New Year's Eve Party

One of my great pleasures is that of preparing food for people I love and enjoying it with them. There were 21 of us enjoying appetizers and dinner and dessert last night: neighbors from down the street, parents of one of Sheri's classmates, friends from decades ago, our small group, another family we know from church.

There was sushi from Suruki Supermarket—51 pieces (including six rolls) for $48.25, an incredible deal and (to my unsophisticated palate) delicious.

But that's not mainly what I mean by "prepare"—and neither is the antipasto pack from Costco®. And neither is cooking too much rice in the rice cooker. Let me start with

Shoyu chicken, sorta

… a variation on this recipe.

About 6½ hours before suppertime, mix

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup shoyu (soy sauce)
• 1½ cup water
• 2 tsp or so minced ginger
  (or fresh if you prefer; we have minced garlic in a jar)
• a similar amount of garlic (not sure if I did this or just thought about it)
• 2/3 cup vinegar (omitted from the food.com recipe)

and pour into crockpot or stock pot set over medium heat.
Optional: lightly brown in oil; alternately, just drop into the pot from the packages:

• 15-18 chicken drumsticks and
• a similar amount of chicken thigh meat

If you brown the chicken, you'll probably need to do it in shifts. In any case, add chicken to the stock pot. Reduce heat.
Slice thinly:

• ½–1 bunch thinly sliced green onions

and add to the stockpot.
Simmer 5-6 hours.

Korean-style grilled beef (not really 불고기)

So I went to Whole Foods to get meat from a humanely raised cow or bull. I saw a boneless cross rib roast, about 5 pounds, and asked them to slice it for me. "We can cut it by hand, but we don't have a meat slicer," the butcher said. Well, it's a first-world problem. I don't have a machine for slicing meat, either, but I do have sharp knives. I cut it thinly, stacking the pieces in a 4-quart Pyrex® mixing bowl. Since this cow ate mostly grass, I figured it would need a little tenderizing, so I poured a little cooking sherry over the stack and a little between. And a little soy sauce. OK, now let me try to recreate the "recipe" such as it was:

Mix:

• ~½ cup soy sauce
• ~4 Tbsp. sesame oil
• a similar amount of vegetable oil (if I remembered)
• garlic? (6 cloves would not be excessive, but I think I forgot the garlic altogether)
• 1 Tbsp. toasted crushed sesame seeds (you could certainly use more)
• ~½ bunch green onions, sliced/chopped/whatever

Layer

• ~5 lbs. thinly sliced beef
  (How thin? I had about 40 pieces, not all of which were perfect slices.)

in a marinating dish like this one, with at least a little of the marinade between each piece.
Let soak an hour or more if you can, turning occasionally.
Grill over charcoal.

Spinach nah-mool (sorta)

I keep qualifying these names because they're like movies whose plots were "inspired by a true story." Here's what we did for the spinach.

Boil very briefly, then cool:

• 2 lbs. fresh spinach

Marinade

• ~½ cup soy sauce
• ~¼ cup vegetable oil (if I remembered)
• ~4 Tbsp. sesame oil
• (I probably forgot the garlic again.)
• 1 Tbsp. toasted crushed sesame seeds (you could certainly use more)
• ~½ bunch green onions, sliced/chopped/whatever

Mix all marinade ingredients.
At least an hour before suppertime, but probably not the day before, add about half of it to the spinach, and mix well. Let it sit in refrigerator for 30-60 minutes, and taste it. If it's bland, add a little more of the marinade.

Serve with steamed rice (brown rice if you're health-conscious) and kimchi/kim chee.

---

Cho jang

I didn't serve this last night, but I wanted to write down what I remembered from last time.

• 1 Tbsp. go chu jang (hot pepper paste)
• 1 Tbsp. white sugar
• 1 Tbsp. white vinegar

Whisk all ingredients together. And that's all there is to it.

Why Florida citrus fruit tastes so bad, and why I'm so slow

The elder daughter says it's because (the citrus I mean, not me) oranges and the like ripen in the cold. This also explains why oranges are never going to be a cash crop in Hawaii.

On the second subject, which reminds me of a meeting at work which I missed, I just realized that 1 John 1:8-10 explains verses 6 and 7. Here's what I mean:

⁶If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. ⁷But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. ⁸If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. ⁹If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.

1 John 1:6-10

Verses 6-7 talk about walking in the light, and although I've been reading this chapter many times over the past 30 years (I memorized 1 John 1:9 in 1978) it didn't hit me that the phrase "walk in the light" is explained by verses 9-10. They're parallel passages.

• If we walk in the darkness, we lie(6) ↔ If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves(8)
• If we walk in the light, we're purified from sin(7) ↔ If we confess our sins, he will purify us(9)

Obvious, right? How did I miss it all these years? Or am I just having a middle-aged moment (or millennium) and had I simply forgotten it?

Either way, I'm glad to know (and I'll probably remember it for the rest of the week at least) that 1 John 1:6-7 is explained immediately by the following verses.

Posting a Keep Out! sign in the attic

The photo at left was taken from my attic. That's the inside of a 9"-diameter vent; I can't tell what sort of wasp or hornet or bee that slightly-used house belongs to.

Here's another picture (click for larger image); it's not very well focused but you can see a little more. I don't know much about wasps or hornets or other flying things with stings, but I do know this: I don't want them in my attic. I especially don't want them colonizing other nice spots in the attic.

In that second photo you can see that the opening in the top of the vent is rather large. I'll say it's big enough for a small rat to climb through. Now the inside surface of the vent is rather slippery, and I wouldn't fancy trying to climb it myself, if I were a rat's size. But that wouldn't stop a mouse or rat from falling in and looking around. And finding some other places to build a nest.

I had some ½" wire mesh—that would keep mice and rats out. I also had some fine plastic screen; that would keep the insects out. I tracked those supplies down, and also some tin-snips for the wire mesh, an X-acto™ knife for the plastic screen, and a staple gun (with enough ½" staples).

Back in the attic, I held the wire mesh up to the hole to determine the shape and size to cut. The tin-snips worked reasonably well. Then, because I have lots and lots of plastic screen, I folded it over the wire mesh and cut it to size with the knife.

Now I had an assembly of two thicknesses of fine plastic screen around one of ½" wire mesh; it was also less hazardous to carry the assembly, because the sharp ends of the wire were covered. Fortunately there was enough room to squeeze into the spot below the vent. Then I started stapling.

You can see the result at right. If you look carefully you may notice that the hornet's nest is gone. When I drove the first staple in, the nest dropped down onto the screens.

I waited. No buzzing sounds. Or wings. Or stingers.

I reached around an unattached edge and gingerly picked up the abandoned (I hoped) nest. What to do with it? I fed it through one of the gaps in the vent. It fell through the opening and dropped onto the roof.

With that disposed of, I applied a half-dozen more staples.

Posted: Keep out! No trespassing!

Things not to do when installing a water heater: a list

1. Buy a water heater installation kit, you know, the package with two water hoses (one cold, one hot) and a gas supply hose, and pipe-thread tape (which I heard is not actually “Teflon® tape”)
   • The gas supply hose might have the wrong gender(s).
   • The water hoses might be too short or too long.
   But it's OK to buy the kit if you have determined that all will fit.
2. Waste “teflon tape” on threads that don't need it
   • the water hoses don't need it because the connection is secured by pressure, not by the threads.
   • most of the gas hoses don't need it either
3. Put white “teflon tape” on gas-pipe threads that do need it
   • You can find dire warnings on the ’net about doing this. Use pipe dope instead.
4. Use a drain pan that isn't big enough to catch any possible dripping when your new water heater starts leaking someday.
   • Because it will.

How do I know not to do these things? Three guesses…

Improving quality of a multi-component system

Suppose you have several product testing teams -- let's call them the "A", "B", "C", "D" [etc] teams.

Suppose each testing team focuses primarily on testing "their" component, but teams can also find defects in other components, so for example the "A" team mainly tests the "A" component, but they might happen to find a problem in the "B" component.

The "A" testing team has a manager, who is probably being rated on how well the "A" team is finding defects in the "A" component. The "B" test manager is rated on how well the "B" team finds defects in the "B" component. And so on.

Each manager will tend to say "I want the bugs in our component to be found by us, so whenever those other turkeys find bugs in our component, you guys explain to me why they found it and we didn't."

What will happen then? Whenever the "B" team finds a bug in the "C" component, say, the "C" team will be motivated to duplicate the portion of "B"'s tests that found the "C bug," and they will spend time on this that they could have spent writing new tests.

So here's a puzzle: how to put a stop to this behavior? Because if things go on like this, the "C" team will waste a bunch of time

• writing reports for their manager (who is also in a lousy position) explaining why the "B" team found bugs in the "C" component, and
• duplicating parts of the "B" tests.

In the worst case, everybody will copy everybody else's tests, which means the same tests will be run multiple times, rather than writing and running different tests. How does this improve product quality? (Really, the "C" team should be thinking of other ways to test the "C" component, and the system for that matter, rather than duplicating all the "B" tests that happened to find some "C" bug.)

Here's what needs to happen: The QA Director or VP needs to be told that this nonsense is going on, and they need to put a stop to this sort of internal competition. In particular, they must not ding the "C" manager if the "B" team finds a "C" bug, and so on.

I mean really, if the "B" team finds a bug in the "C" component, the "C" manager's response should not be "Grrr, we should have found that, not those turkeys"; it should be "Terrific! Let's see if we can learn anything from them and write new tests to more thoroughly test our stuff."

Because every bug found inside the company is caught before the customer hits it, and for that we should rejoice. The point of quality assurance is to assure quality of the product as seen by customers; it really shouldn't matter if the "B" team finds "C" bugs or the "D" team finds "B" bugs -- so long as we find and fix the bugs before they get to the customer.

When people don’t stay long on your team

In a conversation that hasn’t happened, I chatted with someone about the team he manages.

“People don’t stay on the team for long,” he says. The team is staffed entirely by volunteers who want to support the team’s purposes, which for purposes of this short essay I’ll describe as “helping people grow.”

Why might people not want to be on this team long? Is it because they don’t really understand what the team’s mission and vision are? That’s possible.

Another possibility is that the work is too difficult—either absolutely (Just Too Much Work) or relative to the results they can see (i.e., “What is the larger organization getting for all this effort I’m putting in?”).

Or there may be something about team dynamics: is the team hard to get along with, is there too much criticism and not enough encouragement for new members’ work? Is the leader hard to get along with?

Now that I think of it, I know of at least two teams with long-term (multi-year) recruiting challenges. Let’s call one of them the “G Team”; it’s hard to get people interested in joining this team. It’s kind of nerdy, to tell you the truth. I was on the team for a while, but then other responsibilities took me away from it. Today it’s still hard to get people to sign up for it. Once people do, though, they seem to stick with it, at least for a few years.

Another team, I’ll call it the “T team”, has people sign up, but they seem to stay on for a fairly short time. I’ve talked with two ex-members of the “T team”; one of them had the odd experience of showing up for a meeting and being put to work stuffing envelopes. This person left the team shortly after that meeting.

Another ex-member had a, ah, an altercation with the team leader. This ex-member apologized for their part in the unpleasantness, but the team leader never ’fessed up to theirs. As far as the leader was concerned, the issue was 100% the ex-member’s fault.

This sort of thing isn’t unique to the non-profit or volunteer world. There are some managers who have a hard time holding on to subordinates. You may have met them; some of them are like the engineer who was never wrong; some have multiple faults (hopefully your manager isn’t like Michael Wing’s composite anti-manager “Burt”), some just work in awful organizations.

But if you’re leading a team of volunteers, or managing a group of employees, and you’ve got high turnover (you get to define the term), you might want to look in the mirror. Some questions to ask (and not ask):

• How have I solicited input from the team about my leadership style, my strengths and weaknesses, things I could change? And how have I responded to that feedback?
• How do I show each team member that their efforts are important? How willing am I to delegate decisions (rather than tasks)? And if they decide something in a way other than I would have, how often have I overridden their decision?
• How often do I give direct, specific encouragements to my team members? The “specific” part is really important. “You’re great” is nice, but it could be insincere. And it could sound insincere. Better to find something they’re doing right and making a sincere and appropriate affirmation about that: “Thank you for putting in the extra effort to find those details supporting our plan; that really improves our chances...” or something like this, is much more powerful.
• When a team member does something I don’t like, how often do I to tell them, vs complaining to someone else? And if I tell them, do I do that in a punishing or a non-punishing way?
• How readily do I admit my own mistakes, misjudgments, failures, to my team?
• Don’t ask: Why are you leaving? (And don’t ask HR what was said in the exit interview, either, if there was one.) Really. An employee leaving the firm knows there’s no percentage in saying anything negative about their ex-manager. And in the non-profit world, what’s the point of saying anything negative to you? If they thought you would/could change, wouldn’t they have said it earlier?
• When was the last time I showed concern for each team member’s personal or emotional life?

The best thing in the world

It happened at lunch: “Tim” caught the vision. What captured him was the hope that “Whenever someone sees me, they see Christ in me.” We were looking at Deepening Our Prayer by Adele Gonzales (link), where an exercise encouraged us to consider 2 Corinthians 3:18:

And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

“Bill” pointed out that the verse says that we all reflect the Lord’s glory; we all are being transformed into his likeness. This put me in mind of Genesis 39:3, which was in a recent sermon on the “With God” life: “[Joseph’s] master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord caused all that he did to prosper.”

Joseph, as you may know, was sold into slavery, but the Lord was with him. Though he was a slave, he didn’t despair; he pursued his tasks with intelligence and energy. And the text doesn’t say his master “saw that Joseph was intelligent and energetic”; it says he “saw that the Lord was with Joseph.” What was it about Joseph, I wondered, that his master saw the Lord was with him? How would I have to change so my boss would see the Lord is with me, rather than seeing my talents or whatever?

At our church, we’ve also been praying a shortened version of a prayer of St. Patrick:

I arise today through a mighty strength, the blessing of the Trinity:
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me
… and so on

I recently read a longer version which includes these lines:

Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

http://www.2heartsnetwork.org/Patrick.htm

which I take to mean “may all who see me see Christ in me; and may my words reflect Christ in me.”

It was somewhere in this discussion that Tim’s whole face lit up. The idea really captured him—the idea of being so much like Christ that everyone who sees him would see Christ in him. And rightly so!

Lunch with Tim and Bill was a high point of my week: it’s a joy being with brothers in Christ who remind me how magnificent God’s promises are and who share my joy in partaking of his goodness. It’s the best thing in the world.