Author: Lisa

55 Days of Grilling: Day 10

I made a braised pork today — cooked at ~300 degrees for about six hours. A few days ago, I mixed up a marinade for the bone-in pork roast.

  • 2 Tbsp kosher salt
  • 4 Tbsp maple syrup
  • 1 Tbsp ground mustard
  • 1/2 cup Dijon mustard
  • 2 Tbsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 Tbsp smoked sweet paprika
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil

I coated the roast in the marinade then vacuum packaged it. Six hours was too long — a more marbled roast might have been fine, but the one we had got dry. Drizzling it with maple syrup helped!

Python: dir

I am writing this down because I never manage to remember these two super useful functions that tells you what a variable is.

iLastProcessedTimestamp = 0
with open(‘test.txt’) as f:
iLastProcessedTimestamp = int(f.readline())
print(dir(iLastProcessedTimestamp))
print(type(iLastProcessedTimestamp))

The type function tells you the variable’s class (in this case, int). The dir function tells you the attributes of the variable.

John Thune’s Six Bucks an Hour

It looks like he’s eliding details for effect. Per NYT:

“In Mr. Thune’s first job, as a busboy, he was paid the legal minimum of $1 an hour. Mr. Thune has said he worked at Star for seven summers, ending up as a cook earning $6 an hour. He used the money he saved to attend Biola College in California.”

He’s got a neat sounding sound bite — I made 6/hr work for me *and* paid for Uni. And, I guess, the point is that you need to move up and get pay increases so you’re making 5x or 6x minimum wage. Republicans tend to be big on the ‘your own bootstraps’ thing without considering the bigger picture.

As a kid, he quite possibly wasn’t paying for housing, electricity, food, heat, clothing, home repairs, medical bills. Maybe he was, I don’t know the guy. But, if he was living at home as a kid … with parents footing all of the ‘adult’ bills? That 6$ an hour went a LOT farther. When I worked in high school, the 60% (or whatever) of my cheque that didn’t go to taxes was for gas (to get to work, so not needed if I wasn’t working) and fun money. Seemed like a lot of money at the time.

And, great, he saved up to pay for Uni. He graduated in 1983 — average tuition, room, and board that year was 4,167. Which was a significant increase from the previous years he’d have been attending. Four years of Uni from 1980-1984, using national average tuition costs, would have been 14,634$. Maybe add in some in books/fees. What that? 20k to get his degree. I was forking over 20k a YEAR tuition, books, housing, and food. And that was only a decade later. 4500$ in 1993 dollars would have been just over 7k in 1996. Because Uni cost has seriously outpaced inflation.

When I left Uni and had to pay for adult things? I was making minimum wage — 4.75$/hr which was increased to 5.15$/hr not too long after I started. I clearly recall *not* being able to make rent on minimum wage. Eating the cheapest (and completely unhealthy) stuff from the cheapest grocery store — which had expensive health ramifications. Taking a second job because, on top of all of the just-to-survive things I needed to buy, I also needed to start repaying my student loans. Without the benefit of a degree because I couldn’t afford to finish Uni. Yeah, I had some lucky breaks that let me take jobs that paid better. I’m not conceited enough to think it was only my brilliance and fortitude that got me out barely-scraping-by jobs. I happened to have gained IT experience in Uni before *everyone* had computer experience. I happened to live in a small enough town that a lot of people in IT knew each other, and I had a friend call me up when he was leaving a job and basically offer me the position. Not to be nice — we weren’t that good of friends — but he had gotten a great job offer within the company. The internal transfer wouldn’t go through, though, unless his boss OK’d it. And his boss was going to be a LOT more willing to sign off on the xfer if there was a replacement employee right there. My phone could have been cut off for non-payment when dude tried to call me. If I didn’t have a credit card, I wouldn’t have been able to buy one nice outfit to wear to the interview. Hell, dude could have called someone else before me.

55 Days of Grilling: Day 6

Lunch today was a salad with grilled apples and spicy peanut sauce. The peanut sauce

  • 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
  • 1 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
  • 1 tablespoons soy sauce (this was a little much)
  • 1 tablespoon maple syrup
  • 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
  • 1 teaspoon sriracha (could have used a little more)
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/4 cup coconut milk

In a small skillet, mix the peanut butter, lemon juice, rice vinegar, soy sauce, maple syrup, and sesame oil. Heat over a low heat to melt and combine. Add ground ginger. Add coconut milk to thin it into a dressing. Add sriracha to taste — Anya liked it with a teaspoon of sriracha, but Scott wanted it a little biffier (Anya’s word for spicy). I hard boiled a few fresh eggs — the yolks on the fresh eggs are awesome. Not dry at all.