Death Valley Adventure - Day 1 - Arriving

[Composed 11/21/2023]

Our Death Valley adventure has begun! We started the day in luxury by visiting the American Airlines club lounge at DCA (thanks Mom & Dad for the generous gift of access!). After pastries and tea, we boarded our plane and headed West. The flight was uneventful, minus the spectacular views of the Rocky Mountains.

We landed in Vegas, but before we could lose any money at the casino, we were on our way out of town. On our way out, we hit up Tacotarian, a vegan taco place. Oh-my, the food was fantastic.

The two hour drive from Vegas to the Inn at Death Valley was punctuated by stunning views. I've got countless photos of the landscape with blurry trees in the foreground, as I tried to capture the surroundings while we sped along. As we approached the park we stopped so I could take some proper landscape photos. After photographing the scene, I took a closer look at the plants and rocks where I was standing. I flipped over one bland looking rock and found this guy:

Not sure what I was looking at, I I asked the kind people at /r/whatisthisrock. Here's the answer I was given:

Looks like you have a sedimentary rock with some marine fossils. I'm pretty sure that round, white spot at the bottom is a crinoid fossil and many of these look like infilled burrows which would be trace fossils.

Back in the Proterozoic Death Valley was covered by ocean!

It's one thing to read about how the desert I was standing in, millions of years ago, used to be an ocean. It's an altogether different thing to be holding proof of this in my hands. This may be Geology 101 stuff, but in that moment was I was Indiana Jones making an epic discovery.

Arriving at the Inn at Death Valley, we were initially impressed by the grounds. However, as we approached the building that housed our hotel room, we were struck by how shabby the place was. The dim, rundown hallway gave off 2 star hotel vibes (even though we were paying 3+ star prices). Fortunately, the room itself was OK. Small and basic, but better than the hallway outside suggested.

Readers of my blog know that my superpower is finding the bright side of things. No matter the situation, I'm usually able to tease something positive from it. Well, my optimism met its match at dinner tonight. Hoping for the best, we got dinner at the all you can eat buffet. Good lord the food was bad. I mean, how do you mess up french fries? On top of it all, the buffet was $35 per person. About all I can say is that for $70, we did in fact, stave off hunger.

So here's my pro tip for visitors to the Death Valley Inn: don't depend on the restaurants. Once you get to the Death Valley area there are no grocery stores. This is only a problem if you don't plan ahead. So plan ahead. Fortunately, we arrived hauled along plenty of food. I'd also recommend an immersion boiler to make hot water. With hot water, you can "cook" backpacking style meals in your room; something doesn't seem possible at first because there's no microwave.

Oh look, I learned a lesson from this experience. That's handy. I guess I am glad that we had this awful restaurant experience. See, there was a bright side after all!

OK, enough kvetching. We're going to get some rest, we've got Death Valley to explore tomorrow!

The All You Can Eat Buffet Ends Today

This year I'm growing Jerusalem artichokes. Not from Jerusalem, and not artichokes, this variant of sunflower grows from a potato-like tuber and produces more tubers at the end of the season. Also known as sunchokes, it was this video highlighting their use as a high-yield, low-effort food source that initially caught my attention.

Digging a little deeper, I came to appreciate that Jerusalem artichokes are one of those plants that keeps getting rediscovered. In the 1600s, Native Americans introduced the plant to colonists and they became a staple for the pilgrims. In 1907, they were declared scientifically the "most efficient of all economic plants." In 1930, the US Government tried to convince housewives that like the innovative avocado, the Jerusalem artichoke was a worthy addition to their pantry. In 1935, this "no-account, worthless vegetable pariah" was promised to be a "vast source for industrial sugar and alcohol," earning it the nickname the "million-dollar weed." Today, the NIH links to over a 1,000 scientific papers that mention the Jerusalem artichoke. From biofuel to diabetes, the easily forgotten sunchoke keeps being offered up as the answer.

Planting Jerusalem artichokes was easy. I purchased a handful of tubers from Amazon and dropped them into the ground. After about a week, shoots started to appear.

Success! I shouldn't have been surprised, the plant is native to the US and has a reputation for being easy to grow.

As the plants continued to grow, I noticed that some of the shoots were nibbled off by critters. I remained unconcerned. And then, two days ago, I peeked outside and found that the entire crop had been devoured. I present Exhibit A from the crime scene photo shoot:

Oh, this means war! So off to Amazon I went for supplies. I spent yesterday setting up a chicken wire enclosure, with the hopes of keeping my chokes safe.

Will our furry neighbors laugh at my attempt and simply go back for seconds? Probably. But for now, I think my 'million dollar weeds' are safe. And I'm telling you, when Jerusalem artichokes finally do hit the big time, I'll be able to say that I grew them back before they were a fad.

Eat the Yard: Harvesting, Cooking and Eating Burdock

I've always been under the impression that burdock, while often derided as a weed, was a tasty wild edible. One challenge with testing this claim is that accessing burdock's taproot takes effort, so it isn't something I've been able to casually try.

Fortunately, a few burdock plants popped up in the corner of our backyard. While many would have be annoyed at their giant leafy presence, I was overjoyed. Today, I decided to harvest one of the plants and take that overdue taste test.

The harvesting process, as promised, was reletively tedious. Eventually I was victorious, extracting a big 'ol alien looking chunk of root. A took a nibble of my bounty on the spot and found it tasted sort of like horseradish root, minus any heat. It wasn't bitter or off-putting, just bland and chewy.

Following this recipe, I sliced up the taproot and covered it with a healthy dose of olive oil, salt and pepper. I then put it in the oven for 30 minutes at 350°F. Every 10 minutes I gave it a shake.

After the pieces of root cooled a bit, I noshed on a few slices. It was, drum roll... OK. I suppose it was like any startchy vegetable, basically neutral tasting. I took the advice here and cooked the burdock with the skin on. I'm not sure if that helped or hurt. As I tried a few more pieces, some of them tasted pretty good: they were nicely seasoned and relatively tender. But other pieces of the root remained chewy and fibrous. Maybe I should have peeled the root? Or maybe cooking needed more cook time?

So, does burdock live up to its reputation as being a delicious wild edible? Maybe. Properly seasoned and cooked, it may be perfectly tasty. But with my first attempt I didn't crack this puzzle and ended up with something mostly fibrous and chewy. I've got another plant growing in back, so maybe a second go-around will be more successful than my first.

Passover 2024: Really Digging This Year's Seder

Passover ended earlier this week, and while I'm still making my way through two remaining boxes of matza, it's quickly becoming a distant memory. Like past years, I thought I'd jot down some experiences from the seder as well as some prep material that I found helpful. Enjoy!

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This podcast episode: 19th Century Raisin Wine in America, featuring Professor Jonathan Sarna, was filled with interesting bits of Jewish Americana. Including the mind-blowing fact that while the Bible was translated to English in the 1500s, it wasn't until the mid-1800s that a Jewish translation of the Torah was published. Professor Sarna touches on this in the podcast and explains why an American was uniquely positioned to create this first translation.

Speaking of raisin wine, I made a batch for the first time this year. In the melee that was our hosted seder, I forgot to serve it. The 'wine' tasted so-so, but the process of making it was, for someone who's never attempted this before, unique. The recipe calls for combining boiling water, raisins, sugar, and a lemon. You then stir the concoction for 7 days. For the first three days, the 'wine' was what I expected: raisin-colored water. But by the fourth day, the mixture started to be carbonated. By the seventh day, the mixture was a frothy, living thing. It was remarkable.

The podcast above also highlighted the story of Kedem. And what a story it is. I'll never look at a bottle of Kedem grape juice the same way again.

Before the seder, we did a bit of crafting to decorate our seder plate. Combining small glass bowls and stick-on jewels made for a quick and beautiful project that we could immediately put to use. At least we didn't have a repeat of last year's glue gun incident.

While watching this video on seder plates, I was reminded of the amazing fact that the seder of 1865 happened one day after the surrender at Appomattox. Jews were literally toasting their freedom at the moment that American slaves were being freed. This article explains the Jewish perspective on this moment well.

Speaking of the seder plate, I picked up four new facts about it. First, we used to feast on the foods present on the seder plate. The egg and shankbone that are now symbolic used to correspond to the meal's main course.

The Jerusalem Talmud (compiled around 400 CE) requires two unspecified cooked dishes to be eaten as part of the Passover meal. Some 200 years later, The Babylonian Talmud asks, what are these two dishes? And it offers several answers that resemble neither lamb nor eggs. ...
For most of our history, the dishes, no matter what they symbolized, were the main dishes of the meal. Today, the egg and the shank-bone are symbolic and are not part of the meal, but initially they were the meal. Only much later, as some Jews refrained from eating roasted meat at all during the Seder, the egg and the shank-bone were merely ritually placed on a Seder Plate and were left untouched.

Second, around the year 1000, Sherira bar Hanina suggested that the egg on the seder plate was a nod to Miriam.

Rav Sherira continues with a second custom, ostensibly unknown to his questioners in Kairouan:

And there are those who add another cooked dish in memory of Miriam, as it is written, “And I sent before you Moses, Aaron and Miriam” (Micah 6:4).
And these three dishes consist of fish, meat and egg to correspond with the types of foods that Israel will eat in the future world to come: fish to correspond with the Leviathan, egg to correspond with ziz saddai (Psalms 50:11) and meat to correspond with shor habor (see Rashi on Psalms 50:10).

While women are featured prominently in the story of the Exodus, there's not any mention of women at the seder itself. That's why I was so struck by Rav Sherira's explanation.

Third, the oldest known seder plate, from the 1400's, has spelling errors in its text.

his plate, the earliest known Seder plate in existence, belongs to a small group of Jewish ceremonial objects that survived the expulsion from Spain. The inscription in the center refers to the main components of the festival: pesah (Paschal lamb), matzah, maror (bitter herbs), and seder. The errors in the Hebrew inscription may be the result of its having been copied by a non-Jewish artist who was unfamiliar with Hebrew letters.

So next time your creation doesn't come out quite as perfect as you'd like, know that you're in good company.

Fourth, the seder plate predates plates:

That’s right. The first seder plate wasn’t made of china or ceramic, pewter or silver – it was more like a wicker basket. And it most likely wasn’t round. In fact historians tell us that the actual name was “ke’arah” which is the Hebrew word, not for “plate” but for “tray.”

The use of a basket matches up symbolically with both the experience of baby Moses and brings to mind the first fruits ceremony. While seemingly esoteric, this ceremony provides the core text the haggadah uses to tell the story of the Exodus. A basket also fits better with the materials that our ancestors would have on hand. I've been looking for a reason to do some basket weaving with the invasive English Ivy in our backyard. Maybe next year I'll finally get it together and craft myself a seder plate.

Speaking of stuff growing in our backyard, one notable moment from the seder was when I took the littlest kids into our backyard, and they helped me harvest the horseradish I'd grown from last year's seder. Sure, the kids were in their seder clothes and we were digging in the dirt, but boy was it fun. Here's a fragment of this horseradish; you can see it's already sprouted again and will be ready to be planted soon. I'm looking forward to harvesting it next year!

A Cruft Free, Super Simple, WordPress Link Rendering Plugin

For this year's Omer Learning Project, I've launched a fresh WordPress instance using Lightsail. I'm utilizing the Lingonberry WordPress theme, as it's super lightweight and should work well for the site's post-centric content.

I'm using the free version of the Ultimate CSV Importer plugin to import content I plan to share every day of the Omer. This content is provided by generous members of our shul via a Google Form.

This has all been working out well: individuals can quickly contribute content, and I can easily schedule it for publication. Where things broke down, however, is that a number of the contributions included links, images, and YouTube videos. By default, these show up as plain text in the final post. For example, consider this test post:

What I wanted is for WordPress to automatically detect and render that URL as an image.

I'm sure there are a variety of plugins that do this sort of thing. The problem is that these plugins often do way more, introducing a level of complexity and noise into the site that I'm trying to avoid. In this case, it was easier to code my own plugin than to find just the right one to use. The plugin I created is named: bs-simple-formatting-fixes.

This tiny, poorly named plugin detects links in your posts and turns them into rendered content. It includes support for images, YouTube videos, and basic links. It means that the post above is automatically turned into:

You're welcome to grab this plugin and customize it to your own needs.

Chag semeach and happy counting!

Living History, IRL: Fort CF Smith

This past weekend, we hit up a Civil War living history event over at Fort CF Smith.

We got to meet and hear from the fort's namesake, Mr. Charles Ferguson himself. Smith's role as commandant of cadets at West Point meant that he came into contact with nearly all of the well-known generals of the Civil War—both Union and Confederate. He was an interesting character, and the reenactor playing him did a great job.

We then perused the relatively small encampment with my brother, sister-in-law, and G. G flitted from station to station, taking the scene in. A definite highlight was making hardtack, which G adorably pronounced hard-a-tack.

While we waited for our hard-a-tack to cook over an open fire, we walked down to a parade ground where we saw a cavalry demonstration with 5 reenactors on horses.

It's one thing to collect up and dress in Civil War kit, working on your backstory and tuning your impression. From my perspective, it's another thing altogether to do this on horseback, running Civil War-era drills and battlefield formations. Again, I was really impressed by the group that was putting on the display.

When it came time to taste our hard-a-tack, G gave it two thumbs up. Given that hardtack is essentially the same thing as matzah (it's only flour, water, and salt), I'd say that G is in good shape for the upcoming holiday of Passover, where we'll indulge in matzah for 8 days.

I'm so used to taking in living history on YouTube (thanks Townsends, Deer Skin Diary, Tasting History, Fandabi Dozi, Woodland Escape, and many, many more) that it's easy to forget that it's a genre intended to be consumed in real life. And so it was fun to get offline and into the field. I've visited Fort CF Smith a number of times, but afer this last visit, I'll never quite see it the same way again. Well played Civil War Reenactors, well played.

Visting St Louis: From Jail to the Arch

[Composed: 11/3/2023]

I just got back from visiting one of my long-time customers in St. Louis, Missouri. This customer specializes in jail communications. Think specially secured Zoom for prisoners and their loved ones.

This has been a fascinating field to write code for, as it has intense security and legal requirements that must always be met.

While I've worked for this customer for years, this was my first visit and very much felt like a homecoming. When the company started, it consisted of a few individuals; now they have grown into a truly impressive operation.

After our meetings, they asked me what I wanted to check out in the area. Simple: While I wanted to see the famous St. Louis Arch, top on my list was to go to jail. I was hoping I could see the system that I'd been working on for so many years actually deployed in the field.

They were kind enough to oblige, and in relatively short order, I found myself face to face with a hardened kiosk in a local jail that was running the comms software I'd helped build. We got a full tour of the small facility, at least the parts that didn't contain active inmates. I even got to hang out in one of the cells they use for isolating prisoners. It was all quite the experience.

After leaving jail, we made our way to the Arch. While I'd certainly seen pictures of the famous Arch since I was a kid, I'd never appreciated just how massive it is. Nor did I realize that you can go inside of it.

In the lobby, while tickets were being bought for our group, I noticed an obviously 1960s-era tram car. Hmm, I thought, back in the day, that must be what they used to ride up to the top.

Eventually we found ourselves lined up outside narrow hatches, waiting to ride to the top. The doors opened, and people climbed out. At that point, I realized that the retro car I'd seen in the lobby wasn't an artifact; it was a preview. Four of us squeezed into our tiny car and up we went.

The ride takes a few minutes isn't particularly scary. A few times, my brain tried to chime in to trigger a fear response, but I was like, "Brain, chill. It's a fancy elevator ride. We're fine with elevator rides."

The view from the top of the Arch did not disappoint, though again I found my brain trying to convince me to panic. I kept reminding myself to stay cool; the Arch hadn't been blown over in the last 60 years, and it wasn't going to blow over today.

After the Arch, we partook in another St. Louis tradition: eating Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. Now, this is a tradition that I can fully get behind.

Upon ordering, they asked me if I wanted concrete or not? I mean, how could I not want concrete? Of course, I had no idea what they meant, but it was ice cream, so what could be bad about it? Apparently, 'concrete' refers to a "shake so thick that it is served upside down".

At the end of the long day, our little group returned to a shuttered office so I could grab my rental car and head to my hotel. As we pulled into the parking lot, a system alarm went off. In a few minutes, our group had laptops out on a picnic table and were debating the source and fix for the alarm. As I problem-solved with fellow programmers, in person as opposed to over Microsoft Teams, I had to smile at what a surprisingly meaningful way this turned out to be to close out the day. We'd gotten back to our roots.

A Flyby of the Key Bridge Collapse

On a flight home from Rochester, New York we flew within about 10 miles of the collapsed Key Bridge. Even at this distant vantage point the scope of the disaster is mind boggling. Wow. Just wow.

The police radio chatter seconds before the bridge collapsed showed that they reacted quickly to stop traffic, no doubt saving a significant number of lives.

The whole incident underscores a rule I try to respect: when an emergency is reported, no matter how other wordly it must be, Just Go.