Books September 2025

September 28, 2025 10:50 pm

The Telescope in the Ice by Mark Bowen

After having been disappointed in the last few non-fiction books I read for being shallower than I was looking for, The Telescope in the Ice made up the difference.

A deep dive into the history of modern particle physics and what we now call the “standard model” with a focus on the neutrino. The book follows the global efforts to detect neutrino interactions culminating in the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole.

I found it really interesting. The author gives the history, science, and engineering of the topic with first-person accounts providing details along the way.

And that was the only book I got finished in September. It was lengthy and not exactly light reading. Then I started another massive sci-fi tome which took up the rest of the month. I’m almost done with it.

Raptor Patrol

September 27, 2025 10:42 am

What appears to me to be a Cooper’s Hawk seems to have taken up our neighborhood as a hunting ground.

It grabbed this squirrel one evening and a few days later I’m pretty sure I saw it snatch a mourning dove out of our tree and fly away with it. It’s so fast and quiet though. Once something happens by the time you look it’s a just a blur disappearing.

Jess’ Birthday 2025

September 22, 2025 10:41 pm

Jess’ birthday was on Saturday this year so she got the whole weekend to celebrate. Which she needed, because she felt super lousy starting in the afternoon and we postponed dinner and cake until Sunday.

Corinne created a treasure hunt for her which, naturally, led her to her presents. We got that done around lunch time before Jess crawled into bed for the rest of the day.

On Sunday we played a round of Garden Variety and a few rounds of Cat Fluxx (new games Jess got for her birthday).

We had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and then home for the salted-caramel cheesecake I’ve been trying to perfect. I realized this year that the recipe for a caramel topping I’d been using is not actually a caramel recipe (white sugar)–it’s a butterscotch recipe (brown sugar and butter). So I switched to an actual caramel recipe. Still working out how to get the caramel stiff enough so it doesn’t run off the sides. Next year, I’m planning to mix in powdered sugar once it cools to stiffen it up, which I did experimentally for the (poorly-piped) decorations. Also need to figure out how to keep the water in the water bath from getting into the springform pan and making the blondie crust soggy. But it still tastes really good.

Cider Making

September 14, 2025 2:54 pm

I like apple cider, but it’s hard to find good (or even real) cider around here without driving way out to the orchards in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

So I bought a grinder and a press and built a cider station!

Building the bench took up a good chunk of Saturday–longer than I expected since it’s not exactly complicated, but I plugged along until it was done.

That made Sunday, Cider Sunday!

I bought 9.5 pounds of apples from Safeway: 50% Granny Smith, 25% Fuji, 25% Envy. I sliced them up, Corinne put them in the grinder, Heather ran the grinder. Then we loaded them into the press and out came beautiful, rich cider.

The 9.5 pounds of apples turned into 4.5 cups of cider. Less than I was expecting, but it tastes really good.

Also….not cost effective. I’ll have to pay attention to sale prices on apples. My delicious cider, ignoring equipment costs and labor, came at a cost of $6 a cup, yikes.

Games August 2025

August 31, 2025 11:36 am

I did not get much of any game playing done in August.

The family played Vantage, but didn’t ended it incomplete to get to bed.

Then Heather and I played Vantage with friends and after several deaths (and running out of time) decided to call it a defeat.

We’re still really enjoying the game though. So much to explore. It’s really about the journey–not the destination, so leaving a game incomplete doesn’t seem like a waste of time. And being defeated is okay since you got to learn more about the world.