Busy weekend

Current music: DI.fm Chillout
I’m not terribly fond of weekends where you have no decompress time.

Saturday morning dawned; Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest headed out to deal with the chickens. I decided to try fixing some pancakes for when they got back, and botched them totally (my brain-fart was forgetting about the self-rising flour). With no milk, I used the remnants of a can of condensed milk plus water to thin it out, then tossed in some self-rising flour hoping to correct the mistake. Didn’t work. Not even the boys ate them.

So we rushed out the door to a 50^th wedding anniversary for some friends of the in-laws. It was a nice outing overall; starting at a Ryan’s, then we ended up at one of their houses where we shot a couple rounds of pool and shot the breeze with people we haven’t seen much of. From there we went straight to a Christmas party put on by a couple at church; I enjoyed some spiked eggnog and we all chowed down again.

This morning, I got dressed and sat down with the iBook for the first time in several days. Her Imperial Highness came out, literally looked down her nose at me, and ordered me to get the boys up and go over to the church early to vacuum the sanctuary and take the greens out of the window (there was a wedding this afternoon). Ooooooookayyyy... first off, she certainly knows that getting the boys up doesn’t go with getting anywhere early. Of course, The Boy had a friend over (we wish he had more friends like EJ, but that’s a different story), so of course he had to have an attitude.

First trip upstairs: “OK, I’m getting up.”
Second trip: “I’m not going to church, I’ll go help at the chicken houses.”
Third trip: “I don’t have to get up.”

At that point, I told him that he could remember that when he was walking to work and back today, then asked EJ if he wanted to come to church with me. He did, they both got moving, I dropped The Boy off at the chicken houses and grabbed the church keys out of Her Imperial Highness’s purse (another minor detail), then took care of things at church.

After church, we ended up getting some pizza, had about an hour and a half before going out again with the in-laws. Then SWMBO decided the living room had to be cleaned up (and it’s mostly her stuff), but I got a reprieve to pick up M.A.E. from work.

Now it’s bedtime. I can’t wait to get back to the office and relax a little...

Lunchtime blogging

Second night in a row that I couldn’t get to the computer — I was mucking out the gutters in the outbuilding, by hand, in the dark cold rain, last night. Blog stuff is backing up, so I compromised on my self-imposed “no blogging at work” rule and decided to post all this junk at lunch.

The NWS was a little more optimistic about last night’s weather than they should have been — they said we would be well clear of any significant freezing rain. WRONG! Power glitched at the house and rang a phone once, this morning, but everything else seems to be OK. I disconnected the DSL box at home just to make sure. Going to work was a bit of an adventure; the roads were only wet (not icy) but power was out in town and several traffic lights were dark on the highway. And how the juice managed to stay on at FAR Manor is a puzzlement. At work, the power had glitched some time last night, long enough to shut off my G3. I ran the disk repair stuff and got to work.

It’s still this cold steel rain (phrase borrowed from Pink Floyd, it’s perfect) outside, so I dug into the more dubious reaches of my overhead bin for lunch. I have several packs of ramen for days like this, but I only used a pinch of the beef-flavored sodium packet and opted instead for this “Kyo-Green® dietary supplement” packet that’s been sitting on my desk for like forever. Oh, the ingredients sounded soooo appetizing: barley grass powder, wheat grass powder, Bulgarian Chlorella (an algae grown in mineral springs, yum), cooked brown rice, and Pacific kelp (more yum). I’m not a picky eater, so when I say it was “edible,” adjust for your own level of picky. I figured worst-case, I’d be out 20 cents for the ramen and I could still go out. I’m scarfing some potato chips and some quality candy & nuts that the employer handed out yesterday as a side dish. We’ll see if I end up with with a major download event this afternoon....

Thanksgiving, and giving thanks

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving where such is celebrated. We did pretty well today; lots of chow and laughter. My contributions to the spread at the in-laws were challah bread (using this recipe, and a sardine spread which I threw together. If anyone else wants to try it, here’s a recipe:

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Sardine spread
1 tin sardines, drained
3 oz. cream cheese (approx)
1 large basil leaf (I used two, which made it kind of strong)
3 oregano leaves
1 sprig of parsley
pinch of thyme & rosemary
(substitute herbs as needed for availability and taste)

Remove the stems from the herb leaves. Chop finely (food processor works great for this). Add the cream cheese. Remove backbones from sardines and add the sardines (not the backbones... but you knew that). Blend/process until completely mixed. Serve with crackers.

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What am I thankful for this year?

As with every year (day) this millennium so far, I’m thankful for having a job. These last two years I’ve been thankful that the job, as crazy as it drives me sometimes, provides good medical insurance and meets at least our basic needs.

I’m thankful for having a family and friends, both local and online, who care.

I’m thankful for having an imagination and a place to let it run.

I’m thankful for living in America. Bush-league has damaged it, but hasn’t broken it. Better times are coming.

Eating Season

Current music: St. Elmo’s Fire – John Parr
It occurred to me this morning that the two months starting with Hallowe’en and ending with New Year’s Day could be called “Eating Season,” at least in the US, Canada, and maybe Europe. Why do we have so many holidays at this time of year that involve candy, big meals, or both?

It actually makes sense if you look at it on an instinctual level. This is the time of year when non-tropical creatures are working on storing up fuel for the winter. Winter fat has a couple of survival advantages: one, you have a reserve when regular food gets hard to come by; two, fat insulates, so you don’t burn as many calories to stay warm. Calories, after all, are a measure of heat... although a dietetic calorie is 1000 “chemical” calories (or a “kilocalorie”). I don’t know why. So it makes sense that we, on a sub-conscious level, would look for excuses to load up on the chow this time of year.

Nowadays, we have other ways to survive the winter. Grocery stores are well-stocked with fresh produce from South America, we have nice warm houses (if we don’t forget to order fuel for the furnace, of course), and most of us have warm jackets if and when we do have to go outside. But racial habits, built on over thousands of years, are the hardest of all to break. So this year, I'm not going to worry about how much I eat during Eating Season. If I feel led to try a little of everything, I will. A little of everything. I’ll try to get outside more over the winter, letting Mother Nature burn those calories for me.

Death by Number 33

We went to one of the local Mexican restaurants last night (there are two in town, and two more in the retail district — people here like their tacos, I guess). Since I was on the way, they ordered #33 (chili relleno, tostada, quesadilla) for me. The barking started soon after leaving the restaurant; Daughter Dearest made the mistake of riding with me and I got to “share.”

It gets worse: the wife tells me the snoring (from both ends) went on most of the night and she ended up sleeping in the living room. I was even more oblivious than usual.

It continues to get worse: they haven’t completely gone away yet, over 24 hours later.

Gnarly-Top Wheat Bread

I really need to start adding a little more water to the dough when I put the bread machine on dough cycle. Quite often, the dough is good & tight, and I have to prod and pull and stretch to get it to fill the pan. Tonight’s wheat bread needed some extra water — not only was it on the dry side, it was bogging the machine down to the point where the motor wouldn’t turn without some help, and that was after I added more water.

Naturally, those finger-pokes and so on don’t flow or rise out of the dough after it goes in the pan, so the result looks like the above. It’s still good though. I’ll cut it up first thing in the morning. Right now, it’s bed time!