Make Your Own Olives

The local Greek Festival is this weekend (September 3 - 5) in Belmont, California. In the spirit of this event, I thought I would post some of my experiences around olive curing. As you know, olives are a delicacy in Greece...

I have been growing and curing olives for the last few years for my friends and family. I had two small trees in my backyard and they grew a small amount of tiny, but tasty olives.

We moved a couple of months ago, and the new place is void of olive trees. So, I looked and looked and found this great farm in the Central Valley where you can buy olives for curing (or olive oil) for $14/10 pounds. The farm says it should be ready to ship in mid-September.

I have used a great recipe for my formula for curing. It takes about 3 - 4 weeks in total.

If you're an olive enthusiast, I encourage you to order 10 pounds or so and experiment with your own personal olive concoctions. You can get some nice mason jars at your local Safeway or Albertsons to store the olives in and let them ferment a bit. Home cured olives make great gifts or host gifts for dinner parties.

Just a little tip from the KroBlog.

How Long Should I Be Grounded?

I am hoping that this entry will finally inspire the flood of comments and feedback that my blog so clearly deserves.

So here's the scoop.... My wife is on the nest. We're due with our third child on October 5th. In recent weeks, I have had the opportunity to travel for business - London, LA and Seattle.

My wife has requested that I extricate myself from extensive travel as of September 1st. After some BRIEF (.25 seconds) consideration, I agreed that this seemed sound and reasonable. Others have disagreed, claiming that one should be grounded only two or three weeks before the due date and as long as you were only a couple of hours away (flight time), one could even extend that out closer to due date.

What is the recommended date to stay close to home?

Baby Names

My wife and I will be welcoming our 3rd child into our family (and this world) in early October. Like most parents, we have spent countless hours pouring over books with pages and pages of potential names for our new family member. It can be both fun and stressful choosing the perfect name for a person you have never met or seen before.

While the books we have used do an OK job, two online resources offer a more interesting look at American names over the years:

- The Social Security Administration web site gives hard numbers on the popularity of all names through the decades: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

- Another great resource is The Baby Name Wizard: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html This offers a great graphical interface along with some cool features - click on a name you like and it will give a graphical representation of the popularity of any name throughout the last 120 years.

Have fun!

Kro is Stalked by a Bird of Prey

I was walking my dog, Curly, last night down at La Entrada School in Menlo Park when I got the distinct feeling that I was being watched. The sun had just gone down, so I got a little creeped out when the feeling came over me.

Much to my chagrin, the thing that was stalking me was nothing but a simple owl. I thought to myself, "While the owl is certainly a bird of prey, there is no way an owl would attack a 155 pound male with an 80 pound dog...right?"

Allow me to say that the aforementioned chagrin lasted all of about 15 seconds. The owl's wing-span was a solid 5 feet and he was definitely circling Curly and me. I started getting really worried after the owl had circled me about 7 or 8 times.

At this point, I stopped and started waving my arms and yelling, which the owl mistook for me "waving him in," and he began to dive bomb just a few feet above my head. Now my heart was pounding and of course Curly was oblivious to the whole thing. So, being a relatively intelligent person, I ran as fast as I could towards the closest building. The owl was persistent and he continued to circle my dog and I as we ran the 90 seconds to safety.

He finally gave up but only after 4 minutes of playtime and circling me 30 - 40 times.

Damn that owl. Damn him!