Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Sometimes Love is a Boadacious Breakfast

I slept late this morning and when I did get out of bed, brush my teeth, comb my hair and get dressed I sat and checked my email even before I went looking for a cup of coffee.   Sometimes I'm a slow starter.   Anyway it occurred to me that Lisa had been up for a while and was busy getting mom up rather than working on breakfast, even though she always wakes up starving so I decided she should have some banana nut pancakes (a particular favorite).   She saw what I was doing and suggested I add a couple of the fresh peaches our friend Pam brought us and, just for grins, I microwaved a handfull of dehyrated apricots in a half cup of water and threw them in too.

We got several batches of plums from our neighbor's tree this year and after I worked up the last batch I had seven cups of juice. It takes six cups to make plum jelly and I already had several batches put up but I hated the thought of having an entire cup of juice left over so I divided what I had into two 3½ cup batches, put one of them in the fridge in a covered container, added 2½ cups of unsweetened apple juice to what I had left and simply followed the directions for plum jelly.   It didn't set so I wound up with four pints of plum syrup.

A few days later I made a wheat-free chocolate cake.   Powdered sugar contains corn syrup and corn products are highly toxic to Lisa so a traditional butter cream frosting, consisting of powdered sugar and butter, is out of the question.   We've tried to produce a decent frosting using regular sugar but we've had no luck so far with that.   Then I remembered the "plum sauce" I got from my last attempt at jelly so I opened a jar and poured that over the cake.   Wow!   Serendipity is sometimes good stuff you know?   So, yesterday I remembered the 3½ cups of plum juice which was in the fridge, even though I'd intended to throw it away when my last batch of jelly didn't set but, having discovered "plum syrup", I got everything together and made myself another batch and that's what we had on our peach-apricot-banana-pecan pancakes this morning.   Life is good y'all.

Don Crowder

On the vagaries of domestic tranquility.

Lisa's been working on a website for her Llano Master Gardeners group and, naturally, she wanted to use all sorts of CSS tricks that I don't know anything about so I had to show her how to quickly and easily find CSS data by googling for information on specific features, anywhere you can find it, rather than a frustrating search of a single site when you can't find the keyword that leads to the data you want or a long and frustrating round of reading tutorials that never mention whatever it is you're looking for.   Then, if she found information and couldn't understand it I had to read it and explain it to her and then when she got it to do whatever she wanted it to do I had to admire it and compliment her on it.   I'm not allowed to be busy when she wants me to help her with something; I can help her with whatever it is she wants help with or I can pay, and pay, and pay for the next week or longer.   Nor am I allowed to distract her when she's busy; I can quietly leave her alone or I can pay, and pay, and.... *sigh* anyway, I've learned all sorts of new CSS tricks that I truly didn't want to know and getting the most recent issue of our ezine and personal news page finished was fun and challenging.


She insists that I mention how distracting I was while she was working, constantly bothering her with questions or wanting her to watch some video on YouTube.   I don't remember any of that but she did say that so I'm mentioning it.


I'm sweating bullets over the next post to my lockergnome blog.   It's entitled "How You Can Try Linux" and it's supposed to be a simple, clear, understandable explanation of all available ways and means by which an average citizen can get a first hand look at Linux.   There are lots of choices, enough to be really confusing, and I can't change that so I've got to explain each of them simply enough that an average person who knows nothing about Linux will have no trouble selecting an option that suits him or her.   Nothing to it, but it may take me a few more days.


I made another trip (my third) to the clinic in Llano the other day and our favorite PA, Joanna Schork, loaded me up with advair, singulair, levaquin and nasonex.   For the first time in months I'm starting to feel better.   On both of my previous visits to the clinic I called in and took whomever I could get because I felt so bad and Joanna wasn't available on either of those occasions.   She's certainly made a believer of me now; if she isn't available the next time I'm miserable I'll make an appointment for whenever she will be available and simply continue being miserable for as long as necessary.   Nuff said.


Don Crowder