Since we bought our car at a dealership in Annapolis, we felt compelled to take it back there for the first scheduled checkup. There are closer dealerships, but Annapolis isn’t very far and it’s a fun place to spend a couple of hours.

We had lunch at McGarvey’s Saloon, an Irish bar with pretty good food. I had their house ale and a bratwurst. After lunch we did a little shopping and wandering around. Mandi found an eye-bleeding bright red jacket and I found a sweet new shopping bag to replace this embarrassing one.

Not long ago a plow finally came by. I can’t tell whether it moved any snow, but maybe the salt/sand will get some melting done before the next snow storm starts tomorrow.

The storm ended a few hours ago, and I think we’ve got more than two feet of snow. We still had a couple of inches left over from the last storm in the back yard, so there might be 30 inches out there. Maybe tomorrow I’ll snowshoe out to find out.

We cleared a shovel-wide strip to the sidewalk and around one car. Hopefully a snow plow will clear our street tomorrow – we saw one go by a block away so there’s some hope. It’s supposed to be sunny so maybe that’ll help melt off the cars.

The most serious issue so far (besides stir-craziness) is that the cable and internet went down early this morning and haven’t come back. Hopefully Comcast is working on it, but since the road hasn’t been plowed yet I can’t really fault them. Fortunately, we’ve got power, iPhones, a couple of Netflix, and an expanded Tivo full of suggestions. We shouldn’t get bored enough to try to light anything on fire until at least Monday.

Between cooking dinner and meeting up with as many other friends and family as possible, we made it to most of our favorite spots in Seattle. We had dinner at Mashiko, easily the best sushi restaurant in the whole world. We had breakfast at Le Pichet on our way to go shopping at Pike Place Market. We had coffee at Caffe Ladro, maybe still my favorite coffee shop.

We tried a couple of new things thanks to friends. We had coffee at Caffe Fiore in Ballard, where the espresso is possibly as good as Caffe Ladro. After Mashiko we went to Shelter Lounge, which had great beer and bar food. We met some friends for dinner at Mission in West Seattle, which had excellent adobo pork.

We mostly just walk around Pike Place Market looking at stuff, rarely buying anything. For real shopping we head down the hill a street to World Spice Merchants, where we get spice mixes and chai. We also like The Spanish Table and their new sister store Paris Grocery.

That was about it for this trip to Seattle. I wish we’d been able to stay longer and visit with more people. It was a hard to leave, but the monsoon that greeted us on arrival did make it a little easier.

I knew I could import the PDF into Gimp (converting it into a bitmap) and edit it there, dropping in my signature and whatnot. Next I needed to turn the bitmap back into a PDF. Gimp doesn’t make PDFs, so I saved the bitmap as a high-res PNG and went looking for something to convert a PNG into a PDF.

ImageMagick should have immediately occurred to me, but I needed Google to connect the dots. Here’s the command I figured out after some trial-and-error:

convert -page Letter -density 28.3 input.png output.pdf

Note that the 28.3 part was specific to the resolution of my PNG. Using other values, when I checked the PDF’s properties the dimensions weren’t 8.5×11 – so I just tried numbers until I got close enough. I’d imagine there’s an automated way to do the calculation, but for just one PDF trial-and-error worked fine for me.

We got a turkey a whole week before Thanksgiving for some reason, so I brined and roasted it as practice for doing it again at a friend’s house next week. It turns out even a 15 pound turkey has quite a bit of meat on it, so I’ve been making turkey dishes all week.

Turkey soup is really easy to make if you can manage to make some turkey stock after carving the bird. To make stock, just simmer the carcass in water a while. You can add things like peppercorns, allspice, onion, celery, carrot, etc. if you want to and are not completely burned out on cooking. I cool the stock a while then strain it into something for the fridge. You can remove the fat from the top the next day.

For the soup, soften some vegetables like onions, celery, cabbage, and so on in butter over medium-low heat. Add some chunks of turkey and some stock and simmer a little while. I serve it with grated cheese and homemade Worcestershire sauce.

So, I found this idea for placing an image over an embedded video, but it failed with a JavaScript error. This answer at stackoverflow got the code working correctly.

The method uses two “div” containers, one containing the replacement preview image and one containing the video embed code. The video is hidden using inline CSS and a bit of JavaScript toggles the image hidden and the video visible when the image is clicked. The image should be the same size of the video and should probably have some sort of “play” symbol so users know to click it. Here’s the code for the containers:

<div onclick="thevid=document.getElementById('thevideo'); thevid.style.display='block'; this.style.display='none'"><img src="vidthumb.jpg" style="cursor:pointer" /></div><div id="thevideo" style="display:none">

(put the YouTube embed stuff here)

</div>

A nice addition would be some way to give users with JavaScript disabled a plain link to the video at YouTube.