Sun 24 Sep 2006
Easy Like Sunday: Miss Caitie
Fri 22 Sep 2006
Friday Cat Blogging: the Kelly Cat
In addition, here’s a post from last year with photos from the Good day in 1995 when Kelly introduced himself.
Thu 21 Sep 2006
Ah, Béa…
Trying for the first time to embed video… this one of an interview of French Socialist presidential candidate (oops, not yet a candidate, she insists) Ségolène Royal and France 2 weekend anchor Béatrice Schonberg. As noted elsewhere, Mme. Schonberg is married to Jean-Louis Borloo, a minister in the current government, and earlier this month the head of the network announced she would be taken off France 2’s newscasts from January 2007 through the elections in May 2007. It’s an insult to an experienced news professional, but it’s a fait accompli…
Béa, who’s married to a politician on the right, is on the left of the split-screen below, while Socialist Ségo is on the right. Va savoir…
Wed 20 Sep 2006
In All Its Glory
A volunteer morning glory whose vine has crept across a bush at the side of the house.
Tue 19 Sep 2006
Survey says…
Keep your nose to the grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel, and you’ll be sorry you did.
Mmm, crunchy…
Not much under the category of Food lately, but here’s one… Pat is a very good cook. She knows what to do and how to do it, and when and when not to follow the instructions in the cookbook. She can also scan the refrigerator and freezer, and where I would find nothing and call for pizza, she can grab this and that and make it into a fine home-cooked meal.
Tonight, she saw zucchini and tomatoes from the garden that wouldn’t be good much longer, sausage that was near its expiration date, cooked it up and added some peppers and onions and sauce, and there you have it, fresh made ratatouille for supper.
As you can imagine, with a quality cook like her in the house, I don’t do much in the kitchen. She does trust me with safe recipes like cookies and muffins. Even then, it’s no sure thing. Last weekend, I made zucchini muffins. (Yeah, we have a few homegrown zucchini this year. So did Jack and Jennie, who shared their bounty with us.)
It wasn’t the first time I’d made the muffins, so things went smoothly until I tried to make the cream cheese frosting. I always set out all the ingredients on the counter, just to have them all at hand when I’m working… make that “almost always.” After combining the butter and the cream cheese and the vanilla, I went to add 3 1/2 cups of powdered sugar, and learned we had only 2 cups left. It was late, too late to head out to a supermarket.
Crisis? I thought. What crisis? Checking the Internet, I found that a substitute for powdered sugar could be made by putting cornstarch and granulated sugar in a blender and letting it whip around in there awhile. Ho-ho, this is gonna be good!
Well, I did as directed, and it looked awfully powdery when I opened the lid, but when I added it to the mixture and tasted it, there was a definite granularity present, and a distinct crunching sound. More whipping followed, but the crunchy frosting remained crunchy.
I told Pat what I’d done, and she asked a couple of questions before giving up, shrugging and accepting that both the muffins and the frosting were going to have texture. If she couldn’t fix it, I wasn’t going to try any more, either. We’ll try to do better the next time…
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Mon 18 Sep 2006
How We Spent Our Summer Vacation (#2)
On a hot August afternoon, Pat and I went to HersheyPark with Jack and Jennie and granddaughter Diana.
Diana is the one with the pacifier in this photo. After this kiddie ride began, the child in front of her slipped out of his safety belt and as you see here, he jumped out of the car while it was moving.
He got right up, apparently unhurt, and began running around the fence yelling for his mother.
Attendants stopped the ride, and the boy’s mother ran in and got him.
