Well, There's Another One Under the Belt

At least we weren't the only ones with disasters. My aunt and uncle had ordered Thanksgiving dinner from Wegmans. Last year, they did a bang-up job and all the food arrived needing only a minimal re-heating and everything was delicious. This year the food arrived....ice cold. The turkey needed cooking for 2 hours. The veggies were icy cold. The gravy was a congealed lump in a plastic container.

My uncle was not happy.

So we opened the wine, and stuck the turkey in the oven and generally made merry and then, thanks to a turkey that one of my cousins had cooked and sliced up earlier, we loaded plates with slices of warm turkey and cold veggies and stood in line at the microwave. So we didn't end up all eating together, as the first people were about ready for seconds when the last people were still waiting for microwave time. But it was tasty and we were all together. This will be my aunt and uncle's last Thanksgiving in their house as they are moving, at the beginning of 2008 into a retirement community/assisted living cottage. It's feeling very end-of-an-era here in my head. When I was little, we'd all get together at my grandparents. Oh, I know it wasn't every holiday, though it feels like it. And my grandmother and mom and her sisters would cook a huge and delicious dinner and clean up afterwards and the men would sit around and talk and the kids would all be underfoot. My mom and grandmother and aunts all seemed so happy, working together, laughing and carrying on.

I don't think I'll ever feel that grown-up.

My cousin Mary Linn was up from Virginia (and her niece Amy flew in from Chicago...sure was nice to see her again) and ML brought along a slide projector and boxes of slides that her parents had taken all over the world. Her dad, my Uncle John, was in the Army...they lived in Germany, Japan, Thailand. My Aunt Lois took most of the pictures and she had a very good eye. It's amazing how beautiful the colors still were in these slides, some of which were from the late 1950's. And my aunt looked so lovely. There were also pictures from a trip that my mom, my Aunt Lois, ML and I took in the early 70's to England. Fun to see.

Oh....and the cake this morning. Another disaster. It cooked up...the oven temp was a little off but I adjusted. And then, when I went to turn it out of the pan...the pan that I had sprayed so heavily with Baker's Joy that little alpine skiers could have slalomed down the sides...that pan...the cake came out, leaving huge chunks of itself behind. I almost threw the whole damn thing out the window. The unopened window.

Fortunately, the brownies were delicious.

Oh, and there's a new chevron scarf in town.


Rachel says it looks like someone's insides. Seems a little harsh to me.

The Baking Gods Were Angry

Happy Turkey Day!

We had disaster piled upon disaster last night in the kitchen. We were supposed to make dessert for T'Day dinner at my aunt's. So Rachel and I planned on:

• brownies
• tiny lemon pound cake bundt cakes
• chocolate buttermilk cake

What we ended up with at the end of a long hot evening:

• lovely brownies (thanks to Rachel)
• some blobby little things that, if you squint closely, look somewhat like little bundt cakes
• a semi-cooked (although a toothpick came out clean and the top was getting burny) chocolate cake that, when turned out onto a cooling rack actually ran out and left a puddle of half cooked cake batter on the stove-top

So I am now waiting for the dishwasher to stop, so that I can pull out the cake pan and make another lemon pound cake. And hope that this one turns out. I think I'd better put a thermometer in my oven. It can't just be baker's error. Can it?

Here's a link to the cute little mini-bundt pan we were using. Notice that they do not actually show cakes made in this pan, only candy.

Okay, off to see if the dishwasher has stopped.

Currently Reading

Last night I picked up Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. I'm almost done and I'm liking it a lot.

Yawn

An interrupted night last night chez Pointy Sticks. I was so sleepy this morning that it wasn't until about 10:30 that I realized that I was wearing two different earrings.

I am, I think, becoming disillusioned with the Chevron scarf and am thinking that perhaps the yarn wants to be something else. I am reassured as to the folding - fellow Ravelryers (Ravelryists? Ravelroids?) seem to have had luck eliminating the folding by a judicious use of an iron. But...I dunno. It feels sort of stiff. I think I might restart tonight with a different yarn and larger needles. Yes, I think the Chevron scarf will be taking a dip in the frog pond.

Probably won't be starting anything new tonight, though, as I have to go home and bake some cakes for T'day. We'll be eating at my aunt's and many cousins will be there. Should be fun. I think we should play some Charades.

Currently Reading

Still carrying When the Devil Holds the Candle back and forth to work with me but I'll admit I haven't cracked the cover in a couple of days. At home I am still reading away at The Chinese Tattoo Murder Case and I'm also reading Ingathering, a collection of Zenna Henderson's People stories. They are dated and a little hokey but still fun reading.

I am also reading, for a discussion on Readerville, the 2007 Best American Short Stories. This edition is edited by Stephen King. I gotta say, so far I've been disappointed in most of them. I mislaid my book for a while, so I haven't yet read the first five stories. (I didn't want the discussion to get too far ahead of me.) And of the others I've read...I think I've really only liked and admired "Wake." I recognize that the Mary Gordon story (the title of which escapes me) is well-written but I thought it about as bloodless and drab as its main character. "Riding the Doghouse" felt like a story that was meant to be the opening of a horror novel but it then just fizzled out. The story about the Jeepster and his murdered girlfriend (another title which has evaporated from my mind) was overly metaphored but once I got past that the story really grabbed me. But it was ruined by the last paragraph or so which seemed to me to be hammering the reader over the head with the Lesson to be Learned from This Story.

"Wake" has well-drawn, lively, flawed characters and an interesting situation. The opening sentence is a grabber and the voice stays true throughout the story. I thought it was fine. I also read, last night, the following story, "Wait." I thought it an sort of amusing trifle but ultimately meaningless and hollow, going nowhere.

So, Stephen, I ask you? What was it that really grabbed you about these stories? I wish he, as some other editors have done in the past, had written a little blurb before each story about why he picked it.

Poetry Tuesday?

You know how you start cruising the Net? Someone suggests an interesting link and that page has a link and then there's another and before you know it, 30 minutes has past and you're pages and pages away from where you started? And then, later, when you remember something you saw on that little jaunt through time and space you can't reconstruct where it was? Well, that happened to me lately. I had, on one of those wanderings found the poem you'll see below. And I read it and liked it. And it stuck in my head and a few days later I wanted to read it again and couldn't retrace my steps. And I had misremembered the place name in the title, so that didn't help. And I couldn't remember the poet. But someone on Readerville (Thanks, nbmandel!) figured it out. And here it is:

___________________

Adlestrop
Edward Thomas

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –

The name because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontendly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

_____________________

I think that's just lovely.

And come to think of it, my finding it so randomly on my Web-wanderings echoes the whole idea of the poem, doesn't it? Fortunately, with a little help, I was able to rediscover the station.

(And just to take a little joy from the whole "Look at this lovely poem experience" I cannot for the life of me, even playing in the Html, get the final stanza to be spaced right. One more try and then I just leave it...muttering and cursing under my breath.)

But yes! I did it!!

Chevron Scarf

One Thing I Like About the Chevron Scarf:

While this is basically just a Feather-and-Fan pattern, by using the "knit through front and back loop" increase rather than a yarn over and by making all the reverse side rows purl rows, Hoverson has made the scarf seem a lot more sophisticated to me. Smooth, I guess, being better than holey and ridgey.

One Thing I Love About the Chevron Scarf:

I love the little dashes of color that the knitting through the front and back loop gives you. They look like little sparks of contrast color on some rows. (I'll try to get a closeup tonight.)


One Thing I Don't Like About the Chevron Scarf:

Like all Feather-and-Fan patterns, this one also wants to fold into thirds. I am hoping that a very strenuous blocking will help reduce that tendency, but I am holding out no real hope. In thirds, this is about the width of a 70's necktie.

One Thing I Think Could Be Better About My Own Chevron Scarf:

I should have used two colorways that were more different from each other. These are close enough that when one looks at it, the scarf looks as though it's knit all from one variegated skein. Which is fine but sort of irritating when one is going to the trouble of switching yarns every two rows.

One Thing That I Appreciate About the Chevron Scarf:

It's really making me excited to try some variations...what would it look like with a variegated yarn and a solid or semi-solid?...what about two solids?...on much bigger needles?...what if you put four rows of garter stitch between each repeat of the pattern?...or four rows of plain stockinette?