I got two projects off the ironing board today — that's a pretty good start to the new year. But it still needs a good bit of clearing before I can iron anything. One chore on the board is only a suit box I need to move to a high shelf. But another is a couple of scraps of black ripstop to remind me to design and make a new roll pouch for my emergency bike tools.
Yesterday I went to Owen's, then took my bike back to the shop, where I made like a very shaky bike vice while he found, removed, and replaced a broken bolt. No charge, even though it was a great deal of work.
I need to adjust the saddle a tiny bit more before I go on any long rides.
Got a roll kit cut out and one side hemmed this morning. And took photographs of each step to decorate my sewing blog.
Just read references to a "hilarious" restaurant review in which the reviewer spoofs nitpicky reviewers by going on and on about the shape of the spoons.
I've got a non-spoofy complaint about spoons: the Yokohama Steak House doesn't give you any. Those lovely, lovely sauces and no spoon!
You do get a sort of ceramic spoon rest with your soup — perhaps there's an oriental spoon-handling technique I'm missing, but I suspect that only tourists think those things are meant to be spoons. They look more like olive-oil lamps: the "spoons" sit quite firmly on their flat bottoms, and there's a groove for the wick running up the "handle".
Wikipedia says that the Chinese are dead serious about eating with the things, and that the flat bottom is to deter drips. (The metal spoons "used in schools and cheap restaurants" looked more usable to me.)
Wikipedia didn't say a word about Japanese people using Chinese soup spoons.
Hemmed the other three sides before nightfall.
It's a lovely day for a bike ride to Warsaw Health Foods, and I'm all suited up and ready to go.
But I *still* can't remember what I wanted to buy. I'll take a tour of the store before I buy baking powder —for *some* reason :-) I've been using a lot of baking powder lately— and maybe I'll see it. I'm planning to come back by way of the library —they have a copy of Walton's _Among Others_, which people have been saying is particularly good— and stop at Owen's for a box of saltines.
I did remember: toasted sunflower seeds. I got some sesame sticks too.
Saw the park full of vehicles — one had a trailer outfitted with seats made of metal mesh like the loading ramp, which puzzled me even more when I saw that they were grouped around a table. Finally realized that it was carrying a patio set that just happened to look similar from a distance.
By the time I got to the Lodge, I'd remembered that they were to auction off the contents (and a La France fire engine and some other stuff) on Saturday January fifth, so I went in to see what was going on. This was an abject failure. In addition to the place being so jammed that it was all I could manage to turn around and come back out, my glasses fogged over the instant I stepped inside.
After the health-food shop, I meant to go to Lowery's to see whether they have any black synthetic tape or ribbon to tie the roll pouch I'm making, but I stayed on Market until the last cross-over —I dislike riding on Winona, and Market is my favorite street— and at that point I could see the dollar-store plaza, and decided to tour the indoor flea market instead. Thence to the library, where I got the book I'd come for and another I found en route.
I intended to get to Owen's by way of the boardwalk, but when I got to the end of Arthur Street, I realized that I'd have to walk the full length of Beyer Farm Trail, including the asphalt portions, so I turned around and went back to Poppy street, and got to Lincoln by way of Sheridan. All I could see of Pike Lake was frozen over, and people were standing on it. On Winona I saw ice only in the bay in front of the hotel, and not even the geese were standing on it. The canal is frozen good and hard, but I didn't see any ice-skate marks.
I got rather more than a box of saltines at Owen's. But not so much that I couldn't check out in the express lane.
There were geese in our yard and the park all day. When I hung out the sheet in the morning, some of them were standing on a wide shelf of ice along the shore of the lake, but that was entirely gone when I took in the sheet in in the late afternoon.
I'd have finished my new roll pouch today if I hadn't had to undo a couple of mistakes. Well, the second mistake hasn't been undone yet — figured I'd better have a good night's rest first.
I took photographs to document the process, and downloaded them to my own computer by myself — Dave showed me how a few days ago. It was a little fussy to set up, but now all I have to do is to plug one end of a cable into the camera, plug the other end into my USB port, and call up Explorer. Hmmm . . . Z-Tree reads Drive E when it's a thumb drive — I should try it with the camera in. Z-Tree lets me do the whole job by keyboard, so things don't jump around and put the file in the directory next to the directory that the pointer was on when I started to release the pressure on the mouse button. Or a directory several screens away, if it suddenly decides to un-collapse a branch of the tree. I suspect that my latest back-up from 98 to XP isn't as fresh as I thought, because I found a whole bunch of files on my desktop that didn't belong anywhere near there.
It's a lot easier to freshen my off-site back-ups than the back-ups on another computer in the same room.
Haven't been on the bike since Saturday, and I'm getting aches and pains to prove it. We're out of bagged salad; I should go to Owen's tomorrow.
Carrying out the garbage was a dirty trick. I not only interrupted their meal, I caused the geese to burn off a lot of calories.
I finished my new tool-kit case yesterday. I plan to take it for a ride this morning.
For which reason I put on my waffle-knit undershirt, and while braiding my hair I studied it in the mirror and thought, "Hey, this doesn't look all that underwear-y." Then later on I caught sight of a side view when I wasn't sucking in my gut . . .
Gotta ride more often.
The seven-day forecast says that tomorrow will be a good day to take outdoor exercise. I've got a few papers I can leave at the emergency-room waiting room, and I suppose that the rain and warm weather will have cleared off the Beyer Farm Trail.
Or I could go see what they've built north of Walmart.
Spent today sewing. Or preparing to sew — I pinned an elastic casing into some old bike tights I plan to use for long underwear, and cut out more than half of the pieces for a half dozen pairs of briefs. Seventeen down, seven to go.
Went to Martin's by way of the emergency room and came back by way of Owen's. Didn't feel like a long trip, and it was nearly eleven when I rolled.
We had whole-wheat flour-tortilla tacos for supper. We left at least as much taco meat as we ate — the seasoning packet does a pound of hamburger. There is also a pot of bean soup and half a meatloaf in the fridge — I'm planning leftovers for Sunday night supper. Perhaps beans and some fresh cornbread; I believe that I had good results with equal parts of corn meal and oat bran once.
Dithering in the closet: All my dresses are dramatic, and I don't feel dramatic.
Had a weird dream about trying to make cornmeal muffins for a crowd and everything going wrong.
The water from the kitchen faucet tastes funny. Dave can't detect it, and he's usually much more sensitive than I am to things like this.
Two loads. Missed an undershirt. Washed all of Dave's do-rags except the one he has on — he's doing hamburger cream (topical chemo) again. It itches, so he has to think constantly about not touching his scalp, or at least remember to wash his hands before he touches anything else.
I don't know which ancestor gave me my dark color, but I'm grateful.
Almost finished cutting out my half dozen new briefs in the afternoon.
Late in the evening Dave came in to gleefully inform me that his site was back up — it went down on Sunday when TIS started installing a new RAID. Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Apparently it takes a while to copy everything to the new hardware.
I should have gone for a walk, but didn't. Tomorrow is supposed to be mostly sunny with a high of 28F, so I won't have any excuse to stay indoors tomorrow.
But then I was kinder short of excuses today.
Twelve degrees! That's more like it. There appears to be a thin film of ice on the lake.
The ice must be more than a film, because there is a swan standing on it.
I was complaining about being all suited up with nowhere to go when Dave complained that we were all out of frozen breakfast dingies. Aha! An Owen's-Martin's-Aldi tour! Perfect day to buy frozen food and leave it on the bike during the next stop.
But no matter how you slice it, getting from Martin's to Aldi involves a stretch of Old Road 30 and a backtrack from 250E to Commerce Drive.
The high being 28F, I naturally suited up a great deal more after that. It's after eleven and I'm just now ready to roll. After I change the water in my bottles.
That plan came a cropper when I packed what I'd bought at Owen's into my panniers and had barely enough space left for two more items, which hardly seemed worth going to Martin's for.
Despite the shortness of the trip, I passed out for the entire afternoon. Maybe it was all that dressing and undressing!
On the other hand, the afternoon isn't all that long when I don't get back until 2:00 and put the soup on low heat at 4:30.
I think I need a new pair of split mittens, with elbow-length sleeves like Dave's and slip-stitched hands like mine. Unfortunately, I've lost the ability to remain in a room where a television is running, so there isn't much knitting time in my schedule. Perhaps I should resume going to club meetings. But both of the available clubs would require me to drive after dark.
Grrrr. I turned on Firefox intending to read the latest installment of Girl Genius, and instead of "about:blank" I found myself looking at a new tab urging me to update my "plug-ins", whatever *that* is. Could it be the durn thing has sidegraded itself without telling me?
Actually, I do know what a plug-in is: Something I Don't Want to Fiddle With. Since I'm getting an increasing number of spams, I'd make an exception if there were a plug-in for Thunderbird that would make "forward as attachment to missed-spam@comcast.net" into a two-click operation, but I read e-mail on JOY98, and nobody is writing plug-ins for Thunderbirds that run on 98.
Stayed home and sewed today. Made tangible progress on my current project.
So I complained, and Dave sidegraded it on purpose, so the nags stopped, but suddenly new tabs had a bunch of junk on them; fortunately Dave came along while I was vainly searching the options menu and showed me the secret place to click to turn the "feature" off.
I'd have finished one of the six garments I'm working on today if the presser foot on the Necchi hadn't vibrated loose and bent the needle.
We needed salad, so I drove to Owen's even though it was a lovely day for a ride. Didn't want to spend half an hour putting on insulation.
And I forgot to go for a walk, but it's dark and cold out there now.
Oops! Yesterday evening I absent-mindedly set the cat's treat dish on the floor instead of in its moat, and now we have ants all over.
It's a lovely day for a ride, and warm enough that two shirts and three pairs of pants will be plenty, but I'm sadly lacking in motivation. Aldi loop, I suppose — I might find 7" plates at Big R or one of the dollar stores.
Found some at K-mart. I wonder why only the most-expensive and the cheapest plates come in plain. And why so many printed designs are *ugly*. It doesn't cost any more to print a good design than a bad one —a monochrome design in good taste is probably cheaper to print than a four-ink dog's breakfast— and there are zillions of beautiful open-domain designs.
While I'm wondering: how do they go about printing plates and bowls after they have been pleated into shape?
It would be cool to see a design printed before forming — the pleats are very regular, so the artist could predict what would happen.
Also, the sidegrade stopped Foxit from working, as I discovered when I tried to read a PDF file on Bookstacks. Dave said that they'd done that on purpose, as there was something wrong with Foxit, and the solution was to un-install Foxit and download and install a fresh copy. So he showed me how to do that and now I have a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's _Poison Belt_ on the other computer.
Didn't do much except make pizza today. Purt'near didn't wake up soon enough, and served it late. Used up the last of the puttanesca sauce. If I go shopping next Saturday, as seems very likely, I'll make sausage and mushroom with fresh mushrooms next Sunday. Perhaps with tomato sauce, perhaps with arabiatta.
I intend to use the other half of the pizza dough to make six muffins or two dozen muffinlets tomorrow.
Or one dozen muffins today. We will eat some with the canned soup if they come out of the oven soon enough.
They were delicious, and nine are left.
The shelf of ice along the shore is wider, easily seen by the ridge of ice that was at the edge yesterday. It won't matter how cold it gets if the wind doesn't stop stirring the lake.
I finished one sewing job and one mending job today. And I started to shorten Dave's long johns, but remembered just in time that despite having been around for years, they had never been washed. So I washed them in hot water and dried them in the dryer, but haven't had him try them on again yet.
Today's "What if"
The long johns came out of the dryer tight, but still too long. But by twice 1 1/4" instead of twice 1 5/8". (I measured a tuck.)
The lake appears to be completely iced over, including the bit at the mouth of the creek — but I can't see that part very well without going outside; I usually judge whether it's frozen or not by the behavior of the waterfowl, and there isn't a feather in sight.
I suppose they are all in Buttermilk Bay, which Dave tells me is the name of the place where warm water from the foundry flows in.
As far as I know, the bigger bay in front of the hotel has no name.
I'm having hog jowl on yeast muffin for breakfast. I'm surprised that hog jowl is (a) available (b) a gourmet-priced product (c) lower in quality than the cheap substitute for bacon was. They press and cut it into a hog-jowl shape before slicing, which makes it fall apart in the skillet.
But that doesn't matter much when one intends to tear it into bits to fit on slices of muffin.
From the time we went to bed until almost nine, we both slept soundly — and we both had a lousy night.
In other words, I hauled him to the emergency room again. Swelling, hives, and ferocious itching, but (thank God) nothing interesting to put in the annual letter, and he drove us home. No idea what brought it on; vague speculation that it was "something" given to him during the removal of two skin cancers yesterday, and even vaguer speculation that it was the local anesthetic.
There's only a thin film of snow on the ground this morning, but it was snowing hard at one in the morning. Stopped about the time we got there, and we didn't have to sweep off the car. Every other car I saw in the lot, and I did look around, had been parked before the snow stopped.
I didn't notice any other patients, even though I made a wrong turn and took a complete lap around the facility. But at that time I was paying attention only to the room numbers.
We were in bed before four, which is quick turn-around for an emergency room. They like to keep you around for a while to make sure it worked.
For some *strange* reason, I didn't get much done yesterday. I did edit a new file for my "Rough Sewing" web site, but need to take a couple more pictures before I post it.
We both slept very well last night, and woke up at six-thirty all bright-eyed and ready to start the day. Then we woke up again at nine-thirty.
To find a thin layer of snow on the ground and the houses on the other side of the lake fuzzed out. It started snowing again before we finished dressing, and it's still coming down at 11:18. But the other side of the lake is considerably less fuzzed.
I want to change the sheets, but Al is still in bed. I think I'll take a couple of photographs — it's cloudy, but the ground is white. It's actually bright in the sewing room, where I almost always need artificial light. The snow bounces the light past the trees.
Conclusion first: the new symptoms aren't all that alarming, but he should talk to Dr. Darr about it.
We were put in Room 15 this time — it was 17 on the three previous visits. Perhaps that's because we came by broad daylight instead of the middle of the night.
Dave woke up with a swollen and very itchy eye, a lump in his throat, and other indications that his allergy attack was getting its second wind. He called the hospital and they said he should come in, so off we went without breakfast in case they wanted to do blood tests — which they did; prednisone raises blood sugar, so they needed a fasting test.
This time I was fully dressed, but I forgot to shave. I'm pretty fuzzy; I don't think I've shaven since Sunday. At least my beard is white now so I don't look dirty.
Speaking of which, we saw a man with an absolutely *magnificent* white beard as we were pulling out of the parking lot.
And I had a book I've been wanting to read in my bag. It's lucky that Dave didn't take me up on my offer to lend him _Cat's Cradle_; when we got back I saw it lying on the end table; it's _Imperial Earth_ that is in my bag.
I remember reaching for _Cat's Cradle_ and thinking it was too much of a downer for the occasion; I'm not sure _Imperial Earth_ is any better, but _Among Others_ is still only half done.
You've got your whodunnits and your howdunnits and your whydunnits and your howcatchems; if there is such a category, _Among Others_ is a whahoppen. We know whodunnit and whydunnit before we know what crime was committed, and, at more than halfway through, we still don't know *exactly* what crime. I presume that there is going to be some howcatchem in there too, since the criminal is still running around loose.
When I left off reading, a secondary crime had just started a sub-plot. Here, one of two crimes has been committed. Some say it's one and are punishing the miscreant, some say it's conceivable that his accuser committed slander. I'm confident that this will be resolved, and in a way that illuminates the main plot.
We were out of butter and low on salad, so I drove to Owen's after supper. Also got cheese and fresh mushrooms to make a pizza tomorrow.
Since I haven't had any exercise this whole week, I inspected every aisle, some of them twice. This was less boring than it sounds because they have just moved everything and the guides provided are useless; it's a lot easier to walk one of the cross-aisles and read the signs than to search a very partial alphabetical list for something that's probably close to what you want.
Hey! When I downloaded my mail this morning there wasn't one single spam. I've been getting five or so per download even though I download almost every time I sit at the computer. I don't think spammers take Sunday off, so this might mean that forwarding all of them to missed-spam@comcast.net has done some good.
I chickened out of wearing my new loud-print linen suit to church and put on the dowdy old brown wool.
Just as well; the linen wouldn't have been warm enough.
We're having red 'n rye pizza for supper today. Two cups red-wheat flour, two cups rye flour, one cup oat bran, 1 teaspoon yeast, one rounded teaspoon salt, two heaping teaspoons granulated lecithin, two cups water. I had forgotten that rye makes a sticky dough and thought at first that I'd put in too much water.
Back to normal — I just forwarded eight spams to Comcast.
Before toddling off to bed, I downloaded tomorrow's Schlock Mercenary. I suspect that Tagon's Toughs are about to get a new recruit.
But will it want in after it finds out what happened to their last five ships? Especially Touch and Go. And will we ever find out how the U.N.S. corrupted Ventura? Or what Petey did with her?
Dave's morning blood sugar was pretty good despite having pizza for supper yesterday. Probably helps that red'nrye makes dreadful pizza, and neither of us ate very much. The crust was limp. And Happy Harvest tomato sauce isn't very good; I should have opened the arabiatta.
Fried dough for lunch. I set aside half the pizza dough to make muffins today, but later chose to make tacos for supper, and muffins don't go at all well with tortillas, particularly for diabetics. (Dave can manage low-carb tacos by putting all the filling into one taco.)
The jowl I fried for breakfast was very rich —I fried it limp— and I ate only half of it. As I was poking at it wondering what sort of bread to have it on for lunch, a light bulb appeared above my head and I took a roll's worth of dough out of the bag (which had inflated), patted it into a thick tortilla, and then pressed it over the bacon to fit the six-inch skillet. I turned it over a while ago and it should be ready to eat in two minutes and thirty-four seconds.
I think the rednrye will make splendid muffinlets, particularly if I put bacon grease in the cups. There's about two and a half cups of flour in it, minus one roll, and it takes one cup to make batter for my muffinlet pan, so I can pinch off equal-sized bits instead of trying to divide it evenly. Pity I don't have a melon baller.
It's still raining. I haven't walked anywhere since Sunday. I went to a Fellowship Committee meeting yesterday, but had to drive. Also forgot to put the shelf I left in the dish drainer back into the fridge before leaving. Someone else must have done it by now.
I cleaned off a shelf before the meeting, after there were enough people present that somebody must be capable of figuring out how to remove it — and the shelf came right out when I took hold of it, before I could ask. I hope the other fridge is as co-operative, as it needs cleaning worse. But I'll finish the right-hand fridge first, I mean to clean only one shelf per visit, and I'm rather confined by the weather. It will take a while.
Next Fellowship meeting is next Tuesday at four; at which time we'll execute the plans we made yesterday.
So I'd better get on with *some* of the fridge cleaning before then. The seven-day forecast is for precipitation right through Saturday, but from tomorrow on it's supposed to be snow. But it might lay down some ice when changing over.
I just divided the remaining dough into twenty-four muffinlets. I greased the pans and my hands with a mixture of hog jowl and sausage. It's 6:40 — I'd better start the oven about half-past seven.
There's a pitch-in after church next Sunday and I can't think what to bring. Dave's blood sugar dropped like a rock when he stopped the prednisone —Dr. Darr said he hadn't been on it long enough to worry about tapering off— but I think Sunday is too soon to expose him to potato salad, not to mention that it's a lot of work. Devilled eggs are low carb, but need to be kept chilled and my egg tray has no provision for ice. My crock-pot corn bread with whole-kernel corn in it always goes over well, but it's iffy whether it would cook before noon, and corn is supposed to be very glycemic. Not to mention that *I* don't need to be around a recipe that calls for a whole stick of butter, and it would be awkward to carry on foot. Sunday is supposed to be my first fit day for walking and I don't want to need to drive.
Several other people are much better than I am at tossed salad. My yeast bread isn't good unless freshly baked. Well, maybe muffinlets baked on Saturday would still be edible on Sunday.
I've forgotten what I sat down here to write. I downloaded my e-mail first, and was shocked and horrified to receive an invitation to a tour of the Creation Museum my very own church is organizing. How can we expose our children to people whose faith is so feeble that a fossil could destroy it? How could anyone think God is so limited?
The end of yesterday's entry reminds me that if I take muffinlets to the pitch-in, I'll have to buy another muffinlet pan — but that isn't what I was thinking about.
Perhaps it was something about us being out of January; Dave just reminded me that tomorrow is First Friday. If the weather is reasonable, we may have supper at Mad Anthony's and walk around First Friday. The National Weather Service strongly suggests that I wear wool tights under my jeans if I walk tomorrow. What I see out the window says the same for today.
I baked muffinlets yesterday thinking that I'd better do so before the dough turned sour. I didn't quite achieve that, but with the rye it tasted as though I'd done it on purpose. Only half the muffins made it to midnight. It takes only one cup of flour to make enough batter for two dozen muffinlets, so that isn't quite as piggy as it sounds. And the muffinlets I had for breakfast were edible with butter; I think I can take day-old bread to the pitch in. If I go out today or tomorrow and buy a muffinlet tin; I *think* I got the one I have at Owen's.
When I went back to sewing, I remembered that it was my other diary that I wanted to make an entry in.
There was only one spam in my mailbox when I got up this afternoon, but it was particularly vile: The scammer's bait was "Bible Verses for True Believers".
And it had a work-around for mail readers that automatically block malicious links — I might have clicked on "lower the drawbridge" if I'd found it among regular mail instead of in the Junk folder.
I must have sewed later into the afternoon than I thought — it was time to serve supper when I woke up. Luckily, the menu was bean soup, so all I had to do was put bowls and a sleeve of crackers on the table.
I'm not sure that this wasn't the first time I made soup with real ham bones. There was a lot more meat on the bones than it looked like in the package; I think one of them would have been plenty for a batch of soup that fits into my little six-quart stock pot.
We were out of Great Northerns, so I used black-eyed peas. They need a little more fat than white beans do.
No sign of ice on the lake when there was last light enough to see it. With the wind howling day and night, this isn't surprising.
It isn't really a howling wind; it's just that most of the time it's at the right angle to whistle on the bedroom door. But it is keeping the lake well stirred.
I see large swaths of lake that aren't being stirred by the wind.
I'm planning to ride this morning, if the roads are fit, as the seven-day weather promises a hiatus in the precipitation.
I should have worn one more layer of thin wool, but enjoyed getting out of the house. Got salt on my tires.
I went to Lowery's and bought elastic and sewing-machine needles, then went to Owen's and bought a muffinlet tin. I was delighted to find a stack of exact duplicates of the one I had, then noticed that on the shelf above were one-dozen tins, and two would cost only a little more than one two-dozen tin. I reflected that two small would do anything one large would do, and offer more options, but when I took them off the shelf, I saw that they were a different brand. They looked precisely the same, but I'm so pleased with the one I have that I put them back and took the two-dozen pan.
Perhaps I'd have decided the other way if I'd remembered how hard it is to rinse a two-dozen pan.
While I was at Lowery's, I looked at the tapes — all white or ecru and none with the fiber marked. I did find a narrow black grosgrain ribbon that I might have bought, but it wouldn't have been as good as my home-sewn string. And they have a reel of black eighth-inch satin ribbon that reminded me that I have some at home.
Because yesterday was First Friday, we went to the Great Wall for supper. We hadn't been there in *ages*, partly because we like the food too well.
I suppose that if we tipped the waitress extra, she'd bring us two filled plates and three boxes, but that would take a lot of the fun out of it.
Besides, she would give Dave too much rice and me too little.
On Thursday, Dave reminded me that yesterday was First Friday, and I suggested that we have an unwrap at Mad Anthony's, then walk around the festival. Somewhere along the line that shifted to the Great Wall, then after supper it was cold and dark, so we came home.
The seven-day forecast says the ice sculptures will hang around until Thursday, and Wednesday will be partly sunny.
It also says I'll have a pleasant walk to church tomorrow, but I'll want my boots and cane. Checked, boots are in the closet. My cane has already come out several times this winter. Sometimes un-necessarily — I forgot it in the church once.
I had a milestone yesterday: the toenail that I dropped a boat seat on last May has been touched with a toenail clipper. I didn't actually remove anything, but the edge is less rough when I run a finger over it.
Oddly, the other big toenail has a sort of cliff on it at least as prominent as the groove that divides before from after on my damaged nail. Judging by position, it was formed at least a month after the other. I don't recall any toe-affecting events.
The lake that I can see is about equal parts snow and dark spots, and binoculars show that a few of the smallest dark spots aren't rippling in the wind. No birds around; the only moving thing I've seen is Lucy on her daily patrol. This was before I put out the cat-food crumbs, but I suspect that she'll be back before a cat finds them. Al hasn't had a plate-glass cat fight in months.