Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Archives for January 2010

Snack break: teriyaki meatballs

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I think I’ve mentioned a couple of “retro-local” cookbooks with favorite tastes from my childhood in Hawaii that I always keep nearby. This is one of them:

This was a fundraiser cookbook produced by the women of Hui Manaolana, a service club which my aunt belonged to since she was a student at the University of Hawaii. She is 99 years old now, and the first edition of this cookbook was published in 1951. My own copy is from the 1969 printing. The recipes are those of the club members and their families and friends, very typical Hawaii Japanese home cooking.

I have made the teriyaki meatballs from this cookbook as appetizers for family gatherings and parties. They are quite well-liked, and I never seem to get to eat any of them myself before they are all snarfed down by others. My fault for not putting a couple aside for myself when I make them!

The last time I made them was for a party in December that I was not attending as a persistent winter cold had sapped all my energy and sociability. I went so far as to get out a small container to put my meatballs aside… then forgot to actually put any meatballs in it. By the time I realized my error, the meatballs were several miles down the road on the way to the party. Oh, well!

Following is the recipe, with my own changes noted. You can substitute dried powdered ginger and garlic if you absolutely have to, but using fresh ginger root and garlic, especially in the sauce, will make a very positive difference.

Teriyaki Meatballs
(from Hui Manaolana’s Japanese Foods cookbook)

Meatballs:
1½ pounds lean ground beef
¼ cup finely chopped onion
1 egg
½ teaspoon salt
dash of black pepper
2 tablespoons shoyu (soy sauce – imported Japanese soy sauce, please, or if you use domestic soy sauce, please use Kikkoman)
½ teaspoon grated ginger
1 clove garlic, grated
1 teaspoon brown sugar
Mix thoroughly and form into appetizer-sized meatballs. Bake at 350° for 8 minutes on each side.

Sauce:
1 cup shoyu (see above)
2 tablespoons sake (Japanese rice wine – if I don’t have any, I just leave it out rather than substitute any other type of spirits and add a little more shoyu)
6 tablespoons sugar (since I have the brown sugar out for the meatballs, I usually do 3 tablespoons brown sugar and 3 tablespoons white sugar)
2 teaspoons grated ginger
2 cloves garlic, grated
1½ teaspoons cornstarch mixed with cold water
Bring all ingredients except cornstarch mixture to a boil. Add cornstarch mixture slowly and stir until sauce thickens slightly. Pour over meatballs and enjoy. (EDITED TO ADD: the last time I made this, my grater went missing, so I strained out the not-quite-fine enough fragments of ginger and garlic before adding the cornstarch mixture)

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 11 of 31)

Issues, we have technology issues

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The update to WordPress 2.9.1 went fine, as did the updates to several plugins and the pre-update backups to the database and files. So at least something is working well here. Not everything, though.

I’ve been trying out some to-do list/task manager software. BlackBerry Tasks doesn’t sync to anything else. Google Tasks doesn’t sync to my BlackBerry. Remember The Milk syncs to Google Calendar when both RTM and Google Calendar feel like speaking to one another, and that’s apparently not predictable. Is that big fun, or what? I’m thinking about going back to pen and paper. There really is something very soul-satisfying about drawing that heavy line through a completed task.

Another technology issue that came out of left field involves my family and Skype. I would have never in a million years expected most of my family to want to do the video call thing. But after my uncle passed away last month, one of the things my brother and cousin did was to get everyone set up on Skype to be able to stay in touch despite the distance between most of us. I’ve had a Skype account for a while, but I’ve used it only for magazine business, mostly file transfers and text chat. I do not do video. Ever.

To keep in touch with my family, I suppose I can be more flexible on that point. And then it turns out I may have difficulty doing so, since it seems to involve some workarounds to get the Sony VAIO Motion Eye camera to work properly with Skype. That will have to wait until the laptop comes back from the fan replacement. By then I should have mustered up the energy to deal with technology issues.

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 10 of 31)

Dogs in the big lake again

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Back in the spring, I mentioned two separate incidents in which dogs jumped or fell into Lake Michigan, owners went in after them, and humans and canines both needed saving. It happened again on Thursday night, and at this time of year, the consequences could have been really awful. Dogs and human were rescued, and are fine now.

Most of these stories involve dogs let off-leash where it is technically not legal to do so, and owners who either are not paying close enough attention to call their dogs back from a potentially dangerous situation, or dogs that don’t have a solid enough recall to come back immediately to an owner who is paying close attention.

I totally get that dogs should be able to run sometimes. What I will not get in the slightest, however, is if a rescuer, whether it be a Good Samaritan or a paid professional first responder, is injured or killed saving someone from their own lack of judgment.

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 9 of 31)

Back to school

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Classes start again for Freya and me tomorrow after a three-week break. I originally thought we’d just be returning to our usual intermediate/advanced group obedience class. But there has been a rally obedience class added to the schedule immediately following the group class.

I’m not sure how it is going to work for us to take two hour-long classes in a row, but the times and locations for the weeknight classes I was considering aren’t going to work for us either for the first few months of the year. So I’ve decided to try the consecutive classes for a week or two and see how it goes. If it turns out to be too much in any way for either Freya or me, we’ll go to the as-yet-to-be developed Plan B.

I’m going to take some time now to figure out some goals for this set of classes. The immediate priority is to prepare for our first APDT trial, and also decide whether it will be the trials on January 23-24 or the trials on February 6-7. APDT does not allow choke collars for trialing, as UKC and AKC do, so I also need to get Freya accustomed to working in a martingale collar.

Of course, these goals may be modified, depending upon what happens tomorrow!

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 8 of 31)

Digital spring cleaning

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Maybe I shouldn’t call it “spring” cleaning. It’s been snowing since early this morning, temperatures are dropping like a rock, and the wind is blowing snow all over the place. It’s very clearly still winter.

But it feels like the digital version of spring cleaning as I try to get the past years’ data organized and backed up, and archive non-current items. As I mentioned earlier in the week, my Sony VAIO laptop, which is my primary computer, needs to go in for warranty replacement of the intermittently noisy cooling fan. I actually have another full year to have the repair done as Sony has extended the warranty for fan replacement only. I don’t want to let it go that long, but I didn’t want to send it out until we were done with magazine production for this quarter (that would be The Total Rottweiler Magazine, if you haven’t been visiting here long). The magazine went to print on Tuesday, so it’s a convenient time for me to be without this computer for a little while.

Due to a lifetime of employment in print production, the magazine files are already pretty well-organized. My blog and website files, not so much. I have a lot of non-current versions that should be archived and moved off-line. I’m going to try to get that done over the weekend. If life gets in the way, I’ll just do a couple of full backups and send the laptop on for the repair anyway.

Something else I want to work on is an editorial calendar for this blog. ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog last year had a day devoted to the process, and I really think it will help me in keeping a good balance here between Rottweilers, technology and world domination. It will also help me to make sure that I follow up on ongoing news items.

Winter is a good time for stuff like this, so I hope to make some headway while the weather is ugly enough to keep me inside!

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 7 of 31)