make the food extra tasty.
For the turkey itself I just brine it for one night, then let it sit uncovered in the fridge for about 6 hours to let the flavors do their thing. A simple rub about 4 hours before smoking, and off to the grill with the bird. It takes me about 4 hours to smoke a 8-9 pound turkey breast, but the results are worth it.
It's been almost 11 months since we purchased our house, and we are still working on getting settled in. One of the benefits of purchasing a newly build home is the peace of mind of knowing that everything is still in working condition. You don't have to worry if the previous owner did plenty of upkeep on the house, or if there are any undocumented, and non-inspected, do-it-yourself repairs and additions. It helps Mrs. D-USA sleep good at night.
The down-side of buying a new construction is that sometimes your new house is also in a new neighborhood. It really becomes a problem if you purchase a house that is surrounded by three empty lots that are waiting for their turn to be developed. But the D-USA's don't do anything halfway, and as a result of our clever purchasing our house not only borders empty lots, it borders up against a whole section of neighborhood that has not been developed!
This results in a scenario where Mrs. D-USA can with peace of mind at night, and Mr. D-USA sleeps with the sound of having an entire neighborhood developed outside his window. During the last 2-3 months I have had the opportunity to enjoy the sounds of heavy-duty construction as they are installing cable, water, sever, gas, sidewalks, and now roads.
It remains to be seen if the sound of bulldozers are more annoying than the sound of building a house next door, but I am not looking forward to finding out...
