Miso Oatmeal

I've been on a cheap cooking kick lately. I finally got around to hard-boiling eggs for the week on Sunday; I've had an egg or two every day. I've also been eating steel-cut oats every morning. But even in the reduced-time way to cook them, they still take 25 minutes to make, and that's a lot of my morning. So, Monday night, I made about three servings of oatmeal. I wanted to see how long I could stretch it. I had the second serving today and, after microwaving in water, I thought they tasted just as good as fresh.

Instead of just going with sugary oatmeal, I have been trying to make miso oatmeal. It's not incredible, but, if I get sick of maple syrup in my oats, I can always break it up with miso flavoring.

Miso Oatmeal

steel-cut oats
dashi (Japanese seafood-based powder stock)
miso (red or white)

1. Add oats to a pot, then cover with 2 times as much water as oats.
2. Sprinkle dashi into water and stir. (this is instead of the normal pinch o' salt) The key is not to make it really overwhelming, just a hint of flavor is good.
   
3. Begin simmering. I don't cover it since it usually boils over if I do.
4. Every five minutes, stir.
   
5. After 25 minutes, take off heat and cover.
   
6. Separately, warm up some water (just a couple ladlefuls).
7. When the water is steaming, mix in a spoonful of miso.
8. Add miso mixture to oatmeal. Enjoy.
   

100

My roommate is moving out and I rented a steam cleaner from the supermarket to spruce up the carpet. I started cleaning in my room last night at around 9:15 and cut myself off at 10 out of mercy toward the neighbors. The machine took 2 1/2 gallons of water mixed with a special soap which got incredibly dirty. I was amazed by the amount of dirt that it took off my floor. I was also amazed at the final product. For 28 dollar rental and 12 dollar soap purchase the place is remarkably fresh.

I have now officially begun training in BJJ. Along with that, tango, work, school, studying, and hangin' with the gf I rarely have a free moment, and I'd have to say that I couldn't be happier. I think I blogged before about trying to keep a schedule. I tried it for a month and now it has taken. I haven't applied this technique to any long range planning yet but I now weekly write out my activities.

I will blog about the BJJ options in this area as an assignment from aak, but on Districted. His assignment was to write something that would be helpful to readers who live in this area and that's the only thing I've researched so I can give our eager readers the low down.

I can say how excited I am to be back in training. My back aches and I've been exhausted all day...I'm so happy. I spar, or in BJJ it's "rolling," mostly with the teacher thus far and it's damn painful. It's all grappling on the ground and chess match sort of move-counter move - plus someone smushing your face into the ground (I'm not yet the one doing the smushing). It's amazing rolling with someone advanced when you're a beginner because you think up a given move in the moment that seems smart then he immediately has a counter ready that somehow puts you down. Then another then another and you quickly gain a respect for their experience and knowledge. He knows what I'm going to try before I do. Then he puts his knee on my neck and I need to learn to not panic, breath with what airspace I do have, think of something and implement it. Not succumbing to the panic is a biggie and probably my biggest struggle in training at this point.

Almost-100th Post

Well, now, here's a funny thing. This blog named Hatandcoat, so diffidently updated by its creator, has gone past Districted and has arrived at its 100th post.

Almost.

The Blogger Dashboard reports that Hatandcoat had had 99 posts before this one, but Blogger includes an unfinished, unpublished draft. The draft is, of course, by Hatandcoat. It is titled "What Blogging Feels Like." There is no text other than that.

So I don't feel bad posting this Almost-Hundredth Post. I'll wait for Hatandcoat to look back nostalgically upon the 100 postings, once he deletes "What Blogging Feels Like" and sets down to really write something.

Hatandcoat has a case of writer's block, he says. The lurid details of BJJ dojos may never reach you via this half-alive blog. Things are so desperate, I think I'll suggest a web service that is designed to keep blogs alive. Go to http://www.plinky.com/, Hatandcoat, and seek help.*

As for me, I think I'll write about my food adventures today. (I know my audience.)

For breakfast, I made steel-cut oats the Bittman way. I'd always been suspicious of the 45 minutes steel-cut oats allegedly took, and the Bitten post I linked to above told me my instincts had been correct. After 25 minutes, I cut up a banana for some natural sweetness and put it in the steaming-hot oatmeal. It wasn't quite what I was hoping for, but a dash of maple syrup fixes most things in the morning.

Then I helped move my roommate's boyfriend into a new rental house. It wasn't far away, and it didn't take long. But instead of the normal pizza thank-you meal, I had a pot roast my roommate's mom had brought over for the occasion. (A HUGE roast. I have not seen that much meat since Christmas.) It was nice, although one of the helpers was a vegetarian.

Around 8:30 pm I started making veggie lasagna. Here is the recipe. While slicing the carrots on the mandolin slicer, I gouged my finger above the knuckle on the back, all the way down to the fatty tissue (is that bad?). Other than that, the lasagna-making went smoothly. (As of this edit, it has been 4 hours and it is still bleeding. Is that bad?)

We set up two mousetraps, one really expensive humane one from a hardware store, and one made out of a half-flattened toilet paper tube. I'll let you know which one works, if any. We put bread on the expensive one and peanut butter and cheese on the end of the tube (tying this section in to food).

And finally, near midnight, I hardboiled six eggs by covering them in cold water, salting the water, getting it to boil, and then removing the pan from heat as soon as the boil starts. After 15 minutes, I drained the hot water and poured cold water over the eggs. Unfortunately, I hadn't added any vinegar, so three of the six eggs cracked. I'm hoping the cracked ones will last at least until Tuesday.

*Also, if any readers out there have suggestions for Mr. Hatandcoat as to what he should write, please let him know in the comments.

Things I Learned from My Linguistics Class

• The UN in UNHAPPY is morphologically different from the UN in UNLOCK.
  
  HAPPY = happy
  UNHAPPY = not happy
  
  LOCK = to fasten, to secure (with a lock)
  UNLOCK = to UNDO the fastening of (a lock)
  
  So UN plus an adjective means the opposite of that adjective, but UN plus a verb means to revert back to the state before that verb was done. You can't UNDO something unless it was already done.
  
  
• There is confusion among twenty-year-olds about the past tense of the euphemism for "to ejaculate." Some think the verb is "to come" and therefore the past tense is "came". Others argue vehemently that it is "to cum" and the past tense is "cummed."
  
  I think the noun form can be spelled "cum" and the verb form "come," and I see no reason why the past tense shouldn't be "came." Furthermore, the Japanese slang word is "iku," which means "go," and I like the contrast of Western "coming" and Eastern "going."
  

There are certain uncouth words that should, by now, be standardized into dictionaries: "cum" and "jizz" for example. Mainly because I want to use them in Scrabble.

Blogging Under The Gun

Here's the gchat that I get today from Aak (name changed to protect the innocent):

Aak: blog, or be penalized
you've been warned.
later on.

That penalizing could take some unsavory forms, so I should do as I'm told.

Today we will talk about...brb.

Better now. I have long suspected that I am lactose intolerant and after two bowls of cereal this morning it seems more likely.

My semester started yesterday. One class is a prereq that is supposed to be a transition to advanced mathematics - a gateway course. The people in the room I think all have tourette's. I can't tell if they're obnoxious or quirky. In most classes people are generally tentative about speaking out and mutter an answer under their breath or give their answers as questions, like "x squared?" But these people are cutting the teacher off or offering alternative explanattions to what the teacher has said. It looks like there may be a culture of annoying questions ahead too.

The grad course isn't like that at all, which is interesting.

Uh, more to talk about...Ok, fight stuff. I'm SO psyched about St. Pierre vs. Penn II next weekend, and Thiago silva vs. Lyoto Machida as well. I like Lyoto Machida a lot though people think he's boring. I don't. He dances around strategically and avoids the opponent most of the time but when he picks his moments he is hyper aggresive. It's great to watch.

Backwards Thinking

Well, that was disappointing. All Hatandcoat admitted to was being argumentative. (Even though he's still clearly a prescriptivist. Ask him sometime about when he tried to speak with "perfect grammar.")

And it seems that Hatandcoat is reluctant to post for the time being about anything, while he figures out a certain situation (teaser: it has to do with BJJ). So I guess I must take up the slack again and provide the meager readership with some randomosity:

I spent the week up in Timonium, while commuting with a borrowed car every day to school. Timonium and environs are part of my old stomping ground. It was neat to drive down streets that I half-remembered. It was nostalgic, finding that I knew what roads were what at the intersection of Old Bosley and Pot Springs Road, even though the only signs were stop signs. I vividly remembered driving the same way, many times before.

I think it's the same feeling that I read about in books. The narrator goes back to his hometown and meets up with the girl he knew before, and they take a walk, just like they always did, and they reminisce about hearing the frogs in the summer. I feel that way about Pot Springs, Dulaney Valley, Charmuth, even some stretches of Joppa. I wonder, do people my age have memories more of walks or of drives?

I'm Back

After too much time off from my favorite hobby, I have now resumed my training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I couldn't be more excited. At the moment I'm frustrated because I went to class the other day but the teacher was sick and class was cancelled. That was my 3rd class. For the other two, I showed up at the scheduled time then the teacher moseyed around and we eventually got started.

I remember when I was in high school and a friend of mine and I would go to the gym to lift weights. We would do a set, chat for a while, go get a drink, sit around, chat, do a set, check out some girls, chat, etc. Then years later I did body for life for a couple months which taught me the value of having and sticking to a plan for a work out. Wasted time is the enemy. I love wasting time sometimes - today has consisted of watching Karate Kid II then the Eagles game then gchatting gf then blogging then eating candy and making coffee that I don't need. But not when there's something I want. And with Jiu Jitsu I want it.

I'm also excited that there's a sport that I can do as an adult. I sorely miss the weekend days as a kid when my friends and I would play football for hours then go to our respective homes for dinner. Those hours were - no joke here - some of the best times of my life. More recently I played tennis occasionally with a good friend. I love just forgetting everything and concentrating on the sport at hand for a time. Nowadays I have no sports friends except gf who is a runner. That's great, but running just doesn't cut it for me. I need excitement and not just boring and meditative.

The Eagles are up 10-8 going in to half time. :)

Debate Over?

I with you sort of agree but care to the little.

I wouldn't say I'm staunchly in the Prescriptivist camp, but when there is a word being used incorrectly and I must answer a question based on the usage then that is bull. What does that say about my stance on this issue that I say that dead and dormant have two separate meanings?

I don't find this discussion interesting either, I'm just one of those people who gets really pissed off when I think I'm right and nobody will agree with me.

Word Debate

As long as we're brabbling, please allow me to initiate a conversation here on Hatandcoat. If you've ever been in a grammar argument, or if you've ever insisted that some people don't know how to speak their own language, you are already part of the debate. So don't roll your eyes at this post, Dear Reader, for it may well give you ammunition for your next grammar/definition showdown.

On Christmas Eve, a friend of mine brought up the American Heritage Dictionary's "usage problem" with the way people now use the word "fortuitous." In a nutshell, the word only originally meant "happening by random chance or accident." Since the 1920s, though, people have confused it with "fortunate" and "felicitous" and thus exclusively used it to mean "lucky, a good accident." If you said the following sentence, hardly anyone would think it's wrong:

In a fortuitous turn of events, I found a $100 bill in my pocket.

But if you were to say the following, people would give you the stinkeye:

In a fortuitous turn of events, I stepped in dog feces.

If you insisted that that was an accurate usage of the word, they would probably tell you that "fortuitous" means "lucky."*

I thanked my friend for the tidbit. I love these little problem words. And I love knowing the history of the word and the evolution of its meaning. But I didn't bother to get into the boring argument that I usually get into with these kinds of word problems. That argument is PRESCRIPTIVISM VS DESCRIPTIVISM.

Prescriptivists, in the linguistic domain, are those who believe that there are rules for a language. That there is an ideal language that we follow grammar rules to match as closely as we can. That there is a wrong way to speak and a right way to speak.

Descriptivists are those who believe that language is in flux, that there are no rules as long as the speaker and listener both understand what is going on, and that there's no right and wrong, there's only communication and miscommunication.

The problem with prescriptivists is that the grammar rules they learned in school were just the product of one or two prescriptivists who wrote books in the 18th or 19th century. The educational system picked those books and based lessons on them. Split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of sentences, etc., have established histories in English as a language, and they do not muddle understanding, yet armchair prescriptivists cling to these notions like they are holy scripture.

The problem with descriptivists is that, although language is in flux, there is a great deal of value in learning the rules that most people, especially upper-class people, agree on. If I write a cover letter, I'm not going to write it however I like. The genre of a cover letter dictates that I follow certain rules so I don't sound like an idiot. Furthermore, if I spoke however I pleased, I might not be understood by most people, so it might be expedient to follow the rules.

I lie somewhere in-between. I dislike the dogmatic approach many (including Hatandcoat) have towards language, grammar, and definitions. I love that words can change meaning, via ignorance or otherwise. It means that our language is alive. And many so-called grammar rules are unnecessary and misleading.

But on the other hand, I recognize the need for some rules (especially in certain language genres), and I like the original meanings of words as well as I like the new ones. For me, it's a question of "How many rules are enough," not "Which is right, rules or no rules".

Hatandcoat, care to defend your prescriptivist ways?

*If they did that, they would be acting prescriptivist about their own misinterpretation! It's prescriptivist vs. prescriptivist!

Words = Frustration

More games posting.

A couple days before the edge of your seat throwdown, I hung out at Aak's place and played some new game he got for xmas called...damn, I can't remember the name. It was this game with trivia cards containing the answer at the bottom of the card and six clever clues to the answer. The person whose turn it is gets one clue at a time and he/she moves ahead the number of spaces determined by how many clues it took. There's a limited number of guesses available.

We started playing and his roommates filtered in and joined. The game was me vs. Aak with them as "freelancers," or available to answer for both teams.

On of the clues was "Though my name suggests that I am dormant, I contain plenty of creatures."

One girl immediately said "Dead Sea." I say no and we get further clues. More clues come and more discussion leads to "Dead Sea...[talking, talking]...Dead Sea...[talking, talking]...Dead Sea."

Now, the clue was effective in making us think of the Dead Sea, granted, but I ruled it out as the final answer because Dead ≠ Dormant. Anyone who thinks that "dead" implies "dormant" would be wrong and as their teacher I would put red ink on their paper. Of course, the answer is Dead Sea.

The most frustrating thing was that nobody saw my point in subsequent discussion. Aak says he understands but finds the clue "acceptable."

Suck it.

The Settler

That was such an awesome game of Settlers of Catan, I feel the need to blog about it now.*

I went over my friend Brogue's house to play some New Year's Day games. I played one game of (expanded for 6 players) Settlers for 4 hours, then I played San Juan, then I played another expanded Setters game.** And I won the last one.

More than that, I feel I've learned something about the game.***

The first game, I was landlocked, and I was amidst enemies, yet I obtained the Longest Road and was able to hold onto it for the whole game. My first placements were almost good. I had some high-rolling numbers, but my wood was weak and I was missing ore completely. Sheep was not very plentiful, either. I soared up through the midgame, but then I was stuck at seven points. Without ore, I couldn't do anything. Meanwhile, the others didn't have any ore, either, but the winners had ports, a 3:1 and a 2:1. I decided to try to incorporate ports into my strategy from now on.

The second game, I had really good placement from the start, but I had nowhere to go from there. In the huge, expanded board, there was one really fertile quadrant where everyone crowded each other, and then there was an empty wasteland. I put one in the crowded area and one in the out-there section. I managed to cover all resources with decent numbers, except I had no grain. But in the empty wasteland, I was close to a 3:1, which would also give me a grain with a 4 on it.

It also just happened that, through doing that, I got three sheep with every roll of a 5. In the fertile land, I was near a sheep port. 5s kept rolling, inexplicably, and with my 3:1 port, I traded in enough sheep to clothe Qin Shihuang Di's army of terracotta soldiers.**** And with all that wool, I bought me access to the sheep port.

At this point, the others realized I was a threat. Every time a 5 was rolled, I got material for cities. The others stopped trading with me, and soon the robber was on my 6 or my 8 every turn. I had to go for Development Cards to get the robber off my back. Meanwhile, a girl got Longest while the guy next to her got Largest.***** I had had dreams of building up my four-segment road into something big, but she made her road 8 segments and she was close to cutting me off. Then the girl got a city, and she had nine points to my eight.

I sat nervously while my hand filled up with cards. Three bricks. Five sheep. Three ore. Two wood. A wheat. Some more sheep & brick. I realized that the key to winning the game was in my hand of 17 cards, and, if the robber wasn't rolled, I could do something awesome.

Finally it was my turn. I flipped a soldier over, just to steal a wood from the girl who was winning. Then I rolled. I got nothing out of the roll, but I hadn't needed anything, save that the robber not move. And then I did what nobody expected. I built FIVE ROADS from two wood, five brick, and six sheep. I stole Longest and won the game.

And no one was excited but me.******

* The dorkiest sentence I've ever written.

** That's not much better.

*** Okay, forget what I said in the first footnote.

**** Too much of a stretch? I just wanted to link to my China history stuff.

***** You know, in another context, that could sound interesting.

****** Awwww, man, they didn't see the beauty in the pummelling. Some people. I'm pretty sure this is the most... dorky is too good a word... the most arrogantly dorky sentiment I've ever expressed. There ought to be a word for "arrogantly dorky."