S’more Hamentashen Graham cracker dough adapted from Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery via Smitten Kitchen 2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (375 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour 
1 cup (176 grams) dark brown sugar, lightly packed
 1 teaspoon
via S’more Hamentashen.
S’more Hamentashen Graham cracker dough adapted from Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery via Smitten Kitchen 2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (375 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour 
1 cup (176 grams) dark brown sugar, lightly packed
 1 teaspoon
via S’more Hamentashen.
When did people stop answering their phones?
Everyone I know, except me, screens their calls, or just lets messages pile up until they feel like dealing with them.
Is this efficient? Well, maybe for the person being called, but I’m so old fashioned, I like to have a real person answer when I call. Since I don’t screen my calls most of the time, me leaving a message means that the person on the other side always calls me when its inconvenient.
Like today. I called someone for a simple question, did they mind if their name was on a list with 100 other names, instead of being anonymous. They didn’t pick up, so I left a message, twice. The first time I wasn’t succinct enough and the machine cut me off. They called back a couple of hours later. I was in the bathroom, but since I had my phone in my pocket, I picked up. I asked my question again. The person wanted to see the document with the 100 names, just to be sure. So I had to call them back.
Fortunately, this had a good outcome, I got to my computer, and they were at their computer, so the document in question was viewed right away, an answer was provided, business was concluded.
But so often, it doesn’t go that way. Say we have the same exchange I call, leave a message, they call, ask to see the document I go to my computer and send a document. But they weren’t home when they returned the call, so I have to wait for their response, and I can be on tenterhooks all day. So I have started to avoid calling people because it’s more trouble than its worth.
Am I being too sensitive?
d|
@markcoker Think of your books as as an amorphous object with buttons knobs and dials that you can tweak#SFWC14 |
How hard could it be to push a rock across the ice?
Well, pretty hard, actually.
So curling is sort of like crouching down and pushing yourself off of a set of starters blocks to begin a sprint on a track, except instead of a running track you are on the ice–which is specially textured so it is not as slippery as it is for skating. Anyway, picture a sprinter, one foot (for your stronger leg) in the blocks, one foot planted on the track. Now imagine the foot ( your weaker leg) on the track has a huge Magic Slider under it. Instead of balancing on your fingers you have one hand on a 42 pound stone with a handle on it and one hand holding a tiny little PVC hurdle. Your butt is lowered, so you are upright. Push off with your stronger leg off those starting blocks and then that leg drag behind you…and end up in sort of a low warrior yoga pose while sliding down the ice with one hand on the hurdle (which experienced players don’t use) one foot (your weaker foot) on that Magic Slider, one hand on the rock with a handle, and one knee and ankle dragging behind you. Just dandy for me, who had an ACL replaced in 1998. I think the warranty on that ACL is about up, and my ankle with the bone spurs is on my right side, too.
So if you can stay upright sliding down the ice and haven’t let go of your rock you do need to let go of it eventually. That is the point where I usually fell over.
Oh, and you have to impart a spin to the stone, too.
The idea is to slide the stone with just enough force to slide into a round target on the ice called the ‘house,’ and stop.
Then there’s the ‘sweeping,’ which your teammates do to smooth the ice so the stone goes farther, which you don’t always need to do. Got all that?
The direction you rotate the stone and pace of the sweeping is dictated by the ‘skip’. After the thrower releases their rock,he skip yells to “sweep,” Then the skip yells “HARD!” which means the two teammates have to work harder. Or the skip just likes to yell. Our skip was Jay Diamond, who was really good at yelling. And he liked it, too.
Everyone liked yelling. The ice was divided into about ten ‘sheets,’ for the curling, which is a curling term for lane–there was a ‘house,’ at each endof the ice, and each team had 8 rocks to try to get close to the house. Two teams share a lane, and once every stone is propelled to the far house, they line up and DO IT AGAIN, down to the other end. Ten times. If a team six lanes away get a good shot, everyone on the ice yelled. Maybe it was because they have flasks hidden in their brooms.
Sliding down the ice and trying not to fall was tough, but doing the sweeping was tougher. Hard work! By the time I was done, I was heavily into the aerobic training zone. My ribs still hurt.
This is 3 quarts of honey from my last harvest–addicting home grown honey.
Hello, everybody.
It’s still very dry here in California. I spent a couple of hours trying to clean the deck where I put out a lot of pots which sometimes grow plants in them, and sometimes don’t.
I am cleaning it off after the winter of no rain, a lot of the pots are empty, so I’m emptying pots, bringing up new plastic pots, and sweeping all the oak leaves off because I am thinking planting a whole new bunch of seeds which I will hopefully raise to blooming glory. I might need this oasis because with California in a major drought I might have to let my regular garden dry out. The deck is on the same level as our showers, and if we have to save shower warming up water, a deck on the same level is much more doable than going down a floor and out.
But this is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about bees.
On my other blog, preeva. net, there is a blog post about bees. You can see it here:
http://preeva.net/2013/03/28/honey-extraction-report
It basically says I got bees, I took some combs full of honey out of the hive, then when I saw the bees crawling around on the combs I felt sorry for them and rescued them and felt weird.
Of course, writing is about saying plain stuff in a prettier way, with process and everything. So I wrote an essay about it, and tried to sell it.
Not having much luck with that.
So maybe it needs to be a short story.
What do you think?
I’ve seen my bees feeding on the palm flowers
One of the first people to help me understand my father’s documents was a man named Alex Bauer, a friend of my in-laws and a lovely man from Hungary. He died last year, after a long and full life, and he was so loved that there were shiva minyanim at two synagogues full of people who had nothing but good things to say about him.
Today, I was looking up someone else in my address book, and his name was in my phone book again. Some glitch of the cloud, perhaps. So I deleted his name all over again, and cried.
I am taking the rest of the month off of blogging here. I’m trying to write a novel in a month, so I have to narrow my bandwidth.
See you in December.
Jodi Paley gave me this one–Pumpkin cream in her soufganiot (doughnuts)! Sounds great. she will mix pumpkin puree with whipped cream.
This family is the real deal. They deep-fry their turkey (see idea#1), Mom and Dad are both rabbis, and Mom bakes up a storm. She even makes her own pumpkin butter. That’s too intense for me, but I found some great pumpkin butter in the store. It’s from Oregon.
Follow the link for a full recipe. It’s a great baking blog, if you are kosher and pareve.
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