| | November
7, 2009 Today would be a good
day to finally fix Pookie's nose. But first I have about 50 vintage tablecloths
I want to get listed on ebay. I'll do that after I get home from the grocery
store while Jim rakes leaves and watches the Pats game. We took a breather
yesterday a drove west to take Baby Boy out for his birthday. It was nice to see
him and Alyssa.
I made rye bread last week and now I remember that rye flower tastes like
ladies' perfume to me.
 I
keep doing this... I don't make rye bread for years, then when I do make it it
reminds me that I don't like to eat perfume. Does anyone else have that problem?
I also don't eat tarragon because it tastes like putty. It must be connected to
my dysfunctional olefactory system, which my spouse assures me is off-kilter and
doesn't work half the time. I once came home to a house full of natural gas
(someone knocked the knob on the gas stove and it let gas into the house all day
while we were at work), and I thought it was skunk. Thank goodness I opened all
the doors and windows and didn't turn on the stove! Five hours later, Jim
arrived home and called the fire department, who brought the ladder truck over
to take a reading on the levels of gas (it had dissapated), but the fire chief
told me that on new gas stoves that can't happen anymore. So we now have a new
gas stove, but it can happen. And has happened.
And now some Robert Frost:
Nature's
first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
October
31, 2009 It's a blustery, fun
Halloween day out there today. Jim and I will be leaving a basket of candy on
the front step tonight for the kiddies while we get out of the house. Jim has
cabin fever.
I've scanned some Covey
family ephe mera that was thoughtfully shared with me by Glen & Judy. You
can  find
it all in Frank Covey's Things.
These are Frank's parents, here on the left and right of this blog entry. Meet
Abbie and Edson. Edson died in 1906 at age 67... so not only is this image more
than 100 years old, he is no older than 67 years in this picture. Abbie died in
1923 at age 80, but this phot would have been taken when she was no older than
63. Do you find that shocking? I do! Anyway, you can access the Frank Covey page from Frank's entry in Genetic Muster,
too, and from Photo Album. I forgot I had
these other pages, actually. I've entered that age in which things fall out the
back side of my brain, and if nobody tells me they're hanging there, I don't
miss 'em. It's a good thing I have a web blog so I have record of my travels,
else I'd forget it all. =)
Ni's
childhood teddy lost his olifactory feature a few weeks ago in a run-in with a
small dog. Alyssa handed Pookie to me one day... the Pookster's nose dangling in
the breeze. I searched the internet for a way to fix him. I could
send him to a teddy bear hospital for anything between $60 and $100, but that's
not going to happen, especially since it's highly probably that come  January 1st
Jim & I will be living off his unemployment check and my meager substitute teaching
checks.
After much research, I've finally decided what to do, so I starting looking for a new nose, but the
largest one I could find is smaller than Pook's old nose, so last week I
invested a few hours of one evening to chipping, cutting, soaking, steeping,
peeling, scraping, and removing the back off the old nose so that I could reuse
it. Holy cow, those Gund folks really know how to affix a button nose! (My efforts were
punctuated with Jim's admonitions, "You know you're going to cut yourself
doing that." I assured him any damage I did to myself could be easily fixed
with peroxide and adhesive tape, but in the end no such fix was needed.) So I'm
ready to complete the repair, but am as intimidated as all get out. Teddy-bear
repair web sites tell me I have to open up Pookie's head from the back, unstuff
it, reinsert the nose, then close up his back. I'm not going to do that. I'm
going to find some heavy burlap or something, attach the nose to it, and insert
in into the hole in Pookie's face which I'll then sew up tightly with several
applications of quilting thread. I may regret it, but it can easily be undone if
I make a mess.
I was thinking this morning that when I was a kid we'd all be down at Grandma
Lil's house on Halloween to watch her hand out 200 to 250 popcorn balls, which
we'd all helped her make the prior week. Sometimes she made extras to freeze for
Christmas. Her popcorn balls were spectacular. I hated picking the old maids
(unpopped kernels) out of the popped corn, but that's what made them so
fantastic. How ironic that I can't eat popcorn balls anymore, although this
morning I was thinking that it would be worth a large oozy rash just to taste
one of hers again. =)
October
18, 2009 I
am not good at making soups and yesterday's attempt was no different despite
using a recipe that has more than 200 five-star ratings at Epicurious. I am
better at savory soups rather than brothy ones, but I had a hankering for
chicken noodle soup which unfortunately falls into the brothy category. How hard
can it be to make chicken noodle soup? THe broths went it. The leeks, carrots,
zucchini, and green beans. The mushrooms flavored with garlic and lemon went in
next, although they were so tasty on their own I was tempted to put them onto a
plate and eat them on their own instead. And the chicken bits. Its downfall I
believe came at the end when I added the egg noodles. They weren't the
traditional white semolina egg noodles we're all familiar with. No, they were
whole wheat egg noodles. Thick. Highly absorbent. Slightly gray in color. They
swelled and took over the soup so now it's less a soup than a runny egg noodle
mess. One of the soup reviewers suggested that soup is always better on day two
but I'm doubtful. So even though the soup took me an hour and about $20 and even
though it's being stored in the fridge as leftovers, I don't think I can stomach
another lunch of it. Rrrrr.
I am waiting for Bob to show up. After days of phone calls, he vowed to stop by
this morning to assess whether he can fix these 2 table lamps that need work. I
don't want to replace them. I want them to work, and Bob has volunteered to
assess them for fixability and has furthermore volunteered to fix them for a
fee.
Having read Malcolm Gladwell's "Offensive Play" in this week's New
Yorker which, in the shadow of Michael
Vick's prison sentence, examines if football is any different than dog
fighting, I'm not sure how easy I'll be watching today's NFL games on TV.
You can read
the article for free but probably this week only. [Ann]
McKee [who runs the neuropathology laboratory at the Veteran's Hospital in
Bedford, MA] got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office.
“There’s one last thing,” she said. She pulled out a large photographic
blowup of a brain-tissue sample. “This is a kid. I’m not allowed to talk
about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He’s eighteen
years old. He played football. He’d been playing football for a couple of
years.” She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain
had marked the presence of something abnormal... This was a teen-ager, and
already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old
age. “This is completely inappropriate,” she said. “You don’t see tau
like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old.”
October
11, 2009 First of all... this
is the BEST wedding invitation I've ever seen and YOU MUST GO READ IT IT'S
AWESOME! Congrats to the couple, whoever they are!
 Now that that's out of
the way... New NON-corn finds at Whole Foods today! My trips to Whole Foods have
become fewer since Roche Bros. has started including more non-corn items on
their shelves. But today I made the trip for arrowroot, and while I was in the
store I scouted around for new products. I am now completely in love with Wholesome
Sweeteners, who have found it within their capability to completely avoid
adding starches to their brown
sugar and... wait for it... uses tapioca starch as the anti-clumping agent
in powdered
sugar. (Note that they do use corn starch in some instances, so be sure to
read the label.) Yay! This is, indeed, behavior we want to encourage!
Since it's difficult to get face time with the home computer these days (JimBob
is hopelessly attached to the job hunt unless there's a football game on), my
blog projects are small these days. What I find myself doing is researching the
ships my ancestors sailed on. (All my families are posted in Genetic Muster.)
Not every voyage has a passenger list that has survived, and not every colonist
sailed under his/her real name. And not every passenger was considered a
passenger when you consider slaves, convicts, servants, and other similar
persons status put them beyond the pale of being mentioned. If you google
"passenger lists" you get manifests of passengers from all times and
places and methods of transportation, but there are ways to narrow down the
results, like by including your ancestor's name or adding a date to the search.
Some in my line escaped English with John Winthrop (http://www.winthropsociety.com/settlers.php),
and others came for other reasons.
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