A quiet day. I ironed a shirt and played with the computer, creating a few new files for the new year. Dave sorted the comic books Martha and Steve brought him. I read a Super Goof.
The cranberry cake was good hot from the oven, but now that it's cold, it needs more cranberries and more sugar.
The apricot cake is *good*.
I still want to make a date cake, but we need more cake like we need a hole in the head.
Dave stopped at Martin's on his way home from his radiation treatment. I stopped at Owen's on my way home from Goodwill.
I read a joke once that defined eternity as two people and a ham. What is two people and two hams?
I bought 1.75 pounds of sliced ham. Dave bought 2.685. I don't think that a package of ham can be weighed to a thousandth of a pound.
I had thawed a one-pound chub of ground turkey before the ham incident, so I made turkey loaf for supper tonight: one package of turkey, half a package of turkey-flavor instant dressing, three eggs, and assorted vegetables. I put the water called for into a skillet with two chicken bouillon cubes and two finely-chopped stalks of celery, brought it to a boil, and allowed it to cool while I chopped an onion and three or four mini-sweet peppers and roodled around in the freezer for a spoonful each of whole-kernel corn and chopped broccoli.
I didn't put in the margarine the stuffing mix called for, but liberally buttered the loaf pan, and put blobs of butter on the potato after I zapped it, cut it in half, and pressed the cut side into the top of the raw loaf.
And it was *good*, and there's enough left for three more meals.
Having stayed up all day yesterday, I've been a little tired all day today. Tomorrow, I'm going to try to get off early enough that I can get home by nap time.
I got back in time for a nap by dint of skipping lunch — not a hardship, because the only restaurant on my route is Culver's. (I just checked Google Maps, and it says that I also had the option of stopping at Lassus Handy Dandy. I do eat at gas stations, but not that close to home.)
I had a snack stick and a muesli bar while packing my groceries onto the bike, and ate a banana with lots of English walnuts when I got home.
When the timer went off to say I'd been in bed for an hour, I was undecided: I was still tired, but I was *bored*.
So I got up and hit every snack in the kitchen except the dark-chocolate truffles I picked up in Aldi's Christmas clearance aisle.
It's lucky that I already have supper planned, because I'm not very bright.
⁂
When getting up stiff, walking helps. When getting up stupid, plotting a thirty-mile ride on Google Maps helps. It will be spring before I can use that map, but I printed it out for inspiration.
Meanwhile, today's eleven-mile ride left me sore.
We both bought rolls on the day we bought ham. Dave's were "steak rolls", which are six-inch sub rolls, so we had ham subs for supper yesterday.
Left-over turkey loaf and lima beans tonight.
I was planning macaroni and cheese with ham in it for tonight, but I have a meeting at 5:30, so I'll have a sack lunch featuring a ham sandwich, and Dave is thinking of the peanut-butter hamburger at Oak 'n Alley. Their sandwiches would be good if their special blend of ground beef included some suet. All the cuts they grind are *dry*.
Puts me in mind of Aunt Doris's all-beef hamburgers.
I'm cleaning up my junk folders. joybeeson@comcast.net got 177 spam e-mails in 2018. n3f@comcast.net got 8, roughsewing@comcast.net didn't get any. Of course, roughsewing@comcast.net also never gets real e-mail. Well, hardly ever — fan mail from my Web site comes to that address. The latest fan letter was written in 2014.
I just heard the whites finish washing. I think that this is the first time I washed the black clothes first.
This afternoon I added Fluconazole and D3 to my list of pills and printed a fresh sheet. While throwing out the old slips, I wished that I sometimes needed to print a fresh sheet because I'd used up all the slips. That's probably more likely now that I'm getting six slips to the sheet instead of nine.
I was overtaken by a truck spraying molasses on Clarke Street.
I was on Clarke Street because I'd eaten three cream-cheese rangoons with my lunch and felt too stuffed to sprint across US 30.
I found two pairs of all-polyester pants at Goodwill. I wonder where the people who donated them bought them?
We might get three inches of snow tomorrow.
Snow has begun. It's only fogging down — I can still see the other side of the lake, dimly — but it has the look of snow that's settled in for the duration, and Weather Underground says three inches.
It's really cool that I saw this coming a week off, and took my outdoor exercise yesterday.
Hoo, now it says "3-5 in". I think it said that yesterday too, and I just remembered the minimum. Says Monday will be a really-nice day and I'll want to stay in the rest of the week.
When I undressed last night, I peeled off three pairs of tights in a wad and dumped them on the sewing machine to put away in the morning. This morning, every time I went into the bedroom, I saw Al curled up on the sewing machine. The pants even had an ear.
They are hanging in the closet now.
Weather Underground says tomorrow will be the last pleasant day for a week, but I'm washing clothes. I don't feel like sorting out stuff for a dump tour and packing the bike.
We've been playing with the $0.99 iron skillet I bought at Goodwill. It's a cutsey nutmeg-grater finish single-egg fryer that I thought I'd be re-donating on another trip, but I found that it exactly fits one frozen hash-brown patty and one link of sausage, and this morning Dave found that it's perfect for cooking canned corned-beef hash. He said that you pack the pan level full, cook over low heat for five minutes, stir, pack flat again, turn up the heat a little, and cook until it's brown on the bottom, then turn out an unbroken patty.
So this evening, I found a place to screw in another iron-pan hook.
We've been saying that I should get up into the attic and find out what's there while I still can. I think we should tell the kids to go up there and help themselves to anything that strikes their fancy; if it isn't within arm's reach of the hole, we aren't using it. Except there is one suitcase in the wayback that I'd like to keep. And all the Christmas stuff is within arm's reach, but all we ever use is the wrapping paper.
I believe that there are some real sleigh bells in the pile, but I may have already given those away.
I told Dave that it took me a dozen shots to get a picture that wasn't blurred, but the first was 1277 and the last — which is both sharp and properly framed — is 1287, so I took only eleven.
One of the first set was sharp, but a vital bit was cut off at the edge. After that I began checking the over-all appearance as well as zooming in to check for double exposure.
The nicest part of a digital camera is that you can look at the picture while there's still a chance to take another one. But a picture doesn't always look as good on the monitor as it looks on a postage-stamp screen.
Dave thinks I need a new camera. I think I need more light and something to brace my arms on.
Eighteen years I've put up with a useless shelf making half of the sewing-room closet unavailable for storing fabric. EIGHTEEN YEARS!
Today I took a screwdriver out of the kitchen drawer and spent about five minutes removing it.
⁂
Ew, gross! I just opened Ink-Free News, and the third story down was that a defense attorney argued that a slightly-built felon ought not to be sent to the Department of Corrections because the other prisoners would "victimize" him.
The judge opined that a pup who ran with the big dogs could expect to be bitten. Nobody involved hinted that prison guards should be expected to protect him.
The judge did commute the prison sentence to time in jail. The new sheriff is very fussy about what goes on in his jail.
I'm not going to check this rumor out for fear of spoiling it: I just read that old people need twice as much protein as young people.
I suspect that it was a garbled report of old folks needing half as much food, but the same amount of protein.
Whatever, it's time for a steak!
For weeks Dave has been trying to find out why his cameras open connections without closing the old ones, which uses up all our connections and I can't FTP my off-site backups.
He finally traced it to a defective cable, which is now in the trash bin.
This morning, I was nearly to the bridge when I realized that I'd forgotten my church key. Going back for it made me more than six minutes late, but I needed it to get in. By the footprints in the snow, someone who doesn't have a key also didn't get the message. I wiped the gaskets and door handles and changed the ice trays, and did some stair-climbing exercises. I seriously needed the walk, because I've been staying in so much. I haven't even been out to the compost heap. Pity I didn't think of that before I took my boots off.
There was snow on the hood of the church bus that completely covered the windshield.
Supposed to be a nice day tomorrow, with the ice too cold to be slick, so I plan to go shopping after Dave gets back from getting his ear fried. This will be his last treatment, yay rah. I've had to scrub blood off his pillowcase.
From the back, with his white belly concealed, Al is invisible on our new gray blanket.
But his shed fur shows up as a lighter gray.
⁂
Later, I was standing in the bedroom door when a white foot appeared and disappeared.
After Dave got back from getting his ear fried, I set out to go to Aldi and Owen's. I went out Center Street, turned onto 30, and saw Menard's sooner than I expected; I've never taken that precise route before. I turned right onto Parker Street, turned left onto Husky Trail, and was in Martin's parking lot before I remembered that I wasn't going there. So I parked and went in for the Brownberry sandwich thins I can't buy anywhere else. I got some emmentaler cheese on my way to the bread aisle.
Then I stocked up on cheeses at Aldi; our cheese-and-lunchmeat basket is piled up.
I bought three items at Martin's. I spent $151.61 at Aldi, the most-expensive item by far was $6.29, and the Martin's receipt is longer. But Aldi cheated a tad by putting all six of my cartons of seltzer on one line. Duplicate items that I heaved up onto the belt got individual lines. The clerk got down on her knees and moved my seltzer from under the cart I brought in to under the cart my groceries were in. Didn't take half as long at it as I would have.
Aldi didn't have plain seltzer, and there was no indication that "assorted flavors" still include plain. I hope it hasn't been discontinued. The carton and a half in the garage won't last forever, and the packages Kroger seltzer comes in don't fit my filing system.
Aldi also appears to have discontinued their own-brand soda pops, but I didn't look very hard.
After stocking up on frozen food at Aldi, I went to Owen's and bought frozen dinners and more pizzas. The meat bin in the freezer runneth over. I should be able to neaten it up a tad when I'm less tired.
After Dave's last electron treatment, they gave him the fitted cage and pad they had been strapping his head down with. The doctor said that his sunburned ear will continue to get worse for a few days.
But he has to get up early again tomorrow. He's seeing Dr. Darr for a regular checkup.
Dave said "I don't have a *thing* to do tomorrow!"
I still have to pick up the pizzas to get at the vegetables in the freezer. Dave took the remaining White Castles out of a huge box and put some into the small-packages-of-meat basket and some into the fruit basket.
But I've put the vegetables and the potatoes into fresh bags, so it's easier to look under them.
Good day to stay home. I re-arranged some of my fabric stash in the morning, and embroidered inventory marks on some of my new clothes in the afternoon. Evening spent reading funnies and usenet.
Walked to church, spent one hour and twenty-one minutes helping set up for tomorrow's dinner, then climbed every staircase in the place — well, those in the front. I didn't go up and down the two sets of stairs from the stage in the fellowship hall to the sanctuary, or the one in the furnace room. I forgot those existed.
After lunch, I tried *again* to find the setting that will allow me to read what I'm replying to when I write an e-mail. I didn't find it, but I stumbled upon a setting that will allow me to read my incoming mail. Thunderbird had been displaying random messages in a fat sans-serif type too big to focus on, and refusing to change when I clicked "simple HTML" and not even "plain text" would make it legible. I resorted to pasteing one message into Notepad, and I discarded a lot of messages after a glance.
While looking in vain for "display quoted text in a color distinguishable from the background" I found and un-clicked "allow messages to over-ride your choices". I can't imagine that *all* GRAPHIXML messages choose to force the same unreadable font, but it seems to have worked.
Well, at least now they're not *all* in that unreadable font.
I've found something else to hiss about: web sites that offer you a chance to opt in to something you don't want and the choices are "I gleefully accept" — highlighted so it will be chosen if you accidentally hit "enter" — and "I will accept tomorrow".
My usual response is ctl-W.
I got some sewing done today. The closest I came to setting foot outside was getting bread out of the freezer in the garage.
Today was glorious — below zero isn't all that cold when there is hardly any wind. I couldn't be bothered to put my boots on.
I forgot to close out the Banner today, but I have a wonderful excuse: I was answering a fan letter!
My previous fan letter was in 2017.
Another quiet day of sewing and editing.