Our Bird Mash

Now, I know all of you have just been waiting to hear about the bird mash we eat, so here goes. Pookie The Cockatiel and I have a primary diet of cooked grains, which Dad and Mrs. Highpants call mash. Periodically, Dad makes a trip to a natural grocer in Central Square Cambridge, MA. This place is completely natural, including occasional moths in the grain. To be honest, Dad doesn’t go there, because it’s natural, but instead because they have good prices on bulk grains.

Cooking the mash takes several elapsed hours, because everything has to cool. However, the actual cooking time is about 1 1/2 hours from prep to finish.

First, after the grains (and beans) are purchased, they are divided into three categories and three jars, long cooking, short cooking, and no cooking.

Long Cooking

Brown rice

Small beans like Adzuki

Barley

Wheat Berries

and any other grain that takes about 40 minutes to cook.

Short Cooking

Red/Orange, Green, or other kind of Lentil

Quinona

Macaroni

Buckwheat (groats, kasha)

No Cooking

Wheat, Rye, or Oat Flakes

Millet

or anything that will cook (soften) from the heat of the other cooked ingredients

Cooking

To a 4 QT covered saucepan, mix 1 cup of long cooking ingredients and two cups of water. Bring to a boil, and then simmer for twenty minutes.

Then add 1 cup short cooking ingredients and two cups of water to the first ingredients that have been cooking for twenty minutes.

Heat to bring back close to a boil and then simmer for twenty more minutes.

Remove mash from heat.

Stir in one cup of no cooking ingredients, and let everything cool with the lid on, to preserve moisture.

This mixture can be seasoned with a little allspice. If you want to use other spices, check with your veterinarian or bird expert for spices that won’t hurt birds. We know about allspice, because it is used in commercially available bird mash.

With Apologies To Pee Wee King, Chilton Price, and Redd Stewart

I’m responsible for the software that keeps track of our town’s collections, water, real-estate, and motor vehicle excise bills, as well as parking tickets, and most recently assumed co-responsibility for printing the bills as well, so repurposing The Duprees You Belong To Me made sense.

See the water bills along the Nile

Parking tickets step out in style and

Real-estate payments begin to smile ’cause

They belong to me.

Excise service warrants wet with rain

You owe a bundle, and that’s a shame

But pay your bill on time to avoid the pain and

They belong to me

I’m still working on the rest of the lyrics. I find it helpful to bring a positive attitude to work.

And here is the original.

Who’s Navigating In There?

I work with a Vietnam Vet, who, the other day, told me it was okay not to be able to do the things I’ve been doing for years. I think my friend’s being a vet is important, because if he could survive that, his advice seemed to carry a little more clout.

You know the kinds of things we used to do, but cannot do as well now. Removing all the snow from around your house in blizzard conditions, clearing all the neighbors walkways, and generally being Mr. Good Guy of the neighborhood are at the top of my list.

I do not know exactly what it was, but during all these heroics during our recent Blizzard of 2013, something happened to my left foot. I think it might have been taking a Mt. Everest mountain climbing step onto a huge snow pile, or not drinking enough fluids at work.

Either way, my left big toe joint — that is the metatarsophalangeal, or MTP joint really became inflamed. My gait changed,  because I had to stay off my left foot. I went into my doctor, and took a cane. Mr doctor thought I might have gout, and tried to get fluid out of the joint with a needle, not a pleasant experience. Good news, there was no fluid, so gout was unlikely. It’s probably tendonitis, he said. We will see.

I have not been in my thirties for years, but I still feel that way. I am not willing to surrender, at least not yet. But, is it wise to let the older me provide some navigational advice? Will he keep me off the large ice mountain, and make sure I drink my fluids? We’ll see.

Technical Experience and Opposite Directions

Starting out in the computer industry, especially when I became a full-fledged software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in June 1985, meant doing lots of work. In software development, that meant writing a lot of program code, technical documentation, and tests. I was getting experience, doing the work I loved to do. That did not change too much over the next eighteen years, except the projects became more complicated, and responsibilities increased. But, I still got to write software.

Now, my technical experience is taking me a way from the technical tasks I enjoy. I review RFIs (Request for Information) and RFPs (Request for Proposal), a couple of tools municipalities use to go eventually out to bid for a product or service, and I had better be good at it, or my lack of reviewing will either scuttle or hamper the project. Even worse, not reviewing well won’t scuttle or hamper the project but scuttle me instead.

But I find it very curious that the more technical we become and the more experience we acquire, the less time we spend doing the tasks that got us there in the first place.

The Printer and The Mailman

Long before my time working for a municipality, our department, the Information-Technology-was-once-called-data-processing department came under an enchantment (of sorts). Our department started delivering interoffice mail between our building and another. Then came payroll and vendor check delivery. The person who printed the tax bills also had the mail and check delivery duties as well.

Well, at the end of last year, the person responsible for those duties retired, and I assumed the bill printing and part of mail delivery. Fortunately, my days as a mail delivery person are about to come to a close. IT work is very interrupt driven, and delivering mail cuts into working on issues. And for the software development and sustaining engineering part of my responsibilities, that time is cut into as well. At the end of the month, mail delivery will no longer our department’s responsibility, and that is a good thing.

Now, the printing is another matter. That is going to be outsourced. Normally, outsourcing jobs is a sore point with me, but if you saw what has to be done to print parking ticket notices, motor vehicle excise, real-estate, and water bills, you would understand very quickly why it should be outsourced. The half-time job is a full time duty.

And although we have a wonderful template based program called Planet Press (a product of Objectif Lune) that helps design, modify, and print the bills , the task of printing bills is nudgy, time consuming, and requires a lot of checking. The only good part of printing the bills is using the Duplo Folding Machine. When it is doing its thing, it makes a delightful, slightly-addictive, thwack, thwack, thwack sound.

But, hopefully, within a year, that job will go away, too, and I’ll have more time to fix programming bugs, occasionally write new software, and do other system administrative-related stuff.

Director of Printing and Engraving

Uh, oh! It’s time for another one of those shepherding out one technology for another periods in my life. Eleven years ago, it was automating a radio station. I helped write a scheduler, my first and worst database project, which allowed people to order songs they want played throughout the day. Inevitably it led to fewer jobs.

Now, it is bill printing’s turn. One of my colleagues is retiring, and he’s been printing the tax and utility bills since before I got here. We are eventually going to outsource the bill printing, but it takes time to find the right vendor, not to mention modifying all the billing programs to create the right kind of output required by the vendor. So, it’s my time to see this old technology out the door.

You might be saying to yourself, what’s wrong with that? Have you ever printing 2,000 water, 14,000 real-estate, or several thousand motor vehicle excise bills? And, they have to go through a folder. Well, there goes my software development schedule.

As my boss said this morning, I’m now Director of Printing and Engraving.

Visual High Tech Elixir

Feeling down? One thing that might help is a large computer monitor. Despite the trend towards smart phones, smart tablets, and more, you are still seeing the world in miniature. For me, nothing beats seeing things large.

After years of feeling guilty, I finally asked for and received a 24″ rectangular monitor at work. The brand/model is an Acer V243H. It’s a thing of beauty and frightening enormity. Now, almost my entire computer world including mistakes, pestering email requests, software-under-edit, and more can appear at once on my screen just like musical theatre.

So my reality might not have gotten better, but I have been able to dupe myself safely into thinking everything is big and rosy.

It is great living large.