k3v0.net

the roommate

I now have two new roommates

Last Friday around 2:30am the old roommate gets home from the bar quite inebriated. I knew this would happen since I sent a couple texts and called her all with no response. I was on edge (with good reason). I got to sleep around 11pm on Thursday, and was startled awake by the phone ringing. The rooommate is headed home from the bar…

She barged into my room and started bugging me about something. I couldn’t make sense of what since her drunken ramblings were circular in the little logic they had. At this point I tried to get her to calm down and tell me what was wrong. This only ended up provoking her to throw her fork and steak knife at me. The steak knife hit my arm and gave me a nice half inch deep nick. I decided it was time to go to the bathroom and clean things up once I realized there was blood streaming down my arm.

Once in the bathroom she came in. She started asking if the wound mattered more, but she didn’t say more than what. After some cleaning she tried to bite where she got me with the steak knife. She missed and ended up simply chomping on my arm for a while, giving me the most spectacular hickie bruise ever. After that she tried to smash my computer monitor, but I thwarted her. Then she called me some names (none of them terribly creative, I excpected more) and ran into the livingroom. I heard some banging from the livingroom and got there in time to watch her dump my 40 inch 1080p LCD over on the tv stand, putting a nice large hole in the screen. She then proceeded to start jumping on the tv once she pushed it onto the floor. At this point I decided upon retreat. Nothing important was left to smash so I thought there was nothing to lose.

I go into the bedroom and lock the door. She tries getting it open a couple times and then walks away. I then hear/feel a couple thumps on the door with something. Then I see something breaking through the door. She tells me to open the door, to which I say I won’t until she chills out. Before I am finished saying this she repeats her request. After going back and forth a couple times the banging stops.

I open the door and there she stands with my Henkels 8 inch chef’s knife.

The door gets shut and locked, and at this point I called 911. Since there is no code to get into the building I had to meet the officers outside. The roommate realized something was going on since I was quiet and she went into the second bedroom. I put on my shoes and made a break for it. She followed after me, barefoot and wearing a shirt covered in my blood. She kept repeating “do you realize you’re going to send me to jail for this?” as she chased me down the steps and outside. The police arrived and asked our stories. In the end they cuffed her and took her away.

I was not prepared for such surreal events. I never thought I’d get attacked, never thought I’d see someone I loved standing in the hall with a razor sharp blade. It was a bad after school special.

After it was all over and I dropped the restraining order I asked her what made her so mad. She said she didn’t know, and that she was just really sad and depressed. I couldn’t believe someone could be so senseless.

Tags: Roommate

k3v0.recipe: ravioli

Making fresh pasta is fun. It was cold outside so I wanted to be stuck in the kitchen for a little while but it was totally worth it. In this case I ended up making three different fillings: veal, beef, and a combination of the two. I ended up only making and cooking the beef so I froze the rest of the dough and the 2 bags of filling. I know some day those will come in handy.

Ingredients:

Pasta -

• 3 cups semolina flour
• 5 eggs (4 for dough, 1 for sealing the ravioli)
• 1/2 cup of water
• extra flour if needed
• 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil

Filling -

• 2 lbs. ground veal
• 2 lbs. ground beef
• bread crumbs
• 3 eggs
• grated parmigiano reggiano cheese
• salt
• pepper
• garlic powder
• basil
• 3 medium sized onions
• 3 bunches green onions
• olive oil

Tools:

• pasta machine
  

  pasta machine

• ravioli wheel
  

  ravioli wheel

resting dough

I made the dough first since it needs to sit for a while so the wheat can get hydrated. I first mixed the eggs, oil and water and slowly poured it into the flour. My dough started out a little sticky and needed more flour. Once it got a nice smooth consistency after kneading for a while I put some flour on the bottom of a bowl, then put the dough in and covered the bowl with plastic wrap.

browning meat

After the dough was resting I began browning the meat in some olive oil. I only added a little salt at this point since the whole filling will need to be seasoned later. Once all the meat was browned I let it cool for a while so it wouldn’t cook the egg. After that I sauteed the onions and garlic and added those to the meat. Then I added some salt, pepper, garlic powder, basil, egg and cheese to mixture. I then added a tiny bit of breadcrumbs to soak some of the moisture in the mix.

filling mixture

dough ball after resting

Once the mixture was all set it was time to roll out the dough in the pasta machine. After resting the dough should be nice and elastic and impress nicely if you push on it with your finger. I only needed the roller section, not the fettucini attachment so I removed that. Each time i put the dough through the rollers i patted it in some loose flour to keep it nice and pliable. Once it was rolled out I tried to make 2 even lengths and I brushed some egg on one side.

Once the dough is rolled out I portioned out small filling balls for each ravioli. I then placed the egged length of dough on top and made sure it was well aligned to the bottom length to ensure even raviolis. I then used the flat blade on the ravioli wheel to section off each individual ravioli. I then pressed down on the top of the dough to flatten out the filling and remove the air. Next I pressed on the edges around the ravioli to seal the whole thing. For the final seal I ran the edging wheel on each side to acheive the nice ravioli look. When the ravioli is well formed I patted it in flour and then put it on a drying rack so it wouldn’t stick to the others.

I only boiled them a couple at a time so they had space to move and the water didn’t cool down too much. Fresh pasta cooks much quicker so they only took around a minute each. I was being lazy so only canned sauce and some fresh grated cheese was used, but it was certainly delicious.

final product

why do straight people care if gay people get married?

All this Proposition 8 talk has confused me. As a straight person why should I care if gay people get married? I think people should have the same rights regardless of their sexual orientation. I don’t understand why we need to ban gay people getting married. It’s not as though straight people respect marriage that much anyway.

Civil unions which have the same rights as marriage are almost acceptable since they guarantee the same legal standing as marriage, however the USA should know that separate but equal is never equal. I hope  the rest of the USA sees how silly it is to descriminate against people based on who they like to hump.

A week that will be well remembered

This morning I was walking to my car after I voted and I got to thinking about how epic this past week has been. Today’s election is a historic event in American politics. We will either soon have our first black president or our first female vice president (the first option is preferred of course ).

With equal signifigance the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series last week. I feel strange walking around the fair city with a Phils cap and an incredulous smile. The spell has been broken by the first team I’ve really followed and gave a shit about.

This makes me see I feel the same way about the election. For the first time I feel that I was voting for a candidate that I wanted in office instead of just voting democrat to avoid the evil republicans. I suppose I should say this is also a personally historic week.

The real historic thing in my mind won’t just be that Barack Obama will be elected president. It will be that the USA has matured a little or maybe come to accept its diversity. Maybe that isn’t the case, maybe people are simply tired of the failed policies of the Bush administration and they just want change. I think it goes deeper than that though.

All I really know right now is that I plan on watching as much CNN as possible tonight so I can see how it all plays out.

Tags: Phillies

fancy flash tag cloud

I implemented a new flash tag cloud in the sidebar yesterday using the wp-Cumulus plugin. It’s a highly configurable plugin that can also be set up to display the standard html tag cloud to viewers without flash enabled, which I tested on my trusty iphone.

At first some of my tags were overlapping each other, but there is an option to evenly distribute the tags. Once I fixed that everything looked great with a minimum of setup. All in all it’s a handy and easy to use plugin.

Tags: wordpress