Miscellaneous Ramblings

I dug a friends grave today. My oldest friend, my most loyal friend. I buried my dog today. First I had to end his life. They say it’s the right thing to do, they say it’s better to stop the suffering. They say the prognosis is bad. None of that makes it any easier to tell someone to kill your dog. They wouldn’t let me do it, but I was there, I held his head and told him I was sorry. Sorry I couldn’t fix him, I had always fixed him before, it was my job. This time I couldn’t. So I told them to kill him, I rubbed his ears and told him I loved him as he drifted away. Then I brought him home, in a plain cardboard box with a heart on one end. Then we dug a hole in the back yard, we did it ourselves. It was fitting. He was our dog, he was my dog, so I dug him his grave. He can take his last summer nap now. He was doing so well, acting like he was 2 again, we never new anything was wrong. I don’t think he ever knew anything was wrong till the end. In the dark we stood, even the cat, I thanked God for his gift. He taught me more than I ever taught him. I covered him myself, it took much less time than to dig his grave. A shallow grave, under some trees where he can see the whole yard. He used to love to sit and survey his domain. In our old house he’d sit at the high point like a king and just watch his whole yard, he sat above the house so I think he was watching over us too. I’m tired and sore now, I can’t even feel the physical side, the emotional drain has been too much. I’ve shed a lot of tears today, I’m shedding them now. My eyes hurt, my head hurts, my arms and my back hurt, but most of all my heart hurts. He was there through everything, he was always glad to see me, we never fought. He was my companion on long road trips. He was my confidante, he always kept the best secrets. He was my wife’s rock when I wasn’t around, he took her in and loved her as he loved me. He was her dog too. We were his people. I miss him so much. Now all the food that falls on the floor has to be cleaned up. The gate to the stairs doesn’t need to be left open so he can come and go anymore. I don’t have to feel around for him on the floor to keep from stepping on him when I go to bed.

He was my loyal friend. He was my oldest friend. He was my companion, He was my dog and I love him and I will miss him dearly.

Zoot MacLeod — June 8, 2008 — R.I.P.

The intrepid Captain Pickard sent me a link the Weezer video Pork and Beans which on top of being an excellent song is also an excellent video. However I immediatly felt slightly deficient in that I only recognized about 60% of the youtube references contained within. So I’m now trying to track down the videos for everything I’ve missed by not going daily to youtube.com or break.com.

On a side note ‘The Red Album’ comes out 6/3, I’ve already lala’ed it, but I might try out their mp3 purchase stuff just to see how it is. Depends a lot on their policies around DRM.

Whenever I discuss configuration management with anyone that is new to the concept, and even some people that have been doing it for a while.  There’s one concept that comes up that I have to argue with people about incessantly.  It’s this concept of concatenation.  Basically what people want to do is have this stub of a file be global, this other stub only effect this particular subset of machines, this other stub affect this other subset, then finally a stub that’s host specific. Read the rest of this entry »

After an unexpected and sudden trip (sans the boy) to Cafe Capistrano I’ve now gotten on a Sangria kick. Capistrano does not have their liquor license, but does have their beer and wine license. So they make margaritas and sangria with wine only. The last time I made sangria it didn’t go so well, I loved it and proceeded to drink half of it, T hated it and wouldn’t touch it. I’ve been trying to find a by the glass recipe so that I can try different recipes without devoting an entire bottle of wine to each experiment.

It’s a daunting task because there are as many sangria recipes out there as there are bottles of red wine most of them call for adding hard liquor and soaking the fruit for several days prior to mixing. But they say wine is good for you so I guess I’m up to the challenge.

My previous post about the ‘Perfect Manhattan‘ probably misled a few people. I’m in general not a fan of dry vermouth, hence why I like ‘The Haining’. I’ve always been in search of the perfect (note the lowercase ‘P’) Manhattan. Every time I’m out at a bar and I have one they are usually really good, in fact often times, so good they are dangerous. But yet when I make them at home I don’t get it right. I had suspected that despite ordering just a ‘Manhattan’ that I was actually getting a ‘Perfect Manhattan’. After having one there is a definite difference. So I’m still on the hunt for the right recipe for me. Sadly it’s actually hard to find Rye Whiskey here in NC (yay state run liquor). Traditionally when I’m out I generally order bourbon Manhattans but I’d like to try one with Rye.

Maybe I’ll take a more scientific approach this weekend and make a couple of small variations for tasting purposes. One of the downsides (is it really a downside?) to experimenting is that once you have 2 or 3 they all start to taste the same.