50k elevation challenge

After 3 3/4 years, I finally completed the 50k elevation challenge (for geocaching) in October with my friend Jes. I logged far more than than 50k of elevation over the period, but the challenge had so many rules that many of my hikes didn’t count.  In fact, for a while I had kind of given up even tracking gain.  I […]

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Overpackaging

I purchased a Sandisk 16Gb USB stick drive (~$10 on Amazon.com) to transfer large files between machines rather than having to burn multiple DVDs.  (Also because I ditched my optical drive to install a second hard disk in my ancient MacBook.)  While shuttling files, the USB stick went into some kind of lock-out mode. The consensus from the

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Paseo-like Cuban pork sandwich

And now for something completely different… Paseo-like Cuban pork sandwiches, using a recipe from the Seattle Times food blog, originally based on Paseo reverse-engineering done by Lorna Yee, presented in her cookbook The Newlywed Kitchen. This took me about 1 1/2 hours of attentive cooking, but elapsed time was about 20 hours as most of the marination happened the night

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Dumpling Cube

I love making gyoza, but because I am not adept enough at it to hand-make them at the rate my family consumes them, I wanted to try the Dumpling Cube my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas.  The result was my best batch of gyoza using the Classic Pork Gyoza from Japanese Soul Cooking as a starting point.

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Fitbit Charge HR review

Since my Fitbit Force was recalled earlier this year, I’d been pining for a simple motivational aid.  Microsoft’s Band looks awesome, but it’s sold out as soon as they get another batch of units.  The Garmin VivoSmart had some interesting features, but lacks stair climbs (important to me because I do so much of that in a

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More Cheese Making

It’s been a couple of years since I took the Cheese-Making class at PCC, but while thumbing through their course list again, I had the urge to try it again.  The last couple of weeks have been experimenting with: Yogurt – I picked up a used “yogurt maker,” which is a just a fancy hotplate with

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