GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir, Haruki Murakami, 2007

    I heard about this book on an interview of Brian Koppelman on the Tim Ferris podcast. Brian recommended this book highly, and it makes sense given other books that he recommends. This memoir is the non-melodramatic version of the War of Art, which makes it a far superior book.

    There is very little about writing in this book, but when Murakami talks about writing, it pops. Especially when he takes a couple pages in the middle of the book to discuss the three key ingredients to making it as a novelist – talent, focus, and endurance.

    That passage alone is worth the cost of the book if one is an aspiring writer.

    I’m not an aspiring writer, but I am an occasional blogger and a slob who has always known the need to get off the couch and start exercising.

    He doesn’t glamorize running either.

    Running is both the subject and the metaphor.

    Put one foot in front of the other. Again and again.

    He doesn’t claim any particular epiphanies during his runs. He just enjoys the solitude of running. But that is quite comforting as well.

    As I’ve broken forty, I’ve become a better at getting bored. During this quarantine, I’ve started talking walks on a regular basis. Just a mile or two sprinkled with the occasional 10k.

    It’s nice to exercise without expectation, not waiting for the runner’s high or some special insight. Just log a few more miles, one foot in front of another.

    Coda:
    As pedestrian as this book may be, it has resulted in three key decisions. Few books can claim such an impact on my life, even if it only lasts a short duration.

    1. I’ve decided to read the entirety of Murakami’s english-translated ouvre. His writing is so forcefully delicate, personal and piercing, that I need to read it all. I had considered this exercise years ago, but his books had not yet been widely translated. They are now, and I have no excuse.
    2. I’m quitting self help books. I’ve known for the longest time they are the junk food of non-fiction prose – quick easy reads that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something but invariably leave you empty after a few days. Just as John Maxwell quit reading for pleasure to focus on his study of leadership, I am going to quit work related reading so I can focus on life.
    3. I think I will refocus this blog with a new tag line “thoughts on my consumption”. My excursion into daily blogging last year was an interesting practice, but without a center the experiment felt rootless. “Write every day” may be a rule that works for many people, but I found myself being starved of input, since I was spending all my free solitude keeping up with the next blog post. “Write about any book that I’ve read” may result in a better balance between input and output. It doesn’t require constant output, but it doesn’t allow the blog to lie fallow for extended periods. Plus, it also addresses my great fear of becoming merely a passive consumer. We’ll see where this goes!

  • Count Zero, William Gibson, 1986

    I revisited Count Zero, the second of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, for maybe the fourth or fifth time since I first read it in college.

    It’s odd to think that I’m further from my initial reading of the book than my first reading of the book was from its publication date. I guess that’s life, it keeps moving forward, but some artifacts keep staying along for the ride, and Count Zero is one of them.

    This book is the tightest, cleanest, and meanest of the trilogy. Almost a novella compared to its older and younger siblings. That’s why I love it. It feels effortless. It’s a story that says plety but doesn’t try to tell you anything.

    It seems odd that I still enjoy such a simple rip roaring genre yarn as a middle aged adult comfortably ensconced in the desert with a prototypical family of four. But then again, I’m not any more sophisticated than my collegiate self, just more willing to embrace the same old dopeyness.

    Certainly nostalgia plays a big part. The heavy, physical tech brings warm memories from computer class elementary school, descriptions of cyberspace resonating with flashy MTV logos, even as the direct neural connections of jacking-in seeming so gauche in this wireless age.

    As I walk around my Vegas suburb thinking of the book I just reread, it seems the real world has ended up closer to the gleaming spotless clones of Star Wars prequels, but during this time of pandemic, it feeling that the decrepit barbarism of Gibson’s Sprawl is just around the corner.

  • 100% Wheat Berries

    Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a “wet-grind” method that my wife suggested one morning. I soak wheat berries for about 8-12 hours at 160% hydration. Then I just blenderize the heck out of them in the vitamix.

    I’ve had consistently good results with for 50% berry and 50% flour breads (basically 80% hydration dough), though I have had decent attempts all the way to 75% wheat berry loaves (admittedly it took a few tries to figure out how to fold such wet dough!).

    The other day I found some chia seeds in the fridge. In the past, I’ve noticed they soak up an incredible amount of water (at least 4x their weight) so I thought I’d go all wheat berries this time:

    200g Berries soaked in
    320g water for about half a day. After blending, mix in
    100g starter (100% hydrated)
    With the starter, this is a 148% hydration dough.
    40g chia seeds, soaking up an +/- equivalent of 160g water, resulting in an equivalent to about 72% hydration – an almost dryish loaf!
    4g salt, don’t forget your salt.

    And yeah it worked out really well, the oven spring wasn’t amazing (I don’t think I proofed long enough) but this was most likely the best tasting loaf so far this year.

    Plus, with flour being so rare at this time, I think I’ll be doing this 100% wet wheat berry grind method for a while coming up.

    Have fun!

  • Sourdough Bread Video

    I spent all day Sunday editing a video on making sourdough bread.

    It would be a little faster to read my blog posts on sourdough bread, but hopefully this is a good “snapshot” of how I currently make my bread and there are things that video conveys that cannot be described adequately with the 26 symbols of the alphabet.

  • Five legs, Five Snapshots

    After years of being properly frightened by scary stories of salmonella, I finally got around to cooking chicken. I’ve never really cooked chicken before. I’ve roasted a couple of birds, but never actually handled uncooked chicken meat in any earnest way.

    Four weeks ago, I moved out of my in-laws house out of an abundance of COVID-19 caution. Among the few items I brought along with me was a pack of five frozen chicken legs.

    This past weekend I finally thawed them out and started messing with them. The last leg (and a couple bones) are stewing on the stove as I write this up. And it made me think of a few things that have accrued over the my past life that led to this moment.

    When I was in high school, I got really into listening to world music and Seamus Egan’s album A Week in January was in heavy rotation. I recently picked up his newest album, Early Bright, and it has been playing in repeat in the background this whole month. As with his earlier album from the 90’s, it is a lively work, terse and tight, but somehow mellowed with passing of two decades.

    My map in this experiment was the poultry chapter in Mark Bittman’s classic, How to Cook Everything, a book that I’ve purchased twice. The first time, I had accidentally purchased it as a soft cover book, which I salvaged by selling it to the used book store when we left Houston. The second time, was at the friends of the library bookstore; I made sure this one was a hard cover. Even though we work in an internet age, it is good to have a curated tome that you can trust implicitly. It may not have the best recipes for everything, but if you were searching for that, you wouldn’t need a cookbook. This book is properly a primer for those (like me) who have spent decades scared of touching dead birds.

    The friend who introduced me to Mark Bittman was Chris Leong. He was a couple years ahead of me at Berkeley while we were never close I still look up to him. He was (and is) a great cook along with being a great architect. I remember going to his place with a few guys while he cooked up an amazing meal of some meat wrapped in something else. It was both gorgeous and delicious. More than the meal itself, I remember watching him that night in the tiny apartment kitchen enraptured in the task, while the rest of us fools were dicking around in the living room. It was a quietly brilliant display of concentration and craft that has stuck with me over the past two decades.

    The table upon all these meals have been consumed was picked up by my wife while she was was in college. Ikea still makes the Ingo table, if you want one for yourself. We used it as our dining table during the years in Houston, the legs have been chewed up when we had bunnies running wild in the house. It bears the marks and scars from that time with its burn rings and oil stains as a record of our lives together. It spent a while in the garage while we stayed with the in-laws, but hopefully it is now back in use, for good.

    When we had moved into our Hassett house for a brief moment a couple years ago, I decided to get a wok. One morning I popped into Resco to pick up some other items and saw one selling for $10. What the heck, I bought it. It sat there unseasoned for a year and a half. Last summer, I finally seasoned it, only to not use it for another six months. However, I’m happy to say this fellow has now been pressed into service, obliterating napa cabbage to go with a little chicken.

    And yes, I’m happy to report that I am no longer scared of poultry. It took forty years of eatin’ other people’s birds, but I’m finally here to try my hand at this game.

  • Bread, wheat berries and loaf pans (Q1, 2020)

    We bought a Vitamix during Black Friday and after a bit of experimentation we’ve settled into a very good routine with the bread.

    The basic ratio for soaking the wheat berries is 160% water (for winter red wheat, less for white). I also learned that I need to let it soak for a while. Definitely more than a couple hours (learned that the hard way) but it seems to work pretty good by the time you hit twelve hours.

    During Black Friday we also bought a cast iron loaf pan. That allowed us to play with much wetter mixes than I had previously done, since shaping was no longer a limiting factor, I believe that I may had gotten up to 110% hydration on one loaf.

    After playing around with different ratios of wheat berries to white flour, we ultimately decided that a 50/50 split was the tastiest option.

    150g wheat berries all purpose flour
    240g water (soak)
    150g flour
    150g starter
    ±3g salt

    This base recipe results in an 80% hydration loaf, which is well in line with my round loaves. However, we’ve stuck with the loaf pan, primarily because it has been nice to bake in the toaster oven, saving us the hassle of taking everything outside the big oven.

    To minimize waste, I’ll rinse out the vitamix into the starter. And if I put in a little too much water, I’ll take some of that water and use it for the dough, up to about 100% hydration.

    In general this is working wonderfully, I strongly recommend trying this wet grind method. No need for a dry grinder, and no dusty mess.

    The next step is to start throwing some odd grains into the mix and see what happens!

  • Innovation, Carl Chudyk, 2010

    I consider Carl Chudyk a minor diety in gaming. Of all his games, the one I have come to love the most is Innovation.

    I had a rotten introduction to the game, a 2v2 team game where it just seemed utterly uncontrolled random and chaotic.

    Which as any Chudyk enthusiast would recognize is pretty standard impression by the uninitiated.

    The second time wasn’t much better, a 5 player game with one of the expansions. Even now I couldn’t recommend such an experience.

    So I just ignored the game for a few years until I listened to an in-depth podcast extolling its virtues. I also had come to know too many respected gamers who spoke highly of the game. And by then, I had also finally come around to enjoying his other classic, Glory to Rome.

    So I bought myself a copy and the third time was indeed the charm.

    Chudyk excels at creating games with tight tactical play masked in a sea of seeming chaos. His games can require high skill to consistently play well, but the outrageousness of his card combos result the appearance of blind randomness.

    There are a lot of moving part to keep track of. It is cards, but it isn’t random. Chudyk gives you a lot of levers to dance with the crazy. All this takes a moment to grok.

    And when you do, it becomes beautiful.

    Once you know the landscape, moments of brilliant tactical play reveal themselves. Surprise and delight await you around the corner.

    Or sometimes you draw badly, and frustration gurgles in your chest as the draw hinder your progress.

    But experienced Chudyk fans would note, somehow it is the n00bs who always end up in an extended run of useless cards.

    There’s an awful lot of game here. You just need to learn to go with the flow. Of course, you will plan ahead. But the beauty of the game is found when you’re forced to change your plans. The fun starts when your well laid plan falls apart one turn later.

    It is not easy to thrive in this chaos. But if you enjoy such a challenge, Innovation gives you both in spades.

  • EntreLeadership, Dave Ramsey, 2011

    Given the guests on the podcast with the same name, I went ahead and borrowed EntreLeadership from the library. The book is a simple, quick enjoyable read.

    Admittedly, I’ve never run a business and have no intention to do so in the future. However the book seems like it could be a good primer spanning for a would be entrepreneur, even if much of the topics are covered elsewhere (such as Covey’s 4 quadrants, or Ziglar’s 7 spoke Wheel of life).

    However there is one piece of advice that did not sit well with me. He proudly flaunts his “no gossip” policy, which is a fireable offense. It seemed odd to me, so I slipped onto the internet and came across the Daily Beast expose on his exceedingly heavy handed leadership practices.

    Then it all snapped in focus. This is a man who has been the boss so long he has forgotten what it is like to be an employee. He has no idea that his position as the founder and owner is a singular one. His perspective is applicable only to himself.

    Just flip one of his other exhortations around. He wants each of his employees to act like entrepreneurs. So if I’m running my own little freelance gig, shouldn’t I talk with my fellow freelancers about market conditions? Shouldn’t I make sure that my primary client is treating me fairly? Shouldn’t I “gossip”?

    I get that employees should not waste their time bellyaching at the break room. It is better if they bring up concerns to their management so the problems can be fixed. However, that type of trust is earned, not demanded.

    This writer has been boss so long, he has mistaken great culture with a populace that has been cowed into submission. And that too is a classic mistake entrepreneurs make.

  • One Small Step Can Change your Life, Robert Maurer, 2004

    I recently went on a Kaizen kick borrowing all the books on this subject from the library.

    Most were straightforward business books from the mid to late 90’s, before the malaise that hit Japan and mad the subject less of a juicy marketable subject.

    But One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Dr. Maurer, was an interesting self help book where the main premise is that very small steps can ultimately be very fruitful, hence the title. It is a very optimistic book, with quite a few examples from both business and historical lore as well as personal interactions by the author.

    Like any self help book, it is a persuasive hamburger – it starts and ends by selling you on the effectiveness of of the topic with a multiple steps process in the body of the text.

    In this case, you are given a primer on kaizen as a business practice and then some examples on how this approach can be applied to one’s personal life. This book’s six-point program consists of:

    • Ask Small Questions
    • Think Small Thoughts
    • Take Small Actions
    • Solve Small Problems
    • Bestow Small Rewards
    • Identify Small Moments

    And then it closes with a reminder that kaizen is good for both for changing course on bad habits (or jumpstarting inactivity) as well as stacking gains on top of previous successes.

    The basic premise is that sustainable change comes from small steps that are consistently applied over a long period of time. This stands in contrast to the “innovation” or bootcamp mentality – which are banking on shocks to the system to make lasting change.

    The issue with the drastic change approach is that sometimes the system will often bend but snap back into place – the inertia is too much. Kaizen is small so it is immediately actionable, and it entails such small steps that the recalcitrant system doesn’t know what hit it.

    Coincidentally, I listened to a podcast about meditation and one of the suggestions for creating a practice is to just aim to meditate for 1- minute every day. While such a goal may seem ridiculously paltry, it creates a habit and it creates opportunities where you decide to meditate for more than a minute. While the decision to go an extra minute may also seem miniscule, the podcaster noted this choice was actually quite momentous. That first minute is motivated by an extrinsic factor (your previous commitment to meditate for a minute every day) but the second minute is voluntary and motivated by intrinsic factors now that your obligation has been satisfied.

    This seems to me to encapsulate the spirit of this book. Make a small step and the ride the wave to continuous improvement.

  • Fridge Bread, Oct / Nov 2019

    I’ve been playing with rising the dough in the fridge, and aside from the lost space in the box, it has worked out really well. The main thing is that the timing is much more forgiving.

    400g all purpose flour
    300g water
    200g starter
    4g salt

    The only change from typical recipe is adding a lot more starter (and of course throwing the dough in the fridge for 2-3 days after the autolyse and mix).

    Along with proofing in the fridge, we are now playing with using fresh wheat berries in the bread. I soak the 100g of berries in 200g water overnight and then process it in the vitamix (using the last 100g of water to wash out the container into the dough).

    400g all purpose flour
    300g water
    200g starter
    4g salt

    This system is proving pretty promising, getting the flavors of whole wheat bread without concerns about the oils in the flour going rancid.

    And now that we’ve gotten into the soaking business…next step, sprouted grains!