multipurposegoddess

What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 07:33 Argh. Last night, GoogleTalk worked on my phone for the first time in days. This morning, all of google hates my password. I lost my cloud!


It came back eventually. At one point I got an "Undeliverable Mail" message about somthing I knew I hadn't sent, so I assume there was a Trojan or some sort of hacking involved in the outage.

• 08:34 Sorry anyone who got random e-mail from me, looks like I picked up a virus or something
• 11:28 RT #Apple should make a mobile app platform for #AR that you wear like a HUD and call it an iPatch. (via @AestivalMoon)
• 11:50 Just took a good look at the book on my nightstand - I never finished reading it, that's why it has a bookmark in the middle. Sigh.


I can't tell you the number of times I have finished whatever magazine I was reading and thought that I didn't have a book to pick up and I should do something about that. And the whole time I was in the middle of a book! I suppose I have the option of just putting it down for good,since I'm not sure I remember what was going on, but I'll probably finish it now that I've remembered that I was reading it...


• 14:15 Woo! Good bike ride with sushi lunch in the middle. Yay!


Almost five miles, got to the park that has the Aquacenter in Fairfield, so maybe I can ride over to the pool, swim/splash around and ride back. Seems pretty doable!

Also, Japanese restaurant we hadn't been to before that was very good. Just had a bento box lunch, we'll need to go back so I can try some of their huge number of rolls - I've only recently gotten into rolls, I've always eaten mostly sashimi when I get sushi, but I love trying the specialty house rolls that you can only get one place and this place has a bunch of them.


• 16:26 We rode past where the Farmer's Market is, so confirmed that that is an easily bike-able destination.


I wish the Farmer's Market was at a more convenient time (or, really, that the few things in my life that are actually scheduled fit more conveniently with getting to the Farmer's Market) but riding my bike to get fresh produce is almost as appealing as riding my bike to get ice cream (which is , like, archetypically awesomely summer thing that must be done).


• 16:47 The chicken I put in the fridge to defrost on Sunday, that I was worried might be a little past it's best-by date? Still a little frozen.
• 20:25 Got chicken and tzimmes in the oven. Yay. Dinner at 10, not so yay, but it'll do.


It turned out really well, but not nearly enough vegetables. I think I'll make it again this week and double the tzimmes. Part of the plan is to use the leftovers to make a piroshki like things with challah dough wrapped around a little roast chicken and tzimmes, Shabbos-innabun, as it were, and this plan requires an abundance of veggies.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 19:34 First attempt at proper pie dough with goose fat about to go in the oven (form of indiv. turkey pot pie!). Hope it's good, more in freezer.


Used the Ratio "recipe" for pie dough (and I just realized I left out the salt entirely. Whoops) using the goose fat that has been in my freezer for two years. Felt a lot greasier than I am used to pie dough feeling, though I don't think the proportions are very different from how I've always made flour and shortening and water pie dough. Pretty easy to roll out and cooke up tasty.


• 19:35 So far, surprised by it's being easier to handle in some ways than Peg Bracken's Quick&Easy Pastry. Does require frequent chilling.
• 19:35 Also, thank you, Thomas Keller for teaching me to have parchment paper around at all times. Great stuff!


I've been using parchment paper to line, like, everything and catch vegetable peelings and that sort of thing. Rolled out the pie dough between two sheets and it worked like a charm, even if you could see through the parchment by the time I was done.


• 20:42 Pie is yum
• 01:09 Argh. Bought MasterCook 11, downloaded and installed, can't find any of the supposed new features. No Help file, even. Should be asleep.


So aggravating! I pre-ordered it, and I got the e-mail saying it was available for downloading at midnight, so I downloaded it. All the promotional stuff says you can put shopping lists (and I think recipes) onto iphones and ipads, so I want to try my touch, but I can't find instructions on what to do anywhere and there's no obvious things in the menus. When I click on help, I get help files from MasterCook 8!

After struggling with that for far longer than I should have in the middle of the night, I ordered the back-up CD in hopes that maybe my download is missing parts and the CD will have everything, so now I should just wait until it shows up, but I am still aggravated.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 12:54 I continue to suck at grocery shopping. I take two hours to get ten things and then come home and cry because some of those things are WRONG


Totally sapped my energy. It's possibly the stupidest and most frustrating manifestation of my ADD, and, of course, the most consistent. I hope the new shopping list application I got for my phone will help a little - it can track what aisle things are in so maybe when I'm going for just a few things I can go right to them rather than wandering about unable to find them...


• 12:55 But I am doing GREAT at celebrating Nat'l Hamburger Month. And Nat'l Bike Month.


Though I failed to ride my bike at all yesterday. Meant to do it in the afternoon but it got too hot and I was exhausted from the grocery store. Sigh. If I go today it will be by myself, which is always a little harder than going with DH, but I hope I will manage.

Ate the last of the burgers that DH grilled up for us yesterday at lunch, so probably no more burger eating for a while. very pleased with how the buns turned out!


• 15:14 Dumpling report: Mushroom-Asparagus Bread Dumplings in a Mushroom Sauce. Dough is in fridge, blanching asparagus.
• 15:15 Not looking forward to the "steam fir an hour" portion of the recipe...


Close to a sauna recipe! Probably nice in December/January...


• 15:20 Not looking forward to the "steam for an hour" portion of the recipe...{stupid autocorrect}


Was not actually so bad. I didn't have to stay in the kitchen, for one thing.

• 15:56 Taking my mom! RT Lady of #Suisun offers great Delta brunch cruise for Mother's Day. bit.ly/LadyofSuisun (via @SuisunCity)


Really looking forward to that. It's the same paddlewheel boat that DH and I took the Valentine's Day cruise on, probably the same route down the slough, I'm pretty sure mom and dad will enjoy it.


• 20:39 The house declares tonight's dumplings delicious. Yay.


I suspect I will like the "slice and fry in butter" version of the leftovers even better!

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

Okay, I'm just gonna turn this into a regular journal entry, maybe with those tweets inserted if I remember they are there when I get to that part, because there is a lot of narrative to get through. Exposition. Whatever.

When we bought this house, it came with a fridge Which was nice, because while I understand many people in California have to buy fridges while they are renting, I never have, so I was fairly pleased that I still didn't have to. We went on using the free one, even though it's shelving and door arrangements were unwieldy and inconvenient, and it only had one crisper drawer that only sort of fit into its space. But free!

And then it started collecting water. Pools of water on the floor of the refrigerated compartment all the time. At first I thought it was spillage so I'd just clean it up, but more would appear. And things on the tops shelf would freeze. So I got a fridge/freezer thermometer and started adjusting the controls, trying to maintain a stable temperature. Giving each adjustment 24 hours to stabilize makes that a sloooooow process.

I've gotten hooked on Trader Joe's soy ice cream sandwiches, they are delicious and I always want to have them available in my freezer. Now, the way I learned to tell if a freezer was at the "right" temperature, was by ice cream consistency - if the ice cream is soupy, freezer should be colder; too hard to scoop, warm it up a bit. So every time the ice cream sandwiches were not quite the right firmness, which was every time I had one, I'd tweak the freezer settings appropriately.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the ice cream sandwiches were perfect and I rejoiced that I finally had the freezer right and decided not to mess with the fridge settings anymore because the two seemed to be interconnected somehow - like bra band and cup sizes, changing one probably necessitates a change in the other.

And then a week or so later, my ice cream sandwiches were way too soft.

And, of course, the fridge had recently filled with water from the last time I had wet-vacced it out.

So DH and I pulled out the fridge to see if we could see anything in the back that might help - if the water line was hooked up in some bizarre fashion, for example, or if coils obviously needed cleaning or something. Well, we came to no real conclusions about the fridge (except that the water line was NOT hooked up at all (which was kind of a relief) but seeing behind a fridge that had never been pulled out and cleaned behind (never by us, and judging by the accumulation possibly never by the previous owners, either) was too much for DH and he had to go lie down. Seriously.

So we decided to buy a new fridge.

We did no research - we were going to Lowes to get a small patio table I'd found online anyway, so we just hit the refrigerator section while we were there. The saleslady was very informative and checked on rebates for us (which we didn't qualify for, alas) and looked at various types and settled on one that was the price we had in mind and an Energy Star rating (I know that's kind of bullshit, but there were some for sale that DIDN'T have Energy Star ratings at all!) and would fit into the space as we had measured it just that morning. We wanted it in black, so it had to be ordered, delivered to the store, and then delivered to our house, at which point the delivery guys would take away the old one. Yay.

It was delivered yesterday morning. We emptied the old one and started steam mopping that poor neglected floor and the Lowes truck showed up and took the old fridge away. They brought in the new one, lined it up in the space and - it didn't fit.

• 09:26 Bwahaha! I *thought* I measured the space for the refrigerator correctly. Turns out, NSM. Half inch of counter trim in the way. #fb


It looked like if we just took off the trim on the edge of the counter it would fit, so we got out the Wonderbar and took care of that. Still wouldn't quite fit.

Now, I don't know if y'all know this, but I am a Measurer of Stuff. I make graph paper sketches of my living spaces so I can decide where the furniture goes. I have tape measures in every room in case I need to determine the dimensions of anything. So I was distressed that my measuring was impugned.

Of course, I did not actually measure the fridge at the store, I took their word for it. But that wasn't really the problem. Once we had the fridge line up with the space, it was clear that it would fit just fine at points, but the left wall leaned in just a bit and got in the way. This wall is part of what is clearly a later addition - someone decided that the coat closet would be better used holding an oven and microwave and built this brick facade around the whole thing, one wall of which is to the left of the fridge (my left, facing the fridge, not the fridge's left). It's kind of like really thick wallpaper, this brick facade an eighth or a quarter inch thick.


• 11:28 Turns out, I forgot that none of the lines in my house are straight. New fridge, very straight lines. New angle grinder may solve this. #fb


So, it looked a matter of millimeters and I googled how to cut bricks and the answers all seemed to come up angle grinder. So we got an angle grinder, and a mortar wheel and a wood wheel, why not? And we did some grinding and it was very slow and smelled terrible and we had forgotten to get dust masks anyway, so I went back to the hardware store and got chisels (and ventilator masks and mallets because you can never have too many mallets). The cashier recognised me from the angle grinder purchase and we chatted about how very useful mallets are, and how they seem to hide when you want them.

Got out to my car and someone had squeezed into the not-a-parking-space between me and the handicapped spot so I couldn't get to the driver's side door. Grr. I stood around for a little while hoping that whoever it was was just running into the store for a second and would pop right back out, but no. I was able to crawl in through the passenger side (I wasn't sure I"d be able to, crawling over bucket seats is fraught with peril), and the guy who was parked in the handicapped spot came out while I was waiting and chatted with me about what a drag it was but how it was no use getting mad which actually restore my equanimity quite a bit because he was right, no point in being mad, I'm sure I have inconvenienced people with my parking at times.

Picked up Double Down combos at KFC out of curiosity. Not great. Not terrible. It was odd to be eating the "sandwich" and reach with relief for the french fries because they were not quite so full of fat. Dog got the end of mine, which he was very happy about.


• 14:31 Brick-specific chisel FTW


So, with the chisel we were able to make a mostly nice clean line at the corner and rip off all the brick from where the top of the refrigerator would meet the wall down to 6 or 8 inches off the floor, where the space was actually big enough to encompass both fridge and brick. Took all day, taking turns wielding the chisel. It's a simple machine, but you have to use force. The stonemason does all the work

That was extremely satisfying. Place the chisel, tap-tap-tap, crack, brick into bucket-o-bricks. Tap-tap-tap goes on for longer, of course. Now we have two 5-gal buckets full of brick scrap that I may or may not be able to find a use for. It's, like, a quarter of an inch thick, maybe, and some stuck to drywall.

Did not, to be clear use the mallets with the chisel. Used a ball peen hammer as specified by the chisel packaging. Worked a treat. Reminds me a little of rappelling in that drawing the force diagram in my head while I do it helps my technique. As my husband said - what would we do without theta?


• 16:38 Fridge is in its nook, food is in the fridge. Whew. #fb


Now we just have to crawl under the house and turn on the water, and hook up the water line to the fridge. I hope that's simpler.

Once we got all our food back out of the coolers and into the new fridge and freezer - it's a lot more space than we used to have. 3 drawers! Easily configurable shelving! Usable door shelves! Everything is clear so I can see what's in the drawers and on the door! i'm gonna have to go grocery shopping today, fill it up a little.

And get all the magnets back on it, of course.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 11:56 Watching a Stargate Universe from back before the Saints had won the Superbowl. It was a whole different time. #fb
• 14:55 OK, looks like we are going refrigerator shopping! Whee.
• 19:22 One refrigerator bought. My first side-by-side, with some bells and whistles.

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So, this refrigerator we have now came with the house. I have no idea how old it is or anything, but it seemed to work so we kept using it. It's clearly missing parts that would make the ice maker and water dispenser functional, so we just ignored those features. However, I can't keep the freezer at an even temperature (my ice cream sandwiches fluctuate GREATLY in softness, (ice cream hardness is my measure for a freezer holding the right temperature. It's what I know) no matter how much I monkey with the temperature controls. Which is worrying when I freeze so much and expect it to, you know, stay edible.

Also, it's collected water in the bottom of the refrigerator compartment for forever. At first I thought something in there was leaking or melting or something, but I've pretty well ruled that out. Condensation seems plausible, but there's no water running down the sides or dripping off the ceiling and none of the food on the shelves is wet, which I don't know if that means it's NOT condensation, but I would expect those sorts of things if it was.

So I thought maybe the fridge was, unbeknownst to us, actually hooked up to a waterline and sine the water clearly cannot go to an ice maker and or water dispenser as it would like to, it somehow migrates to the floor of the fridge. No, I don't know how, but it was enough of a theory for us to pull the fridge away from the wall and peer behind it.

For the first time ever.

You can probably imagine the potential for lutherans back there. DH was truly disgusted and had to go lie down. He's a delicate flower in some respects.

But there was a water line. It was not, at the time of the peering, actually connected to the inlets on the fridge, but I again theorize that we could have ripped apart the coupling when we pulled it away from the wall if it was only, like, sort of connected.

Anyway, long story short (too late), new fridge bought. We got a Whirlpool side-by-side with ice maker and water dispenser (PUR filter included) and some kind of fancy technology that is supposed to let me control the temperature of both compartments without opening the doors. Exciting! We got black, as that seems like it will go with our bizarre cast-iron faux-wood-stove and wall oven the best. To be delivered next Thursday.

What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 18:45 Dumpling report: steamed cornbread is quite tasty! Very moist, but crust not very crusty. Will check leftover tastiness tomorrow. #fb

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It held up well over time - stuck it in the cooler for the drive up to Portland and ate it at a rest stop - yum. Then left it sitting on the counter in my sister's kitchen for a couple of days and ate it on the way home. Still good!

What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 14:37 Under 200 things overdue on my to do list. Sweet!


One day later and it's still true! It's a little pathetic how accomplished that makes me feel.

• 20:33 3 lbs bones + 3 lbs meat + 3 qts water (+some other stuff)= delicious delicious soup. And lots of it.


OMG so good. This is another recipe from The Dumpling: A Seasonal Guide (Matzo Balls in Beef Broth). That book is scoring very highly with me! Everything has been delicious. The breadcrumb dumplings in the cauliflower soup fell apart a little, but that is likely more due to my slapdash technique rather than a problem with the recipe. I'm so pleased!

In related news - we've been eating home-prepared meals all week because it's just easier for Passover. It's not that much more work from a cooking standpoint, and produces a lot less garbage, than the 4 days of DietToGo we usually do, but it does make for a LOT more dishwashing. So that's good data to have.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 15:00 Nothing makes me feel more agricultural than planting corn


Unless it's rendering tallow. Though that's not exactly agricultural. Feels similar.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 10:20 How sad is it that an 8 PM movie in SF seems like it might be too late for me? Pretty dang sad, I'm thinking.


Pondering the Last Unicorn, but probably won't go. I get sleepy so early!


• 10:58 We're going next weekend! Yay! RT Only 3 More Weekends of Tao Soup! - eepurl.com/nevT (via @PlayafterPlay)
• 11:38 I wear the cheese. It does not wear me. #fb
• 13:16 All the dog foods I like keep getting discontinued. Grr.


Pet Promise (I think that was the name - it's the food I used to get at the birding place, so I think of it as "the food from the birding place") has gone out of business. Whole Meals is gone. And now Solid Gold freeze-dried beef patties have been discontinues at PetCo and I can't find them anywhere else, so they are apparently gone. I was all excited to be ready to take the dog backpacking! Back to the drawing board on that - I'm pretty far from being ready to backpack myself, so it's more of a theoretical problem than a real one.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 11:00 Now that all my plates seem to have rims on the bottom, a tortilla press might be a good idea...


On the other hand, might be able to manage with a frying pan. Test tortillas were tasty, if way too thick.


• 12:05 Grr. Cannot fit old bike rack onto newish bike.


Ordered one that claims it will fit. So close to being able to grocery shop by bike!


• 13:02 Have undone everything I wrongheadedly accomplished this morning. Trying to think of it as breaking even rather than a total loss.

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