L---p----1----+----2----+----3----+@10-4----T----R----+----r----r----7--T-+--r I haven't persuaded Thunderbird to stop messing with my hard returns, I haven't persuaded Alpine to run on this machine, and Web mail (aside from excessive delay and general infuriatingness) doesn't allow me to insert a file except by putting the entire file on the clipboard, which is a tedious process involving three different programs, each of which might introduce its own mistakes. So to get this month's Banner, go to http://davebeeson.home.comcast.net/LETTERS/AprBan09.txt 2 April 2009 Oops. I sent the March Banner, but forgot to post the divided-into-paragraphs version on the Web. This month I'm posting the URL of the backup copy. Wish there were some way to predict which hard returns would be deleted -- if I knew, I could put in an extra return at that point. I finished reading _The Misted Cliffs_ well after midnight, got up to go to bed, and saw Al asleep on the other end of the sofa. He sleeps on the bed with Dave when I sit up at the computer, but when I read into the night, I always find him in the living room with me. It was after noon before I returned the salad greens to the church. Felt queer to leave the church on a weekday without my Trafalgar bag. 5 April 2009 Finished my new black bra yesterday -- all but putting the elastic into the casing. I must cut another out at once, so I can memorize the correct order for leaving a gap in the side seams. Motzarella was out of order tonight, so I finally finished reading Hillerman's _The First Eagle_. 10 April 2009 And now the new black bra is in the wash. Got one of the elastics twisted, but don't feel it when wearing it, so I haven't tried to pull it out and unsew it. Started to cut another twice: first I discovered that there isn't enough of the black linen, then I laid out the white linen I made the two white bras from -- there were four yards of that originally, so there is worlds left -- and decided to hold off until after Dave buys himself a laser level I can use as a chalk line. Yesterday I picked a little at my tunic-and-pants set and the tick for the pew cushions. Didn't do any actual work except for washing one sheet, and I had a nice long nap, so I was surprised when I was too tired to want to ride my bike to Owens after our evening walk. Which reminds me: I'd better suit up before lunch time today! We had a sunny Wednesday, so I took a ride and changed my books at the library. Stopped at Sherman & Lin's, the health-food store, Lowery's, and Marsh on the way out, and the emergency room on the way back. The new distressed-merchandise Sherman and Lin's was open; didn't note anything interesting except for a "laser cat toy". Bought some chocolate in the original Sherman & Lin's, including a box of Hershey dark-chocolate truffles under the impression that the tin box was un-embossed; it wasn't, and the truffles weren't all that great. Dave agreed that they weren't all that great, but the other half of the box disappeared. Bought lecithin at the health-food store, a zipper and some safety pins at Lowery's, green split peas at Marsh --- where *did* I find those yellow split peas? Owen's & Aldi have no peas at all, and I haven't been to any of the Mexican groceries in ages. And, of course, dropped off magazines at the emergency room. I wonder why we call it a "room" when it's a whole wing? 16 April 2009 Today's the day I celebrate my birth! 17 April 2009 It wasn't convenient to dine out together on Wednesday, so we postponed to Thursday. Oddly, I forgot all about it being my birthday on the fifteenth, and frequently said "well, it's my birthday" and sluffed off or indulged on the sixteenth. We went to the new pizza parlor above the Barbee Hotel. Turned out to be a sports bar, and therefore very noisy, but the pizza was good and they turned the music down a tad during most of the time we were actually eating. Dave said the pizza was close to Smitty's! Not at all the same kind; it was a thin, crunchy crust. I'll try the "deep-dish" next time -- and eat it on the balcony. We had about half of a sixteen-inch pizza to bring home, but it's nearly all gone now. Dave shopped intensely for a couple of days, but hasn't found the right laser level yet. Hey, I could have gone on a hardware-store tour today! Felt bad about not riding on such a lovely day, but I've barely begun the books I got at my last trip to the library, and I couldn't think of anywhere else to go that was a reasonable distance. I did ride to Owen's and back on Wednesday. Looked in the International foods, but didn't find yellow split peas. On the previous trip, I'd noticed a couple of packages of green split peas in the beans-and-rice aisle. Probably just as well I wasn't out on the bike today -- we set out to walk to Roy Street for our after supper walk, because we had noticed some new signs identifying trees when we walked past the Greenway yesterday, but about where the Greenway tangents off from the old circle drive, I felt a sharp pain in my left foot and I've been limping ever since. Feels like a break or a sprain, but I haven't tripped or kicked anything. It feels a tad swollen, but looks perfectly normal. We went almost to the yellow lollipop, thinking that my foot would improve if I sat down and rubbed it. The bench by the lollipop was occupied, so I used a convenient stump (which, on closer inspection, was a section of log). Rubbing didn't help, so we turned back. My cane doesn't help either. I'm catching on to how to walk without aggravating it, though. (Staying on the carpet does help!) 18 April 2009 I'm getting around better today, but mainly because I've figured out how to walk without pushing off with my toes. 19 April 2009 The good news: my foot is so much better that I could walk to church today. The bad news: limping all day Saturday left me with a sore left calf. Feels as though the soreness will be gone tomorrow, though. -------------------------------------------------- On Apr 21, 2009, at 8:13 AM, Joy Beeson wrote: > > > I've taken to e-mailing my newsletters, > but I could suggest laser to my sister, > who still prints out long runs. Do $200 > laser printers work better than $200 sewing > machines? Yes ... For nearly a decade, I had an Apple 8500, an 11 x 17, 20 pages per minute duplexing (2-side) printer. Eventually, a component failed that was not economic to replace. Since I was suddenly without a printer in the middle of a big project, I rushed out to Staples and bought a Brother 5230DN (duplex/Ethernet network) laser printer for $250. Although it only printed on letter and legal size (no 11 x 17 sheets) rated at 30 ppm, it was significantly faster than the 8500. I've now had the printer for 3+ years and it's been quite reliable, although the actual throughput is more like 20 ppm when duplexing (but the 8500 was also much slower when duplexing, too). Shortly after getting the Brother 5230, I purchased a Xerox 5500DN (55 copies per minute) for about $2500. This was truly an excellent production printer, maintaining its rated 55 copy per minute speed even when duplexing. (200 page book in about 4 minutes!) It also handled paper up through 11x17. But when I downsized my business, I sold the Xerox about 2 years ago. So, for the past 2 years, I've been using the Brother 5230 as my principle printer (supplemented by a HP 2605 color laser) with no troubles at all. I put a lot of "miles" on a laser printer, since book projects often get printed out several times during the production process. (Although I'm using PDFs more frequently these days.) I can't say that I'd expect near as good service from a $200 sewing machine (my wife has a $2000 Pfaff). If you need limited color output, you'll pay for a low end laser printer out of the savings in ink jet cartridges in almost no time. =============================================== Pete Masterson, Author of Book Design and Production: A Guide for Authors and Publishers Aeonix1@Mac.com Aeonix Publishing Group http://www.aeonix.com =============================================== -------------------------------------------------- Hey, lo and behold, etc., pasting in the above snippet from a mailing-list conversation *didn't* break my save-as-a-file button! But I'd better look at the back-up file to make sure Thunderbird didn't tell me it was saving as text, then add HTML garbage anyway. 23 April 2009 Nobody for Handwork Circle Tuesday, so I finished sewing hooks on a strip of selvage that will become part of the shoulder openings on my linen Salwar Kameez. There is neither a salwar nor a kameez in the outfit, but I don't have another name for that sort of suit. I guess I could call it "tunic and jeans", but I think of a tunic as a shirt with rather less shaping than the short dress I'm making. And when people say "jeans" these days, they mean a skin-tight high-fashion garment. Afterward, I took a token swipe at the refrigerator. Same Wednesday; I wiped up a dried- on spill, removed a carton containing three eggs that flunked the float test, and did very little else. Oops! I didn't even check the ice cubes! Martha had another appointment Wednesday night, so I made at least two artistic decisions at the Banner meeting, protesting LOUDLY all the way. Hope I didn't mess up *too* badly. All we did was to get the letters cut out, and two stripes and one of the lines of letters ironed on. My brand new laser level, which Dave had brought home from Lowes earlier in the day, was a big help with that last. Though they call it a laser level, what it is is a chalk line. There are a pair of bubble tubes in it, but a base less than two inches by three can't do any serious leveling, not to mention that it puts out a sheet, rather than a line, of light, so you can't mark a level line unless you are on a vertical surface. So I'm all set to resume work on cutting that wide, wide piece of linen into bras -- but my wash-out marker has just run out of ink. Before the banner meeting, I ran downstairs to see whether I could get some left-over "dump cake" (crumb pie) to take home. The clean-up crew insisted that I also take a container of apple salad and a container of sloppy joe. Marissa got away with just the dump cake. 27 April 2009 Spent today riding around Warsaw on my bike. Stopped on my way out to check the ice cubes in the church fridge, and show a young mother of two (who had come to see Mrs. Near) where the unlocked door into the church is. The playground was full of children; at such times we lock all doors except the one the church secretary can see. I got a new wash-out marker at Lowery's, returned _Death of an Adept_ and _Freddy and the Space Ship_, checked out _Ruby Dice_ and _Freddy Goes to Florida_, ate lunch at Subway -- their toasted BLT on whole wheat is pretty good -- through the Beyer Trail to the Emergency Room where I dropped off some magazines, straight home. Didn't think to look at the swamp across Arthur from the BMX park until I was past it. Because of the detour to the church, I approached The Entrance on King's Highway instead of Park Avenue. Much to my shock and surprise, I MADE THE LIGHT. There are four roads meeting at that intersection; one never arrives when the light is green. Rumor has it that conversion into a roundabout is being planned. I made a pretty good meat loaf yesterday. I had gotten tired of trying to thaw kettle bread on demand, so a couple of big pieces had gone stale and been cut into croutons, dried, and frozen. I had also acquired a pound of frozen "Italian" flavor raw-turkey puree at Kroger's "10 for $10" sale. So I thawed the turkey and combined it with a pint of bread cubes, one egg, two minced celery stalks, a chopped onion, a chopped carrot, two heaping teaspoons of Knorr chicken-flavor salt, and all the fresh herbs I could find: green garlic, thyme, oregano, and chives. I forgot about the parsley, and figured that garlic chives wouldn't do much when there was garlic and chives. Patted it into an iron skillet and poured left-over "fire-roasted organic" crushed tomatoes over the top. That didn't look like enough, so I added some thick vegetable-juice cocktail. Baked an hour at 400F, and it was good. Pretty good cold, too. When I was about to add the meat after putting all the seasonings into the bowl, I felt that I should have used one cup of bread instead of two because Dave always complains that there is too much loaf in my meatloaf, but he liked it and said that he hoped I'd taken notes. I guess it's because real wholegrain bread has more body than factory bread. I also made a pretty good supper tonight, particularly considering it was all ready-to-eat stuff out of the freezer. I have a little cookie sheet -- the kind they call a "jelly-roll pan" when you buy one -- that fits my toaster oven. One day when preparing to bake two of those little fried-looking stuffed chicken breasts on it, I realized that there was room on the tray for an entire meal, so I added a freshly-zapped potato (cut in chunks) and some frozen veggies, and sprinkled olive oil over all. Today I didn't have any potatoes in the house, so I mixed half a cup of potato flakes with a cup of milk and some salt, stirred in a few drops of olive oil, let it get stiff, and mounded it on the greased pan between two chicken breasts. Two onion wedges end-stopped the stripe of left-over pan, and I filled the space between those bookends with "steam in the bag" mixed vegetables. Then I sprinkled everything but the chicken with olive oil. The package said half an hour at 400F, but I allowed thirty-five minutes on account of all the extra stuff. About fifteen minutes before it was done, I remembered that I'd picked some asparagus, cut the tips off four spears to fit across the pan, and put them in. Fifteen minutes proved to be just right, but Dave said twice that he liked asparagus better fried in butter. Perhaps if I'd dipped them in olive oil first, he'd have liked them better. I had no idea that I have a habit of tugging at the hem of my shirt hem until I wondered why there are holes at the side seams of my two rattiest old work shirts. Since then, I've been catching myself at it all the time. Aannd I got up just then to see what Dave had said in the kitchen -- the predicted rain had just started -- and realized why I tug at my hems: sitting down runkles them up. Did I say a while back that Thunderbird hadn't reacted to pasting in a quote by insisting on HTML? Now it has caught on. If I tell it to save as text instead, it says yassah, right away boss, saves in HTML, and labels it text. So I schlepboarded it into PC-Write to make my back-up file. Not all that much trouble, but I'm going to have to make an icon that goes directly to it. To my delight, I discovered that Agent does e- mail. To my chagrin, I can't figure out what to tell it to look for; no matter what I put into the blank, it can't find the server. 29 April 2009 Didn't get anything done except one load of wash yesterday, but a while after getting back from Handwork Circle -- which I spent reading a few chapters of _Ruby Dice_ -- I remembered that I'd put a half batch of sweet-roll dough in the fridge to thaw a few days ago, and that I had a jar of applesauce to dispose of. I patted the dough out on a generously-greased jelly roll pan, spread olive oil on top, then sprinkled it with cinnamon sugar, spread apple sauce over that, more cinnamon sugar, more olive oil, let rise a while and baked until brown. Not quite enough olive oil; I ate a couple of the hot pieces with butter, but cold it's much better with sour cream. There were about two square inches left the last time I looked into the kitchen. This morning I finally finished the last pew cushion! The cover has been done for *ages*, and the tick almost as long, waiting for me to get around to putting stuffing into it. Keenly aware that I didn't have any dirty-work jeans, this morning I also laid the oldest pair of herringbones on the ironing board, planning to tear a strip off the leg to patch a tear in the seat. As I was planning how best to do that, the dime dropped: these pants aren't worth that much trouble! So I put an iron-on patch inside, and now have some dirty-work jeans. That's been hanging on the peg for *years*. Next, perhaps, I'll mend the second-oldest herringbones that have been waiting for weeks for a patch on the knee. 3 May 2009 Time to wrap this up and send it, but I'm sleepy. Perhaps in the intervals of washing clothes tomorrow? I got a surprise when reading the bulletin in church this morning: a thank-you note for the pew cushions in the prayer room. Made a chocolate cake yesterday -- just barely. I melted the chocolate in the morning and set it aside to cool, planning to bake after my nap -- but I barely woke in time to make supper. So we were eating hot cake out of the pan pretty late at night. I forgot to buy pecans, but there was a bag of black walnuts in the freezer, so that worked out. The Fat and Skinny Tire Festival was still going on today, but all I did by way of looking at it was to veer into Auditorium Boulevard on my way home from church. The barbecue stand was open, but I already had a box of barbecued chicken in my hand, having bought some leftovers from a fund raiser on my way out of the church. I briefly considered buying some smoked macaroni and cheese to go with it. Dave said that he watched a few laps of the criterium. Both of us walked around a good bit yesterday. We somehow missed seeing the barbecue stand when we went downtown for lunch. Dave went home for a sandwich; since I'd already had one, I walked around the village, and climbed up to The Shop Upstairs. I hadn't been there for at least a year -- and with good reason: there isn't much to look at. I don't think I'd noticed before that when the building had been a home, each bedroom's closet had been a door-wide slice off a corner. When I saw the first one, I assumed that it was a china cupboard like the built-in cupboard we had in New York, even though I was upstairs and it had no shelves. I don't see how you could hang even one dress in such a small triangle. I first noticed the barbecue truck from a window of The Shop Upstairs. Friday evening, we went to the Great Wall to celebrate Dave's birthday. There is still some rice and Three Crowns in the fridge. I polished off the pork one night. Haven't limped in quite a spell, but I'm still careful about what I step on. Oddly, asphalt doesn't hurt as much as concrete -- and I really liked the cobble-like "bricks" running down the middle of the Village at Winona. I guess grass is good not because it's soft, but because it's uneven. 4 May 2009 Dave went mushroom hunting last week. Ward found a few, Dave none at all. But he got a marvelous birthday present. When we came back from our after-supper walk Saturday evening, I noticed that the daffodils in the lily-of-the-valley bed around the mailbox needed deadheading, so took out my pocket knife and stayed behind. Finished the job, then decided that there weren't too many daffodils in the tiger-lily bed to deadhead after all, hiked over, and cut all their heads off. The lilies are nearly up enough to hide the fading daffodils, by the way. Going straight from there to the house takes me past the redbud we planted to replace the lightning-struck ash -- and there was the biggest sponge mushroom I've ever seen! Stopped and stared for a while, then started to fetch Dave to see it. I'd hardly taken two steps before I saw, lying in the grass, a morel that I'd have thought impressive if I hadn't just seen the other. And one, still on its roots (on its mycelia?), that wasn't a lot smaller, but something had bitten the top off. I didn't want to leave a mushroom lying in the grass, so I picked all three before going in. We had mushrooms, asparagus, and left-over barbecued chicken for supper Sunday night. They were wonderfully clean; no bugs at all, and only a little dirt at the root. I split them in half so they'd cook all the way though, and I had to slit the lining of the largest to make it lie flat in the skillet. Rolled them in unseasoned whole-grain white-wheat flour, fried in oil and whipped butter. -- Joy Beeson http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/ http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather) west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.