Catspaw's Guide to the Inevitably Insane

Last night I went to a Nobuo Uematsu concert played by the SF Symphony orchestra. To properly put this in context, you have to understand that Nobuo is easily my favourite composer of all times, and I had front center orchestra tickets in a grand symphony hall (omg omg omg squee!), making this easily one of the things I'll remember when my life is flashing before my eyes on my death bed.

Two male and two female opera singers delivered liberi fatali absolutely perfectly, and after Terra's theme you could see tears in the eyes of the audience. Nevermind One Winged Angel which is excellent just as an mp3 and absolutely breathtaking live. So okay, I'm sitting there fangirling more than just a little bit at all of the music.

On my right were a couple maybe in their 60s who had orchestra season tickets and asking why there were so many young people in the audience that night. I explained to them that the music that night actually comes from a series of videogames and they looked a little skeptical.

At intermission, the woman leaned over and said to me: "The music is so beautiful! You are so lucky to live in a time where even your video games have so much beauty."

It was simply stunning, and I really like that the older couple hearing the songs, without even the emotional context behind them, were able to appreciate just how amazing the music was. She was right, of course.

I've been wanting to cook rabbit for a while now. My local grocery store sells them whole next to the whole chickens and every time I buy a whole chicken I think to myself, "I should make rabbit sometime." I decided that this weekend was as good of a "sometime" as ever.

Walking into the busy grocery store, I yelled at the meat counter that I wanted two rabbits. "What?", he yelled back over the crowd between myself and the counter I couldn't get to. "Two rabbits", I replied. "What?" "Two bunnies." "I can't understand you!" So I made the little-bunny-foo-foo motion with my hand and then raised two fingers. The guy behind the counter nearly fell down laughing.

Invited over a bunch of friends via mass-text-message, and here's what the dinner entailed:

	Hasenpfeffer (german stewed rabbit). I followed this recipe using two whole rabbits.
	Kartoffelsuppe (german potato soup). That way I'd have something to serve the guests in case everything else took longer than expected. I followed this recipe.
	Karotten im Bier (carrots in beer). I can't serve a meal without vegetables, but it's kinda hard to find authentic bavarian vegetables that don't end in -kraut. So I went with this recipe to match the beer we would be drinking anyway.
	Brotknoedel (bread dumplings). I wanted to give these a try since I loved them in Munich, so I followed this recipe, but not being totally confident about how they'd turn out, I also made...
	Pretzels. Deelia had been ranting and raving about his homemade pretzels to me for years now, so I figured I'd give it a try, following this recipe.

My favourite part about dinner parties like this is the project management that goes into the whole thing. My evening's schedule worked out something like this...

[...]
4:30 pretzels done rising
4:45 start bunny
  - get soup ready
  - shape pretzels
  - cut carrots
  - shape dumplings
6:15 begin reheating soup
6:15 put dumplings on
6:20 start carrots
6:25 put pretzels in oven
6:30 serve soup
6:40 take pretzels out of oven
6:42 add stuff to carrots
6:45 serve main

There's a certain type of multi-tasking that I absolutely love, and it's the type that's involved here. It's the "keeping many things in your head at the same time" multi-tasking, and it's part of why I love my current job at work as well. I'm answering questions on IM, talking to people in my cube, writing a few lines of code, answer another question, check email, write another line of code, etc. In a perfect world, engineers would be able to put their heads down and just code for hours on end without interruption, but the world isn't perfect, and my job in particular involves a lot of minute-by-minute interruptions, and I like being able to juggle all of these things effectively and very quickly context switch.

By the way, the bunny was fabulous. And it's way more fun when you call it "bunny" instead of "rabbit"...