revchris

Haven't done a lot today. Did a couple loads of laundry, cleaned up under the bird feeders (we have very messy birds). Shortly after lunch, I started making bread.


My bread book says this is pain à l'ancienne (country-style French "old dough" starter - pâte fermentée - bread), but baked in the style of pain de campagne. We've been playing with more"artisan" sorts of bread, and using the bread machine to make dough, but then forming loaves and baking them in the oven. This loaf took 9 hours from when I put the ingredients for the starter into the machine until it came out of the oven. I've got half the starter left, and will make another loaf tomorrow, as the starter doesn't last long.

Finally, someone (and she knows who I mean) pointed out this website, which is (I think) a great way to waste time. I'm currently up to 14x10.

Today I cleared all the sidewalk and the driveway of snow, then sanded and salted same.

Next it was off to Woodman's for people food, bird food, and candy making supplies, with a stop at the hardware store for propane and a bacteriostat and a new wicking pad for the humidifier.

Then I went back and cleaned up the end of the driveway after the plow came through, and then shoveled off the edges of the roof, and then drove over to the hardware store for shear pins because the plow berm did in one of the ones in the blower, and I couldn't find any spares in the garage.

After a lunch break, I spent the afternoon installing a second lampworking station in the garage (canopy hood, tile on the counter, torch) and cut quick connects into the line for the first torch to allow the second torch to run simultaneously.

Now I'm going to start some laundry.

They finished paving our neighborhood today. Base coat asphalt on Northland, Fulton, and Nancy, and topcoat on all three plus School. The roads really needed it, but it's also nice for them to be done. I'd guess that all the cones and barricades will go away either tonight or tomorrow. One of the neighbors said they were pushing hard to get it done so they didn't have to wait for things to dry out after tonight's predicted rain.

I'm over the swelling and most of the itching from the allergic reaction, now I'm waiting for everything to finish peeling and for the last of the red to go away. We're fairly sure that it was a reaction to something on the celery we bought for the potato soup. I was talking with John at Jim's Meat Market (where we got the Italian sausage), and he says they stopped using celery in everything a while ago. They used to fail a health inspection every year or two, and their health inspector suggested they cut out the celery, as it's apparently a common source of pollutants, including dirt and agricultural chemicals. John says they haven't failed an inspection since (he said it's been 10 years).

The cats spent the day at the vet for teeth cleaning. Jackie had one tooth removed, Marley had one canine and three other teeth pulled. The vet's pretty sure that Marley's weight loss is related to the dental problems. teeka got home with the cats shortly after I got home, and we shouldn't laugh, but Marley was frantically throwing food around because her mouth was still numb while she was trying to eat something (anything? everything? whatever a starving kitty needs!).

Yesterday I rebuilt my mother-in-law's computer. Her old one stopped working while they were trying to figure out what she'd need to do to run Adobe CS3, so they decided that it was time to upgrade. I picked a kit from Tiger Direct, and they went from a 3GHz Celeron with 512MB or RAM to a 2.2GHz Dual Core with 2GB. I built the new machine a couple weeks ago and swapped all the drives from the old one to the new one and traded video cards with her (I had a PCI-E/16 card and both AGP and PCI-E/16 slots, she had an AGP card in the old machine and a PCI-E/16 slot in the new machine, and both cards were similar quality), booted it up, and then went away while it figured out what drivers needed to be installed. Told it to cancel all it's install attempts, ran the driver disk, downloaded the video card drivers, a couple passes through Windows Update, and then boxed the new machine up to go back home.

I'm probably going to use the old machine and some of the accumulated other parts from home to upgrade Teeka's desktop the same way. She'll go from a pIII-900 to the celeron, which should make it a little less frustrating to use.

Anyone want to buy a camper? We've decided that we should try to sell the camper because we really only ever use it one weekend per year, and with ongoing maintenance and what we went through this time to get it hooked up to the truck, it's really not worth it.

They're predicting lots of rain all day, and teeka is extra tired and hurty today, so we're going to stay home.

Of course, since I have ham and chicken and andouille and brisket and chorizo and shrimp and rice and green peppers and celery and onions and rice, I'm probably making jambalaya later, too.

ETA: apparently, looking at the list, it's going to take extra rice.

I was going to post this yesterday.

It was my turn to cook, so I made
( Lasagna for a small army )
Froze a lot of lasagna today, and plan to vacuum-pack most of it once it's frozen.

Going to the RenFaire tomorrow. It's closing day, and we plan to be there all day because we haven't made it to the fair at all this season.