This is before sewing the hookside on, but it looked pretty much the same after.
I'm waiting five minutes for the pizza topping to cool. I think I put in too much onion and not enough meat.
It's to be quite simple: hamburger, fried onions, canned mushrooms drained and stirred around in the greasy meat and onions, then when it's cooled a bit I'll stir in a little "arrabiatta" spaghetti sauce, spread it on the pizza, and cover it with eight ounces of shredded "Mexican Style Four Cheese".
Change everything after "arrabiatta" to past tense: my time ran out while I was looking at the jar to correct my spelling. Now it's five minutes until time to put it into the oven.
And it was delicious. But I do want to try the recipe again with more meat. Same amount of onion.
Put my coat on and walked over to look at the creek. While outside, I heard noises that imply that they are working on the house on Montague Lane today.
On the way back, I noted that all the herbs in the Joe Rickets strawberry bed are still producing: Lavender, hot oregano, thyme, winter savory, flat-leaf parsley, and curled parsley. But all I put in the bean soup I made yesterday was a bay leaf out of the freezer.
The oregano and marjoram in a more-protected location are gone entirely. Well, I haven't dug around under the leaves that have blown into the bed.
This morning I cleaned up my Letters directory and used Z-tree to mirror it on Drive E, then I used Explorer to back it up on JOYXP, then I used Filezilla to freshen the off-site back up.
I should do the same for all my other directories, particularly the two Web sites.
And, of course, as soon as I finished, I opened this file and rendered all those back-ups obsolete. But PC-Write freshens the Drive E backup semi-automatically, and I use WS-FTP to copy the Banner offsite after each writing session. Which leaves the XP copy languishing, but it's fresher than it's been for a long time.
It's Roomba's day in the bedroom. Roomba has affected our housekeeping considerably; one gets tired of moving things out of Roomba's way a lot faster than one gets tired of moving them out of the way of the vacuum.
And I notice a similarity between Roomba and Filezilla: since Filezilla moves large quantities of files efficiently, now that I have a copy, I'll copy the whole directory more often — but Filezilla won't run on JOY98, so before I run Filezilla, I have to freshen the previously-neglected backups on JOYXP.
Tonight I dropped JOYXP's mouse and when I picked it up, the wheel wouldn't wheel and the buttons wouldn't push. Dave opened it up and blew it out with the air compressor, and now it's working again.
It's nice to have an engineer in the house.
Grump. Started reading the book I crawled around on the floor of the children's library for, and by page ten I'd realized that I'd read it before. _The Far West_ is worth a re-read, but I could have had a new McKillup.
Further grump: after freshening the back-ups, I looked at the index file to the Banner archive, and found that some of the links weren't working, and others turned up blank pages. Back into WS-FTP, the non-working links were to missing files — there were some I hadn't moved into the archives, and therefore hadn't copied into the back-up archive. So I uploaded the missing files. So far, so good. The links that turned up blank pages were to files that had zero in the size field. I re-uploaded one, it now had bytes in it, re-uploaded the next one, the first one was blank again. After fiddling around for a while, I gave up. For some reason, Comcast wants those files to be empty.
And now I don't trust *any* of my off-site back-ups.
Still grumpy. I bought yellow raisins today so I could start a batch of apricot cake tonight — and forget entirely that we are down to our last stick of butter.
Pleasant ride otherwise. I went to Aldi, going by way of Roy Street, Pierceton Road, and Aunt Millies to make a little exercise out of it. At Aunt Millies I saw, for the first time, someone else using my steps. It was a man carrying something he'd bought at the convenience store in the gas station. He got into a long-haul semi-tractor that was pulling an empty flatbed and drove away. Lot easier to get in and out of the lower parking lot than to negotiate the tight turns into the gas station.
We already had plenty of bread, but I bought a bag of wheat-flavor bagels.
Filled my panniers at Aldi, then stopped at Big Apple to buy a BLT for supper, then stopped for lunch at Burger King. I had a small order of "satisfries", which weren't as good as the classic fries.
Dave set up the card table permanently, so I bought another, then he re-arranged his room and folded up the first card table, and there's already a card table in its storage slot, so its been hanging out in the hallway for a couple of days.
I intend to set up both of them tomorrow and scope out the velvet I intend to cut into camera curtains. I hope they are the same height.
They are, and the second card table fits behind the other end of the piano.
The camera-curtain project screeched to a halt when I got my Velcro down and all of it was loop side. Dave thinks he has a roll of hook side stashed away — somewhere.
On the second of December, I didn't mention that I'd moved my collection of Threads Magazine and my tallest books to the top shelf. That's a big step toward cleaning up the sewing room.
While putting away stuff that we'd piled on the bed so that the Roomba could work, I realized that we have four scratching posts in the bedroom: The cedar fencepost strapped to the wall, the rope-wrapped commercial post, and two pieces of firewood.
⁂
Finally saw something funny on Facebook: a picture of a cat in a shipping carton, with the caption: Amazon / World's leading supplier of cat beds
Stayed home on a clear day to sew — and didn't do anything. Well, Dave bought some hook-side tape and I sewed a piece of it to the camera-curtain I made. But now I can't find my box of loopside tape.
And I picked up a couple of books in the sewing room while trying to remember where I put the Velcro. I last remember it when I was standing in Dave's room closing the box after showing him what I had.
And, Hey! There's my copy of _Today I am a Ham_!
For some reason, I folded up the ironing board yesterday. The sewing room looks queer without it.
The loopside tape is still missing. I've begun looking in such places as an end table that has had piles of books on the lid for months.
Loopside still missing.
It's four in the morning and I don't think I'm going to get to sleep any time soon. Didn't help that a few minutes after three, several law-enforcement agencies started chasing someone around at ridiculous rates of speed. Mostly on country roads, but he crossed 30 at least twice, and about half-past three he zoomed through Warsaw on 15, "bailed" near the laundromat, was tracked for a while, and was later said to be Signal Forty, whether that means caught or lost I've no idea. Didn't help that I could hear only the dispatcher. Well, I could hear the other folks now and again, but couldn't understand them, and she often responded to transmissions that I couldn't hear at all.
We had a lovely Christmas dinner at the church. I crashed soon after I got home, and didn't wake up until after Dave had eaten his share of the wings he brought home for supper. Might be why I can't sleep tonight.
The wings were delicious, by the way. It's Wings Etc.'s "mild sauce", which is tasty on its own. I can taste the flavor of the Tabasco in it, not just feel it.
Hmm. It's been more than half an hour since I took my Levothyroxin. I could have another wing.
⁂
I settled for a taste of sauce and a glass of milk. Woke up at nine, as usual, but I want a nap now.
This morning I started a load of wash, put it on pause, rode the flatfoot to the teller machine, walked up Ninth Street to the church, saw to the butter from yesterday's dinner, emptied the ice trays into the bin and refilled them, and rode home again.
And forgot to re-start the washer until I'd been home for a while, so I'm going to start my nap late today.
⁂
Leftovers for dinner: hamburger soup, potato salad, and fried mushrooms. I bought sliced mushrooms on my last trip to Aldi, but never had time and energy to make pizza.
At some time during the day, I was about to get up from this chair, glanced east, wondered what that box on the sewing machine was. The Velcro!
So Dave put up the curtain. I should take a picture of it. I don't think I *can* take a picture from the working side — photographing black velvet through a pane of glass it's right up against isn't going to work very well.
In the process, he discovered that the loopside was actually a strip of loopside and a strip of hookside rolled up together. I said @#*&%!, but later remembered that we needed sew-on, not stick-on, hookside, so Dave would have had to buy some anyway.
But maybe I should un-roll the roll of sew-on loopside.
I just clicked on a link to a video of a spectacular ice flow — which reminded me of one of the reasons that I rarely look at videos: they have either meaningful pictures with meaningless sounds, or a meaningful sounds illustrated by a close-up of a moving mouth or something equally uninformative, making me long for a copy of the script the narrator is reading to me.
In this case, the sound actively undercut the picture — the way the photographer kept exclaiming "wow!" and "oh my god!" made the flood look trivial, and in one place he yelled "You can hear it! You can hear it!" and I wanted to slap him and say "No, I *can't* hear it! You're closer to the microphone!"
I've got the Christmas cards ready to print out, but I want a nap before I try to read the printer manual.
They are all black ink this year. Partly because the inkjet is out of colored ink, partly because I've never been happy with the red you get by mixing magenta and yellow. I lucked into an almost-tolerable design for the front. Meaningless, but not repulsive.
I wish Ed Sibbut's clip art were still available; all that's for sale now is anonymous. I tried a Web search, and the only hit on his name was my own Web site. [turned out that that's because he's "Ed Sibbet"; he's now making designs for stained glass.]
I think that I check my e-mail several times a day, and it's rare that I delete all of the messages I've downloaded and don't make a fresh back-up, but when I deleted obsolete back-ups this morning, there was no 2014-12-16. This is not rare, and finding more than three back-ups for a date *is* rare. It's usually one or two.
I think I'm finally going to start cake-baking this morning.
Started the last batch of cakes last night.
Been too busy to write — even on washday. On Monday, I started the wash, then went shopping. I made the potato salad yesterday; today I have only to devil eggs and bake the cakes I boiled fruit for yesterday. And wrap the cakes I baked yesterday; I meant to gift-wrap them right after plastic-wrapping them, but wrapping a soft cake without squashing it proved awkward, particularly the part where I push down on the cake to make the label stick.
ARRGH!!! We arrived at the party, I got out of the car, put on my coat, picked up my purse, opened the trunk — the cakes are all still in the freezer!
But we are invited back next week. I hope Alice can talk by then.
Spent the glorious sunny morning fiddling with the computer.
⁂
And the glorious sunny afternoon. But Sunday through Wednesday are scheduled to be partly cloudy and New Year's Day is supposed to be clear.
I hosed off the plastic before putting it back under the catbox. The hose had been frozen the last few times I tried that. According to Weather Underground, it will be frozen again on Monday, and stay frozen for the foreseeable. I wonder whether four sub-freezing days in a row will be enough to skim over the lake.
I spent a good deal of my fiddling time putting
the Banner archives into a more-logical order,
which means that if you look for this file in the
usual place, it won't be there. Index, if I
recall correctly, is at
http://davebeeson.home.comcast.net/LETTERS/2014BANN/2014BANN.HTM
[I recalled correctly; Comcast didn't.]
Dumped the dirtier catbox and hosed it out this morning. If I'd done that yesterday, I could have aired it in the sun for a while.
One thing I did while not fiddling with the computer yesterday was to peel the remaining garlic (which was starting to sprout) and put it into a baby-food jar with vinegar and a pinch of calcium chloride. Then I steamed a couple of the older pickled garlics in a mess of fried vegetables for my lunch. (Started out to be my breakfast, but I was cooking them over very low heat.) Neither one turned blue. I must try with butter instead of bacon grease next time.
For breakfast this morning we had some of Darryl's corn in omelets. Well, mine ended up as scrambled eggs. It was delicious.
⁂
While checking to see whether the URL I gave yesterday was correct, I discovered that the file was blank. As are all the other files in that directory, and a lot of the files in the parent directory. I have been having a lot of trouble with files mysteriously becoming empty.
Luckily, Dave is about to buy a new web service. I should have a more-reliable address soon after New Year.
Oops. I opened an e-mail intending to mark an event on my calendar and discovered that it was last week.
We had a discussion as to whether the lake was frozen this morning; evidence pointed both ways. When I went outside to comb my hair, I could see patches of open water, and that settled it.
There's enough wind to move the clothes on the line, but not enough to spin the anemometer. I hung the king-size sheet out, and found the weather so pleasant that I hung out the rest of that load too. But the other two loads will be hung on the racks.
Another oops: there was only one pillowcase in that load. I forgot to change the cases before putting the whites-with-bleach in. But the whites-without-bleach haven't gone in yet.
Yesterday or the day before, I had fried vegetables for lunch again, and put butter on the garlics; still no blue. I vaguely recall blue garlic in something sometime, though.
⁂
I mixed a new batch of tooth powder today. This time I ground a sprig of dried peppermint into the salt.
*Somebody* is at home at the Wildman's. There are six or eight children playing on the sandbar, which appears to have a coating of ice on the far edge.
One of the boys is wearing shorts; I saw him lying on his back waving his arms and legs, wondered what sort of game it was, he got up and promptly fell down again. Then he continued sliding on the ice. Ah, to have such small weight and such strong bones!
I was planning to make a sprawlmart tour today, but I didn't sleep well last night and woke up late and unenthusiastic.
Started to pick up the papers in the sewing room instead, but got side-tracked by a Gohn Bros. catalog. They gots work denim!!! The information isn't of immediate use, because I still have enough of the superb herringbone the worn-out pants I'm wearing were made of to make two more pair of jeans.
Today was Roomba in the sewing room day, so I got a lot of papers picked up. Most of them have been thrown down again, in even more disorder, but some have been trashed and some have been put where they belong. And I did a couple of mending jobs, which got two garments out of the sewing room. And a couple of garments were moved from general clutter to the to-do hook. (I have a "giant storage hook" that provides an extra foot of closet rod; I hang works in progress on it so they'll be in full view at all times.)
Spent most of the day playing with the computer. And starting to clean up files that should be closed out at midnight.
At that point in the writing I remembered that I haven't been for a walk since Sunday and went out for a quick lap around the block. *Very* quick; I forgot that at this time of year I'm supposed to slop around in fuzzy pants I can wear under my jeans, not thin jeans that I can go outside in. So I walked as fast as I could all the way; almost forgot to look at the house on Montague Lane, and had to go back a few steps.
Despite the cold, there is more open water than there was yesterday. The wind has blown all the ice onto the shore.