More things in November

More stuff from the last week or so!

Beaujolais Nouveau with my French group - so I made some chocolate-dipped madeleines and French bread. Miam.

A colleague brought in frosting piping stuff and taught a bunch of us how to pipe like a pro. I apparently didn't get that memo. 

I purchased a cheapy "smart" LED and started playing around with programming it. 

Time for our annual gutter cleaning and putting lights on the house. Jake helped me rake the roof off, which is now apparently a thing we do. Pictures of lights soonish.

Finally, Four Generals has my Buddhahed milk stout, so we went there to celebrate and to play Bananagrams. Reed and I, playing as a team, started the round with MEGACAT, but Judges Andrea and Jake -- who also happened to be our opponents -- ruled it not a word.

Meeting in the Microsoft treehouse!

Another week in November for the Shireys

This week for us:

Another 5k at work with coworkers. I've been meaning to get a picture of the Sasquatch Crossing sign on our trails for a while.

Finally got my sous vide device out again for some beef tenderloin. It was fantastic.

We were running low on green coffee beans, so I bought a bunch of them. Eight pounds worth.

And I roasted a full pound of them over the course of an hour. I was curious how much moisture weight is lost, so I did a very rough calculation. The "one pound" bag of unroasted beans was 497g (1 lb 1.5oz). After roasting (and a little bit of spillage), they were about 420g - and, to boot, had expanded a bit and no longer fit in the bag. That's about 15% moisture loss (again, some of which was actually spillage).

We also did the first of (hopefully) many family training hikes in preparation for all the walking we're going to do in France and Italy. The four of us went to Little Si for a hike of a bit more than five miles (once you account for all the extra climbing on rocks and whatnot that the boys wanted to do).