Wednesday, November 30, 2005
New wedding rules
I’m learning so many interesting things from Jen’s wedding. For example, did you know it’s ok to wear black to a wedding now? Neither did I. I just know that tidbit will save me trouble at some point down the road.
I don’t have the temperment at all for handling a big wedding...what she’s doing would have driven me mad long ago. I’m crazy excited for her, though. It sounds like it will be absolutely beautiful. And I think everybody should get a wedding that matches their dreams. Mine just happened to involve boots, jeans, and a trip to Vegas. Heh.
Hey, look Dad:
New England is trying to catch up with y’all again! LOL.
And did you see what Glenn Reynolds wants for Christmas?
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Ah, Christmas. Specials, that is.
This is funny, and not in the least because we were just talking about this the other night. We had Rudolph on (you know you’re pregnant when you can’t stop crying for the poor misfit toys) and afterward we got to talking about how different it is now that you can just pop a tape in. No waiting impatiently for the day it’s on, and no freaking out that we might miss something. Now if you miss it, you just skip back.
Sometimes it feels like we’re raising this kid in an entirely separate universe from the one we grew up in.
By the way, I have no idea why the site is so nightmarishly slow today. It’s on our list of things-to-try-to-figure-out, since it’s been dragging since the upgrade. Hopefully one of us will get a chance soon…
A Little Martha Love
I think Jay just fell a little bit in love with Martha Stewart. We’re sitting here watching her and she’s talking about how she hates scented laundry detergent. She’s pleading with Tide to make their unscented soap available in economy sizes, and my husband is cheering.
Yes, when we got married, he converted me. I used to be a scented soap person.
Silly Monkey
My parents sent Sadie a huge box of books for her birthday a couple of months ago, and I’ve been bringing them out slowly since then. Whe she seems bored with the selection she has, I add one to the mix. Last night Eight Silly Monkeys joined the group, and to rave reviews. So much so that when I tried to put it back on the bookshelf, she broke down in tears. She took it to Jay to have him read it to her, too, then burst into tears again when he only read it once. She held it while he read her her bedtime book and looked at it, instead. I presume that she fell asleep holding it...there was no getting it away from her so it went to bed with her. And this morning, when I went in to get her up, the first thing she did was hand me that book.
The girl, she is opinionated. Heh.
I guess I know what I’m doing today, lol.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Happy Birthday
To blogger Peter Caputa, who is 29 today, and has a cool list of things famous people did when they were 29. For instance, Carole King released Tapestry, and I show my age by remembering when it was the all time top selling album.
Ecosystem Changes I’d Like To See
N.Z. Bear is in the midst of changes to the Blogosphere Ecosystem, so you may note your blog’s rank has changed dramatically, and that may or may not be where it ends up.
My first impression was that perhaps he’d also pruned out some of the thousands of spam blogs clogging the lowest ranks, but looking closer, that seems not to be the case. That’s a change I could get behind, but an awful lot of work. You’d almost need to enlist the blogging public to check and submit for removal those blogs, almost wiki-like.
I can take or leave the purging of inline trackbacks as links that count, though that wouldn’t be needed if other moves were made. Some of the gaming has nothing to do with inline trackbacks and such trackbacks appearing in open trackback posts. If open trackbacks are manual, you’re foiled. If someone starts multiple blogs and links themselves repeatedly, you’re foiled. If someone hosts open trackbacks, the inline trackbacks may not count, but the obligatory links to the open trackback host will.
First, if Don Surber is the biggest problem, banish Don Surber.
Second, purge the “blogs” that aren’t blogs.
Third, as best you can, purge spam blogs.
Fourth, and most importantly as it makes item one moot, limit the number of unique links that are counted from any one blog to another. Five seems like a good number.
What does that do? It limits the usefulness eevn of open trackbacks that are manual, and of hosting open trackbacks for the hosts who benefit from massive, nutrition-free linkage. It limits the usefulness of starting multiple blogs and linking yourself over and over, or guest blogging and cross-posting/linking yourself over and over.
It’s a simple rule that presumably would be easy to implement.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
What We Face With Sadie
Just one example, which we forgot to blog about a week or so ago when it happened.
At bed time, Sadie always gets one of two books - sometimes both - read to her, then she gets put in bed. One is The Going To Bed Book, and the other is The Moon In My Room, which we call “the moon book.” She gets to choose which one.
Well, she decided that if she hid both of those books, we wouldn’t make her go to bed. She was irritated when a different book got read to her and she was put in bed anyway.
A Yummy Food Meme
If just thinking about food doesn’t nauseate you at this point in the weekend, anyway. LOL. Here’s an either/or, which do you like better meme...I’ve bolded my preferences.
01. CHEESE or CHOCOLATE?
02. BLUEBERRIES or STRAWBERRIES?
03. COFFEE or TEA?
04. CORN MUFFIN or ENGLISH MUFFIN?
05. PANCAKES or FRENCH TOAST?
06. YOGURT or CREAM CHEESE?
07. RICE or PASTA?
08. CAKE or PIE?
09. GROUND BEEF or GROUND TURKEY?
10. HOT DOGS or HAMBURGERS?
11. JELLY or MARMALADE?
12. AMERICAN CHEESE or SWISS CHEESE?
13. DIET SODA or NO SODA?
14. LEMONADE or ICED TEA?
15. CHERRIES or GRAPES?
16. CHOCOLATE QUIK or STRAWBERRY QUIK?
17. WAFFLES or PANCAKES?
18. WHITE BREAD or WHOLE-GRAIN/WHEAT BREAD?
19. PEAS or CARROTS?
20. PUDDING or FRUIT-FLAVORED GELATIN?
21. COLD CEREAL or HOT CEREAL?
22. KETCHUP or MUSTARD?
23. MUSTARD or MAYONNAISE?
24. MAYONNAISE or KETCHUP?
25. BLACK OLIVES or GREEN OLIVES?
26. ONION or GARLIC?
27. PLAIN BARBECUE or BARBECUE WITH SAUCE?
28. SCRAMBLED EGGS or FRIED EGGS?
29. EGGS or EGG REPLACEMENTS?
30. MEAT or VEGETABLES?
31. CHINESE TAKE-OUT or PIZZA?
32. SUSHI or DELI SANDWICH?
33. WHITE CLAM CHOWDER or RED CLAM CHOWDER?
34. KEY LIME PIE or LEMON MERANGUE PIE?
35. PIE & ICE CREAM or CAKE & ICE CREAM?
36. WHIPPED CREAM or CAKE FROSTING?
37. HONEY or MAPLE SYRUP?
From Fat Lady Walking.
Happy Birthday
To blogger Billy Beck.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Wonderfalls
In response to the update on this post, I just e-mailed Glenn Reynolds the following:
Tim Minear is right. We were hooked on Wonderfalls from the first episode, and it was too good for Fox not to summarily execute. It’s a wonder it ever made it to air in the first place.
I immediately described it as a twisted Joan of Arcadia.
We ordered the full season after it became available, sat and watched the whole thing in three sittings, in the intended broadcast order (Fox screwed things up by flipping a couple of the episodes, one of which was in some ways a continuation of the other), and it was great.
Yet I am not sure I’d want to see it go past a season. Why?
It amounts to the worlds longest romantic comedy. Warped and twisted and amazingly funny, but still at heart a romantic comedy. You can view the season and end it with a mental note of “and they lived happily ever after”
without ever needing to know more. Perfection.
Then I remarked how odd it was I’d meant to post about it after we watched the series, but instead I was saying what I thought in an e-mail to him. So hey, why not post it!
Wonderfalls. One of the best, funniest shows ever made. Buy the DVD set. It’s cheap for a 13 episode long romantic comedy.
200,000 Watch
As I type this, we are at 197,272 hits. That puts us in “200,000 watch” territory, as those 2728 hits can add up might fast.
Cool, eh? And that doesn’t count the combined 150,000 or so hits we had on our original blogs.
So is there a prize for the 200,000th hit referrer? Sure! Assuming you’re not something lame like “unknown,” maybe we’ll mention you in a followup post. How’s that for cool? Not.
Parade
Talk about location. Sadie and I watched the Christmas parade right from my office window today. We weren’t close enough to see my grandniece on the Girl Scout float, but we were warm. It was pretty impressively long for a smallish town type of parade.
Sadie’s favorite parts were the bunch of dogs that were in it, and the music from various bands and floats.
I didn’t think to take pictures from the window until the very end, and I’m not sure they came out well. Maybe next year we’ll plan on it, get dressed and go down to street level for it. She should really get into it at that age.
One cool thing… It’s unabashedly a Christmas parade. At least one of the marching bands played a Christmas song with religious (hark the herald angels) overtones. One of the floats had a manger scene! What is the world coming to? Quick, somebody call the PC police!
Friday, November 25, 2005
Today. (27 wks and a day)
And yes, I’m measuring 31 weeks. Dang second babies. Heh.
“Food”
Sadie is in her chair in the kitchen, eating breakfast, second breakfast, or whatever it is. After a spoonful of turkey soup, a slice of cranberry banana bread with cream cheese (she mainly eats the cream cheese off of it), and some apple sauce, I found myself out there asking her if she wanted a shower, or food.
Her “mmm!” standard reply was ambiguous, so I kept repeating. Finally I pointed at the bathroom, said “shower?” and then said, “or food?”
Sadie said “food.”
Woohoo! I’d been wondering if we’d get more words out of her if we didn’t understand her form of communication so well, or pretended not to.
Not what I was expecting, either. Usually she eats lighter at this point. Then again, she got up early. Anyway, it gave me an excuse for the two of us to try the blueberry pie, which is as amazing as the apple pie turned out to be. Now we know: Hannaford store brand pies. Bonus if they’re discounted.
Happy Birthday
To my adorable grandniece, Katherine, who is six today.
Happy Birthday
To blogger Charles Hill.
Soup
I made delicious turkey soup without trying. I put the carcass in the crockpot, along with a couple wing and thigh pieces still heavy with meat, added water and leftover drippings (about half the total from the turkey) about 2/3 or so up, and cooked for six hours.
Then I picked out bones, which brings me to a question: When cooking down a bird carcass, is there an easy or preferred way to get the bones, even the small ones, out once most of the meat and meat-like substances have departed the bones? I used a pasta spoon and a fork to scoop up meat and pick bones and intact hunks of skin or fat out. I got everything large, but there remain little pieces of bone. Which is annoying more than a problem, since they have cooked to the point of softness. Still, it seems like there ought to be a better, more thorough way.
Anyway, I added a couple cups more water, about five sliced up carrots, and just under a cup of brown rice, then cooked another eight hours. This morning it was soup. I just had a bowl, and it was fantastic, bordering on too salty. Apparently the secret ingredient is the beef boullion cubes used on the turkey along with the spices. Those contain stuff like MSG. Last time I did this, it was bordering on bland, despite spicing it and using drippings. This time I used nothing. In the back of my mind I had the idea if it was bland I would spice it and cook just a little longer after it was otherwise done, since the problem before seemed to be that the flavor of the spices cooked away after so long. No need this time.
Doggies
It’s going to be fun the first time Sadie gets to meet a friendly dog in person, as she’s completely fascinated with them. She likes to stand at my office window, watching the dogs in the yard next door, and even making them bark by rapping on the window.
Be that as it may, I didn’t think she was that fascinated by them. After watching the end of the parade with mixed interest yesterday, she wound up watching, with far greater interest, the big dog show that was being broadcast.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Mmmm… Turkey
The turkey came out amazingly tasty; good flavor combination. It was maybe a little overdone, but if so, not by much. I don’t think it was the best quality bird ever, or it was a very active one or something. It has about the darkest dark meat I have seen, and that meat is rather tough and stringy. Much of it is going into soup.
Everything else was good, too, and I managed to pull off having it all done at the same time, despite having four burners and five things to cook on said burners, one of them in two steps in two separate pans. Sometimes I don’t synchronize closely when there are only three hot food items.
The candied sweet potato is just about to die for. I experimented, using maple syrup as an ingredient, and adding a small dash of ginger and a pinch of nutmeg. So it’s three sweet potatoes, a decadant amount of butter, some water, some brown sugar, about 1/3 cup of real maple syrup, and the bit of spice that could have been left out as it was too little to notice. Looks like some people use syrup exclusively, some use no butter or no water (which I could have reduced or possibly even eliminated easily), some use ginger (the nutmeg was my idea), and some use liquor.
Poor Sadie was having tooth issues and ate almost nothing. Basically just all the cranberry sauce and a little of the sweet potato, maybe a bite of turkey. A little while ago she felt better and got hungry, so this time she ate some of most everything, especially the turkey and sweet potato, before falling asleep in her chair. Poor kid. We find sometimes she’s well off to take little catnaps like that, then wake up and keep eating if she wasn’t done.
I just put the carcass into the crockpot to boil down for soup. We may have to find someone to share it with though; maybe take some to my brother’s house.
Sadie calls…
Surrogate Sagacity
I was going to base my turkey in part on Steve’s method, but it turned out I had no sage. Doh! Seems to me I ran into this before, then still forgot to buy some.
So I went here to see what substitutes sage had, if any. Sure enough, poultry seasoning, rosemary or thyme.
I ended up making melted butter mix with beef boullion, dashes or pinches of garlic salt, seasoned salt, nutmeg, ginger, (oh shoot, I forgot the black pepper! except there’s some in the seasoned salt), savory, and more ample amounts of rosemary and thyme. Dribbled/rubbed that on and stuck it in at high temperature for a soon to be ended little while to pre-crisp. At first I worried because it smelled weird, but now the whole place smells great.
I’ll take it out momentarily, baste a bit, maybe dab on some more butter (and add some black pepper), and cover it with foil for the bulk of the cooking time at a lower temperature. This says I need 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 hours at 325° for it to be done. I’m fanatical about well done meat, and there is no popup doodad, so it’ll get the high end of that for sure.
Okay, back to work. Get the turkey to its second stage and start prepping other stuff.
I’m Dreaming of a White Thanksgiving
One of the features provided by my past several years of going to Vermont for Thanksgiving has been snow, almost invariably, either already on the ground, or while I was there. Here that’s rare, which is a Good Thing.
It may not be the first of the season - in fact, it’s the third to be at least a dusting - but sure enough, since I couldn’t go to the snow, the snow came to me. I awoke to find it falling vigorously, with a small accumulation starting to exceed a dusting. We’re in the 1” to rain zone, but Boston is up for 1 - 2” and 2 - 4” north and west.
I hope this means the winter snows itself outearly, rather than it being a sign of things to come. At least it’s picturesque, won’t stick around, and we’re not going anywhere today.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Mmmm… Pie
I was pretty sure we weren’t going to bake anything else for the holiday, though I was tempted to find another, dessert-like banana recipe, or to try my hand at apple pie with all the apples we were given. Well, I needed to go to the store today for a few things like sour cream, cottage cheese, and soda.
Walked in the door and the first thing I saw was a table of pies with a sign “price as marked,” which is shorthand for “discounted because look, it’s Thanksgiving eve and we made about a hundred too many.” I ended up getting a lattice top blueberry and a crumb top apple for $3 each. Go me. I was tempted by the mince, but I’d be the only one eating it, unless Sadie liked it. Probably, since this is Sadie we’re talking about. Mince pie at holidays pretty much ends up being for me, my grandmother, my uncle if he’s around, and maybe my mother and sister. I don’t think anyone else likes it to speak of.
Anyway… luckily I didn’t have to buy a turkey, cheap as they were. Both of us were paranoid enough to think of giving the turkey in the fridge the smell test earlier, in case. I smelled a turkey-like, pleasant smell. She smelled nothing. We declared it good and I sealed it back up enough to keep it overnight. Yay for free turkey.
I thought about buying poultry seasoning while I was there. Looked at the ingredients, said “I could make that out of stuff I already have, except maybe the nutmeg” and returned it to the shelf. Nutmeg? (Which it seems I do have after all.) Who knew. I have the sage, marjoram, etc. Speaking of which, I need to look up what I did last year. I seem to recall I used my friend Tom’s method of starting at an extremely high temperature to sear in the juice, switching to a lower temperature for the bulk of the time. My uncle told me the opposite, cooking an extended time at a very low temp, then finishing at a high temp. It just goes to show there’s probably a different turkey cooking variant for each cook.
I still haven’t decided whether to bake or candy the sweet potatoes. It’s so good either way…
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Mmmm… Dessert Breads
I made this cranberry apple bread tonight and it’s absolutely fantastic.
At the same time, I also made this cranberry banana bread, which presumably will be good too.
Left the nuts out of both of them, though if we’d had pecans I’d have used those. The apple took exactly the hour the recipe stated. The banana needed a few minutes extra. Actually, I turned the oven off and let it sit in the fading heat several minutes while I cooked supper stuff.
We had burritos with chicken, rice, beans, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, and in mine tomato. Beats Taco Bell any day. Sadie loves the chicken. Lately that seems to be her favorite thing that isn’t dairy.
Anyway, good recipes. Not sure if we’ll make anything else that could be called dessert, so those may be what washes down the turkey Thursday. We’ll see. I think I actually need to hit the supermarket tomorrow, despite my best efforts to be stocked up. At least it’ll be literally for just a few things. Really. Not like my usual “few things” runs that cost $50 and two or three trips up the stairs.
Thanks to Sharon for the idea to try Ocean Spray’s recipes.
Because I couldn’t resist.
Given the rather, um, vigorous discussion of Fresno culture that took place over at Caltechgirl’s yesterday, I thought I’d point out the following: Cow Tipping Debunked. Heh.
Happy Birthday
To my oldest niece, Amanda, who was born the same month and year as Deb.
Solved
The control panel problem is solved. EE formerly had a themes folder under its system folder, with not a lot in it. In the newer version there is a themes folder off the root, but the directions never tell you to upload it. That is what the control panel uses. It’s very pretty! Here, I’ll show you…
Click for a full size image. The whole tabbed design for the publish screen is new. The top tabs are the same.
Yay, We’re Back!
We were able to get the upgrade. After first figuring out what was eating all our disk space on the server and downloading a full, 177 MB backup, I installed the update. It went smoothly, but then I came into the EE control panel and am being completely weirded out by the massive change to it, both functionally and in appearance. I can’t imagine they meant it to be all white with black text, so something must have been changed.
Oh well. At least we’re back. And functionally it looks like they’ve done some cool things to the innards, so we’ll see…
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Carnival of the Capitalists is Up
(Shamelessly using the same text I wrote for the Carnival of the Capitalists site...)
Brian Gongol at Gongol.com, host of the most widely used CotC submission form, has posted the November 21 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists. Note that it uses a template you might find useful if you are hosting, and can be sorted randomly, alphabetically, or by category. As mentioned, one of the categories this week is posts about the late Peter Drucker.
The next scheduled host is Gill Blog.
Cat Good
Sadie is sitting with Deb, watching a Baby Einstein video. She acted excited when a cat came on. Deb said “you like kitties?”
Now, Sadie has a habit of talking to herself in a sort of mumbled babble. Sadie replied to Deb with mumble “cat good” mumble! The “cat good” was crystal clear.
That’s the first time she has put words together like that. Even if they are two of her favorite words to say. That’s not counting the times she has said “love you,” as she heard it that way and was basically repeating, if choosing the right meaning and context. Nobody has ever said “cat good” for her to repeat.
Yay for language development!
