justin penney

Standing Here Since Midnight (mp3)

This was recorded on my iPhone. I pulled the tracks into ProTools for a little EQ, delay and compression. The iPhone mic leaves a lot to be desired except for the upright, I am really pretty happy with the sound of that.

When I first put the Dakota on the market, I asked Grandpa what he would want for his truck. He threw out a quick number that I felt was fair.

Once the Dakota left, Grandpa let me take is truck on an “extended trial”. I was fairly concerned with the milage and wanted to make sure that it would be reasonable and that I didn’t mind driving it the 25 miles to work.

The truck is a 1990 Ford F-150, extended cab, long-bed. Oh, and two fuel tanks: one is fourteen gallons and the other is sixteen gallons. Despite the heft I was able to eek out fourteen miles per gallon. Not too bad when I was getting sixteen to eighteen in the Dakota.

Today, we were having lunch at my grandparents and Grandpa wanted to do the deal on the truck. He did have a surprise for me. The back of the title was already filled out with a sale price of $1.00.

Grandpa came out to the truck with me to clean out the bed. Even though he hadn’t been able to use the truck in over two years, he still knew exactly where everything was.

Once everything was put away we spent a couple minutes just talking about the truck. Grandpa was reminiscing about things that had been done with it. We talked about maintenance, cleaning, repairs. I mentioned cleaning and that it needed a coat of wax before winter. Granpa looked down and lowered his tone. He said, “I used to be able to take better care of my vehicles.” After a few moment we headed inside.

This felt less like buying a vehicle and more like being handed stewardship of it.

I’ve been threatening to use the slow-cooker more. Today, being cold and un-full, seemed like a great day to start.

Ingredients:

Pork:

• 4 pound pork butt
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 jalapeno
• salt
• pepper
• cinnamon
• cilantro (I didn’t have enough dried and couldn’t find any fresh)
• beer (I used Boulevard pilsner)

Toppings:

• 1 avocado
• 1/2 of a white onion
• queso fresco (crumbly cheese, could use feta if queso fresco can’t be found)
• corn tortillas

Beans:

• canned (exciting)

I bought an 8 pound pork butt and cut it in half, making use of the newly aquired deep freeze. I trimmed the largest pieces of fat off and cut slits in the butt. I stuff the slits with the chopped up garlic and jalapeno. I used about a table spoon of salt and a tablespoon of pepper and rubbed it on the top of the roast. The little bit of dried cilantro was  sprinkled onto the top of the roast along with around a teaspoon of cinnamon. I poured the beer over the top of the roast and set the cooker on high for 6 hours.

The beer and cinnamon flavors consumed the air in our house. The scents were especially potent when coming in from outside. The smell of food in the air makes a home inviting.

Once cooked the meat came apart with a gentle tug of the fork. The meat was piled onto the tortillas and topped with the onions, cheese and avocado. I added a little Cholula sauce to mine but Jacey kept hers naked.

My 2006 Dodge Dakota left with its new owner earlier today. It was a great truck, but it made no sense to be paying on a vehicle that just sat in my driveway.

2006 Dodge Dakota

I’m not sure what I’ll be using for bad weather transportation. I may be buying my grandpa’s truck but on the phone earlier he was leaning toward a “long test drive”. We’ll see how that works out.

Thanks to a crappy motherboard vendor work got backed up and I’ve been slammed this week. It also the last week before I start a week long vacation so it’s fitting that it’s been a bear.

I’ve configured a 48 TB Lustre array with 18 additional compute nodes and a 9 node application server running Grid Engine with linux-ha. Pretty full week there.

In between the work, Jacey and I celebrated our 6th anniversary, I finished mixing an album, had Dollar Fox practice and took Lily to Literacy Night at her school.

Full week.

Work has been busy. Do to some inattention and some terrible suppliers we’ve been slammed for two weeks. We should have had these orders spread out over two months … not two weeks.

Evan is nuts with the walking. He’s now walking as his main form of movement. He starts to run then he trips. He’s als got a bit of dramatic flair with some simple fales turning into “roll half way across the room” event. Pretty cute.

Lily is having a good time back at school. Today she attended a cheerleading camp. We are really trying hard to expose her to as many activities as possible so maybe some will stick.

I’m planning for my vacation. A week alone! Crazy.

Finally listening to The Band. I’ve never really listened to any of their material. They are often brought up in conversations with the bands that I am in. Hell, both bands cover the same The Band song. I’m only familiar with it in passing. Sort of like the Stones. I just never really listened or paid attention.

We’re nearly done with the next Rumblejetts album. It’s been a LONG time in the making.

Moved to Wordpress from Blogger. I really like the iPhone app for Wordpress and felt I needed to shake things up a bit. I guess it doesn’t matter since Facebook has made personal blogs obsolete, or at least a quaint holdover from the early aughts.