Wearing white sandals to church for the last time this season.
Spent yesterday wandering around on my bike. I bought half a pint of orange tomatoes and three yellow squash at the fairgrounds market, and four cookies at the courthouse.
For supper we had pork schnitzel with slices of one of the tomatoes Kathy gave us.
I'm planning to make reduced-carb lasagna from the squash and the amish swiss.
Lasagna is much improved when you're trying to use up the cheese!
I left out the sauce and put in, on average, one of Kathy's tomatoes. I used the remainder of one we'd started slicing, and two slices from another. There were two layers of tomato, one on each of the two lasagne. I salted the tomatoes with a packet of powdered chicken bouillon. I didn't have any ground beef that wasn't frozen in one-pound lumps, so I covered the top with slices of Brookdale luncheon meat. (I meant to use Spam, but Brookdale was on top of the pile.)
I forgot to put in the mini-sweet peppers, but it was delicious and we ate more than usual even though it was richer than usual. There's barely enough left for one person's lunch.
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Cool, man! I just validated the August Banner, and the validator found only one mistake!
The cat got two out of three this morning: I went to Tractor Supply to buy litter, to Big R to buy dry food, and to Aldi to buy shredded potatoes.
I got peanuts in the shell at both Tractor Supply and Aldi. Both bags are carefully concealed, and only a pint set out for current consumption.
I didn't put the pint into an air-tight container.
After breakfast, I felt like going back to bed, but first I needed to deepen the hole I dug yesterday to bury the duck I had found on the lawn. No sign of being mauled; I don't know what killed it.
After a bit I deemed the grave deep enough and dumped the duck in — and found the stiffly-upturned feet perilously close to cultivating depth. I'd have needed to touch the duck to get it out of the hole to dig deeper, so I proceeded to hoe the dirt back into the hole. It will be spring before I dig planting furrows after all — and now that I think of it, that part of the garden is slated for potatoes that I lay on the surface and bury in dirt hauled from elsewhere. Potatoes seem to produce better if they are above the surrounding terrain.
Then I dug a hill of potatoes even though we haven't eaten any of the three potatoes I got out of the previous hill. This time I got nine potatoes, a total of one pound and eleven ounces as measured on a scale that used to make eleven one-pound packages out of ten pounds of meat. According to my pree-cise calculations, that makes it thirty ounces. And I did hose the dirt off before weighing them.
There were also at least three marble-sized potatoes that I left in the dirt in the hope that they will sprout next spring. I've had good luck with volunteer potatoes — when I notice them in time to weed around them. But they will probably be buried too deep to make it to the surface.
In case these devilled eggs are good: to the yolks of a dozen and a half large eggs, I added half of an eight-ounce package of cream cheese, enough malt vinegar to fill a hole mashed into the cream cheese with a fork, half a tablespoon of salt, one teaspoon of dry mustard, and a quarter teaspoon of curry powder. Then a little more malt vinegar and a splop of extra-virgin olive oil.
After the eggs are boiled and peeled and cut up and the yolks mashed, I plan to add sufficient sour cream.
The eggs were good, but the curry was very subtle. I think I like subtle in curry.
The Versa has been recalled. Dave is to take it in Thursday and pick up a rental car that Nissan will pay for until the parts come in, which will be next spring.
So I've got to get my maps etc. out of the car tomorrow.
I forget what I was looking for when I found a link that gave me two shocks. First, people need to look up how to hand-wash dishes? Then I clicked on the link and the suggestions were quite sensible.
I find it amusing that we eat off paper, but the cat always gets ceramic. I rinse off the treat saucer and pasteurize it over the pilot light. So the cat gets *warmed* ceramic. I haven't heated a plate for humans since Dad and I stayed in a national-park cabin, and the oven got hot every time I cooked anything, so I stuck the plates in it.
Dad bought a pocket stone to sharpen his knife, and that knife and a piece of firewood he'd shaved off to make a cutting board were most of my cooking tools. I wish I could remember what I cooked. I presume we bought food at the park store where he got the pocket stone.
No, that didn't look like Rev. Church at all. Pastor Henry was always so *there*.
Eggs in the fridge. Same recipe except I put in more oil and vinegar, and left out the sour cream. Tastes a bit vinegary to me — but Dave didn't pucker and he's usually sensitive to sour. At any rate the vinegar, like the salt, will fade into the whites during the night.
No trace of curry flavor. The previous batch started tasting curried after a few days.
The vinegar flavor faded; the salt didn't. But I didn't bring any back.
It has been raining leaves, but not today. Perhaps it's the high humidity. I'm drying the clothes outdoors — on racks on the patio under the eaves.
On Saturday, when we set out on SR 25 to go to Donny's house, I commented that we could turn onto SR 19 at Mentone. Dave said that it wasn't a good way to go, and I added that it wasn't a good road — on the parts of it I've used, SR 19 is maintained to county-road standards, and it's also inclined to zig-zag. Its path through Mentone is hard to follow when I'm on a bike and can stop and think at any time.
Which, at least in the part north of Mentone, makes it pleasant for bicycles, since it's a good county road and people in cars avoid it.
We didn't follow 19, but 19 followed us — it appears that they are working on it south of Mentone, and the detour followed 25 — all the way to US 31, if I recall correctly. On the map, following 900 E to SR 14 looks like a better route, but I presume that they didn't want to direct traffic onto a county road.
Minus for the new car: while loading stuff, I thought it very inconvenient that one can't open the trunk from the outside without the remote. It being a loaner, we have only one key, and since Dave was driving, he was carrying it. The remote is part of the key; Dave loves that idea, and I admit that having a huge fob in my pocket is often a nuisance — though it does make it easier to find the car keys when I'm also carrying my bicycle keys. But I don't like having a bunch of pushable buttons on the part of the key that I take hold of when I want to turn it in the ignition. At least one of them is "push and hold" to reduce pocket dialing, but when you turn a key, you grab and hold.
I did use the key when I wanted to roll the windows down while we were at the birthday party, and didn't push any buttons while turning the key. I was slightly annoyed that I had to start the engine to roll down the windows; "accessory" will do it on the Versa.
Dave says it drives about like the Versa, and turns as sharply.
Big plus: I can read the odometer from the passenger seat. The last time I drove, I wanted to use elapsed miles for navigation and couldn't even *see* the odometer, let alone read it.
Then I remembered that the last time I drove, I drove the truck. Umm . . . I think I went shopping after that. I know it was after, because I noticed that my rotator cuff didn't hurt, and thought that it must be because there were frequent turns. But I don't navigate on the way to Tractor Supply, so I didn't look at the odometer.
I just looked at the pictures I took while marking linen to cut out some underwear, and the only one that's unusable is an extra shot I took because I thought my hand shook during the previous shot. I don't know how the shot could be out of focus — and I've already deleted it, so I can't look to see whether my hand shook just right to simulate bad focus.
Dave is playing with the "locate device" function of his new camera. I should learn how that works in case I need to know where he is.
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We have too many webcams. For some reason, one of the pictures I'd taken was on XP's monitor. When it caught my eye, my first reaction was "Eeek! I've got to turn the laser level off before it runs the battery down!"
Of course the entire reaction took about half as much time as the "Eeek" describing it.
I rode to the Farmer's Market this afternoon, and bought two pints of tomatoes, a very small muskmelon, and a single-serve head of cabbage. I didn't think until later that I should have gotten two heads of cabbage. I've never seen them before and I'm sure they'll be gone on Saturday.
Ink-Free News says that the neon sign that was in the corner of the Marsh parking lot is a rare antique, made of real porcelain. They didn't announce this until after a museum had taken it away.
This news will disappoint everyone who thought that the sign had been taken down to make way for a new one.
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While reading Ink Free, I found an article that I wanted to comment on. This must be the first time this has happened, because I'd had no clue that you aren't allowed to comment on Ink-Free articles unless you are logged in to Facebook. They popped up a form with my name and password already filled in, but I closed the tab.
The new driveway alarm is packaged up ready to take to UPS for return to Amazon, and the old one is back on the wall.
Our driveway alarm started sounding its low-battery alarm when the batteries had just been changed — and it's plugged in; the batteries are used only to tide it over glitches, and ought to last forever.
So Dave ordered a new driveway alarm. It seemed better than the old one — it has a selection of sounds, for example. Except for one little problem: it sounds its alarm at random — and frequent — intervals, and it never sounds when something is moving in front of its detector.
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There were more little cabbages Saturday. I bought three and ate half of one with my lunch — which was half of a submarine I'd picked up at Owen's West. (Dave ate the slightly-squished other half for supper.)
The small-tomato season seems to be over.
I came home from the farmers' markets by way of Walmart, since I haven't been getting any exercise lately. This took me past "The Farm", where I bought a watermelon.
I couldn't sleep, so I got up at four in the morning and caught up on my Facebook notifications. I even managed to see some of the photos. Photos that I get to by clicking a link in an e-mail flicker back and forth between two magnifications, but I learned today that if I poise the pointer over the poster's name and click it at every flash, once in a great while the flashing will freeze on one view or the other and let me read the comments.
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I drove the Sentra for the first time today. I wouldn't have suggested pizza for supper had I known that Winona Avenue is still broken.
Seems to work just like the Versa, except that I was home before I found the door-handle door lock switch. I *thought* I saw motion near the handle when I locked the doors with the armrest switch, but the black-on-black switch was quite invisible. On the Versa, it has an orange-red logo when it's open.
It was a good day to dry laundry outdoors. But I'd better get it in before sunset.
Dave's on the way back from his appointment. I checked his "locate my device" site.
I finally started marking the linen that's been in the parlor for days, maybe weeks. Then took a break and cultivated the garden. Now it's nap time.
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When he got home, he said that his phone tells him when he's being spied on.
Evening: time to read the London Telegraph. One of the headlines is "Fishnet boots and leather jumpsuits: Dior's Paris Fashion Week show is full of clothes to lust after".
I think they mis-spelled "laugh at".
This is cool: Al has learned that nagging me to top off his dish when he sees me get up to go to bed is more efficient than waking me in the middle of the night.
A downside to buying stuff off the dented-produce rack: one of the assorted apples in the ninety-nine cent bag was really, really good and I have no idea what variety it was.
I put at least half a pound of white colby into my lasagna, and it was delicious. I also included all of one of those tuna-size cans of ham in the layers.
[Pause to write "tuna-can ham" on my shopping list.]
I make reduced-carb lasagna by leaving out a third of the noodles, adding layers of fresh vegetables, and using lots of cheese. Since the vegetables give off broth instead of soaking it up, I buttered the noodles with tomato paste instead of adding sauce. The paste didn't dissolve and move around so next time (if I remember until summer squash is back in season) I'll use thinner layers of paste and put it on the lower layers of cheese too. I salted it with a packet of Goya chicken-broth powder.
Now I want to have a slice of cold lasagna, but there's just enough left over to have another meal.
Since I'll send this tomorrow, I just went through the file and commented out the boring bits. (If you're muttering "it's *all* boring bits", just "view source" on the Web copy, and see how much improved it is.)
Now I'll upload it and run it through the validator.
W3C found only one mistake, and that mistake was only one character — but it was a dilly. A comment didn't close; I'm amazed that I didn't notice a bunch of stuff missing when I proofread.
Went to Aldi in Sprawlmart for the last time yesterday afternoon. They had everything I looked for, but not always where I expected to find it. Some furniture was missing, but I don't think that they took it to the new store.
On the way home, I crossed 30 and went to look over the new store. I had to look into the setting sun for it and ended up blundering in the back way. As I came up beside the building, I noted that they had all-new carts, about twice as many as the old store. Then I rounded the corner and saw that many again! They must expect the new location to increase traffic, but both are close to 30, and Commerce Drive is a bit easier than Parker. On the other hand, there's this massive advertising campaign . . .
As far as I could see through the windows, they are all set to open tomorrow.