YahYah’s Neighborhood

How will you use technology or the Internet to help you plan and prepare this year’s Thanksgiving feast?
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Ooh, good question, Vox. I have been thinking much about the feast this year, because it's the first time that I'll host my family. I'm quite excited to cook for them, and to not have to travel on Thanksgiving weekend. Yay!

I'm keeping the menu traditional. I mean, it's hard to improve upon things you know everyone likes. And we don't eat cranberry sauce and turkey much year-round, so I don't think it's a bad thing having the same menu every year.

As far as technology, there's not a ton I do to pull it in for Thanksgiving. I don't even have a digital thermometer. ;-)  However, I do use Cook's Illustrated online quite a bit (thanks to Aquanetta).  The team at Cook's Illustrated doesn't necessarily use a lot of technology, but they are very scientific.

If you want a guaranteed-to-please recipe, Cook's Illustrated is the place to go. The idea behind it is that they take a recipe, try it 100 or so different ways with slight variations, each time testing with a tasting panel, and they tell you the exact best way to cook it. And to top it off, the editor is a chemist, so he explains why these methods work best. It is, by far, the most reliable source of recipes -- and I've read a lot  of cookbooks and cooking magazines.

Here's my Thanksgiving menu. All the recipes are from Cook's Illustrated except where noted otherwise.

Roast turkey (brined, stuffed with an herb paste)
Gravey
Mashed potatoes
Cranberry sauce
Roasted brussels sprouts with bartlett pears (Body+Soul magazine)
Green beans with toasted walnuts and roquefort cheese (Body+Soul magazine)
Creamed spinach
Pumpkin pie (Libby's recipe)
Pecan pie (from a Thanksgiving cookbook I have, forgot the name, but it's great. My pecan pie secret is to include chopped pecans in the filling, as well as a layer of halved pecans on the top for looks)

The fam is bringing rolls, candied yams, stuffing and butternut squash soup. Yum!

Btw, Cook's Illustrated also tests cooking equipment - someone put together their list on Amazon as a shared list if you want to find any equipment. Geez, I sound like a commercial!

The first day of bootcamp was grueling. And not that it wasn't enjoyable. Here's the rundown:

• Worship - Sojourn had a really unusual worship band that sang some really fantastic tunes and did a phenomenal job.
  
• Dave Harvey - Lead out speaker, knocks it out of the park. Really fantastic. Spoke on why ambition is important in church planting.
• Ed Stetzer - A power preacher and WOW did he preach. He commanded the room and commanded us all to do the work of an evangelist. It was power filled. Did I mention there was power involved?
• Workshop #1 for me: Kevin Jamison gave an amazing nuts and bolts of resources and tips on developing your core team. Tremendously insightful and well thought out.
• Workshop #2 for me: Keith Watson gave a more ground level experience of his church planting journey. It was the perfect compliment for Kevin's.
  
• Steve Timmis - Steve showed himself to be humorous, gracious and an engaging teacher. Enjoyed his teaching very, very much.
• Darrin Patrick - Darrin could have accomplished the same things in me by repeatedly taking a baseball bat to my kneecaps. Although I think the scars from his talk are going to be longer lasting than that.  

Day Two:

• Worship - Bluegrass style. Very nice.
  
• Kevin Cawley - Taught on decoding your city. Artistic, well thought out and intensely practical training on learning about your city.
• Bob Thune - Discipleship training that was very good from Bob. Not very familiar with him until now. Really enjoyed this.
• Lunch Q&A with Scott Thomas - This was great. Scott is a natural and is really funny. I think I was one of only two or three who got his 'fundamentalist' joke. 
• Workshop #1 for me: Rick Long taught on elders and really took a great, biblical way of looking at this that helped me, immensely.
  
• Workshop #2 for me: Matt Adair taught on Strategic Partnerships and had a great talk with us. As a side note, I was a bit miffed by the way the crowd treated him and his discussion. Maybe they were all tired. Not sure, really, but I certainly appreciated his frank and blunt take on a difficult topic.
• Dr. Russell Moore - I had never heard of this guy before. He knocked my socks off. He spoke on preaching as spiritual warfare and it was intense, funny and so razor sharp that I think I will have to repent twice just to make sure.
  
• Matt Chandler - To be honest, I was expecting a great deal from Matt and, though he repeated some of what I have heard him preach before, it was such a blessing to sit under him. I realized that he was hammering home an overarching theme for me personally.

That theme was that - and I am sure of this - I am completely not ready to plant a church right now. I questioned things before, but I have no question now. I am sure of this. I am sure that I need to serve somewhere, for a little while, and have an elder beat the hell out of me, spiritually speaking. So I am officially benching any plans for at least a year from when I am able to serve faithfully and train more extensively. I am going to do my best to not even think in that direction.

Right now there are questions that burn in me but I have men who have helped and will continue to help me in this. I would absolutely encourage anyone even considering a church plant to go to one of these bootcamps and see what it has to teach you.

I have never been more convinced of my own weakness nor of Christ's mercy and goodness towards me. I feel like the child who has just been spanked and now has to reconcile with the parent, admitting and owning what was wrong and seeing the way forward into what is right.

Pray that I continue in the way He would have me go.

What was your favorite class in high school? (And no, lunch doesn't count.) 

French.  Was my favorite college class too.

Would love to take more classes - or better yet, spend a year in Paris so I could be immersed in the language.  I love the way it sounds.

Not a whole lot to remark upon lately, but last night I made a new dinner. I "fanned" Sunset magazine on Facebook, and now and again they'll cull useful ideas from their readers. A few days ago, they asked "what do you do with leftover rotisserie chicken?" I got a couple good ideas. Rotisserie chickens are great for when you don't have the time or energy to cook but want a homecooked, healthy meal.  Idea #1 was to shred the chicken, pour barbecue sauce on it, and put it in a sandwich. Oh so simple but sounds tasty, no?

Idea #2 was last night's dinner -- chicken and biscuits.  Cut the chicken (I wouldn't shred it with forks, but using spoons gets just the right size pieces). If you have time to sautee an onion, put that on top of the chicken. Pour a can of cream of mushroom soup (Amy's Organic is the best) on top, followed by a package of frozen peas and carrots. Then top with biscuit dough, and bake according to the directions for the biscuit dough. I used Bisquick, so the whole thing was super easy. It turned out great, and I think was reasonably healthy, too.

This morning, I actually hauled my butt out of bed early and went to the gym!  For me, this is a major accomplishment. I haven't been active for the last few months. My workout felt great. Woo hoo!

On January 1st 2010, FreeOnes will be opening the voting for the Miss FreeOnes contest! Fans will be able to vote for their favorite models and one lucky girl will win $10,000 and the Miss FreeOnes title! Girls, you can still enter! http://missfreeones.com

Behind the scenes production footage of Felt 3: A Tribute to Rosie Perez with Aesop Rock and DJ Big Wiz who provided the scratches for the album.

Felt 3: A Tribute to Rosie Perez drops next Tuesday (11.17.009) and will be available where most fine hip hop music is sold so hit the streets and cop it at your favorite independent or chain record store!

Pre-Order Now!
Fifth Element - http://is.gd/4S7Cc
iTunes Deluxe - http://is.gd/4RRcO
iTunes - http://is.gd/4S7CQ
Amazon - http://is.gd/4S7Da

http://www.facebook.com/slugandmurs
http://www.twitter.com/slugandmurs
http://www.myspace.com/mursandslug

Kanye, Balloon boy, Charlie Bit My Finger, and more -- AUTO-TUNED!
****
Free Kanye & Charlie Bit Me ringtones: http://thegregorybrothers.com/ (under the Music tab)

We remix ATTN #2 with the melodies of cherubic children and cherubic Kanye. Who is the best unintentional singer?! You tell ushere are your choices--

Kanye?
Charlie's brother?
Charlie?
Child with banana?
Child trying to steal banana?
Balloon Boy?

Thanks!!

Oh, well - I've forgotten the model numbers.  This is what happens when you take the time at a party to learn someone's name - you learn their name and make the whole evening special but you sacrifice some other random piece of information.  In this case, model numbers.

As far as I can tell, I used a PDP-10:

Vs-dec-pdp-10

(Taken by Ed Thelen of material owned by Computer History Museum under the non-commercial rule.)

Followed shortly by a VAX 11/780:

Vax11-780

Talk about good times.  I had access to these only because I was friends with the system administrator at school.  He set me up (I think I basically whined a lot until he did) with a user name and password.  My first user name and therefore email address ever was "tomato". I don't know why I chose that.  He said "What do you want for a user name?" and I spouted out "Tomato".  So I was known as "tomato" for a few years.  Whenever I logged in I'd hear "Hey, there is a Tomato on the system!".  I had email and was able to send/receive with a few friends that were online also - mostly right there at the school.

A few years ago a customer was walking through my company and he was talking about how he had made all of his money in the "internet" and how he had his first email address in 1988.  That's how he started his conversation.  It was like "How did you get rich in the internet?" and his first statement was "I had my first email address in 1988".  Obviously there was something else involved because I had my first email address in 1983 and I didn't make it big in the internet.  Of course, the internet wasn't really there yet so much back then.  I think there was ARPANET, etc - but I'm not going to go into all of that.

I didn't do anything really constructive on either of these systems at the time besides read newsgroups.  Later, maybe around 1987 I had to have a "real" account because I had a class on the VAX so the "tomato" account went away and I moved to something like just "wilso_d" or something else mundane.  At that point I was taking an operating system class and we had to write our own OS in something like C or Pascal.  It's all vague at this point, but none-the-less, this was my moment to both PDP and VAX systems.  Both were pretty good considering the time frame.  All text-based as I recall with dumb-terminals.  I think the world really was faster before the advent of fancy graphical user interfaces (aka Windows).

You can read more about the VAX here.