Sweet potato casserole recipe

If you have any other recipes for this dish, throw them out. This is the last you'll ever need.

For everyone who's tired of having to set a good example for the kids and wait until after dinner to eat dessert, add this recipe to your Thanksgiving feast.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups cooked potatoes (about 4 medium potatoes)
• 2 eggs
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ cup milk
• ¼ cup butter
• 1 cup sugar

Directions

Blend all ingredients with mixer and pour into casserole dish. Combine dry topping ingredients and then add melted butter. Mix until crumbly and sprinkle over potato mixture. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes.

Topping:

• 1 cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup flour (all-purpose)
• ¼ cup butter
• 1 cup chopped pecans

From Hazel Green Elementary School cookbook with modifications by Samantha Bacon.

Just for you, Madeline

My five-year-old daughter is learning to read. I made flash cards for us to practice phonics and recognition, and I wrote this simple app to give her a way to practice on her own too. Thanks to the Wiktionary folks for the pronunciations.

Along with the buttons, you can advance by pressing Enter or Right-Arrow and hear the word with S or space bar.

The code is available on GitHub.

My little budding star

On to recovery

Thanks, everyone, for checking up on me.

I had hip surgery this morning with the doctor who pioneered the procedure for the labrum damage I had. Everything seemed to have gone well. Dr. Byrd even gave me a DVD of my surgery! I assume it's video from the scope, so stay tuned for future post with some nice gory clips!

I'm sore of course, but the drugs are good. I have this device called a Game Ready that's a sleeve around my upper leg and a pump that compresses the area with ice-cold water. It's supposed to speed up recovery, but I'll be on crutches for 8 weeks—no driving for 6.

I have a followup visit in the morning and tort^H^H^H^Hphysical therapy after that.

My wife has been a wonderful caretaker. I don't know how I married so well!

Helicopters and jets

I looked out a window into my back yard where a small helicopter sat. I think it was mine even though the back yard didn't look like the one at our current house or any where I've lived. Another helicopter was flying very low and slightly erratically so as to jostle my craft with its downdraft. Did I mention loud?

‘I should call the FAA,’ I thought, ‘that's harassing flight.’ (I don't guess they have a game warden at the FAA.)

My neighbor had a small jet in his back yard, and the helicopter was also buzzing it. By this time, my wife was watching the scene with me. Next thing I know, the jet was in the air (must’ve come with the vertical takeoff feature) at about the same height as the helicopter.

“I hope it doesn’t hit the house,” Sam said, but as it flew away, we heard a thud from the roof.

We ran out to the back yard. We didn't seem concerned about the helicopter any longer, so maybe it departed too. The yard and house now seemed to be our current house, and we inspected the roof for damage. Because of the recent hail, we have a nice new roof in real life, but in the dream, the roof was old and faded with a comically ghetto patch-job of all kinds of different materials and colors. For example, in one spot there was a tannish piece of linoleum with a faux tile look next to maybe a tar patch.

But I'm still a spring chicken!

I've been trying to duck it for a couple of years now, but it doesn't look like there's any way around it. I met with a surgeon today, and after reviewing MRI and CT studies, he recommends a laproscopic procedure to clean up bone spurs on my right hip and (we hope) a little tidying of the labrum.

The weirdest thing is I don't know how I did it. A few years ago, we owned a house on an acre-sized lot, and toward the end of push-mowing sessions, that hip seemed to become really tired. The worst incident was after—not during!—a street hockey game where I suddenly couldn't walk and had to use my stick as a cane. You'd think there'd be some nasty collision or fall or something to pin this on, but it really seemed to come out of the blue.

That's been a couple of years ago. Back then, I didn't know I had a likely tear and hoped that I could work through the condition. In my defense, the pain was only in certain positions, and I walk limp-free. Deep squats at the gym hurt, and I hope I didn't do additional damage trying to tough it out.

So I'm facing four to six weeks on crutches and several months of rehab. It's tough getting old.

Star Trek!

Our kids were at my mother-in-law's getting some grandma time, which meant Mommy and Daddy got to have a date night. I have a pretty cool wife, so she suggested going to see Star Trek!

When I was growing up, my dad and I enjoyed watching TOS and TNG (that's the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation for those outside the know) together. As I've gotten older, the old episodes that were once so exciting have become bland and sterile. The movie definitely had more edge to it! Maybe it was the corny inflections, but I never pictured Shatner's Jim Kirk ever bailing from classic 'Vette just before it went over a cliff at 80mph.

Watching the backstory develop was fun—a healthy Captain Pike even!—but seeing them all so young gave it a Starship Troopers feel. My wife later remarked that Sulu drawing a sword on the drill platform was very Power Rangers. Any name would have been better than the decidedly lame "Red Matter." Star Trek always was mildly statist in its outlook, and I cringed when law enforcement asked young Jim, "What is your name, citizen?"

I'd read Bo's blog post about continuity errors beforehand, but either he missed something in the movie (which I find hard to believe) or he very subtly avoided giving a spoiler. Rereading... No! I made a bad assumption! He hadn't yet seen the movie at press time!

The movie was conscious of continuity issues and used what should have been a clumsy device to sweep them all under the rug: Nero traveled back in time and thus created a parallel reality with a different history. (Think: git checkout -b.) Having been prepped by Doc Brown's repeated warnings about the dangers of changing the past, it was easy to accept. Now the writers have nearly complete creative freedom with the sequels that are sure to come.

This sleight-of-script has another subtle benefit: audiences now get to appreciate the series from the perspective of Spock, who became a living lexical closure!

A great flick! My wife, who was never any sort of Trekkie, enjoyed it too, and we both look forward to future installments. As the plot was wrapping up, I thought to myself, 'An old friend is back.'

Afterward, we took a short walk for dinner at Red Robin. I've never had bad service there, but they'd definitely kicked it up a notch—and not in the phony, minimum-pieces-of-flair sense: attentive, smiling, friendly, helpful. If you think recessions are all bad news, quit allowing Krugman to fill your mind with junk-economics.

Playing chess with Maddy

My four-year-old daughter wanted to play against the computer in Chess Titans. Observations:

• She plays an unorthodox opener: p-h4 and then continuing right-to-left, she advanced pawns one or two spaces (apparently at random).
• No concept of position.
• Her understanding of material advantage is better suited for checkers: a few times, she asked, "Do I have more of their people?"
• Her strategy is better suited for a first-person shooter. A couple of times, I tried to explain that she was making bad trades, but the appeal of capturing was irresistible.
• Knights on d2 and e2 were highly comforting.

Still, it's a start!

Kids say the darndest things

This morning on the way to school, my 8-year-old son and I were talking about his spelling words. One was investor, and I asked whether he knew what it meant.

"Is it someone who invents something?"

"No, that's an inventor. Hmm, let's see. Do you know what profit is?"

"Like the guy in Halo?"

Very touching short animation

I saw this video when my wife was in St. Louis at a baby shower for one of the girls she played volleyball with in college and my kids were at my mother-in-law's. So moving.