I thought I'd better get out the _Joy of Cooking_ and verify that I have all the ingredients for the cake that I plan to bake tomorrow. Of course, I've had the baking bar for months, but what else goes into the cake besides butter, sugar, flour, and real-vanilla extract? (Salt and pecans.)
So I pulled out the baking bar behind the packages of eating chocolate — and discovered that it wasn't baking chocolate, but milk chocolate, only 39% cacao.
So I'll use 4.4 ounces of 70% eating chocolate and see how it goes. I may melt some of the baking bar of milk chocolate on the cake for frosting.
10:47 AM 5/3/2022
Eating chocolate made a good cake, but the other 61% of the baking bar appears to consist of ingredients that don't melt at all. It turned into fudge, but couldn't be spread. This cake doesn't need frosting; I put it on only to keep the cake from drying out, and a one-gallon twist-tie bag took care of that. And lumps of fudge on the cake aren't bad.
I must cut it up this morning, and freeze it in snack bags.
I discovered this morning that Kroger gallon bags are an eighth of an inch bigger than Meijer bags. Meijer bags are a whole number of centimeters and Kroger bags are a whole number of inches.
Neither is big enough to wrap the disused mandoline that I found while putting away the glass plates, so I put it into a grocery bag. And put it on the bike, since Saturday appears to be the next dry day and I'll pass Our Father's House on my way to the Farmers' Markets and the herb sale at the pavilion.
12:25 PM 5/18/2022
For several months, I've been wearing my old ragged sandals only for slopping around the house, for fear that they would finish falling apart when I had nothing to change into, but on Monday I was in a hurry to get to Kroger before the pharmacy closed and didn't change shoes.
Sure enough, I came back with one strap dangling, and threw the sandals into the trash.
This morning I struggled into my new white sandals, wore them for a while, reflected that I *had* come home with no particular inconvenience, and fished the old pair out of the trash. On inspection, the dangling strap is one of three that a single strap splits into, and I could glue it back with contact cement if I thought it worth the trouble.
The two toe straps on the new sandals have buckles, which means that I can't tighten them after the shoe is on, but have to somehow force my foot in from the back without scraping my sock out of place. (I can *almost* get the prong into the proper hole with my foot in the sandal; perhaps when the straps have stretched a nanometer, I can put them on the normal way.)
And the thick soles that protect me from the pedals when riding the road bike make me feel like Lurch or Herman Munster when walking.
Turned out I had plenty of time, but it was good to get there in time to pick up supper at Penguin Point on the way back.
On Wednesday the fourth, I was surprised to come back from an all-day ride with the time and energy to write, and opened BLOGSEW.TXT intending to jot down a few notes to be later moved into 2022BAN5.HTM.
Then I thought, why not take the notes directly in the Banner file? So I clicked file:open in Notepad.
Turned out that I had more energy than I thought, and wrote quite a long piece, using copy/paste to do things that PC-Write does automatically. I began by completing the remarks about Dave's birthday that I'd begun the day before, and segued smoothly into the unexpected pleasant day that led to setting out for Meijer by a scenic route, and hanging a right at Cessna Drive because I was bored with Meijer, all in detail that I wish I could remember.
I had a quite witty comment on this picture of the sandals I bought at Walmart:
and I remembered why I'd taken this picture of the laundry bag Alice made for me:
Not too long after saving and exiting the program, I remembered a word I'd wanted to use, and opened the document to replace the not-quite-right word — and all I'd written, plus a chunk of Tuesday's effort, was GONE.
On Thursday, I made a thorough search of my computer, and the missing article was nowhere to be found.
The nearest I can come to an explanation is that I somehow opened a back-up copy, and then over-wrote it. But what about the missing chunk that couldn't be in the back-up without also being in the original?
Knowing that what I wrote might vanish for no reason put a damper on the urge to write for the whole rest of the month.
The latest stage in Al's decline is that he will no longer pee in the litter box. It can't be his arthritis, because he still deposits turds in both boxes, and I hear vigorous recreational excavation in the corncob box at night.
By great good luck, he insists on using a moppable floor, but we had an exciting week or so before he settled on using the shower. This decision was significantly aided by Dave's habit of scrubbing all his other choices with Clorox cleaner.
We lost a couple of cat-bed pads that I used to keep in the walk-in closet in case Al wanted to hide behind the cedar chest.
Wet beds were our first clue that something was wrong, and at first we thought the roof was leaking. I was *not* looking forward to taking down all of the twentieth-century Banner issues that I keep on the closet shelf!
I took advantage of the prolonged rain and a clogged gutter to put the pads under a waterfall of demineralized water for a couple of days, and that got the smell out, but I'm sure that a cat's delicate nose could detect "Hey! This is a toilet!", so I haven't put either back down.
I remember Grandmother having to hang a rug on the wall to keep Charlie from using it. She said that Charlie would sit and gaze up at it longingly.
We used to keep the door to the master bath closed so the bright nightlight wouldn't keep Dave awake. Not too long before Al's litter-box problem, we realized that the dimmer nightlight didn't keep Dave awake, and whenever I wanted the brighter one on, I was within arm's reach of the outlet. But habit prevailed, and I kept on making sure that the door was closed at night.
Then came Al's difficulty, and I had to reverse, and make sure the door is open. So far, knock wood, I haven't locked him out.
He scolded me once because I hadn't flushed the shower.
I just looked out the window, and saw a robin looking in.
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