Hot ones

content/blog/wk10day6.md

@@ -1,7 +1,149 @@
 ---
-title: "Week 10, Saturday:"
+title: "Week 10, Saturday: Hot ones"
 date: 2024-10-05T21:55:00+02:00
-draft: true
 ---
 
-{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/todo.png" alt="Credit: " >}}
+{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/kushsessions-06.png" alt="Credit: KushSessions, YouTube" >}}
+
+This morning, Quinn and Liv get up early so that they can be in time for the Comic-Con in Zurich.
+I'm not much of an early bird today, nor any other day, so I snooze until 10:00. Marina is clearly
+also procastrinating, as she's still upstairs rummaging through some drawings and participating in
+Inktober. I'm sure she'll _eventually_ go to the Zurich [[popcon](https://zurichpopcon.ch/en)] :)
+
+In the morning I prepare the backing data for my article tomorrow. I have to do a bunch of loadtests
+of five different versions of the `sFlow` plugin. Neil has already announced it on vpp-dev@ so it's
+good for me to strike the iron while it's hot and follow up with some more in-depth details of what
+we're trying to do.
+
+I finish a stack of loadtests at 11:30 or so, and I have an outline of the narrative I'm going to
+tell. You see, in this sabbatical blog I just write a linear story of what I've done on a given day,
+which takes me about 15-20min or so each day. But an IPng article is a bit more involved: here, the
+order, wording, build-up and references really matter, to me at least.
+
+I know we'll be having lunch (and likely, dinner) at Brad and Cristina's place, so I keep it light
+with my food in the morning. I just make a toast sandwich with kasseler rib and mustard. There will
+be wings in my belly, soon enough.
+
+Usually we take the car to BBQ-Brad (which is his name in my household); but seeing as I am
+intending on drinking at least one $unit of wine, I decide to take the bike instead. Yesterday I
+thought ahead, and plugged it in. It's fully charged and ready to go! The bike ride over is pretty
+fast, it's only twenty minutes or so, and almost none of it is on public roads, almost all the way
+it's a beautiful gravel bike path up from here to Bassersdorf, then along a little river, and
+finally straight past LSZH Runway 32, which I've seen already quite a bit in the simulator, yaay!
+
+I arrive and Brad is in excellent spirits. I haven't seen him in months, as he has hiked the
+[[Kungsleden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kungsleden)] trail from Narvik southbound. I saw a
+picture of his belt size before-and-after; and yes I have to see he's in good shape! Cristina is
+also home and I'm a bit sad that we had made all of these promises to one another that she'd come
+over for dinner and what-not, but yet, here we are two months later :)
+
+Barbecue-Brad has prepped twenty chicken wings in the _sous-vide_, so really all we need to do is
+grill them for a nice brown crispy skin. We heat up the BBQ and chat, we have a lot to catch up on:
+his trails and tribulations, and my sabbatical and what it does to me (all good things, I swear,
+except maybe calorie intake!). We pre-heat the oven at 110C so that we can keep our wings hot. 
+
+Game plan:
+*   We have ten hotsauces, varying from baby strengh to mule-kicking strength. I brought not one but
+_two_ Last Dab's from the actual [[HotOnes](https://www.youtube.com/@FirstWeFeast)] channel. These
+are 1Mio Scoville units, at least. Brad also has a few from his travels. We line them up.
+*   We will do two batches of ten wings. First batch is 'warmup', second batch is 'come to Jesus'.
+*   Each pair of wings will be tossed in a tupperware box.
+*   We will cheers to each wing. We have to celebrate the sacrifice these little chickens made for
+us, as well as the sacrifice we'll be making to the Porcelain Throne tomorrow.
+*   We will also take a picture and share tasting notes for each wing-set devoured.
+
+Simple, right? As I prep the eating location, Brad comes inside with weak-ass white chicken wings. I
+sternly demand he goes back outside. You see, I want the whole wing to be brown, not just the
+top and bottom. Although I do get yelled at a bit, perhaps also called an asshole, Brad does comply.
+
+The wing eating process is hilarious. I tried to order the bottles from mild to strong, but on
+bottle number five, very clearly so, I mess up. It's a hotsauce called _Hellfire_ (pictured
+eventually below **after** the Last Dabs, ruh-roh!). I don't quite know what happened, but it was so
+incredibly hot that my face just melted right off. Brad was in somewhat of a panic, about to tap
+out, but drinking copious amounts of milk did help. Holy mother or Pearl, that thing sucked.
+
+But, we get a little break as we prep the second batch. Now it's for realz, as the hot sauces that
+are left are the big ones from my fridge. A Blair's Megadeath, one of Brad's Ghost Pepper from
+Half-Moon-Bay, but also (luckily for us), one pleasant one which has almost no heat at all. Finally,
+the Last Dab from [[Heatonist.com](https://heatonist.com/)]; and to top it off, a *second* Last Dab.
+We called them the First Last Dab, and the Last Last Dab.
+
+{{< video src="/media/vdo/IMG_5801_20.46.12.mp4" alt="First and Last Last Dabs" >}}
+
+Cristina comes to visit us for the last few. I am pretty sure she's dodged a bullet there, as she
+_merely_ has to participate in our _First Last Dab_ and the _Last Last Dab_, because I think her
+head may have popped straight off, had she eaten this retched _Hellfire_.
+
+{{< image src="/img/brain.png" width="8em" float="left" alt="brain" >}}
+
+By the way, for those hotsauce afficianados out there: I tend to only eat hot sauces that have
+natural chillies in them, and if so, I can stomach them all. However, sometimes these vendors just
+add chemical capsaicin and in the ingredient list mention _chilli pepper extract_, but that's no
+fun. In my fridge there is two thirds of a bottle of [[Satan's
+Blood](https://www.scovilla.com/de/hot-sauces/76/satans-blood-chile-extract-40ml)] left, which is
+literally 100% pure chemical capsaicin dissolved in vinegar and that's .. it. That stuff is
+diabolical, as its name suggests, and will kill a full grown rhinoceros. Zero stars on yelp!
+
+But, as Sean Evans says, we made it and now it's time to roll out the red carpet. Brad takes me out
+for a drive in his new toy. The weather is beautiful out and although I'm an EV driver, I definitely
+have not lost the appreciation for a petrol sports car. I love listening to the pop-pop and put-put
+sounds of this engine, and we take her out for a photo shoot at a church on the hill. You can see
+one of those pics in the gallery for today.
+
+Once we come back, we hang out in the yard and enjoy the last bit of sun. I brought some _Limousin_
+steak with me and, hey guess what, we'll barbecue it on BBQ-Brad's barbecue. So we fire it up again,
+and mind you, it's a coal fired grill, and from the greenhouse we select a few ripe tomatoes. I'm
+quite jealous of this process: having vegetables and fruits in your back yard, it's simply divine.
+
+As Brad and I laugh at each others complete inability to make a proper diamond shape on the meat,
+Cristina chops some of the tasty toms. One of them is quite funky, and it's called [[Brad's Atomic
+Grape](https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-brad-s-atomic-grape)], no relation to the human Brad who
+lives at this address. Together with some potato wedges, we sit down for a nice home cooked meal. 
+
+Cristina likes to bake cakes and tortes. And I appreciate how she does this, because I'm not
+particularly a sweet-tooth. She however minimizes the sugar used, and her apple pie is really good.
+Its apples are tart - and come from the garden mind you - and the crust is crispy and sweet but not
+overly so. She also offers a cheese platter, but by now I have had about 4'500 calories of food so I
+tell her to get back to me after a few bottles of wine.
+
+We sit on the patio until late in the evening, and we talk about this-and-that, but we do permit
+ourselves to take a small detour into audiophilia. The sound in this room of the house is incredibly
+pure. I love it, so I ask what's on the wall. Brad is happy to go at length on the
+[[Klipsch](https://www.klipsch.com/uk/products/r-40m-bookshelf-speakers)] speakers and sub. We
+listen to our favorite 'audio calibration song', for him Norah Jones, for me Mr Oizo, and it's
+really enjoyable.
+
+Before I know it, a few hours have passed, and Brad has opened a third bottle of vino. At this point
+I remind Cristina of our conversation after dinner, and she leaps up from the rocking chair and
+Hell-Yeah's into the kitchen, grabbing a few metric tonnes of cheeses from the fridge. That'll pair
+nicely with this Rioja, thankyouverymuch. At this point, my eating habit is somewhat debaucherous,
+and I indulge in a few nice bits of cheese and bread.
+
+But now it's 23:00 and I should be going home. So happy to remind myself that almost the entire
+bikeride is not on public roads, although a little bit of it is through a military domain. I make
+the bike ride home in about twenty minutes, and in one piece: I'm a responsible bike-rider, I swear!
+
+At 23:30, I take a hot shower to put my core temperature back in the healthy range, and I turn in
+for the night.
+
+
+## Pictures of the Day                                                                                                                                
+                                                                                                                                                      
+{{< gallery-category >}}                                                                                                                              
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1816.JPG" caption="Biking over to Brad and Cristina's house, I stopped at the tail end of the Zurich Airport main runway and plane-spotted a bit." >}}      
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/route.png" caption="The route I took from my place to Brad's is a lovely bike ride, mostly on bike paths and away from cars and other traffic." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1817.JPG" caption="Selfie of Brad, Cristina and I; under the pergola (or: gazebo) in their back yard" >}}   
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1824.JPG" caption="Brad is already having fun with these wings, and we haven't even started yet" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1827.JPG" caption="In the rebound, the chicken wings on the barbecue are golden brown and crispy" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1834.JPG" caption="This is the lineup of hot sauces we ate today - we re-ordered them post-factum." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/vehicle.png" caption="Close up of Brad's new toy at a quaint church in Schaffhausen, Swizerland. No, I'm not at liberty to tell you. Don't ask." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1849.JPG" caption="A beautiful tree at the edge of Brad and Cristina's property in Winkel, Switzerland. I love the red/brown/orange colors against the green tree to its right" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1850.JPG" caption="I grabbed a handful of ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse. Those will fit nicely in my belly." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1854.JPG" caption="The Limousin Steak is fantastic, as always. Well done, Brad and Pim!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1856.JPG" caption="Cristina made an apple pie, which tasted yummy. Well done, Cristina!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-05/IMG_1857.JPG" caption="We end off the evening with a few sips of wine and this cheese platter" >}}
+{{< /gallery-category >}}                                                  
+                                                                           
+{{< gallery-modal >}}                                                      
+{{< gallery-script >}}                                                     
+