Dave is watching Alton Brown and cutting up a chicken. I'm staying out of the kitchen.
Some of the hyacinths are open. The daffodils need to be divided.
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I promised to tell the story of Dad and the non-fixie bike. I don't recall enough details to tell it right, and I think only Dad could properly express the terror he felt.
He would have been a teen-ager at the time. Since he was old for getting married when he and Mom got hitched in the thirties, this would have been pretty close to the nineteenth century, nineteenth-century tech hung on into the forties for those who couldn't afford the latest bleeding-edge tech, and there were a *lot* of those during the thirties. (Between 1941 and 1945, you couldn't have it even if you could afford it.)
Some people writing about the early days of the bike use people who had contempt for brakes on bikes as examples of luddites. That's like ludditing people who refused to carry smart phones in 1980. The brakes on early bikes were no brakes at all. The most-efficient, if I gather correctly (I never read any organized account of brake development) was equivalent to the back of a spoon lightly pressed against the tread of the tire. Bike brakes began by imitating the "brakes" intended to slow wagons going downhill, and it took a while to develop a brake that would actually stop a bicycle.
And there wasn't a lot of pressure to improve brakes as long as the pedals were connected directly to the driving wheel. Seen in profile, a toddler's tricycle is pretty much the same design as a penny-farthing (high-wheeler, "standard"), and I'm pretty sure the tricycle I pedalled around on the porch had no brakes. If I wanted to go slower, I pedalled slower.
This didn't change much when the "safety" bike (so-called because you didn't fall ten feet if you lost your balance) connected the pedals to the driving wheel by way of a chain and two sprockets. The bike still goes slower if you pedal slower.
This design, now called a "fixie" (for "fixed gear"), is still in use for velodrome racing, and the track bike still has no brakes. A front brake must be added if the bike is taken on the road, and some guys still ride them.
I saw such a bike parked in front of a store during one of the Mohawk-Hudson Wheelmen's September Century rides. When we gossipped about this at another rest stop, someone (possibly me) commented "At least he's carrying a frame pump" and someone else said "If you look closer, that's a flute".
I never did find out who it was.
Fixed gear is the cheapest way to build a bike, so fixed gear bikes were all that Dad had ever ridden.
Then one day Dad was allowed to ride a friend's new bike. This must have been at the friend's house, because I rode my three-speed "English racer" all around the Colfax place, going as far as Colfax to check out books at the library, and I never found out what the two lower gears were for — it's flatter than a pancake around the Home Place.
He was doing fine until he got to the top of a hill and tried to slow. Instead of slowing the bike, the pedals broke free of the back wheel and the bike kept going faster and faster.
He didn't mention an alarming noise coming out of the back wheel, but I'm sure there was one.
Happy ending: he was so terrified that he tried to pedal backward, and the bike was fitted with a coaster brake.
Thus endeth the story of how I almost never got born.
We ate the chicken tonight — nearly half of it! During the cooking, Dave said that he was never going to do that again, but after he ate, he opined that maybe it wouldn't be so traumatic now that he knows what he is doing. I wished more than once that I'd paid attention when Mom was frying chicken.
Only a tad more than half the chicken would fit into my biggest skillet, so he fried the other half after supper, more gracefully than the first batch.
He fried the second batch in my other big skillet, because there was a fairly decent gravy in the one he'd used the first time. I drained all the fat into a small skillet, and he strained it into the big skillet to fry the second batch — if there is a next time, I'll strain the fat into the small skillet to save more goodies for the gravy.
I also reconstituted mashed-potato flakes, and warmed up some left-over canned peas.
We discussed my birthday dinner during supper. It has been our tradition to go to a restaurant where we have never eaten before on my birthday, but last year we had carry-out barbecue. This year I don't feel adventurous even though we've had our shots, so we are going to go to Wings.
I took a tour of Sprawlmart on my way to Kroger today, bought a chalupa at Taco Bell, and went to Tastee Freeze intending to use the picnic tables they left up all winter — but they were open for business. I found a low retaining wall on my way to Jefferson Street, and ate there. Whereupon I discovered that my orange niqab can't be thrown back over my head without taking my glasses off. I must carefully compare it to the white niqab to see how it's different.
I put away both masks upon leaving Kroger — and then saw the ATM booth and remembered that when I stopped at the bank on the way to Sprawlmart, the ATM wasn't working. So I had to dig my pleated mask out and put it back on.
I tried to make mexican lasagna for my bedtime snack and ended up with a quesadilla.
We had left-over chicken for supper tonight. There's enough chicken left to do it again. Dave zapped his; I ate mine chilled.
I added enough milk to the left-over gravy that we had more gravy than we started with yesterday, and it still solidified toward the end of the meal.
Three loads of wash. Good day to dry it outside.
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After the quesadilla that turned out to be lasagna and the lasagna that turned out to be a quesadilla, it is noteworthy that I made a quesadilla for my bedtime snack and it turned out to be a quesadilla.
It's more noteworthy that I wanted a quesadilla, rather than bread and milk — I think I had my first communicable disease on Saturday and the first half of Sunday.
The symptoms were more like "something I ate", but the only candidate for that was the chalupa I had for lunch on Friday, and if Taco Bell had been selling tainted food on Friday, it would have been in the news by now.
I didn't realize that I was sick on Saturday because I'd skipped my nap on Friday, so I just went around muttering "I used to have to skip my nap two days in a row to feel this rotten."
Come Sunday morning and I was still exhausted, the penny dropped. I felt much better after the service.
As I set off to ride to Bomy Singh's to buy our supper (the chicken makhani isn't half as good as the chicken tiki masala) I was thinking "Wow! I must have been depressed all winter; this bright, warm weather makes me feel like Eddy Merckx!" I didn't even shift down for McKinley Street.
On the way back, I discovered that it wasn't the temperature or the bright sun that made me feel so good — it was a very stiff tailwind.
A while back, Brock Tidball told us that it would save a lot of paperwork if we made our heirs the direct beneficiaries of our IRAs instead having the IRA pay the trust and the trust pay the heirs.
All we needed for the trust was names and addresses, but the IRAs require social-security numbers too. I think that this is the first hint that our heirs have had that they are our heirs; nice to know that "rich uncle" hasn't been on their minds!
Don't count your chickens, kids. We could choose a new set of heirs or spend it all ourselves.
I meant to catch up on my sewing today, but I'd hardly warmed up when I wondered whether what I was doing was mentioned in Rough Sewing, found that it was, but one sentence needed editing, and the rest of the morning went to editing my Web site. But I'm now two-thirds through replacing the elastic in an old bra instead of halfway through.
And I should add a paragraph to that picture of the bodkin I'm using . . .
I was also distracted by the discovery that a needle I'd left on the magnetic pincushion when I paused to take a nap several days ago had become thoroughly magnetized, and cut very interesting didos when held up by the thread. I particularly like the cartoon-like vibration when it finds the pole it seeks.
I paused to think while composing a Usenet post, and that left my eyes focussed on the flag in front of the house across the street. We have idly wondered on many occasions what the significance of always flying the flag at half mast might have.
But studying the composition that I see through the window without prior conceptions, it's plain to see that the flagpole is too tall.
Al E.: "It's rude of you to line the comfortable niche on the bottom shelf with valuable papers that I have to push to the floor before I can lie down."
Good news and bad news: the patio was covered with male cottonwood flowers this morning. That means that the flower-bud stickypod season is over — and the leaf-bud stickypod season is about to begin.
I'm drying the clothes inside today. Two loads, both small.
The Times-Union was already up when I checked at 10:48.
Department of "how does it do that?": I found a cottonwood stitckypod on the back window of the car when I was loading my sewing machine this morning. We haven't had a wind strong enough to blow a stickypod over the house.
I'm taking the Necchi in for repair. The treadle doesn't work either, but I'm putting off figuring out how to load it into the car.
I may catch up on the hand darning I need to do.
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Ayup, there are two and a half weeks of machines in line ahead of mine. I sure hope that it's trivial when he gets to it.
Sharp change of subject:
For context, Fancy Feast classic pate is the only food guaranteed to get Al's cosequin down him, so I never, never give him Fancy Feast that isn't drugged, and I buy one of each flavor whenever I buy it so he won't get bored.
And I buy other food in three-ounce cans because that's about as much as he can eat before he says "What, again? I never want to taste this again." (Since he's as old as we are, three ounces can be eight meals.)
When I went to Martins after dropping off the sewing machine, they were completely and totally out of three-ounce cans of cat food, except for a sparse scattering of Fancy Feast. And I quite recently bought one of each flavor that Fancy Feast makes in classic pate.
So I bought a five-ounce can of Heart to Tail at Aldi — I can throw half of it out. [What I did was cut it into eight servings, same as the three-ounce cans. Didn't waste a lot, as it wasn't thickened stiff enough to shatter, so Al liked it. I bought all three flavors on my next visit.]
Martins also didn't have yogurt or Brownberry flat buns, but that is more-or-less expected, since both of those are targets of opportunity. Aldi always has L'ovenbest flat buns, and I bought a package, but Aldi doesn't sell yogurt at all, only yogurt pudding.
I bought lowfat cottage cheese by mistake, and there isn't a drop of cream in the house.
I've put a load of rags and towels in to soak overnight, and the lower bin of the hamper is at long last empty, except for three bath towels that I don't want to wash because there isn't room in the linen cupboard for them. It's supposed to be windy tomorrow, but Thursday is predicted to be even windier.
Ye cats and little fishes! The latest Aldi ad features touchscreen gardening gloves!
For the city folk: if you *need* gardening gloves, you absolutely, positootly want to take the glove off the hand that you put into your pocket to take your phone out.
Not to mention that those touchscreen fingertips aren't going to work too well through a layer of dirt.
This morning, we packaged the five pounds of hamburger I bought yesterday. We put fourteen quarter-pound patties in the freezer, leaving about a pound in the fridge.
Must have been more than five pounds — that adds up to four and a half, Dave measured the quarters a bit generously because the meat is twenty-seven percent fat, we had more than half a pound for supper, and Dave fried another patty for breakfast.
We pack the patties in Walmart's square snack bags, which make nice square patties that I can flatten with the bacon press, and we don't dirty anything except Dave's hands and the kitchen scale.
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We celebrated my eightieth birthday by going to Wings, where I ate rib tips.
Ain't modern dentistry wonderful?
Good day for cultivating the garden
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On second thought, it's bloomin' *COLD* out there.
So I stayed in and edited pictures of blooms.
Picture taken facing west.
I'm planning to dig all these bulbs up when they ripen, and put them out by the road marked "free". A few days ago I photographed them so I'd know where to dig. All of them are white narcissus with yellow centers, except for two clumps of white daffodils, one next to a clump of narcissus on the north end, by the driveway, and the other close to the south end, also snuggled up to narcissus. This morning I took a couple of zinc markers out and stuck them into the daffodil clumps.
While I was at it, I shot some other flowers:
White daffodils blooming where all but one of a row of peonies died out. I'll move those next year — and I'll move the tulips in that row this year, if I don't lose track of them before they are ready to dig.
Close-up of the row, which is slightly past its prime.
The yellow daffodils need to be divided. I plan to distribute them along the wall of the house, so that the ferns will hide the fading foliage.
Hyacinths and violets are in full bloom, and a tulip is thinking about it. The grape hyacinths are doing their best, but don't add much to the show.
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After my nap, I put on a sweatshirt and went out determined to brave the cold long enough to cultivate the garden. I didn't remain to pull the weeds out of the rows!
Then I went back to pick four asparagus spears. What a nice birthday surprise! And there are four more for tomorrow or the next day.
I got three cards today and two yesterday. Dave says Al knocked over the animated card showing a cat batting a ball of yarn. When I set it on the floor, he just kept his distance.
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I just noticed that the crab-apple outside my window is covered with flower buds.
I made potato salad this morning. I harvested parsley, oregano, chives, and a garlic scallion. Put in a couple of shallots, and trimmed a couple of inches of leaves off two of the winter-onion scallions I dug a few days ago. I put in a tablespoon of salt for three big potatoes, and it seems about right.
I cleared the dictionary table of everything but dictionaries. Now I've got to organize the hallway bookshelves to make room for books I took off the dictionary table.
But I can look things up in dictionaries now! Except for the OED; none of my reading glasses are strong enough, and reading with one eye and a lens that is held just so is for ingredient lists and suchlike short, predictable writings.
I got A and B of my paperback collection sorted today. Twenty-four letters to go!
I'd like to have the shelf my antique children's books are on for other books. Some of the great-greats are of an age to appreciate them — perhaps I should inventory those before moving on to C. (And that would give me time to read A and B.)
Abrupt change of subject:
The potato salad was well timed. That evening I got an e-mail reminding me that there is a carry-in tomorrow, so I put some into a carryable container and labeled it "spicy potato salad".
There's a splinter of jalapeño in it, but what gives it zing is the stuff I found in the garden. Plus some dried thyme.
An excessive amount of ranch dressing also helps.
I wish I'd taken more of Bonnie's bean salad. I didn't taste it during the dinner because I don't like green beans, but during the clean-up I reflected that Dave likes green beans and I never prepare them for him, and filled up one of my little Betty Crocker containers.
Once at home I tasted it, and it was nearly half gone by the time Dave got any.
We fed the crowd on paper plates, but there were more dirty forks than you can shake a stick at. I counted eleven in the stuff that was found after I'd dumped the dish water.
Something snipped off the only tulip bloom in the fern bed and left it on the ground. A deer would have eaten it, so I haven't a clue.
I dead-headed the hyacinth in the last of the above pictures yesterday, and all of the yellow daffodils — but I never touched the tulip! It was just outside the frame of the hyacinth picture, and quite green when the picture was taken. You can see it in the enlargement of the picture above the hyacinth picture, lined up with the grape hyacinths.
I just learned that Roomba's "Error Fourteen" means "My bin fell off." I stuck it back on, and don't see how it could have run until now with a loose bin.
Dave erased all our blocked numbers. The list was getting clogged with throw-away numbers, and he suspected that we might have blocked a number that we shouldn't.
It shouldn't make a lot of difference; I've answered only one blocked call.
I got a real call in the middle of my nap. I confirmed an appointment, but was unable to get any clue as to who had an appointment with whom, or when, where, or what. This upset me so much that I couldn't get back to sleep. I hope it's the appointment we have at ten tomorrow.
We signed a bunch of trust papers this morning. We didn't see Brock because he was out sick, so we'll have to make another appointment.
Dave vacuumed the hall and bedroom today. I don't know whether to clear out the sewing room tomorrow, or sort some books.
I didn't buy onions on my last shopping trip because I can always dig up another clump of winter onions. This came a bit of a cropper when I wanted to make chili sauce for hot dogs today, and there was snow all over everything. I couldn't even find the tablespoon for digging up a garlic plant in the herb bed, so I used a table knife. I'd planned to leave the garlics in the herb bed until after digging up all the out-of-line garlics in the garden.
When we put in the raised beds, I found two stainless-steel tablespoons while digging, and put one in each bed. They have been quite convenient.
I've got to get to Menards to look over plastic raised beds pretty soon. The landscape timbers are rotting, and the left-hand bed has sprung a major leak. I hope that I can find beds that I can set over the piles of dirt already in place — those that I've been looking at on line all have floors in them. I think the idea is that you will put them on a patio or deck.
Well, a floor would prevent cottonwood roots from coming up through the raised beds and sprouting leaves, but it's been a long time since they did that.
I've got all the books off the children's-literature shelf, some of which didn't belong there.
I have a copy of _Five Little Peppers_ ˙ and ˙ /How They Grew/ by Maragret Sidney, inscribed "To Pauline Lackey Bailey for the best spelling grade in the class. [signed] Jeanette Ward 1915 – 1916."
I read that as a child, but it's in no condition to be read by an unsupervised child now. I plan to keep it, but I'll put a note for the trustee into it if someone wants it.
While at Aldi, I bought a bag of roasted almonds. When I put them into the freezer, I discovered that it's *raw* almonds that we are running low on.
I left home for the third time at 11:36 and left Aldi at 17:00, so I was gone well over five hours, and was riding or walking all that time, except for sitting down to eat a Filet 'o Fish at McDonald's, and perching in a booth while waiting my turn at Jimmy-John's. Skipping my nap usually leads to disturbed sleep that night (I think my bod goes into emergency mode), but last night I slept like a rock. (And I didn't wake up in the driveway.)
When I roll out my bike, I check that all five bungees are securely hooked, but yesterday there was a sixth bungee that I forgot about. I felt something funny while pushing my bike out of the garage, and found the bungee hooked into the spokes of my back wheel and wrapped around my cogs. "Thank goodness," said I, "that I didn't *ride* out of the garage!"
So I laid the bike down and unhooked the bungee and unwound it, and found that a bit had wedged between the drop-out and the cogs. It was an old, weathered bungee that had completely lost its color coat to sun-rot, and its underwear was faded. It broke when I tried to pull it out. So I tried pulling the other end, and that broke too. I borrowed some needle-nose pliers from Dave and plucked out broken ends for a while, then it occurred to me to rotate the wheel until the stuck bit was under the lightening hole. Then I reached the pliers in through the hole, grabbed the middle of the fluff, and it came out clean. Uh, "cleanly"; it was far from clean.
Then I struck out "1051" in my notebook, wrote in "1110", and set off. (I don't put colons in times in my notebook.)
Then I made a U-turn in the village, came back home, and spent eighteen minutes putting on more clothes. It took so long partly because I had to take my five-pocket shirt off before I could add a raw-silk undershirt, and doing that required me to take off all my headgear, and partly because I had to rustle around in the back of the closet to find sweat pants that had been put away for the summer.
I went to Sprawlmart, where lunch was all I bought. I thought for a minute that I'd found a wearable pair of shoes at Dollar General —that would have been a triumph, to get shoes for eight dollars when I hadn't found anything at any price in shoe stores— but when I tried one on, it was too narrow.
Dropped off some "that's not food" at the animal shelter, and went to Menards — the object of the trip — by way of 100 N. I was feeling a bit tired and hungry by then, so I considered going a shorter way, but by the time I got to the turn-off, I was all "¡GET ME OFF OLD THIRTY!"
Old Thirty is quite pleasant to ride on in some places, but none of those places are near Warsaw, particularly on the east side.
I'm sure Menards has prefabricated garden beds somewhere, but if you ask for "raised flower beds" all they have are window boxes on legs. I'll have to go again some time when I go there *first*.
Took me just fifteen minutes to ride from Aldi to Jimmy-Johns, where I called Dave, then bought a "Big John" to share for supper.
If I'm going to continue going to fast-food places, I must find a pair of opera glasses that fit into a shirt pocket. I can read only the largest letters of the menus, which is all very well when it's been a year since the last time and one doesn't care very much what one gets, but I'm running out of places where I haven't already eaten the featured item.
Opera glasses would also stop the clerks from thinking that I am impatiently waiting to be served.
My address book contains a lot of stale addresses, and I've received a lot of letters recently, so I've started a new address file. The first four envelopes were in alphabetical order. The fifth broke the pattern.
I made a big batch of spanish rice to have for lunches and snacks today. While putting it into refrigerator dishes, I realized that what the original recipe was, was a way to make one patty of hamburger serve six hungry farmers. (But I'm sure Mom's patty was bigger than the one I used.)
I made tamale pie when Mom was there to teach me, but I haven't the foggiest idea what she put into spanish rice, aside from hamburger, long-grain white rice, and a whole quart of home-canned tomato juice, which she boiled down into sauce.
And (all together now) thymenoregano.
I didn't even know it was made in a skillet, not a rice cooker, until I read recipes for jambalaya.
Nancy and Alice must have made it under supervision; perhaps they taught some of the children.
I used long-grain brown rice that had been soaked in the refrigerator for days and days, half a patty of hamburger, every herb in the garden, some dried thyme (all my thyme plants died, but I think I can get a new one at Open Air), two mini-sweets and a strip of frozen jalapeño, a can of mushrooms (which I drained into the rice, chopped, and fried in the hamburger grease and a little olive oil), and a large can of petite diced tomatoes. And some paprika and turmeric.
When a tablespoon each of shoyu and beef bouillon proved to be insufficient salt, I poured in a lot of corned-beef broth.
Oh, yeah, while all the picking, chopping, and mincing was going one, a stalk and a half of finely-chopped celery was steaming in the hamburger grease.
I should have taken notes, because it came out pretty good.
I've gotten back into the sewing room, after a fashion. Yesterday Dave found that a couple of inches of seam in his blue shirt had come undone, and this morning I back-stitched it.
And the envelope-copying project is part of getting stuff off the ironing board so I can iron some tape and two masks, and cut a neckband for my villa-olive dress.
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I just noticed the ingredient list on my "Herb & Sea Salt" crispbread: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, wholemeal rye flour, oat bran, oats, flax seeds, spelt bran, wheat bran, water, sea salt, salt, . . . aaand: oregano, thyme.
Was Mom maybe Norwegian?
And yes, it tastes as though they put salt in twice. Dave loves it.
I like "everything" Norwegian crisp bread because I can eat it plain without diluting the salt: sunflower seeds, oats, flax seeds, sesame seeds, corn flour, canola oil, quinona flour, dried onion, dried garlic, salt, potato fiber, water.
Ummm . . . isn't crispbread by definition made of rye flour? What we've got here is unsweetened granola.
On getting back to normal: I climbed a flight of steps after church today. I'll gradually work my way back to going up and down all four flights.
It's a lovely day, and our crabapple tree is fairly spectacular, particularly when seen from the north.
I picked up Elsie Dinsmore, intending to look up the author's name on Wikipedia, and the next thing I knew I was halfway through it and it was well after eight.
I don't remember the Christian propaganda on every page; it's more obtrusive than the Christian Science propaganda in _Jewel, a Chapter in her Life_, which was written to *be* propaganda.
When I read Elsie as a child, I was unaware that it wasn't a stand-alone — I rather suspect that it was written as a stand-alone, and proved successful enough to repeat. So I was much baffled when someone in another book (I thought it was Little Women, but that was published only one year later than the first Elsie Dinsmore) said "it goes on and on like the Elsie stories."
I do have three books back on the shelf.
Lunchtime: we have left-over corned beef and we have superb kraut — but there isn't a crumb of rye bread in the house, if you don't count Wasa Crispbread (rye crackers).
Ah, well, there's a slice of yesterday's pizza.
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Ta Dah! I remembered that we have "assorted rolls", and the molasses-colored ones are close enough to rye bread.
And the reuben was delicious. It was a bit of overkill to use apple-smoked swiss, but that was all the swiss we had.
I've been assuming that my phone would go a week on a charge, but I've always put it on the charger as soon as I got home, and I'm not *confident* that I can count on it to make a whole bunch of calls without running down. Since I'm not going anywhere alone for the next few days, I'm running a test. I unplugged it at 8:51 this morning, and now I'm keeping it on the monitor stand so I won't see the dangling wire and say "Awk scrickle I forgot to plug it in!"
It said "98% at church this morning, and says "95%" now. I've been making a point of lighting up the external screen whenever I want to know what time it is.
I should have sent this Banner on Friday, but I went for an all-day ride in twenty-mile-an-hour wind and was much too tired. Yesterday I had a fellowship committee meeting, after which I went to a craft show, the Legion hall to pick up supper, and Kroger for milk and eggs.
And today, I baked a birthday cake.
It isn't cool enough to cut yet.
Washday; I hope to get this file proofread and sent between loads.
Dave and I have a date to celebrate his eighty-third birthday at Mad Anthony's tomorrow. His lunch will be free.
The cake has been cut into very small pieces, wrapped, and put in the freezer.
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Not exactly between loads, but before bedtime anyway.