Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Comet Croissanterie

A few weeks ago, I found a day-old pastry on the break table at work. I ate it, because the diet I have stuck to for three years has been impossible to follow the last few months.

Even a day old it was the best pastry I have ever had. I immediately set out to find where it came from. One department-wide email later I found that it came from Comet Croissanterie and Creamery in Kirkwood. Take a normal pastry and make it more flaky and laminated, and then toast it or deep-fry it or something to make it extra-crispy. I became intent on having another, because this was no normal pastry.

Attempt 1: This place is in Kirkwood, and happily the next Saturday I was in Kirkwood picking someone up from the train station. I was early, and I set off to get to the Croissanterie on foot, but I realized I couldn't get there and back in time for the train.

Attempt 2: The next day, I had all but convinced Gary to go there, but then he balked at going to Kirkwood, 24 miles away.

Attempt 3: The next week I traveled there specifically, and I was three miles away when Siri alerted me they would be closing in two minutes. 48 miles round trip, no pastry.

Attempt 4: I looked up the closing hours (noon!), and got there at about 11:30. I walked up to the door! Victorious! Croissants would be mine! No! Door does not open! Door has this sign!

"Or until sold out." I suppose they've been selling out often enough they officially close an hour earlier and then sometimes even earlier than that. Another 48 miles wasted.

Attempt 5: The next day, Sunday, I was up at 6:45, dressed, ready to go, and Gary wheedled, "I can go with you if you wait." I gave him half an hour, and he was up and moving in time. So, 96 miles into this endeavor, I decided to given it another 48 and drive there one more time.

And they were there! And open! And we got one of everything:

(Not pictured: a breakfast sandwich and half of the work pastry, which ended up being an Almond Bear Claw, only served on weekends, which was a "croissant wrapped around homemade sweet almond paste." And deep fried or something, I don't know, it was heavenly. Also shown: some kind of off-the menu muffin, a croissant, a pain au chocolate, and a strawberry-rhubarb turnover.)

Two things on the web menu were not there: the cinnamon rolls and the biscuits and gravy, which astonishingly did not sell well. I would think if one were decadent enough to frequent a pastry shop, one would not draw the line at biscuits and gravy.

Perhaps because it was lamb gravy? Now I really want biscuits and lamb gravy.

Car Key

Last Wednesday I dawdled away my last fifteen minutes at work: went to the bathroom, checked in with friends, divvied up my hours worked and tracked them in the computer system. This is my daily Farewell To Work Dance. The last dance step is snagging my car key - and - I couldn't find it.

I assumed I had just done the car key snag early, so I retraced my steps: I checked my pockets, bathroom stall, friends, laptop bag - no key.

I had to assume I had dropped it in the parking garage that morning. And a Mini key lying next to a Mini car - who could resist that temptation? (Besides Gary - one time we were in a closed used-car lot and found a car key on the ground that did indeed open a nearby car.  We just sat in the car for a bit, and then returned the key through the service department drop-slot with a note that said the car cornered well.)

Since I imagined someone finding the key by the car then driving merrily away, my anxiety immediately bought a new car (fully electric). I didn't mourn the Mini for a minute. But before I contacted the authorities, or even went out to the parking garage to see the burnt rubber and tread marks leading away from my empty spot, I retraced all my steps from when I hit the building at nine in the morning.

I rounded the corner by the first room I'd been in that day and shouted, "OH. THANK. GOD." Because there was my car key, sitting calmly in the middle of the table. Electric car fantasies went dark when I saw my familiar key fob.

A friend within earshot called out, "Was that your car key?" 

I staggered out of the room, "IT HAS BEEN IN HERE SINCE NINE IN THE MORNING!" I said, aghast.

He replied, "Yeah, we wondered whose key it was."

I covered my car key with kisses and I've kept a close eye on it since.

 

Improvement: Interior

Someday I will have to update the interior of the house. The house is like me: even if I exercised and lost weight I would still be old and unattractive. Even if tried to update my house -- paint over the stenciling, remove the Waverly wallpaper -- it will still be an eighties house with a kitchen visible from the great room / beamed ceiling / fireplace. It would be like trying to update a house with a sunken living room: you’d always expect Mary Tyler Moore to wave at you through the kitchen pass-through.

Some maintenance needs to be done on the inside. In particular, I want another Toto toilet, so enamored am I of the first one. I am crushed every time Gary hogs our one Toto toilet and I have to do my business on the original crappy crapper. So low to the ground. Such tardy flushing. I barely feel human using it.

That does mean an update to our time capsule master bathroom - virginal and untouched this 30 years. Never been painted. Builder toilet and lighting and tile. I confess that a little bit of me feels that the whole house will collapse if we pull that thread.

 

 

Improvement: Side Yard

We are staying close to home again this vacation season, so that means we will again invest in home improvements instead of memories. The driveway absolutely needs to be resurfaced or replaced, and if I put in a large, slow-growing evergreen, a mugo pine perhaps, the front bed will be done.

The side yard and back yard also need to be attended to. I am at a loss on the side yard. We've had a side yard like our neighbors: a bed extending a few feet from the side of our house, only ours had the added attraction of a rotting wood border. 

I have been looking at a lot of Pinterest images of side yards. I do not need a spectacular side yard: just a place to keep peonies and flowering plants and one evergreen to cover up the spot where the hail dinged the siding. 

I want something between this, which everyone has:

and this Pinterest extravaganza:

Cleaning Regimen

My cleaning regimen is that I clean when people are coming over. There was a brief episode last week when we thought the tax preparer was coming by and I hurriedly cleaned the public spaces: the guest bathroom and the great room. 

However, yesterday I was in the non-guest bathroom, shaving my feet, as I do, and I was too enthusiastic with my pedicure and a bit of blood got on the floor. Wiping up the bit of blood set off a domino effect and half an hour later the bathroom was spotless. 

When Gary noticed the cleaning noises had stopped, he appeared in the bathroom doorway and asked. “Why are you cleaning? Is someone coming over?”

Sweater

I spied a young thin woman at work wearing a very eye-catching asymmetrical sweater. It had ME written all over it. (Or rather, unabridged, it had LOOK AT ME written all over it. The fringe, the asymmetry, the cowl neck were all designed to grab attention.)

I complimented her, and immediately stalked that sweater online. In a few hours I had found it, surprisingly in my size, in China, and I purchased for $13. I did not feel good about it.

I suspected I would never see my $13 or the sweater, and I got the email the next day saying they couldn't fill the order. Surprisingly, a few days later, I got my $13 back.

For a few days after that the sweater became my Idée Fixe. By the end of the week I had plans to buy it in a smaller size, locally sourced, then take it apart, make a larger pattern, reverse-engineer it out of t-shirt material, fringe the t-shirt material, and then add BEADS, yes thread BEADS through the fringe YES BEEADSSSS, and thankfully Amazon intervened and said, "Recommended for you!" They recommended The Sweater, from another source, and in my size. There it was. Well, still in China, that's where it was specifically, but eventually it was mine.

Strangely, the first day I wore it no one even looked at me, but a week later I tried again and three friends and a stranger complimented my new sweater. I suppose my air of "Screw you guys, I LIKE this sweater" helped me carry it off the second time around.

Spring Cleaning

I understand why people wait until spring to clean. Everything looks so filthy in the winter light anyway, so why bother? You clean, and then the sun shines a floodlight at floor level and every speck of dust casts a foot-long shadow.

But last week I was outside and the air was full of oxygen, and I thought, "I could go back home and clean." But I did not, because the sun was setting.

That made me wonder, what are the perfect conditions for spring cleaning?

1. Your house has to be reasonably clean already, because spring cleaning is devoted to crazy stuff like dusting the baseboards and door tops.
2. The house must be filled with spring sunlight, and ALL the interior lights must be on, the better to see the filth.
3. Daffodils must be up so you can place a vase of them on your table.
4. It cannot have rained in the last day, because wet footprints will mar your shiny floor.
5. No one can have mowed in the last day, again, because you don't want grass bits on your floor.
6. It cannot be too hot. Eighty degrees is too hot.
7. It has to be a weekend, because you won't get the full sun during work hours in the spring.

And of course, this is why I haven't done any spring cleaning for ...let me think ... five years.

Cookbook

So here is my 1,000+ page America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. (Sans dust jacket: dust jackets are bogus).

I went through the index and started putting post-its on all the pages that interested me.

I used up the entire pad.

I am very excited. 

Sin Upon Sin

8:45 am: apple for breakfast, because I am visiting the new Dapper Donut mini-donut franchise and I don't want to be hungry. Just one donut.

9:00: Minimum order of donuts is three. I order three. Gary balks at three. Gary overrides me and orders 24.

9:01: Three hot mini-donuts for brunch.

9:02: Eight hot mini-donuts for brunch.

12:00: All the leftover Chinese for lunch, because all the wicked foods need to be gone by tomorrow when the diet starts anew.

4:00: Hazelnut ice cream bar that's been in the freezer for months because Gary won't eat it.

5:30: One leftover slice of pizza that MyFitnessPal says is 490 calories, which seems steep, especially since we got the thin crust, St. Louisans that we are.

It is 10:19. I am going to go eat the last bit of garbage food that is floating around the house (a frozen Lindor truffle) and then go to bed and digest this 1,500 calories into the half a pound it is destined to be.

Progress of Bath Face

Here is where we last left the Face of Gary in the Roman Baths:

I scribbled away with the marine blue to get the values right.  This is how it looks now - his face needs to get a wash of pink so it isn't so blue:

His mouth still isn't right. He just looks cranky, not pulling a face like he is in the original photo below:

The statue's mouth is wrong as well. I think there needs to be a lot more shadow on the statue's upper lip and a shade more on Gary's.

I meant this one to be much looser, more alla prima, but it didn't happen. Since I did that one teacup value study it appears that I don’t move on until I get the darks right. So that means just like the teacups, it won’t really be right until the highlights go on, and that’s the last step.

George Bernard PShaw

What’s your opinion of George Bernard Shaw? My opinion just plummeted in half an hour last night.

Here's what happened. I thought of that line, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

I reminded myself that George Bernard Shaw said that. Then I figuratively patted myself on the head for knowing that. Then I wondered, “What play is that from? Major Barbara? I bet it is. I’ll look that up.” 

Nope. It isn’t. I don’t know why I thought GBS said that: the Internet said definitively it was said first by Irina Dunn,  then made popular by Gloria Steinem. 

Annoyed, I wondered, “Why did I think that was Shaw? I suppose because he has strong female characters. You know, like how he was interested in phonetics, so he’s the guy who proposed you could use G-H-O-T-I to spell ‘fish’.”

Looked that up. Again, not George Bernard Shaw, but at least it’s often credited to him instead of its originator, Charles Ollier.

So, I had started the night thinking I knew five things about GBS: 1. Paired fish and bicycles (wrong), 2. Invented creative spelling of fish (wrong), 3. Wrote Pygmalion (confident about this one), 4. Wrote Major Barbara (checked and verified), 5. Wrote Passion, Poison and Petrifaction (hard to believe)

Back in my Senior year of high school, I told Mom I was going to be in a production of Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw. It was a small role, the Landlady, but it was all written out phonetically so the cockney accent was easy. Here I am in costume in a typically awkward pose (I'm facing forward):

My prom date Virgil played Adolphus.

Mom cornered me after she saw our performance. “I thought you said George Bernard Shaw wrote that!”

“He did!”

“What, did he write it in junior high school? That play was awful.”

You can go here and judge for yourself.

Last night, because I was already questioning everything I thought I knew about GBS, I double-checked and he did indeed write it, as an adult, the same year he wrote Major Barbara. He wrote it to raise funds for charity, though, and dashed it off in a few weeks.

So, that is why my option of him took a nose-dive in one night. He isn’t responsible for two clever quotes I’d attributed to him, and I re-read the horrible P,P,&P play. Not the man I (erroneously) gave him credit for.

Crust, Continued

Of all the crusts I have made since my big crust breakthrough, I would say all told only 40 percent of them were good. Most were sandy, or tough, or tender to the point of dissolving. I just could not get a reliable result even though I felt the raw dough was consistently the same. 

This weekend, just when I was planning to make quiche, I watched America’s Test Kitchen and The Ladies were recommending we take a new approach to pie crust: a food processor.

”Done that,” I yawned, “and it was not good.” I am a purist.

I ignored the recipe until they grated some butter and froze it. 

I sat up. “What was that again?” It was almost like the frozen butter dots I wanted last year.

The Ladies explained that the way you you make this processor crust is that you combine two doughs: one for tenderness and stability and another for flake, instead of trying to make one crust that can do both and always erring to far on one side: too stable or too flaky. 

The next day I made two batches, one with unbleached flour and one with bleached, and the unbleached one was significantly easier to roll out, so it won.

Looookit. Yum.

Here you go. I really recommend you watch the episode of America’s Test Kitchen if you want the science and the The Ladies amusing commentary.

• Take 10 Tbls cold unsalted butter. Grate off 2 Tbls and freeze, then cube the rest.
• Weigh 3.75 oz all purpose unbleached flour and add 1 Tbls sugar and 1/2 tsp salt.
• Put the flour mixture in a food processor and pulse twice.
• Add cubed butter and process for about 30 seconds until it turns into a ball. 
• Take that ball out and break it into pieces and put them back around the blade.
• Sprinkle 2.5 oz flour on top and then pulse five times to make the dough incorporated and crumbled.
• Take the crumbly mixture, put it in a glass bowl, and add the shredded frozen butter.
• Stir in 2 Tbls ice water.
• Press the mix with a spatula to judge if it seems rollable or if it needs another tablespoon of water. If it does, add an extra 1-2 Tbls ice water.
• Make into a tight 5 inch disk, wrap in cellophane wrap and rest in fridge 2 hours (yes! surprising!) to 2 days.
• Sit the disc out for ten minutes, then roll it and put it in the pie pan.
• Rest in fridge 30min before baking at 350.

 

Latest Oil Painting

My latest painting attempt: I want to reproduce this photo of Gary in Bath:

So far, it looks like this:

They had to cozy up to go from the landscape photo to the square canvas. I sketched the outline in paint before I decided I might want to glaze instead of alla prima. Next step: I need to shade Gary's face.

New Apollo 11 Documentary

Gary is a still a little sick, so I left him at home while I went to watch the new Apollo 11 documentary. 

Summary: Do you get excited when you hear there are lost episodes of The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy? This is The Moon: the Lost Episodes. Remember that beautiful footage of rocket stages dropping away into space? Evidently NASA lost the equally stunning film of the Eagle docking with the command module, and Buzz getting out of the LEM, and now it’s all in this movie along with Kissinger greeting the astronauts and astronauts shaving in space and Michael Collins and his jaunty mustache. Dazzling.

Detail:

• I saw it on an IMAX screen, from a seat in the third row. That was actually great, because it filled my entire field of vision and all the coughing and germs stayed behind me in row six where the good seats were. 
• It was a little exhausting because I had to keep looking left to right to catch everything. I gobbled that movie up with my eyes.
• I was also exhausted because every time there was a photo of a crowd of people I had to scan over every face for technical father Jerry. It sounds pitiful, but he could have been there. Really, he worked there at that time.
• I have always thought that when I was five, Jerry pushed me out of Mission Control during our tour of NASA, but my brother contends it was the computer room, and evidently he is right. There is an amazing dolly shot of Mission Control, and the exterior is not where I was told that girls were not allowed.
• Seriously, though, how do you LOSE film of a billion dollar space mission? Did you confuse it with the footage of all the other moon missions going on at the time? 

Disease, Continued

If I have been sick in the last two weeks, and you have been sick as well, then God help you.

Our conversation goes one of two ways:

You: *Sneezes*
Me: "OH DO YOU HAVE A COLD?" (Makes Sign of Cross, leaves)

or

You: "Ugh, I just got over the worst cold last week."
Me: "Oh! I just had a cold. Did it start with insomnia, and then the next day did you have congestion for a few hours, but then that night your nose started running non-stop for the next two days, but only on one side, and then you puked and had epic diarrhea and then you felt better?"
You: "Yes!" (or sometimes, "Noooo ... ?")

I will always try to see if we had the same virus, not to find which of us is Patient Zero, but to bond. 

One time I had this conversation:

Him: "Sorry I missed the meeting last week, but I was out with the stomach flu."
Me: "Oh! I just got over the stomach flu. Did yours start with distinctive, echoing gut noises, and after that did you keep getting dizzy because all your bowel contents, like, repositioned really fast?"
Him: "Yes! It was just like that!"

And you know what, I forgave that guy for almost certainly giving my that stomach flu, because the enemy of my virus is my friend.

Guitar Again

Since I reached the end of the teacup painting, I returned to my guitar after a week's hiatus. I intended to return earlier, but I made a delicious meal of thinly sliced pork tenderloin, sliced caramelized onions, and caramelized apples. What does that have to do with the guitar, some of you ask. Some of you do not prepare meals. Those who make the meals know what happened. I played the mandolin too enthusiastically.

Not this mandolin.

This mandoline.

It bit a gouge in my thumb, and yet I did not stop until I filleted my index finger knuckle two minutes later. Of course, in both cases when it bit into me I stopped immediately, so all the flaps of flesh were still attached to my body instead of in my dinner.

And yes, I know, who is injured by a mandoline twice in a row? One is wounded, so one stops, or slows down, or something. In my defense, the first bite was just a nip. I did stop entirely after the second incident, which involved hands held over my head and Neosporin and gauze. Gary had to be waved off. He was quite concerned, and he didn't even see the flow of blood.

It was on the thumb and index finger of my right hand, so no guitar finger-picking for me for a week.

That means my muscle memory had a week to establish, or set, or whatever magic thing it does, and it would seem that now I can think the three variations of the C chord and one G chord and my hands play them without conscious thought.

And, I have been eating a tasty pork tenderloin melange all week. Can't taste the blood at all.

High Pressure Trivia

Friend #3 and I were invited to a trivia match by Friend Anne and her new team at work. I went in thinking it was very nice to be invited to trivia by, essentially, a group of strangers (plus Anne). When we got there we discovered that Anne, #4, and I were there as ringers, specifically invited to put a W in their column. They were very nice and paid for our seats and our food. 

I did better than usual. When no one else could answer, I knew who invented the steel plow blade (John Deere) and the location of the world’s largest bat (Louisville, KY), I identified the HP logo sans initials, and I knew Sopranos was the first HBO show to win an Emmy - though Friend #3 questioned my answer, and stubbornly talked me out of it. I was robbed of that answer, but still we lost by three points, not just by one.

We were in the lead until one of the final rounds, in which we were asked to identify all the McDonald’s mascots. It was brutal. I actually joked that the green blob character was O’Grimace, and if anyone had written that down we might have only lost by two points.

I felt bad we didn’t get the win, especially since this was our first outing as Trivia Hired Guns.

Teacups: Done, Because I Have Run Out of Patience

I am done (so so done) with the teacups.

It is odd. The teacups seem to follow you with their eyes! No, but they do look very different depending on the lighting and the orientation. I hated it in the basement, I liked it upstairs in the kitchen, and I like it much more when it is sideways.

Usually when I turn something sideways, the flaws jump right into view. I think I like this one sideways because it puts the middle of the left teacup in the optical center, and the middle of the left teacup is the best part. Only, I grew tired of the gold-on-blue pattern and I got sloppy, which is fine, because it isn't like the Medicis are drumming their fingers waiting for this.

Also the highlights on the cut glass bowl should be brighter and sharper, but they just would not adhere. I know there are three oil painting rules:

1. Slow Over Fast - paint slow drying things last  (like white highlights)
2. Fat over Lean - you have to add oil for each new layer (thins things out so they won't crack)
3. Thick over Thin - and there's my problem. If I follow the previous rule and  add oil to paint the white highlights, that will thin them down so much they won't make an impact. I suppose I'm supposed to make two layers of increasingly thin white.

Ugh. So that means I am not done.

Stockpot

A tedious post ... In Which I Document My Purchases. (Ah - if only I had thought of that category thirteen years ago.)

The induction stove only works with ferrous metals, so one thing I had to give away was Mom's giant aluminum stockpot. The replacement was a $15 Walmart stockpot.

That stockpot lasted five years, until this past Friday when I burned some apple pie filling in it. I went at it with the Brillo pad until I remembered that Facebook had been set on me buying a gorgeous stockpot via one of their ads. A stunning, heavy stockpot that would match all my other cookware. I scrubbed a little more before I said goodbye, old stockpot, you served me well this five years on, and we had many soups together, but now you have burned the apple pie filling and I can't look at you any longer. There are younger, hotter stockpots to be had.

And then, it turned into one of those Missed Connections personals. I had seen this mouth-watering photo of a stockpot, and I didn't go for it, and missed my shot at long-term stockpot happiness, because Facebook would not show me that stockpot photo again. After a day of searching I put this on Facebook:

Facebook kept mum. So I gave up on the Facebook Tease Stockpot (probably some bogus Russian stockpot put there to foment discontent), and paid an old-school in-person visit to the Bed Bath and Beyond. I found a friendly knockoff of an outrageously priced All-Clad Bells and Whistles stockpot set. Honestly, this one was a third of the All-Clad price. It was also three times the price of my original Walmart stockpot, as if there’s some stockpot logarithmic scale in which each level of stockpot is three times the price of the previous level. 

I don't make bulk corn, or even bulk pasta, but I can see throwing bones and aromatics in the insert and later lifting it out instead of trying to strain 12 quarts of stock.

And yes, I did take careful measurements, first thing.

 

Teacup Progress

So this was the start of the teacup painting:

After the first glaze I just hated it:

But then, adding the cranberry glaze on the bowl and the cream glaze on the cups perked it up:

The blue ellipse on the cup is wonky on the right, and somehow adding the blue to the table threw off the bottom of the right teacup. The line at the right edge of the cast shadow is accurate but now wrong, somehow. Cast shadows.  Why are they so hard?

But you know what's easy? Highlights. The bowl needs cut-glass highlights, that'll be fun, and the cups need more color, especially in the shadows. And I have to wait days before I can do it because the glaze has to dry. Maddening.

Das Tut Mir Leid Calypso

"Das tut mir leid" is about the only bit of German I know. It is from the Sarcastic Grandmother dialect of German, and it means, “Oh, poor pouty baby, sucks to be you.”

I was a pouty baby today when I got my copy of David Sedaris’ Calypso from Amazon. "CALYPSO," it said on the dustjacket, “vom autor des weltbestsellers NAKED.”

”Nooooo,” I whispered. Nein!

I turned to a random page. 

“Tiffany ... Cool. Stoned. Hacke. Durchgeknallt.” 

(Tiffany ... Cool, Stoned, Hoe, Girl Interrupted.) [sic]

It is all in German. I should have been alerted when I looked at the price, but I didn't look at the price, or the faint, tiny German text on the image of the cover.

I'm a little verärgert.

Typing Diagnosis

Since October, when we moved into the new office and I got a laptop, my typing has been horrendous. People at work make comments like, "Who wrote defect summary 87 - oh, it was Ellen, I can tell from the typos."

It's as bad as when Caroline felt my typos warranted an MRI.

I've been blaming my new keyboard, but that's a dodge. The typos are equally bad no matter which laptop I'm on.

Finally, I realized what I'm doing wrong. If I'm using a normal keyboard, I'm sitting erect and watching my hands as I type, but if I'm using a laptop or iPad I am reclined and ignoring my hands.

One would think that if I could teach myself finger-style guitar, I could learn to touch-type. Perhaps I should take up typing as a hobby.

Placebo Revisited

This just happened: I found a bottle of turmeric among my medicines. "What on earth?" I thought. "Why do I have a bottle of turmeric?"

Side effects of turmeric: loss of memory of events that happened less than a month ago.

It would seem that burping up a capsule of the stuff was enough to put me off turmeric. I did not have enough success to get the delusion we all get when drugs work: "I feel better so I don't need these drugs that are the reason I feel better."

Work Ellen

One of the reasons I've been quite happy that Gary quit his job five and three-quarters years ago is that I don't have to deal with Work Gary anymore. Work Gary was an ass. He would come home angry, yell at me, I'd ask why he was angry, and it always turned out he was angry at someone at work. But of course he couldn't yell at them, so he'd end up yelling at me. I would always point that out with, "I am not the person who is making you angry. Take it out on the people at work. I am not a punching bag."

Not that he's retired, the stress ball has been passed to me. I'm the one yelling and having nightmares. I've been routinely annoyed about work the past month, not pleasant to Gary, and at one point he said, "Take it out on the people at work. I am not your punching bag."  Touché, mon chere, touché.

Gary is now the one studiously avoiding conflict. Case in point: Wednesday his car battery was dead, and in the past some of our most epic fights happened while trying to use jumper cables, with the combination of Fear of Death and our main fight trigger: Lack of Knowledge. Add in a touch of Man Shame and every fight was inevitable. This time, he bought new cables, researched how to use them, gathered supplies, put on his headlamp, and all I had to do was start an engine. It was amazing. No fight at all.

I Brave the Fifty Three Hour Brisket

Remember when I was too chicken to cook beef? I couldn't bring myself to brine a brisket for almost a week and then cook it in the sous-vide for two days. Well, I am braver now.

I think I balked at the five days of brining, because my new recipe requires only a half hour marinade and then two days of sous-vide, followed by three hours in the oven.

I know it will be cooked through. I think the texture will be great. I'm sure it's going to taste bad, because I used the marinade I had on hand, which was a Lime-based recipe, but the sous-vide directions had me add liquid smoke. Smoke plus lime? I can see a lime-flavored barbecue chicken or shrimp, but beef seems strange.

------ 53 Hour Pause for Brisket to Finish -----

The texture was excellent, but I couldn’t taste the marinade or the liquid smoke, which might have been a good thing. Since it needed sauce, I made barbecue sauce from scratch and we couldn’t eat it (I added too much vinegar, somehow.) Luckily I had enough self-doubt to serve that on the side.

Mph. It was okay. Still not as good as any pork product in the sous-vide.

 

Snow

So, last year we didn't get the snowblower out at all. We've taken to storing it in the basement instead of the garage. There was an anticipated snow earlier this year so I brought it upstairs, but that ended up being light enough to melt.

So, now we have actual snow. I am wild with excitement. I'm looking through the larder and making plans for all the meals for the next three days. In additon, I was very excited to blow snow tonight.

We disagree about when to use the snowblower: once every 7 inches (me, so 3 passes for the forecast 24 inches) or once at the end (Gary, who thinks you can blow off just the top layer). We agreed to disagree and that Gary would run the snow removal process. That will be fun to watch.

I'm also having a lot of fun watching the news, because I am always tickled when our weather report leads the news on CNN.

I don't think this has happened before though: it snowed enough to bring Jim Cantore to town.

Value Study

So here's the latest on my oil painting glazing project. This is for the still life of the napkin, teacups, and the cranberry glass bowl (it's on its side leaning against the wall).

All I'm doing right now is the value study, in which you paint a black and white version of your painting. I keep working on it and it's pretty overworked at the moment.

I still need to make two parts darker, and one part less dark. Can you find them? The answer is below the image.

Less dark: the, um, evocative crease in the napkin that runs from the top middle to the middle right needs to be lighter. I should probably back off on the middle of the napkin where the cups meet as well.

Darker: Somehow I completely missed the shadow that the cup on the left casts on the cup on the right. I goes halfway up the cup. I drew it: you can see the line. Plus, I need to raise where the edge of the table is, otherwise the bowl must be hanging off a nail in the wall to be where it is.

Of course, I selected two cups which are essentially white, a white napkin, and a black background, so I'm going to be challenged finding some colors to glaze on top of what's there.

What Went Wrong With My Last Apple Pie

Hestia, Greek goddess of the hearth, was chatting with her brother Hades. They could see me baking an apple pie in Missouri from their perch on Mount Olympus.

”Jesus, I hate her,” Hestia sighed. “She’s so smug about her apple pie.”

“Jesus?” Hades asked, "What does 'Jesus' mean?"

"I don't know. It's some slang humans use. Still, look at her, thinking she's so good at pies. Let's mess with her."

Hades giggled, gestured, and suddenly the properties of water on Earth changed so that the four tablespoons of water that have always been sufficient for a double crust were no longer enough.

"Ha HAH!" Hestia laughed, "Look at her, all confused. 'Durr, this was enough water last time.' Now she's putting the dough in the refrigerator for thirty minutes to rest. There is no WAY that pie crust will work."

Back on Earth, I asked Alexa to set a timer for thirty minutes.

Hestia demanded Hades find out who I was talking to. Hades got on line and told her that Alexa is an in-home assistant that people use, sometimes, to set timers, and the she is not actually Greek.

When the timer went off I assembled the pie. I knew it was doomed, so I didn't even bother making a lattice. I stuck it in the oven and had Alexa set another timer for the first thirty minutes.

Hestia cackled and whispered to my Alexa, "Alexa, cancel all timers."

"Canceling all timers," Alexa obediently whispered back.

Luckily, after I cleaned up the kitchen I asked Alexa how much time was left.

"You have no timers."

"FUCK." I said. Hades and Hestia high-fived.

I yelled, "Alexa, SET A TIMER for ... for ... (sigh) fifteen minutes!"

"Setting timer for -"

"Oh shut up." I was mad. I was even madder a minute later after I accidentally knocked the whipped cream canister off the top shelf of the refrigerator, and it fell on my kitchen floor, popped its cap, and the nozzle broke off.

"DAMN. IT." Then I set about to fix it, since Gary had said he had been looking forward to Apple Pie with Whipped Cream.

I put the canister in the sink, pushed the nozzle back on, and got a faceful of propellant. And the nozzle fell off.

Hestia snorted, "Whippets! Just say no to drugs!"

Hades said, "Nice one! I didn't even see you do that."

"Huh? I thought you did that." Then they both doubled over laughing when they realized the whipped cream was entirely my fault.

So here is my pie. No lattice. The edges are burnt because the crust protector didn't go on at the right time. No whipped cream to hide it.  And frankly, that is pie sand around the edges, not pie crust.

Cursed. Cursed pie. No more pies for me.

 

2018 Year in Review

Farewell, 2018, the Year of Hobbies, Home Repair, and Amusements.

Well I almost stopped Hobby 1: this blog, because I forgot the key finding from Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: the smaller the topic, the easier it is to write. And the more tedious it is to read, I am sure, but for now I'm on this strange daily post bobsled and I cannot get off.

I went on vacation and was inspired to work on Hobby 2: the guitar. The year began with the doubled-up vacations to the Rock Boat and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. That visit inspired me to pick up my guitar and up my finger-picking game. I am not making steady progress there. One day I will sound glorious, and the next I can't tell if I am more twangy or more plinky. I am doing it, though.

Speaking of vacation: I wrote that I lost my passport card and a pair of earrings on that trip. A week later I found the earrings in my trash can, and a month later I found the passport card slid under the seat in the car we used to return from the airport. So, sorry NOLA, for falsely accusing you.

Now it's been almost a year since I went on that vacation. Instead of taking any mini-vacations we spent August and September shunting money into the house. There was the new mailbox, plus the landscaping wall, and then there was the less conspicuous consumption: the attic insulation, toilet, and the termite protection racket.

A trivia game in the summer got me started on Hobby 3: oil painting. That's working out well, if slowly. I'm about half-done with the value study for the teacups. It's nice to try glazing, because it requires that you wait between coats, so instead of feeling guilty that you haven't painted today, instead you can say "I would have painted today but it's still wet."

Speaking of trivia, this was the year we finally won the United Way Trivia match. That was probably the high point in the year of trivial amusements, even though we saw the Frank Lloyd Wright house, concerts by Cowboy Mouth and Lyle Lovett, Guster, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Steven Page and his Trio.

Finally, I have to acknowledge the activity that used up almost all of my husband's time: hating on the President of the United States. While I was a part-time hobbyist hater (Hobby 4), Gary took to it like it was his job, sending out an average of six Facebook posts a day. Since we avoided the Women's March because we were avoiding the flu, our protest schedule dwindled down to seeing Kathy Griffin when she came in with her World Tour. Other than our aborted attempt to go to the anti-Attorney General rally, I didn't do much protesting. We voted as hard as we could, though.

When you spend a year and voting is the most significant thing you can point to, when the rest of the year is typified by they way you scream I LOVE YOU at the toilet every time you evacuate your bowels (and I do), then that is a shallow life. Perhaps I will find use in the coming year.

Apple Pie Post

Remember how I was complaining that I had trouble making pie crust? On a whim, I decided to make a pie the other day, to fight off the staycation boredom.

I did everything the same as always, only this time I decided to step further into Overworking than Underworking. As I was working it, there was a magical spot when I felt the pie crust get tired. It was just like when the pasta dough gets silky, or the choux dough gets oozy.

Of course, I didn't have anywhere enough apples to make enough apple filling, so I threw in frozen blueberries to make up the difference, and I combined two filling recipes together just to further doom it to failure.

 It. Was. Perfect.

Gary proclaimed it both the Best Pie He Ever Had and the Christmas Pie Miracle.

I tried to recreate it today, and while the crust was again amazing, and the lattice work even more even, I tried to economize and got the little Honeycrisps in the plastic bag instead of the individual ones as big as my head. I stuck with one filling recipe BUT I cut it while warm, so the bottom crust got soggy. However, Gary will not bit The Hand That Feeds Him Pie, so he said the new one was even better and more miraculous. It is a New Year's Eve Miracle.

Palette Pants

I know some painters are tidy, and they clean their brushes on a soft dry cloth. I am lazy, and I clean my brush on my old black jeans.  They are from 30 pounds ago, so they weren't doing anything productive anyway. Same for the shirt. Now that I’ve been painting for months I wish I had pressed my too-tight white jeans into service instead: that would be a glorious colorfest.

I know some painters wear smocks to protect their clothing, but that seems inefficient to me. Why not just combine the clothing AND the smock AND the soft dry cloth?

I am sad to say that putting on the painting pants was the only artistic thing I did today. I meant to paint for a few hours, but I never got to it.

 

Christmas Eve

I can never remember

     if the 24th of December

is the Big Day or the Eve.

    No one would ever believe

 my easy memory jog:

       the White Christmas prologue

the one they never play

        with its reference to LA.*

*(But it's December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up North.)

 

Review: Mary Poppins Returns

I cried at the Mary Poppins Returns trailer. Somehow, I thought that was a fluke. I was still excited to see the movie.

First twenty minutes? No tears. Big girl. Mary Poppins descends from the heavens, the same scene that made me cry in the trailer? Tears. I let them flow.

Next twenty minutes. More tears flowed.

Children sing about Dead Mom. Many tears. This movie is right next to Babe on the List of Movies To Avoid If Your Mom is Dead.

The rest of the movie? Heartwarming thing happens, tears, dance number, tears, Dick Van Dyke shows up, many many tears.

It was ridiculous. My shirt got wet. I had a headache the day after from dehydration. A Mary Poppins Hangover.

I have NO idea why. The original doesn't make me cry. I think they did something subliminal,  like they did in the Exorcist. Split-second frames from Hallmark Card commercials. Sickos.

Another Thing That Happened at the Dentist: Tumeric

The visit to the dentist was just a gold mine for blog posts.

The dental assistant heard me joke about how Gary and I both can no longer sit down or stand up without grunting or moaning.

"Tumeric," she said, authoritatively.

"Advil," I thought, authoritatively.

But then later I thought, my little aches and pains don’t seem worthy of a heavy-hitter like Advil. And since the receptionist backed her up, and since it cost less than five bucks, I bought the Tumeric pills (since the thought of a mouthful of Tumeric right from the spice tin was very off-putting).

When I Googled "debunk Tumeric," I found this article from Science-Based Medicine that suggests that a large percentage of Tumeric promises are bogus, but they are investigating if it has anti-inflammatory properties and if it might be helpful for skin cancer.

So, I will let you know if it is useless.

I Am a Big Girl at the Dentist

Years ago, a dentist tried to pull off a temporary crown without numbing it first. He only tried a moment before I waved him off.

 

But, that was ten years ago, and I was a baby about dental things then. I went in for a temporary crown replacement today, and I decided – given what happened to Gary years ago – I would avoid the Novocaine and just gut it out.

 

The assistant grabbed the temporary, wiggled it, and it fell out. “That's nothing!” I thought,”Why have I been such a baby?”

 

Little did I know the fun was just beginning. The rest of it was … not painful … but unpleasant. You know that feeling when someone applies a cold adhesive to virginal gum tissue? Oh, you don't? See, you haven't had a crown replaced while sober. I mean, it didn't really hurt, just that my sensitive gums were very raw and touchy.

 

The assistant and dentist were very good about letting me know what things were going to feel like. By the end, so many things had been puffed and painted on my tooth stump that it ceased to care.

 

Still, I did feel proud of myself at the end.

Christmas Facade

I knew that adding a Christmas tree would tip our clutter level into Hoarder Zone, so before I brought in the tree I de-cluttered. I did it just so I could stand in the house for a moment and have a pretty Christmas before it became swamped with games and baking supplies and gift assembly.

So here it is.

And it is a lie. Because I knew it was fleeting, and because I knew I could get that satisfaction from just standing in one corner, I arranged the room so that I couldn't see the other corners: the ones where I stowed all the junk. Follow the red arrows to see the hidden shame of:

The hearth, where I stashed the gifts and Gary's Exercise Ball / Footstool:

The dirty microwave, where I put the baking supplies that would have cluttered up my tidy pantry:

And the top of the refrigerator, where we keep All Of The Carbohydrates. Oh, all right, that isn't a stash, that's actually where we keep all the carbs all the time.

 

Because I Got High On Caffeine

This all started because I woke up with a headache. I took some of Gary’s Migrane Excederin. You know what’s in that? Caffeine. I’ve been off the C-Drug for years. It hit me hard.

Then I saw that longtime blog reader Catherine made this ...

... and of course I had to search “King Arthur Flour Cinnamon Star” to find the recipe and some video demonstrations. The recipe suggests you use potato flour. 

This is where things really went of the rails.

It called for potato flour, but I opted to use the substitute, Potato Buds, because yet another type of flour would have maxed out my Flour Palette. Cake four, bread flour, pastry flour, whole wheat versions of each, a bleached and unbleached version of each, plus almond flour and oatmeal flour. But, no potato flour.

So then I thought, “Why not have every type of flour? It’s Christmas. Treat yourself!” I was as high a bipolar methhead on LSD. Caffeine! So to organize all my flours I went to Tupperware.com and bought almost all of the Modular Mates sizes. How much did I spend? I am ashamed to say this, but I think it’s an important step in my recovery: I spent over almost $200. I know. I’m calling them Monday at 7:30 am to cancel, if I can, otherwise i’m eating the shipping costs and sending it back.

Why send it back? Because my caffeine high only crashed after I went to eBay and got more of it used, for much less money (plus much more tasty, tasty BPA since I'm sure its all thirty years old). Sellers across the country are shipping me Tupperware modules in the discontinued Hunter Green. Only, I can’t say if I’m even close to having the number I need because I ordered and cancelled so many eBay orders that I can’t tell what’s coming. I can’t tell, people. 

I can see why the Mormons banned the bean. It will F you up.

 

 

 

 

Mall Shopping

This is the Scale of Futility:

10: Clicking Unsubscribe. 10 out of 10 Most Futile Things to Do.

9: Shopping at the mall for something your grandmother had forty years ago that you want right now. Almost as futile as unsubscribing.

 I just got back from the mall. 

I went on a fool's errand to find these:

They are slips for your pants. I’m not going to wear my gauzy pants immediately, but I thought, “Since I am at the mall anyway trying to find that cute scarf/wrap/jacket I saw here FOUR years ago in the SUMMER, perhaps I can find something else that any sensible person could find on the internet.”

Of course, I found neither item, so instead of the cute scarf/wrap thing I wore my elegant long scarf I bought thirty years ago that I have never worn because I bought it at TJ Maxx on the clearance table and I have always strongly suspected it was a table runner.

Scarf? Table runner? You decide.    

Oil Painting Lack of Progress

Well, I have utterly screwed myself with my painting. Instead of working on my “teacup on a white napkin” opus, I've turned instead to recreating one of my favorite photos of Gary: Gary at Bath.

And of course, painting someone I love has all kinds of extra baggage, plus I'm trying a glazing technique instead of a wet-on-wet technique, and I've just aimed too high. (Glazing = long and tedious and unfamiliar, wet-on-wet = immediate gratification.) I just can't get started with it.

I need to work on the eyes and mouth and hair so it looks like Gary. I don't particularly care if the Roman statue looks like Bacchus. The tea cups, on the other hand, looks just like teacups lying on their sides.

(What’s the round thing at the top? It’s the red bowl with a cast shadow to the right. I put it back.) I’m going to switch it up: glaze the teacups and scribble Gary out in the familiar wet-in-wet. The glazing is extra complicated because it looks like my transparent colors are opaque and some opaque ones came out of the tube transparent.

I really need to stop trying new things with the paints. I need the painting equivalent of playing “This Land is Your Land” on the guitar. Something easy I already know how to do.

No Longer Undefeated at Trivia

Anne assembled much of the first-place winning trivia team for a small local trivia match in Pacific, Missouri. I came in addled because the GPS had taken me on a forty-five minute long trek through every unlit windy back highway in the outer rural environs. It got to the point I laughed hysterically at every hairpin turn.

It was a small contest in a small Catholic school. We really expected to win.

We lost. We lost to Table Four by four points. They got an 84, we got 80, and third place (and everyone else) got under 50.

I was the only one positioned to look directly at Table Four. One woman at Table Four kept making the two-fingered "I am watching you" gesture at me, which tickled me.

I was responsible for one dead wrong answer. The question was "The Missouri Department of Conservation logo has three images including a leaf and a fish. What is the third image?" I was sure it was a river.

No.

I know. A raccoon. So cruel to miss on a raccoon.