Teleidoscope

Thu, Jul 30, 2009

Vermiculite

Posted at 10:34 pm MDT to Garden

I have the final ingredient I needed to set up my first square foot garden bed: Nanette had a partial sack of coarse vermiculite she was able to let me have. And we are putting in a combined order to her supplier: fine vermiculite for her seedlings and coarse for my garden beds. So by the time enough of the heavy landscape construction is done and I can create the planting beds I want, I should have the materials available.

One nice thing about having a friend with an organic farm is that Nanette knows sources for things you can't get at ordinary garden centers. I don't understand why the garden centers don't supply vermiculite in other than tiny quantities.

I also received a new seed catalog in the mail today, from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Looking at seed catalogs is a good activity for a cold damp evening. It's just that usually the cold damp evening is in March or April, not July. The Denver Airport recorded a record low high temperature today, breaking a record from sometime in the 1920s.

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Wed, Jul 29, 2009

April in July

Posted at 7:01 pm MDT to Weather

The temperature at my house was 50 degrees F at 5:30 PM when I got home today, July 29. It's raining, too.

This summer has been ridiculous.

A few days ago, the radio said that Denver was already having the fourth wettest summer since records started being kept. I think we're heading higher in the record books.

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Tue, Jul 28, 2009

Cash for Clunkers

Posted at 7:22 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My plan to take advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program has hit a snag.

On Friday I received a call from the Subaru dealership: "We're in the program. Come in and talk."

Yesterday I sent them an email, to make an appointment for this evening.

Today I received an email: "Sorry, but we have left the program."

I tried calling the other local Subaru dealer. Their website said they were in the program but on the phone, they said the program is already running out of money, but if I want to buy one of the cars on thier lot, not necessarily with the features I want, they might be able to make me a deal. I am convinced the salesman was trying to pull some kind of scam: it seems very unlikely that a 1 billion dollar program is running out of funds 2 business days after it officially took effect.

I guess I need to spend some time looking at the specs of other brands of small SUVs and crossovers. The Honda CRV and Toyota RAV-4 are apparently the closest competitors to the Forester, but slightly more expensive and with slightly different features.

Grr.

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Still Not Menopausal

Posted at 7:37 am MDT to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I found out why I had a really vicious headache Sunday evening and a frenzied burst of reorganizing the house and yard for a few days before that.

Drat. That makes twice in less than 3 months, after a 19 month gap.

If age at menopause really predicts life expectancy, I'm going to need to plan my finances for a looong retirement.

At least I seem to be mostly missing out on my usual hellacious cramps this time around.

And the housecleaning thing is at least a usful PMS symptom. I have always thought that one reason bachelor pads are stereotypically messy is that guys don't get hit by periodic bursts of "Gah! this place needs to be reorganized! Now!!!" Sometimes the manifestations are pretty odd, though. Hard drive defragging as a PMS symptom (which I have engaged in in the past) is really peculiar when you think about it: not something one would expect to have a evolutionary basis.

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Sun, Jul 26, 2009

Shane

Posted at 7:58 pm MDT to Garden

My business partner's son came over for a few hours and worked on the yard with me. I paid very well because i was very pleased with the progress we made.

My little dumpster is full and the yard and front porch and basement (and dining room) are bit tidier than they have been before. The firewood racks are full of firewood. And preparations have begun for a number of different projects.

There is a metal plaque with the house number at the foot of the driveway now. White with brass letters. It is currently held onto steel stakes with cable ties. If those break, I'll check my electronics supplies for insulated copper wire: I think I've got a spool of something fairly stiff.

The back of the truck has been emptied out, and the lawnmower (actually a sort of weedwacker on wheels) is in the truck ready to be taken to the repair sho tomorrow (It's been a few years since I used it, and I'm sure it needs to be oiled and lubed and tuned up before I try using it again.

The front porch has been tidied and organized, though there are currently bales of peat moss and sacks of compost piled neatly on it, ready for the squarefoot garden and other planting beds I am planning. I need to order some serious quantities of vermiculite before I can assemble things, though. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

The dead waterbed mattress is in the dumpster and will soon be out of my life. So are the steel pipes that were a swingset on the property sometime before I bought it in 1985. And a number of other objects that have been cluttering up the yard and basemnet for a very long time.

The aquarium that has been taking up space in the dining room even though it hasn't actually contained any fish since 2002 has also met its fate, though I'm storing the aquarium stand and most of the associated equipment in the basement. The dining room looks much larger. I think I'm going to enjoy the space for a while, then get my keyboard out of the pantry, where it has been making a nuisance of itself since I got back from Boston in December 2006, and set it up in a playable configuration.

The half-barrel that has been waiting to be possibly made into a fountain since I started travelling in 2002 has been moved to a new and better location to potentially be a fountain in. The liner is fine, but the barrel itself is very weathered. I noticed when we were buying peat and compost at Lowes that they have half barrels for less than $30. If/when I finally create the fountain, I will get a fresh barrel to use, but the existing one is helpful for designing layouts.

Also, a 24 inch round cement stepping stone that was in the front yard has been moved to the back, where I can use it in building a platform for the rain barrel.

Once the lawnmower/weedwacker is back in service, this place will begin to look shocklingly civilized.

I still need to figure out what to do about the three dead commercial compost bins. And what to do about an active compost bin that will be functional and survive the wind and UV here. I think I need to get some steel fenceposts and seriously anchor whatever bin I get or build next. My Mom's compost pile had stone walls -- in that part of New England you build walls with the stones that come out of the place you want to put plants, to get the stones out of the way. The stones here are not useful for wall building.

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Fri, Jul 24, 2009

Projects

Posted at 10:30 pm MDT to Garden

Wednesday evening Jason from the New Creation Hardscapes company came by to pick up the final check for the retaining wall work and discuss future projects. He's going to provide some estimates some time next week, but it looks like things will be more expensive than I had hoped. I am so used to this place that I long ago stopped noticing how badly it is graded.

Jason stopped by this morning to pick up some of the materials that were left over from the retaining wall project. I suggested window wells as a partial solution to some of the grading problems on the east side of the house, and he agreed that they would be useful. The problem is that the bottoms of the basement windows are too low to allow the dirt ro slope away frm the house properly. Windows wells will allow the grade to be higher than the bottoms of the window frames.

Also on Wednesday evening, a salesman from Lasting Impressions come by. Their company redid all of my windows on the main level in 1996, working around various problems of the original perversely designed windows, and I have been very pleased with both the work and the windows. The current project is to rebuild the bedroom deck and replace the sliding patio door that goes from the bedroom to the deck and the French door that opens from the basement to the area that is now made usable by the new retaining walls.

Ross looked at the existing deck and said, "You realize this design is totally illegal, don't you?"

I hadn't, exactly, but I wasn't surprised. The windows that were replaced in 1996 cannot possibly have been to code... Two of the bedrooms had single windows that were 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall, extending from floor to ceiling without being shatterproof. And because of the way they latched (or didn't) I am sure they were designed to be mounted horizontally instead of vertically. (The people who were renting the house before I bought it had little kids. Looking back, it's amazing no one was ever injured.) The original living room windows were just (badly) homemade double-pane units that had lst there seals. And they only opened at the top, so there was litle crossventilation in the room, which tends to turn into an oven on sunny days.

I have a standard rant about the house: I was told that it was built in 1974 "with his own hands" by a CU professor, and I am convinced he was a professor of something like English or American History, not anything like engineering or architecture. Every contractor I've ever had work on the house ends up saying "Why did they build it that way?" at some point.

The Lasting Impressions Guys are going to 'repair' the deck, which may turn out to require totally rebuilding it -- there's no way to tell until they start taking it apart. What I end up with should be a lot more functional and at least within shouting distance of code.

Thursday and today I took deliveries of stuff for the yard: a rainbarrel from Home Depot Online and a garden kit and tomato trellis kit from Squarefootgardening.com. The packages are still on the front porch (the box for the 60 gallon rain barrel is huge). I'll unpack them tomorrow and start preparing the places to install them. This will involve a trip to the local Home Depot or Lowes': I'm going to need a staple gun.

I also need the ingredients for the planting mix that goes into the square foot garden. Which happens to be the same mixture that Nanette uses for starting seedlings, so she was able to point me at sources for the ingredients.

Sunday afternoon, I have a strong college student (Shawn's son) coming over for a few hours to help with some yard work. So I'll be able to do some cleanup projects that need more strength than I have (the dead waterbed mattress will finally get put into the dumpster. Yay) , or more than two hands.

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Mon, Jul 20, 2009

Cloudburst

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Weather

Man.

We are having an impressive cloudburst at the moment. I am seeing occasional flickers of lightning in the distance, but for a while I could not tell if there was any thinder because the noise of the rain and hail against my roof and windows was so loud.

I have no attic space -- there is only about 8 inches or so between my ceiling and the roof surface -- so there is not a lot of sound decoupling that can happen.

I hear the hail ping against the metal chimney of the woodstove and the vent cover of the range hood, too.

I suspect this is going to give me a reminder of what the next landscaing project needs to be. There is one side of the foundation that tends to leak water into the basement. I noticed this morning that even though the dirt has been mounded up against the house along there in the past, it has now sunk down. That's probably why the leaks have been more common lately.

I'm planning to have a small paved area added at the problem location at the foot of the steps from the back porch. The project should probably include a French drain there and along the rest of that side of the house, along with the regrading. At least I won't need to buy fill dirt for the regrading: there is a huge pile of dirt that came out of the hole where the ne retaining wall was built.

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Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Current Events

I remember watching the TV coverage with my parents and brothers. We got very little sleep because important information kept becoming available. It was handy that the landing happened on a Saturday: no one needed to get up early the next day.

It'ds a little sad that Walter Cronkite died just a few days before the anniversay, but it is hard to complain about a 92 year lie-span.

On Sunday I stayed glued to the TV while my parents (and brothers?) went to pick up our new puppy at the breeders'. We named him Buzz: it was pretty much unthinkable to get a dog that weekend and not give him a name that referred to the landing.

Looking back, I'm not sure why he didn't end up just named Apollo. Maybe that wouldn't have been specific enough. (His name on the official kennel club papers was Buzz of Apollo.)

Buzz was a pure-bred toy fox terrier (short-haired), but the genes had recombined oddly. When he was 3 months old he was already as big as his mother, and he ended up about midway in size between toy and standard fox terriers. Basically, he came out looking a lot like a Jack Russell terrier in his size and markings -- when I see Jack Russells, I always think they are fox terriers.

He had one ear that stood up like a chihahua ear, and the tip of the other ear flopped down, so he also looked a lot like the RCA dog, except his tail had been cropped.

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Sat, Jul 18, 2009

Grapevine

Posted at 8:02 pm MDT to Garden

I own a grapevine. It is a seedless green variety from Ute Trail Greenhouse, one of the dealers at the farmers' market. It already has little grapes on it.

The place I want to put it doesn't quite exist yet: not until the next phase of landscape remodeling. But I wanted to be sure they did not sell out of the plants.

It should survive in its pot for a few more weeks provided I remember to water it. I'm leaving it on the porch near the front door so I will see it.

Since I am actually trying to start a garden, for the first time in years, I have added a Garden category to the blog. It seems odd to be starting a garden in late summer/early autumn, but according to the Square Foot Gardening website this is actually a good time to start. Germination times are supposed to be shorter in warm soil. And you don't need to worry about seedlings and starts getting frozen.

I'm going to be using square foot gardening techniques in parts of the garden I'm setting up, though not the part where the grapevine will be. I've got some of my garden books out, and this weekend I will be measuring and planning, so when Jason from New Creation Hardscapes comes on Monday to finish out the retainingwall project I will be able to gives him some specs to bid on the next phase.

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Jimmy Carter Has Left the Southern Baptists

Posted at 6:01 pm MDT to Current Events

A group called the Elders that he is a member of is pushing for better treatment of women, and he has decided that working from inside the system is not working. His announcement is here.

The Elders was apparently formed in 2007, with funding raised by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. Other members include Desmond Tutu, South African archbishop emeritus of Capetown; former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan; Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel laureate and founder of the Green Bank in Bangladesh. Also Indian microfinance leader Ela Bhatt; former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland; former Chinese ambassador to the United States Li Zhaoxing. And they left an empty chair for Aung San Suu Kiy.

I found the link to Jimmy Carter's decision on Making Light.

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Thu, Jul 16, 2009

Alice's Restaurant

Posted at 9:57 pm MDT to Current Events

One of the bloggers at the history blog Edge of the American West has posted a great little Youtube video in honor of the 42nd anniversary the the debut of the song Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie.

Note: Muppets are a running theme on "Edge of the American".

The lyrics to Arlo's song are here.

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Wok

Posted at 7:38 pm MDT to Technology

Today I attended a technical conference in the Tech Center (south Denver). As I was driving home, in rush hour traffic, on a hot afternoon, in a truck whose AC has gone wonky, I realized that by making a slight detour I could visit Pacific Mercantile.

I got the 12-inch round-bottomed wok I've been wanting, and a lid for it, and a donburi (a sort of Japanese casserole dish) and some groceries that are hard to find elsewhere.

Driving back to the highway, I passed the building that used to be Restaurant Mori. The building is still there, but appears to be empty. The landlord forced them out by being greedy, but doesn't seem to have had a new tenant lined up. What a waste.

I suppose it's possible they were planning to redevelop the site and things stalled when the economy tanked.

When I got home I had problems swallowing my supper for the first time in a long time -- I was insufficiently careful and paranoid when eating the meals that were supplied at the conference. But this is more evidence that the swallowing problems are related to the food allergies.

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Wed, Jul 15, 2009

Range of Motion

Posted at 7:20 am MDT to Exercise

I seem to have about the same range of motion in both arms now. There are some (beginners') yoga moves that still hurt a little on the right side where there is a narrow band of tissue running from the collarbone to the armpit that has never loosened up since the radiation treatments in 2005, but the actual range of motion seems to match on both sides now.

I really need to find a new massage therapist -- it's been a year since Marti left. There's a tendon or something in my left shoulder that goes sproing during one free-weight exercise which it probably shouldn't do. It feels like a belt slipping out of the groove it's supposed to be in, or as if it is hopping from one state to another instead of moving A to B. I don't think I have the leverage (or knowledge) to work on that myself. I should probably look for a therapist who breaks loose scar tissue (ow) while I'm at it.

It's amazing how I can tell when things are slightly out of whack when I do yoga, even though they feel 'normal' the rest of the time. My hip has been slightly out the past few weeks, but I think I finally got it back into shape (so now it feels weird). The trick was to take some Advil about a half hour before doing my PT exercises and yoga, so the inflammation was knocked down and didn't keep the joint from shifting back where it belongs. It took two days of the Advil and I think it is trying to slip out again, so I need to keep at it.

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Sat, Jul 11, 2009

Attachments

Posted at 10:09 pm MDT to Technology

I'm old enough to remeber my Mom getting savings stamps at the supermarket. There were 'green stamps' and another variety provided by different supermarket chains, and you got stamps in proportion to the size of your purchase. You pasted them into little booklets, filling up the pages with low denomination stamps. or putting a single high denomination stamp on a page. And when you had enough books filled, you traded them for stuff from a catalog.

I don't remember most of the things my Mom got in exchange for stamps, but there was a white ceramic statue of a horse that stood on our coffee table that came from the catalog...

We don't get savings stamps at the supermarkets now -- actually, one market tried to reintroduce them sometime within the past ten years and it didn't work out.

What we get now are credit card reward points, which act a lot like green stamps in that you need to make a huge number of purchases to get enough points to get anything useful. And the stuff that's available for points is often ... um... lame.

A week or so ago I got an email from American Express about a number of special deals, including 30&percent; off on purchases from Cooks.com, which would make the purchases 'cost' halfway reasonble. There was free shipping available, too. I clicked through to the products that were available and found they included Kitchenaid stuff.

I ordered a 12 inch non-stick skillet. I usually use cast iron, but some moern recipes really mean it when they say touse a 12 inch non-stick skillet.

I also ordered some attachments for my Kitchenaid mixer: a pasta roller set and an icecream maker.

I have a manual pasta machine, but the operation really needs three hands: one for the crank and two to handle the pasta. And storing and setting up the pasta maker is a pain in the neck. The Kitchenaid attachments are much more compact for storage, and the Kitchenaid mixer will eliminate the need for a hand for the crank. Making small batches of homemade pasta shoud be a more spur of the moment kind of operation. (Mario Batalli always used the Kitchenaid attachment when making pasta on his shows.)

The icecream maker is to let me make frozen deserts that won't trigger my allergies. I've promised Nanette (who also has a Kitchenaid mixer) that she can borrow it for occasions like the July Fourth picnic: an icecream maker for each of our households might be overkill.

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Thu, Jul 09, 2009

Jeeves

Posted at 10:29 pm MDT to Media

I think I first read some of the works of P. G. Wodehouse when I was in high school, but it might have been college. I do know the first Wodehouse I read wasn't Jeeves and Wooster stories. It was an omnibus of the Psmith stories the local public library had in stock.

I soon worked my way through the rest of their Wodehouse collection, which was not extensive -- I think Wodehouse was mostly out of print for a while in the 70s, then his popularity picked up again later. I think they had more Lord Emsworth than Jeeves, actually.

I've read more Wodehuose, over the years, mostly from libraries and in no particular order. I'm not sure order really matters much with Wodehouse's works -- Wodehouse is pretty consistently silly. I own a two physical volumes of Jeeves and Wooster that I picked up on a whim a while back when I was in the mood for something light and episodic.

Last month when my brother Larry was here for a visit, he spent some time reading a Jeeves omnibus Life with Jeeves.

We talked about how good the BBC Jeeves and Wooster adaptations were, and I mentioned that I had seen some of the episodes on PBS but not all of them, and did not own the DVDs. (I think I saw one season of the three that were eventually shown.) That has changed now: I just received my birthday present: the complete Frye and Laurie Jeeves and Wooster DVDs. I think I know what I'll be watching this weekend.

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Tue, Jul 07, 2009

Palm Pre

Posted at 9:08 pm MDT to Technology

Today I upgraded my cell phone from the rather plain one I had been using to a Palm Pre. Access to the Internet and other smart-phone functions are too useful to ignore.

And I really need to get my address-book on-line where I can avoid misplacing it. I sent my brother's birthday card late this year because I had managed to misplace my dead-tree address book. I really need something portable with PDA functions. My old Palm Pilot died of neglect a few years ago because carrying an additional gadget around was really more trouble than it was worth (and the scribbly input method was annoying). When I did carry it, it got buried in the bottom of my briefcase, and ignored.

With lots of functions combined in the smart-phone, including ones that are handy but not used frequently, I may actually use some of them on occasion, because they will be available in a gadget I carry and use regularly.

Not that I use phones as much as many other people do, even as phones... I was raised in a very phone-averse household and have never really recovered. And now if I ever take up texting (which is really after my time) it will be on a device with a qwerty keyboard.

The most annoying thing about getting this phone now, is that I have just begun a gig at a site where cell-phones are not allowed. My transition to the world of smart-phones functionality may be slowed as a result.

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Thistles

Posted at 9:07 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My yard is looking a bit more civilized.

On Sunday afternoon one of my neighbors stopped by and asked whether I intended to do anything about the multitude of thistles in my yard. He had been working on cleanng them out of his own property.

I asked whether he knew anyone one I could hire to attack them, and he recommended a college student who had been helping him.

Yesterday, when I arrived home from work the thistles that had been barricading my front porch like the roses at Sleeping Beauty's castle were gone, and so were all the ones along the driveway. Some of those thistle plants were taller than I am, with very hard stems.

There are still some thistles in the rest of the yard. Quite a lot of them, actually. He is coming back tomrrow to tackle the rest of them.

I think this is a good time to cut the thistles: they are blooming, but just before going to seed. All of the energy of the plants should be in the parts that are being cut off and thrown away.

When googling, I found a rhyme from Britain: 'Cut thistles in May, they'll grow in a day/Cut them in June, that is too soon/Cut them in July, then they will die.' So I guess I got the timimg right.

I suspect that the plants that are being massacred will try to grow back from the roots. I should probably get my weedmower (a sort of weewacker on wheeels) serviced so I can attack them again in the next round. The mower should be able to handle them if I don't let the regrowth get too tall and woody. A normally dry season next year would be helpful, too. I've owned this house since 1985 and nver seen thistles like this year, thought he stirring of the soil when the power lines were put underground undoubtedly encouraged them.

I may just invest in some black plastic for the area near the house where the barricade grew in the

I wonder if the enthusiasm of these plants means that artichokes or cardoons would do well here. Probably not. That would be too useful. And I suspect the soil here is too cold for the edible kinds of thistle.

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Sun, Jul 05, 2009

July 4 2009

Posted at 3:47 pm MDT to Weather

Man, the weather has been weird lately. We've had rain almost everyday and the weeds in my yard are flourishing (think Sleeping Beauty, but with thistles instead of roses).

This weekend has also been chilly, though we had actual summer temperatures early in the week. Today,at 3:30 pm, on July 5, the temperature has not reached 70, and yesterday was about the same. I borrowed a long-sleeved shirt from Nanette because I was freezing in the breeze

There are also occasional "showers" where it rains cats, dogs and hamsters for a while. Nanette's picnic yesterday had to move indoors for a while, just before a downpour that made it look like someone had aimed a garden hose at her north-facing windows. And today there has been some thunder along with the rain.

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Macaroni Salad

Posted at 1:38 pm MDT to Technology

Yesterday I attended a very nice July 4th picnic at Nanette's. Her second eldest daughter had come in from California, and her two youngest arrived (unexpectedly) from Europe on Friday in time for the celebration, so all four of her kids were there, with various friends and associates.

I brought my Mom's macaroni salad, and part of the cake I baked for my birthday.

The macaroni salad is very simple. The batch I made yesterday was:

1 pound elbow noodles
7 very large hard boiled eggs cut into small pieces
all the stalks from a celery heart, chopped
3 small-to-medium onions chopped
mayonnaise
sweet paprika
smoked paprika

Everyone seemed to like it, but I think it came out a little too oniony. Two slightly larger onions would have been better, if I had them. Or maybe only 2 and a half of the ones I used.

Sometimes when I make this salad, I add a little mustard to the mayo, but I used the basic version this time.

The other food at the picnic was excellent. Nanette makes a great barbecue sauce. And one of Rowan's friends who came is a professional chef (one advantage of having a business that supplies restaurants): he brought bouillabaisse and mashed potatoes with truffle oil.

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Fri, Jul 03, 2009

Republican Governors

Posted at 5:48 pm MDT to Current Events

Damn.

I wonder if there was something in the water at the last Republican Governors Conference meeting.

Neither Sarah Palin nor Mark Sanford seems able to hold a coherent press conference.

Sanford is not resigning yet, despite dereliction of duty and profound public stupidity.

I wonder what the investigators were about to dig up that led Palin to resign so that the state need not spend lots of money investigating her?

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Ai Sushi

Posted at 1:16 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette took me out to dinner for my birthday yesterday, to a restaurant called Ai Sushi and Steak.

The food was excellent, and reasonably priced for the portions, which were huge.

I had a tempura, udon and California roll combo. The miso soup at the beginning of the meal was smooth and flavorful. The flavors of the green onions, seaweed and tofu were not buried under the miso itself.

The tempura (shrimp and vegetables) was light and not greasy, and the dipping sauce had a nice tang in addition to the soy sauce in it.

The eight small pieces of California roll were well made and had a nice balance of ingredients and a complex flavor -- the crab part seemed to be a crab salad, and I'm not sure what all of the ingredients were.

The bowl of udon soup was huge (this meal failed the 'don't eat anything bigger than your head' rule) with very good noodles, an excellent broth, and plenty of cabbage, carrots and broccoli.

I brought most of the meal home in boxes. I had half the cali rolls and tempura pieces for breakfast, and I'm working on the soup for lunch.

And I think I need to plan on a very small supper tonight.

Our favorite Japanese restaurant in Denver, Mori, closed a while back, but I really think Ai is nearly as good, though their menu is less extensive. (I miss kitsune udon, which I used to get at Mori. And the Japanese pickles that used to accompany every meal.)

And I need to find a source of the thick udon noodles you get in restaurants. The ones I can find locally for home cooking are all skinny. The good Japanese grocery that probably carries them, Pacific Mercantile is still in existence a couple of blocks from the site of Mori, but Denver is a long way to go for noodles and pickles and a few other items. Maybe I'll go down to the art museum one weekend this summer (which is at the other end of the downtown shuttle route) and stop by the market while I am there.

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Wed, Jul 01, 2009

Double Nickel

Posted at 11:38 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Tomorrow, July 2, is my birthday.

I have baked a cake in my fancy bundt pan for the first time since my allergies were diagnosed.

I started with Alton Brown's pound cake recipe (from I'm Just Here for More Food , with goat milk with lemon juice instead of buttermilk, and goat butter, and added orange peel and orange extract to the pound cake to stand up to the goat taste.

The cake came out of the pan beautifully and is cooling now. (I won't taste it until it is completely cool. Cutting it before it is stable would be a bad idea.) I have sprinkled it with some powdered sugar now, while it is still steaming, and I'll add more when it is cool.

One of the nice features of my fancy stove is the timer. It rings several chiming tones, pauses, then rings some more. The groups get farther apart, but they don't stop until you do something about them. The timer on my microwave just beeps once, and I often miss it if I am in the other room and the radio or TV is playing.

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