Res ipsa loquitur

Saw this gif from "Air Force One Is Down" -- know nothing about the canon -- but it makes me badly want Rupert Graves as Sam Vimes/John Keel in a film of Terry Pratchett's Night Watch.

He's too handsome, but do I care?

Ways in which adult life is exactly as I imagined when I was six: Tonight for dinner I had a piece of pie and a piece of cake.

Ways in which my adult life is not at all as I imagined when I was six: Now I am madly craving spinach.

Cleaned out half the garage today, including removing twelve 40-pound bags of landscaping rock left over from a project that happened fifteen years ago. It's like homeowners' amnesia. You haven't forgotten that this stuff is there, exactly; you've just forgotten that it has anything to do with you.

Also mowed the lawn. I really don't think that any week ought to have both snow flurries and lawn-mowing in it.

Here's the latest set of overheards.

"I put it in some perfectly sensible place. Drat. Foiled again by my past self overestimating my present self's intelligence." -- kidlet

( Read more... )

And in apology for never posting any fannish content ever, this is what I'm working on now:

Item. There's nothing strange in a good-looking fellow having a lot of sex with a lot of different women, none of whom he introduces to his flatmate.

Note: For christ's sake, this is Sherlock Holmes we're talking about.

Anybody know how to go back to receiving kudos announcements in plain text instead of the new design?

The nine steps of learning new software:

1. Must I? Must I really?
   
2. Intimidated.
   
3. Have one path through the forest and don't want to deviate from it.
   
4. Confused.
   
5. OMG magic vistas open up before me!
   
6. OMG I love this program! Have you seen this program??
   
7. Look at me! I'm a power user!
   
8. Yeah, OK, now I can settle down and get some work done.
   
9. Oh, that. Been there, done that.
   

If the new interim pastor (who doesn't have a nom de dreamwidth yet) was looking for a way to endear himself to me, he's found it: yesterday he looked at the weather forecast and declared today to be a paid snow day!

As it turns out, we could all easily have gone to work; we've got maybe four inches, which stopped falling at about midnight to give the snowplows time to work, and it's already 36 degrees. But I am certainly not complaining, especially since the kidlet had to go to school!

Apparently, when given an unexpected windfall of a day off, the first thing I do is sleep very late, and the second thing I do is go around the house treating all the drains with baking soda and boiling water, and the third thing I do is start some laundry, and the fourth thing I do is post to Dreamwidth. Hi, Dreamwidth.

I made my third visit to Soon-To-Be New City yesterday, and I'm amused by the way my mental picture of the place is taking shape, as defined by the places I'm pretty confident I could get to without consulting a map.

Visit 1: Historic bed & breakfast; spouse's university; cheap Greek restaurant; library; multiple interchangeable cute little downtown coffee shops.

Visit 2: Generic hotel; mall; staffing agency; movie theater; Starbucks inside a grocery store; Target; Red Robin; convent with walking trail overlooking the river, where we looked down on a bird that we think might have been an eagle; two ways to get from the chain-store sprawl to the university and back again.

Visit 3: Airport; two ways to get up the bluff from the river; kidlet's high school; Ukrainian restaurant.

If I can locate a couple of money machines, an Asian grocery, a schmancy grocery, a cheap grocery, a farmer's market, a hardware store with cranky old guys who know how things work, a gym with yoga, a hiking trail, and an actual job, I'll pretty much have covered all the places I go here.

Well, I saw Hansel and Gretel; Jeremy and Gemma are very, very pretty, and it was kind of cartoonishly fun once I managed to get my cultural-criticism lobe cranked down to a quiet whimper.

As far as fandom goes, I can't generate any enthusiasm for any imaginable slash pairing, but I wouldn't mind reading Gretel with Edward. It would undercut the "unattractive or disabled = evil" message that clung like slime to every minute of the film.

The kidlet requested a trifle instead of a birthday cake this year. I had never made a trifle (well, I'd made banana puddin', but never a non-Southern trifle). I used the Cook's Country recipe for Tipsy Squire Trifle as a model; substituted a strawberry syrup for the one and a half cups of sherry because, hello, fourteenth birthday party, and anyway I don't even like sherry all that much; substituted lemon curd for jam because yum.

I have the following observations.

1. Yum.
2. I cannot make a sponge cake to save my life. I found a sponge cake recipe (also from Cook's) and followed it to the letter twice, and both times the layers went as flat as a slice of bread as soon as I took them out of the oven. My grandmother, the farmer's wife, is ashamed of me in the great beyond.
3. Store-bought angel-food cake was just fine, truly. I was afraid it would introduce an artificial taste, but it didn't. Mostly I tasted custard.
4. About that time, I began to suspect that the name 'trifle' might be sarcastic. Pretty big undertaking, unless you happen to have some stale cake just lying around and have my grandmother's skill at making custard.
5. If I'd only been feeding my own kid, I still would have left out the sherry, but I would have added some Grand Marnier with the strawberry syrup.
6. Seriously, can I say yum? This stuff was so good.
7. Pretty sure a person could use milk instead of cream in the custard and it would still be delicious.
8. My grocery store did not have any macaroons anywhere. Trader Joe's vanilla wafers were a fine substitute. I don't buy Nilla any more; have you read the ingredients lately? Also, somewhat off topic, most brands of ginger snaps don't list either ginger or molasses. What is the world coming to, Grandma?
9. People who don't like mushy food won't like this.
10. I like mushy food, and in conclusion, yum.

Today I was filling the pepper grinder, and a peppercorn fell on the floor, and I just left it where it fell -- and then I thought: There have been times in history when kings would wish they were rich enough to drop a peppercorn and not bother to pick it up.

Happy new year, everyone!