Blog is Moving

Well everyone, the blog is moving. If you point your browser to: www.davidvansunder.com you don't have to change a thing. I'll see you over there. Excuse the new look, it's a default theme and a new one is already being designed. I just thought that it would be better to get the move over with now. I'm sure the construction won't bother you all too much. I'll try to keep the noise down and, for those with allergies, the dust as well. Thanks, David

Web Development

Talli and I went up to our property at Lake Tulloch today. We wanted to get another look at the land and decide what to do with it. As you can tell by this picture of Talli by Lake Shastina, we're probably not moving to Lake Tulloch. It's a nice enough place, but strangely enough, there are almost no stores there. Lake Shastina is a much better place to live even though it's much farther from big cities. So, Tulloch will figure into our portfolio as a property to sell not to live on. After returning home, I decided that tonight would be a good night to do some web development. As a result, it's late and I'm working on designing a couple of websites. One is to replace this blog. The other is for our podcast. The blog is being replaced so that I can continue separating myself from Google. For those that didn't know, they own blogger.com where this blog is hosted. I have disagreed with a lot of Google's moves lately and don't wish to support them as a company. So, I no longer use them for web search or maps. I'm replacing them for blogging and in the near future I will be phasing out my use of gmail and phasing in my yahoo account. If they want to take over the world, Google will have to leave me out of it.

South Park: David & Talli

Apparently, Talli and I watched too much of South Park: Season 4. We really got sucked into it, as you can see here. You too can get sucked into it by going to South Park Studio. It only does one person at a time. What you see here is some magic I worked in GIMP. Photoshop would do just as well, but I don't have a version for my powerbook, just my PC. Other than South Park, we continued our spring cleaning and I did some paper work for the clinic. I know, even though it's done, I'm not. We also tended the garden a bit and drank a lot of tea. We love good tea!

Missing Serenity

It's only been six days, but I'm already missing the serenity of beautiful Lake Shastina. *sigh* It would be so nice to live up there right now. I'd miss my family, but life in general would be slower, nicer, easier and cleaner. Besides, what is there that I do now that I couldn't do there? I wouldn't be able to walk to the store, but that's all I can come up with. I can live with that though. I only go to the store once or twice a week. With proper planning, I could make sure I only went once a week. The big question is, what could I do there that I can't do here? For this I have a lot of answers. I could: 1. Commune with nature. 2. Breath cleaner air. 3. Stop having near death experiences because of bad drivers. 4. Get to know my neighbors and have a sense of community. 5. Live where people care about the environment instead of hating it. (To those who say that people here don't hate the environment I have five words. "Actions speak louder than words.") 6. Hike more. 7. Maybe fish from my backyard or after rowing out from my backyard. 8. Take a boat out on the lake in the early morning. 9. Enjoy the silence. 10. Be happy and fit in. (I know this sounds strange, but I feel like too many people here are on the wrong wavelength. Yes, mine is the correct one. I'm sure of it. Those of you who agree...welcome to the correct minority.) Well, one day...

New Water Garden

Our new water garden has been built. The picture here was taken by Talli. She took it while I was working on the yard today. The water garden was started early this week and was finished on Thursday after Talli and I came back from my mom's Teacher of the Year award ceremony. The last two days, Talli and I have been restoring parts of our yard to their former glory. The decline had been caused by over three years of limited time while I helped Talli at the clinic. Before I started helping her, I had been holding the garden at bay. After I pitched in at the clinic, the yard started winning the war. Now, Talli and I are turning the tide and restoring order and beauty over chaos and ugly, but durable weeds. I feel like the yard has come a long way in the last couple weeks, but I am constantly seeing more areas we need to work on. The work is hard and tiring, but rewarding. I really enjoy leaning on whatever tool I've been using and surveying my work. It gives me a great feeling of satisfaction. In some places, Talli and I take away plants in the form of weeds or overgrown plants. In other places, we plant more in the form of vegetables, herbs and flowers. Sometime in the near future, we hope to plant a few trees; both for beauty and to help the environment. Both beauty and the environment are noble causes, which along with happiness and financial security, we believe in pursuing vigorously.

Anne Darling Teacher of the Year

Surprise! The teacher of the year for Anne Darling Elementary School in San Jose, CA is...Maria Isabel van Sunder! My mom. Not a surprise really. The surprise is really that she isn't the teacher of the year every year, the way I feel she should be. No elementary school teacher takes their responsibility to their students and school to the extreme that she does. My hat goes off to her and I wish her a speedy delivery to summer break. I know she can use it. At least my mom has my dad to help her out or she'd go crazy trying to take care of herself after she gets home from work. He makes sure that she doesn't need to worry about shopping for food or preparing dinner. There's nothing better than having dinner ready when you come home from work. Take it from me. Besides, my dad's a great cook. Once again, congratulations mom! You deserve it!

A Little Bit of Shasta Coming at You

Heads up! Next time, duck to avoid that snowball. Lake Shastina is still calling my name. I think I need a little change of pace. A little calmer, cleaner, nicer environment would do me right. Talli made a good point the other day. When I was in Shasta, I didn't complain about the driving of the people around me. Down here, it takes a few minutes for me to complain. Of course, I'm justified because I would have been cut off or almost hit by a bad driver within minutes of driving here. I think that people turn off their brains when they get in the car. I did forget to give my Wal-Mart & Target truck count during our Shasta trip in my last post. On the way up we passed: Wal-Mart: 8 Target: 3 While there: Wal-Mart: 1 Target: 0 The way home: Wal-Mart: 2 Target: 0 Day two of the lamb was excellent. Talli and I still enjoyed it immensely. I found a great recipe. Since the recipe was requested, here it is: Rack of Lamb. The only modification I made was to replace the 1 TBSP of butter with the same amount of olive oil. I never tried it with the butter, but it was great with the olive oil. As you can see, Hunter enjoyed the lamb as well. His tail was wagging so fast that I thought it would fly right off his bottom. It was good to see him really enjoying himself. I'm glad that I decided to share the bones with him. He cracked through them and not a shard of bone was left. After dinner, Talli made a mint tisane with the organic mint that we're growing in the back yard. It was excellent. By the end of the summer, the plants will probably be large enough for us to have the mint tisane every day if we want to. Now, we're just waiting to see how many tomatoes the tomato plants that we planted will produce to see how many tomatoes we will eat from the yard and how many we will have to buy at the farmer's market. Until tomorrow, drive safely. Everyone on the road is crazy...except you and me.

Lamb Cooking Tuesday

Today, was the day. I pulled the lamb out of the refrigerator that I bought when Talli and I went to Berkeley with Geno and Sue. I searched for a recipe on Yahoo! that seemed reasonable and I found one. I had all the ingredients I needed with the exception of three cloves of fresh garlic. So, Talli and I laced up our shoes and walked to Trader Joe's. Yes, I know. It's unheard of in most circles to actually walk to the store. It was a nice walk and no petroleum products were harmed in the course of our walk. The recipe went very well. I was very pleasantly surprised. I also decided to come up with my own side dishes. Maybe I was being creative. Maybe I was too lazy to research fitting side dishes. You'll have to wonder about that because I'm not talking. For the vegetables, I sauteed some fingerling potatoes, green beans and mushrooms in some olive oil with garlic, sea salt and pepper. That's right. They were all organic. I'll bet you didn't see that coming. I also prepared some sauce to pour over the lamb and vegetables. That, however, was a part of the lamb recipe. The lamb was the most challenging part, of course. It took me much longer to trim off the fat than I thought, but the effort was worth it. It was lean, but had enough fat to contribute to the sauce. In the end, we had a great meal which I paired with some Duas Quintas Red Wine by Ramos Pinto. It's from the Douro region of Portugal. According to Beverages & More, it goes well with lamb. That's what inspired this dinner; a wine that went well with lamb and a curiosity in preparing lamb. I have to agree with BevMo. The wine went very well with the lamb. I had to have a full glass. That's how good it was. Talli and I enjoyed the meal very much. It's a good thing because it's the most expensive meal that I've ever produced. I'll make it again one day, but it'll be a while.

Back from Shasta

Talli and I just got back from the Shasta area; Lake Shastina to be exact. We were up there visiting the parcel of land that Talli and I bought early last year. Here's a map, showing our location. We went to get an idea about what it's like to live there and what the people are like. So, Talli interviewed as many people as possible. We got a really good feeling about the place from everyone we talked to and from everything we saw. The community is very environmentally aware. There is a large focus on organic including a few restaurants. The schools are good. The downsides are cold winters and the fact that the only high speed internet at Lake Shastina is by satellite. Oh, well. I can make that work. Now for the view. All I can say is, "Wow!" The first photo is the view from our lot. Talli and I could hardly bear to leave it, but what could we do? There's no house there, yet. One day... This was one of the organic restaurants that I was mentioning. We ended up there on accident. We were flipping through the menus at the McCloud Hotel Bed & Breakfast, where we spent the weekend and we found one for a Thai place. It sounded good, so we went there. It wasn't at the address listed on the menu. In it's place was Vivify: Organic Japanese Restaurant. It turns out that they opened their doors for the first time the prior day. My luck still holds. It was exactly the kind of restaurant that we would have chosen, if it was available. The restaurant is owned by a Japanese restauranteur whose restaurant in San Francisco was given the prestigious distinction of being in the top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. It turns out that he sold his other restaurant to move to Mount Shasta, just so that we could have a great place to get sushi! Very well thought out on his part. On the way home from paradise, Talli persuaded me to stop at the Olive Pit. She'd seen the signs on our previous trips and wanted to see what all the hype was about. I have to say that they sure had a lot of different types of olives, among other things. I pointed Talli to the organic section and we were off. We managed to get some olives, sun dried tomatoes, stone ground mustard and clover blossom honey. Yes, they were all organic. Honey was one thing that we never found organic except online and boy was it expensive online. We got it for less than half the internet price. A big savings. The trip was amazing. I won't bore you all with all of the details, right now. I'll probably trickle them in over the next few days as my enthusiasm for the area bubbles over. If anyone wants a quiet, pristine, friendly place to move to; consider Siskiyou County. If you like to ski, you like nature, you like a quieter life than the city, then you'll like it there. Until tomorrow, this is David van Sunder, signing off.