Details of the day:

We’re in the first week of the academic session, which means work is exhausting. Enrollment is way up so last night we had 45 students in the building between two classes. I’m going to go to my first ballgame of the year tonight as Angela won tickets through her work. We get quite a few free corporate tickets to games through various friends and relatives – we’re in section 216 which is five sections up from the field right behind home plate – so they’re great seats. We’re playing the Milwaukee Brewers, so it’s head to head for both my home teams (I lived in Milwaukee from ages one to seven).

More Seder tease:

Take us Out of Egypt
(sung to the tune of take me out to the ball game)

Take us out of Egypt
Free us from slavery
Bake us some matzah in a haste
Don’t worry ‘bout flavor—
Give no thought to taste.
Oh it’s rush, rush, rush to the Red Sea
If we don’t cross it’s a shame
For it’s ten plagues,
Down and you’re out
At the Pessah history game.

Lou, who was our Seder host with his with Melanie, and his children just got back from ten days of spring training and are baseball fanatics. They could not, however, bring themselves to attend a game where Bush was involved. I overheard a concerned mother asking her child, who had gone to the game, “Did you BOOOO?” “Yes” “Good boy.”

Lou is one of the owners of Vintage Vinyl and is quite the world traveler. More later….

Well Karl, what’s new on the hobby front? I know you’re broke as a joke and yet you still manage to live well and keep yourself entertained.

I have two new fish in a brand new tank, new to me that is. A coworker of Angela’s gave her a ten-gallon, we got her a table to refinish and turn into a stand Sunday at Goodwill for five bucks and then we went to look at equipment. She balked at the assertion that she could only have one inch of fish per gallon of tank water and has decided to buy a vertical thirty-gallon instead of running the ten, she also has friends who are glass blowers and has one of their forms in mind as the centerpiece of the tank. So I brought the ten-gallon home Sunday after Sopranos.


Karl and Angela engage in pretentious wine snobbery,
We have begun doing this wine and cheese thing with our HBO – so we had a port cheddar with 2000 Chateau d’Or et de Gueules Costieres de Nimes (Red wine, France, Rhone Valley). According to our guide on the wine journey, “Old vine Mourvedre, Syrah, and Carignane that’s aged in small oak barrels. We may find Rhone and Languedoc wines are fun, festive and perfect at the table where they really shine with food. This example contains those qualities but with added complexity, texture and nuance from time in the oak. This wine’s got breed, style and elegance with flavors rounded out, softened and highlighted with hints of spice, vanilla and cedar. It’s delicious now and will surely unfold with bottle age. Fantastic wine.” – John Nash, The Wine Merchant, Ltd.

I was very surprised at my first sip as the tannins were so heavy I thought I was drinking an aperitif, but it mellowed as we let it breathe. Still, it had a heavy spice to it that I would more associate with a wine that had been mulled, but I don’t have much experience with these more “complicated” wines. I would say this is a good fall wine that would be best with a game plate of venison or hare. It did not suit the cheese we had it with, nor was it really good spring fare. If I bought another bottle it would be as John advises, to let it age and to have again some coming fall or winter.

My friend Kate, who is not a drinker, once said with heavy overtones of judgment, “My mom thinks that wine, and alcohol in general, are just part of the good life, part of good food and rich living.” Your mother is correct Kate; that is the shape of the world. Kate was trying to get her boyfriend to go to AA because sometimes he would have three or four beers in a row. I don't see much of Kate. hehehe

So Sunday night I came home with my new glass rectangle and a tank heater. My main tank has a second air hose off the pump that was in use so I hooked that up to a diffuser that I had purchased, and didn’t like, for the main tank and I got my bucket of rocks from the basement (you know, your bucket of rocks). I lined the bottom of the tank with white rock chips and then covered that with more colorful river stone. I found a porous rock in the front yard, part of the rock boarder around the front windows, that looks like corral and I put that on top of the of the diffuser so that the bubbles are slowed and actually percolate out through the openings in the rock. I siphoned off some water from my thirty gallon and used that to start the bacteria culture in the new tank. After you do that it needs to run for at least two days – so last night I decided it was ready for fish. Technically you build with starter fish for a few weeks, but that is not really my style and I have confidence in the chemical quality of my water from the other tank, I haven’t had a fish die in nearly two years. I also do not intend this to be a community tank with several species, I decided to get Cichlids, and aggressive ones at that. I got two Convict Cichlids and will pick up a Jack Depsey later in the week.

They seem to be doing fine this am and look good in the rocky tank, ah well I have to get ready for work – more later.