The Food! You could eat off the street and be completely satisfied.

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I’m a much better cook than I am a photographer. This recipe is the bomb.  The photo doesn’t do it justice!  Since the recipe comes from my favorite Italian cookbook, Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan, I won’t reprint the recipe except to write about it generally.

This Pork Chop recipe is a little more complex than my other pork favorite in the book, which is “Pork chops braised in two wines.” The recipe has vegetable oil, pork chops, dry wine, Italian plum tomatoes, whipping cream, dried porchini mushrooms (reconstituted in water) and a bunch of fresh white button mustrooms. Typically I start all porchini mushroom recipes by soaking the mushrooms in their water for 30 minutes while I prepare the rest of the recipe. While they are “reconstituting” in water, saute the porkchops until browned on each side, then you add the white wine and simmer.

When the mushrooms are done reconstituting, you take them out, squeeqe out the water and save it and chop up the mushrooms.  After that you add the tomatoes, cream, salt, pepper, and the “reconstituted” chopped mushrooms and cook at a very low simmer for 45 minutes. At this point, you’re supposed to boil down the porchini mushroom water to about 1/3 but I didn’t have enough burners so I skipped it.

While that’s cooking, saute the sliced white button white mushrooms  in olive or vegetable oil. I always add a bit of butter to this as I like how the musrooms absorb the butter flavor. When they’ve absorbed all the liquid from the oil, add the (boiled down) water from the porchini mushrooms. Since I didn’t boil mine down, I just used about 1/3 or 1/2 of the water. Stir fry the mushrooms until all the water is absorbed.

When the chops are tender, add the cooked musrooms to the pain, cover and cook for 5 more minutes. Then serve.

Since this meat dish is complex in flavor (white wine, cream, and porcini mushrooms are all very strong flavors) and preparation, I served this with simple boiled baby pototoes with butter and parsley and a side salad.

If you love Italian cooking, get the book Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. It never ever fails me. I cook from it at least three or four times per week.

One of my other favorite pork recipe I love is Braised Pork chops with two wines but I suppose  you can also do beef and veal in 2 wines as well.  Other favorites from this book include all of the risottos, the Pasta e Fageoli, Lentil soup and roasted or pan sauteed chickens and all of the bitter Italian veggies pan sauted and several of the beef dishes. The book also has recipes for the really weird stuff like brains, organs and game meats. I won’t dwell on its pasta sauces which are equally fantastic, but a favorite sauce is tomatos and prorchini mushrooms which I never made before this book.  While I use the book mainly for preparing meats because– any dish from this book will delight the taste buds.

I’m no photographer. I used to just snap at random. Now I’m learning from scratch. I don’t know the first thing about photography, but I know what I like at least.

The location: Morges Independence Park, Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Lets just say, the location makes up for my horrible shooting skills.   Instead of shooting from one pivitol point,  I shot subjects at one pivitol point at an approximately equal radius from each direction. I’m glad I did it because using the subjects taught me some valuable, albeit entry-level lighting skills.  Later I went back and shot it again as the pivitol point. Here are the shots, as is, no re-touching, and what I learned.

First Set: Middle of the Park, Mid-Morning, Subjects at One Point

East (more like South East, but we’ll call it East): Looking toward Lake Geneva and the Alps. We’ll call it East, but it’s more like South East.  Even without obvious sun shine, time of day makes a huge difference. It’s still morning on a different day, East-ish, where the lighting is behind the subjects, making their faces still difficult to see. 

North: lighting is better.

South: again, lighting not as bad on subjects. But my equal distance is not so equal!

West: Definitely not equal distances!

Second Set: Along the Grand Rue, Mid-Morning

West: The models are growing weary of this game.

North: They’re trying to ignore me now.

South: Continuing to ignore me. Except the GSD can’t take it and must know where I am so he looks for me.

East toward the lake and Alps: I relocated the dogs from the other side of the tulip garden. Again, this time the sun shines behind and the shadows make it even harder to see faces.

French Bull dog walks by. The casualties of dog-modeling. When they’re at work, they can’t go play. And yes, they did stay, they never got up. Phew!

Third Set: Went back and acted as the Pivitol Point

East: this time sun shining from behind. Now when I see people shooting this way, I note it.

North: Love the lighting here.

West

South

That’s it. A few days late, but glad I played.

Client: YogaSource, Los Gatos Ok, so I’m a little late in the game in announcing this since it actually launched in December. Gosh, I’ve known the owner of this studio as long as she’s had her studio and have been designing and programming the site upgrades since 2005. The owner is the sweetest thing since my secret recipe for holiday fudge and it’s always a pleasure working on her site. The studio rocks. It’s my om away from home, if you know what I mean. And it’s where I got my own RYT for instructing too. Each year the studio gets bigger and the site gets bigger and more complex. Last year, the studio moved and trippled in size and it’s web site trippled as well. This year we got “flashy” and gave the site a proper face lift. It’s om-a-lishious baby! I don’t maintain the site, so if you see any blatent boo-boo’s, talk to the management. They may give you some zen chants to get over it . Oh and check out the site I designed and maintain for the sister studio in Palo Alto.

So here I am with a few hours to myself (at 9 PM on Saturday evening) and now is as good as a time as any!  It took a while. I won’t lie. Because I check, double and tripple check all my files and upgrade steps and and even back up my back ups. But when all was said and done, I have to admit, WordPress 2.7 rocks my world. Last year I upgraded to 2.5, but I never upgraded to 2.6.5 so I always had trouble with the media uploader. Other client sites I manage were on 2.6 5 and I noticed a better backend.

When it was time for me to upgrade, WordPress 2.7 was out. In fact, it litterally JUST came out this month. Typically, I wait around for results of the new update before I install, but I figured 2.6.5 was so smooth, what possible bugs could there be in 2.7? So far, so good. None that I can see.

The new dash board rocks. It’s super user friendly. All my plugins played instantly, I didn’t even have to reconfigure. But make a note, the developers tell you to deactivate all your plugins BEFORE you upgrade. Oh and the media upload feature? Works faster than my fingertips. Gotta love that!

All this PHP stuff makes my head spin. But I sure love me some WordPress. Thanks to all those 150 people who work on this FREE software. I’m grateful it exists and am amazed that it is freely available everyone. And just 2 weeks after the release of 2.7, those crazy WordPress dudes are already prioritizing new features for 2.8. Now, who loves us baby?

I’ve been criticized from friends who work at Google for being too hard on Google because it’s such a “cool place to work” and the “people are nice”  and they really are about not doing evil. Ya right. Google, I didn’t think it was possible, but you’ve sunk to new lows.

I’m seeing it every day. People my age, generation X, people in their 30′s-40′s, who are suddenly becoming mysteriously tired, unable to sleep or concentrate at work. And why? Because we’re connected 24/7 via the Web. I don’t understand why we keep buying more gadgets, belonging to more online social communities and spending more time in front of a machine and less time being outside, being with people (or in my case doggies) as much as we can. Why are we trying to find ways to spend MORE time on our machines and less time being alone with our thoughts or with those we love or doing something we enjoy that may just make us healthy? I work on the web (well, barely these days) and I can tell you, I don’t twit or tweet, I don’t stumble or bumble. I don’t facebook or spacelook. I don’t flicker or snicker. I don’t have the time. But I do blog and read at best on the Web. And i still have a basic cell phone that doesn’t text.

Wake up Gen X. Get off your gaget horse and get outside. Walk in the sunshine. Ride a bike in the foggy forest. Jog on the beach. You may not get that tree-fiddy raise because you didn’t spend that extra 6 hours per week at the office, but guess what? Your time is a heck of a lot more valuable than that raise, that broken glass ceiling or that promotion. Do your job, but by golly, give yourself some time. And above all, be present–100% present–at everything you do. Be present at your job. Be present during your jog. Be present while playing cards with your kids. Be present while playing frisbee with your dog. Be present while talking with your spouse. Be present in your yoga class.  Being present may be the one thing to keep you healthier than any office desk multi-tasking treadmill.

Oh, and more doggie stories on the way.

Although Ms. Taylor makes no mention of any philosophy, her descriptions seem like they were written directly from some of our greatest philosophers. It makes you wonder if either dualism or non-dualism philosophies are not independently right or wrong, but perhaps, each exists as true and not necessarily as an either/or approach to living.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m sorry for you. It’s not all that entertaining and sadly, contributes to the vacuous. For a web developer, it took me an embarrassingly long time to join the blog world. But I suppose that’s because I refuse to join any organization that would have me as a member.

Still, there are some sites that are extremely informative yet, considerably, a huge time-sink. Here’s a site that looks promisingly informative:

I could get lost at looking all the “stuff” on this site. From irrelevant LED lights with toxic batteries to men’s shower gel, a reader sure can learn a lot about all sorts of stuff that consumes our landfills. There’s even a really cute flash slide show of how stuff is made and where it ends up. It made me want to go clean out all my stuff. Only I actually don’t have a lot of stuff so I wouldn’t know where to begin. Still, I couldn’t help wondering, if time spent reading about stuff was actually time spent I could be using to make enough money that would enable me to buy environmentally-friendly (expensive) stuff that wouldn’t end up in a landfill? Although it can’t be counted as vacuous, the site certainly is a time-sink. Click! Buh-bye Annie.

One of my favorite time-sinks on the ‘net today is TED (ideas worth spreading). Now TED is pretty much the opposite of vacuous information. After watching any one of these videos, TED leaves me feeling more like an informed elitist. And since being elitist is the new black, it can’t be all that bad, can it? Unless, of course, you’re a helpless elitist–like me.

~ 

One of my favorite speakers to watch on TED is Richard Dawkins. Whatever your beliefs in God are, his hilarious sense of humor and frank personality make it easy to justify the time spent.

“The highest office of the greatest country in the world (USA) is barred to the best qualified, the intelligencia…to put it bluntly…political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”

         Hmmm. Just what are you trying to say Richard?   ~

Anyway, if you’re like me, you’ll go through TED marathons, watching TED videos for hours, mesmerized. Perhaps you’ll even be inspired to formulate a plan for world peace. But that will have to wait until after you solve global warming or “the omnivore’s next dilemma” (Michael Pollan). Then you’ll swear off of TED for weeks just so you can get started on your plan for world peace, but that has to wait until you make enough money for the month’s mortgage, which leaves you with exactly three free days to formulate your plan. And by the time you get to your three free days to sit down and work on your plan, you think to yourself, “Hmm…I wonder what’s going on the Internet?” And you’re right back to surfing vacuous sites, later redeeming yourself with a TED marathon. And just as you pull away from TED, the next month’s mortgage is due.

No doubt the ‘Net is a wonderfully bad place. But just when it feels like it’s all spinning out of control, I pull the bus stop cord, read the lines, turn off the monitor and pick up one of the 20 or so recently purchased books I have piled waiting for me, hoping the pages will leave me feeling less empty than the ‘Net.

A “stressor” is anything that provokes stress, an event or context that elevates the adrenal stress response and disrupts homeostasis in the body. Typically stressors fall into categories such as environmental stressors (traffic sounds, crowds, pollution), daily events (hectic work days, late for appointments, big projects due, chauffeuring children to events, rush hour traffic), life changing events (death, divorce, marriage, disease, disability). All of these are known to cause physiological and psychological changes in the body.

A “Zeitgeist Stressor” goes one step further, or wider, to include cultural, sociological or even political events or things that affect groups of people, communitites, as well as simultaneously the individual adrenal stress response. Things that fall into the category are (but not limited to) war, random violence (such as teen shootings), economical changes and technology.

As individuals, we think we’re unaffected by our own zeitgeist, but in fact, we’re merely adapting. How we’re adapting is the more relevant question. Do we really ignore the story on the news about the shooting at a local shopping center or does it actually affect our minds and bodies deeper than we’re aware? Does it feel great to be constantly connected to our technology devices or have they become a burden? The topic, Zeitgeist Stressors, is intended to bring more awareness to how the “spirit of the times” is affecting us biologically and psychologically.