Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

This year we served a turkey for Christmas Dinner. As is my way, the turkey was brined for maximum flavor and moistness.
I learned about brining turkeys from Alton Brown a few years ago. His recipe is good, but after a few years of tracking down all the ingredients, I have slimmed down the recipe dramtically. Basically, it’s the sugar and salt doing most of the work and the assorted flavors are generally lost IMHO.
You must brine a turkey a day in advance. If you are reading this an hour before the turkey needs to go into the oven, you are out of luck.
Turkey Brine
(for ~20 lb turkey)
1 cup kosher salt
1 cup brown sugar
2 quart vegetable stock
1 teaspoon Old Bay seasoning
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
5-6 pounds of ice
Boil up all the ingredients until the salt and sugar are completely dissolved. Add ice to chill down the brine until ice still floats in the pot.
It should look like this:

Following the trend of Jason & Matt, here is my year in cities:
January
Las Vegas, Nevada – CES
London, England – Meetings
March
San Diego, California – ETech
Austin, Texas – SxSW
April
Las Vegas, Nevada – NAB
May
Kauai, Hawaii – Vacation
July
Duck, North Carolina – Vacation
London, England – Meetings
August
New York, New York – Meetings
Columbus, Ohio – Meetings
Hamilton, Bermuda – Matt & Yvette’s Wedding
September
Amsterdam, Netherlands – IBC
October
Orlando, Florida – Meetings
New York, New York – Meetings
Troy, New York – Alumni Weekend
November
San Francisco, California – Web 2.0
London, England – Meetings
New York, New York – Meetings
December
Dallas, Texas – Meetings
19 trips, 14 cities, 2 months with no travel

I am hoping that the webhost stays up and stable now.
Since December 8th, the server hosting this site (and about 20 of friends and family) was moved and has not really been operational
Tonight it appears that the majority of issues are resolved. *crosses fingers*

Yes, I’ve been having some problems with my webhost.
Yes, it sucks.

Today we went to Disneyland. Here’s the order of battle:
Space Mountain
Pirates of the Caribbean
Haunted Mansion
Splash Mountain
Tom Sawyer’s Island
Honey I Shrunk the Audience
Space Mountain
Star Tours
Space Mountain
Light crowds and cool weather. Perfection.

I’m in New York for business. Here’s my hotel room.

Yesterday the phone rang and I picked it up.
It was a boy, calling for my eldest daughter.
I handed the phone to my daughter and a big grin crossed her face and she twirled in place as she put the phone to her ear.
“Hello, I’ve been waiting for your call…”, she said into the phone, while motioning me away from her.
I knew this day would come, but didn’t really want to arrive just yet.

Thanks to wonderful and generous Cousin James, we now have a Wii in the house.

Last week the Los Angeles Times revealed their new design. Here’s a snippet of the press release:

The A section of The Times will sport an arresting new format beginning Oct. 22 aimed at providing a compelling snapshot of the day’s most interesting stories via skybox spotlights and a bolder index on the front page, as well as expanding the use of larger headlines, photographs, color, and information graphics, such as sidebars, back story boxes, maps and diagrams. It also will include the Opinion pages, Monday through Saturday.

Well, as one of the rare readers of the newspaper every morning, I have to say, it sucks.
Every morning I walk outside and pick up the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Even in this day of internet news, I still feel that for good in-depth reading, an actual newspaper is best. You might even see something that you want to read that wouldn’t normally search for… *gasp*