Gumbo

When I was in college there was a little hole in the wall Cajun place up the street from the campus called From the Bayou.  The food was pretty amazing for being right next to a college, and the flavors where just not what you would expect to find in the northwest.  Between the great flavors and the fact that my (now wife) and I had our first date there, well southern cooking has a soft spot in my heart.  They had a lovely chicken and andouille sausage gumbo that is still the best I've ever had.  We had the good fortune to get our rehearsal dinner catered by them, but sadly the restaurant has since gone out of business and I still miss having gumbo every now and again.

I'm working off of this recipe from NewOrleanscuisine because it has the things I can identify as what was in the gumbo I loved, and I felt like he had some great tips on both the roux and the rice.  It was good, but I got scared near the end of the roux and started adding broth.  My advice is go into making roux with the knowledge that you may have to throw it out and ride that train as close to burnt as you dare.

Reunions of a sort

Last weekend was Homecoming at my alma mater, and every year my swim team hosts an Alumni vs Students swim meet.  It's part booster, part social trip, and a large dose of nostalgia.  This year was somewhat special in that we could actually go, and a friend that had fallen out of everyone's orbit flew into town for the shindig.  

It was amazing to see him, as when he left for Purdue to pursue his PHD there was a lot of fall out in our group of friends because he choose to marry someone that was fairly universally disliked by everyone who met her.  She was terrible for him, and to make it worse she is Mormon (he is the son of a Missouri Synod Lutheran Preacher).  They had lost of personal problems, not the least of which where her seeming inability to be faithful.  A number of us (myself included) tried to tell him it seemed like a bad idea to marry her, and it damaged a lot of friendships.  Towards the end of his stay here in the PNW one of the people that he was sharing a house with (well call him C) was a very good friend of his.  C had very limited patience for our friends inability to see how bad a decision this was and they had a blow out fight both said hurtful things and to my knowledge haven't spoken in the 5 years he has been gone.  While our friend was in town he apologized for the way he acted (to me) and I told him that C was living near me and gave him C's number.  It was such a waste for two people that had been great friends, to fight over something so pointless.  

Our friend has since had a kid with and divorced from the woman that caused all of the trouble to begin with, and it appears that she continued to have trouble with staying faithful after they moved out of state.  I'm glad that he is working to fix the relationships, we swam together for 4 years much of that time in the same lane for practices.  We also shared an event so we had some rivalry in the 200 breaststroke and it pained me to see it end the way it did.

Here's hoping for a few more mended relationships, I know I have a few of my own to fix.

College and its value

Lately several FB friends have posted articles that are critical of the value of college, at the same time several prominent blogs have been trashing the economic sense of attending college.  I think that even more than questioning the value of the undergrad experience vs the value of not starting your "adult" life in debt, some of these attacks are focused on if we are actually learning in college.  In that instance I am actually in agreeiance, as I was severely disappointed with a number of my undergraduate courses.  The material stale, the teachers on autopilot, and "knowledge" out of date.  Really the two best classes I had where from outsiders so to speak, professors that had just arrived fresh from industry.  Their current experiences really spoke to me more than one aging prof's long winded stories about the Kibbutz back in the 70's.  One of the newly minted professors had a side business that was leveraging the exploding commercialization of China by selling typewriters.  Typewriters, because then as now, the rural districts that where trying to modernize didn't have reliable electricity, so filling out forms on computer was not reliable enough for them.  He claimed to clear about $1 million dollars and had orders booked for the next several years, selling an antiquated technology to an exploding market.  The biggest lesson was opportunity is not where you might expect; sometimes large opportunities exist in where no one is looking for them.

I am conflicted about the college experience, as my position might not have been available to me without a degree and my wife's job as well might not have been available to her so on the one hand I absolutely believe I needed a degree on the other hand my coworker has an associates degree and has virtually the same pay and responsibilities.  Very little of my day to day job function can be tied back to my education and particularly my degree program.  Most of the things I took from college are social in nature, the network I gained from being there.  The friends, my wife, my time on the swim team are all tied to the social nature of the "full undergrad" experience.  I really enjoyed the social aspects of my time at college, and had it been fully covered by grants and scholarships I probably would be less bitter about my perception of the quality of the education.  That I paid for it, and continue to pay for the "education" I received makes me take the position that in dollars and cents my college didn't make sense for me.  My job and the way I started out in the industry would have been virtually identical, the difference is I got to make some mistakes in the relative safety of college, rather than loosing a real job.  I can say that I wouldn't do college over again, or at the very least I would have gone to a different college.

So I'll leave you with this.