Ar Wahan's home office water cooler

OK, is this thing on?

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 03:55:18 GMT

How many other people are deleting their LJ accounts because of the Russian matter? I know at least one person is.

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Country life

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:14:12 GMT

Just posted on a community listserv:

"We've got a black bear hanging around in our back yard and it won't leave. Any suggestions--so I can get out to my car?"

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Cold cuke soup recipe for Ladyegreen

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 22:33:07 GMT

This recipe is from a book so old (1976) that it probably was before this weird stuff called "yogurt" was widely available... it calls for sour cream. I in fact used sour cream when I thawed the base and served it recently, but now I wish I'd used plain yogurt. Greek yogurt would be even more appropriate, I imagine!

Cucumber Soup
Serves 4=6

Saute in large skillet:
3 cups sliced cucumbers
1/2 onion, minced
2 tablespoons butter

Add to the skillet and simmer 10 minutes:

1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups chicken broth
juice of 1 lemon
pinch of dried dill weed.

Puree in blender (I used food processor, something else that didn't exist back then) and chill.

Freeze, if desired, at this point. (I did, and it worked just fine.)

Stir in:

1 cup sour cream (or plain yogurt, as noted above)
1 cucumber, seeded and grated.

Serve cold.

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Wow.

Wed, 09 May 2012 22:40:53 GMT

I was driving home yesterday afternoon when the low tire pressure light came on on my dashboard. Once home, I looked at all the tires and they seemed OK -- none seemed down. I figured one of them might need a little topping up and I'd take care of it when next in town.

This morning the left rear tire was FLAT. AAA came pretty quickly and put on the "donut tire." After lunch I drove down to Amherst Tire Center ( http://www.city-tire.com/amherst.htm ). They could take me right away, so I sat down and started working on my laptop (and hey, they had WiFi!).

They are in the process of remodeling their rather cramped and dreary service desk and waiting area. Chairs and desks were being moved around, and two electricians came in and started measuring the distance between two overhead light fixtures. It was rather noisy and chaotic, but I could still do my job and didn't mind.

After about 30-45 minutes, the woman at the counter told me I was "all set" -- they'd found a tiny, very sharp metal fragment of some kind in the tire and had put in a "plug patch." (I think that's what she called it.) And because I had to "wait so long" (I didn't think I had to wait long!) and it was so "disruptive," there was NO CHARGE.

I protested, telling her I felt I should pay SOMETHING, and that I'd once worked for a contractor and had found observing the goings-on rather interesting.

"Oh, so you were entertained, as well?" joked one of the electricians.

The woman insisted I not pay anything; I told her I'd give the company a shout-out on LJ.

Of course, no one here is in the Amherst area, so I'll also put it on Facebook, where I do have local friends. Amherst Tire does not have a FB page to "like," alas.

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Acid test (and more!) in the garden

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:32:24 GMT

I've been wanting to get more serious about my vegetable gardening this year. I built raised beds eons ago, and enriched them with composted horse manure, and kitchen compost, and the occasional freezer-burned brook trout (from husband's catch, which he'd freeze and then forget about) over the years, plus lime because, like much of New England, our soil is acidic.

But in recent years, the garden has done poorly. I blamed part of it on the fact that since the beds were built, we added a story to our original one-story house, and this has reduced the light in the afternoon. For this reason, I decided to try straw bale gardening this year for at least the tomatoes, positioning the bales in the center of the back yard where the light is best. Things like broccoli and lettuce, even green beans, do OK in the raised beds, but tomatoes and peppers have not been happy.

So a week or so ago I stopped by a garden center to get the fertilizer mix I need to get the straws bales ready. On impulse, I also bought a soil test kit.

I spent a lot of time doing it! I took samples from six different parts of the property (two from front yard circle garden, which is for flowers; one from the original little bed against the south side of the house; one from the rock garden with the hydrangea that Samurai created several years ago; and one each from the two raised beds). Each sample was in a separate paper cup, labeled with origin. The Ph tests were easy, and all came in at about 6.5 (slightly acidic, less than expected), with the amusing result of akalinity in the raised bed that I'd heavily limed in an attempt to get rid of moss! The hydrangea area was actually less acidic than blue hydrangeas want, which explains why this past year the flowers were more white than blue.

The other tests (nitrogen, phosphorus, potash) were more complicated. I had to take soil from each area and measure out a precise amount into their separate cups and then add a precise amount of distilled water, and let it settle. I did this a week ago Friday, and last Saturday morning began running the tests -- each took about 10 minutes, and there were 18 tests! (Six sample areas x 3). So it took all morning.

Having read the symptoms of potash deficiency, I was already expecting that result, given what I've experienced in the last couple of years. But I actually thought all my lovely composted horse manure might have meant I had TOO MUCH nitrogen.

WELL! The old bed on the south side of the house -- the one we've been using longest -- does have a surplus of nitrogen; the hydrangea area, which was only recently established (with horse manure added) is "N1," or deficient... and all the other areas are N0 -- DEPLETED in nitrogen!

The old bed at least registered a little phosphorus and potash. Maybe from rose food I'd given the climbing rose in the past. Not sure about that.

Front circle garden also had sufficient potash -- not sure why.

And both raised vegetable beds were inadequate in phosphorus and potash.

I feel both accomplished for having discovered this and foolish for not having done this sooner!

I'm still going to try the straw bales, though, since I know there isn't enough sunlight to make tomatoes happy in the raised beds, but maybe the peppers will be OK there if I fix the soil.

FYI to Samurai, I put a Miracle Gro product to acidify the soil in the area around the hydrangea, so maybe it will be blue again.

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Note to self

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:11:47 GMT

Even if you are expecting a reply to an urgent business email, DO NOT go upstairs to your office to check it while browning ground beef for tacos.

True, Spouse likes his ground beef "well done," and it didn't actually burn . . . but the cats did not appreciate having the smoke detectors go off!

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They're playing our song! (From the library video)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:29:36 GMT

My question now is, "But did they donate, too?"

:D

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Jesse's Nemesis (or: The Welcome Mat is NOT out!)

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 02:01:31 GMT

We've had a neighbor cat come by several times a day for the last couple of months. There are a couple of things very weird about this. Unless you get very close to them, this visitor and Jesse are impossible to tell apart! (The irony here is that the welcome mat has the images of two black cats on it!)

1. The cat, except for a white patch just below its throat, is identical in coloring and build and size to Jesse. I've been told by the neighbor that this cat is female, and "just wants to be friendly." But there is clear hostility between this cat, as she glares into our house from the deck, and our cats.

2. After some initial nasty cat fights, the hostilities between the three cats (Stella hates this cat, too) have calmed down a bit to just low growling. But . . .

3. Lately I've seen Jesse and this cat sitting very close together. The neighbor cat leans toward him and almost touches her nose to his. All the while, she is panting. She does the same (the panting) when she is glaring at him through the glass.

I have actually wondered, since Jesse was adopted from a shelter, if this cat and he might actually be siblings, and her attraction is because she recognizes a family "scent."

Anyone have any clues on what "panting" means to cats?

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As seen on Facebook (library update)

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:03:27 GMT

One of the people behind the library video on YouTube just wrote:

Video up to 10,966 views. Donations in from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates. And you wouldn't believe the activity over at https://twitter.com/#!/MNSpearLibrary

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No heat -- but a Welsh-American comes to the rescue!

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:31:59 GMT

Written mostly for my own reference.

I left the house at 9:30 a.m. today for a medical appointment and then a number of meetings. When I got home at 5:30, the furnace was off and it was cold inside. Thank heavens it wasn't 20 or 10 or 5 degrees outside, as it *should* be this time of year., or it would have been even colder. Pushing the "restart" button did nuttin'. So I called the oil company. We have a service plan.

Longtime, loyal readers may remember my "we're doomed!" response when a service tech I called Ferengi would show up. It would take him two, even three visits to fix the problem. But he was the one on call on our area after hours.

This time it was a guy named Jones (and I will request him in the future). He is far more familiar with our type of furnace, and quickly figured out the problem. He also lives in Granby, much closer to us than Ferengi's home of Ashfield. So hopefully, he will be our "after-hours on-call guy" in the future.

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And there is more to life than a library

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:37:54 GMT

I have had other adventures, some of them very nice, in the last few weeks. I'll try to post about them here, but not all at once.

So here's the first:

I FINALLY MADE A DECENT LOAF OF BREAD!

When I first met my future husband (1978), he talked about how his friend Molly made incredible bread. Then his sister Mary made incredible bread. He hinted I should ask them their secrets. (I had never tried to bake bread, FYI.) So I tried it myself, with generally lamentable results. The bread would smell wonderful, look great, but end up lop-sided, and with a still-damp interior. I quit.

In about 1995 or so, bread machines came on the market. I helped a friend and his wife move. He remembered that I'd talked about getting a bread machine, so he gave me one as a thank you gift.,

I was all grateful and excited. But while the results were better than my earlier efforts, the bread was now overly browned on the outside, and the bread-machine paddle was stuck in the "ass" off the oddly-shaped loaf. Not exactly a presentation piece. I quit,.

I did use the machine a few times to make pizza dough, with success.

Then, this past holiday, Samurai came home. She didn't know what to give her relatives, and I knew she was a better baker than I, so I suggested baking something. She tried the bread machine just to make dough, and made great cinnamon rolls! Even SIL S, the crabby one, raved about them later.

So about a week ago, I decided to make whole wheat bread, using the machine just for the dough, and to bake the loaves in the oven.

THEY CAME OUT GREAT!

In the process, I learned (trying figure out how to turn a "2 lb. machine loaf" into 2 9x5 pan, or 1/12 lb. machine loaves into 2 8x5 pans) that I am one of MANY people who are finding a new use for that bread machine that has been unused for years. Not for BAKING, but for the first knead and rise.

One useful site: http://www.breadmachinedigest.com/tips/oven-baking-the-hows-and-whys.php

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As predicted . . . sigh

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 05:19:42 GMT

By request, a volunteer put out 35 "Yes for New Library" lawn signs on Sunday. In less than a day, two have been vandalized, and one (his own) stolen.

Meanwhile, I spent this evening selecting and printing out about 35-40 photos of 250th anniversary events for a display at a school play tomorrow, under the heading, "The Spirit of Community."

I was asked to do this precisely to try to remind people of the sense of community all our events appeared to foster. But as someone said at a committee meeting last week, that sense of community was more fragile than we'd realized.

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Fitting

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:08:45 GMT

Today is my father's birthday. A few moments ago, I found his obituary from The Oregonian. (An old clipping randomly mixed in with other clippings of my mother's, not one on line.)

Thank you, Dad.

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More ancient history

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:56:53 GMT

In my search of odd boxes tucked into the top shelves of closets today, I found a box of magazines from 1985 and up called PROFILES: The Magazine for Kaypro Users. (Kaypro was an early home computer that used an operating system called CPM.)

Two headlines on different covers made me chuckle (and there will probably be more, but I haven't looked at them all):

From June 1986: "CD-ROMs: New mass storage medium on the horizon."

And from August 1987: "The 386: More Power to You."

(If you don't know what "the 386" means, you are just a young whipper snapper.)

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drops suitcases on floor

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:25:27 GMT

Some of you will cheer because of this. I am just sad.

This evening, I imported my LJ entries to Dreamwidth and hope to REMEMBER to post from here, and that I've correctly asked Dreamwidth to automatically crosspost. Will have to rebuild my icon collection . . . . (Apparently I have more than 15, so only the default icon imported.)

Spent all day today at the UU craft fair, because I was in charge of the used book table! Of course, I bought some, including an AWESOME find for my daughter (heeheehee), but given that I came in with two large bags of used books to donate, and only left with three books, I think I did well. :)

Between Thursday and Friday, I also made 5 dozen muffins for the "cafe" downstairs in the morning -- mostly pumpkin, but two dozen very yummy muffins made with my leftover cranberry-clementine savory relish from Thanksgiving! (Don't worry, I'd frozen it, it wasn't sitting in my refrigerator all week.)

I still have extra canned pumpkin left from the pumpkin batch. I will make pumpkin tea loaves tomorrow to freeze.

I am beat. Will make dinner and feed horses now . . .

So let's see if this short test post works!

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Happy birthday,

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:14:56 GMT

biscuit1001 !

Thinking of you and hoping you got to see your son last weekend.

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For Mara and other LJ refugees

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:22:29 GMT

This gives a sense of what I've been up to in the past year+, as well as a few random glimpses of my little town. (I didn't make this video, but many of our 250th anniversary events, including the bonfire, parade and moonlight ball, are included. I am co-chair of the 250h Anniversary Steering Committee, so I have been heavily involved.)

This is a cute little video by a local band that performed at the ball.

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