What's so funny?

Is there something wrong with me? I have a problem with several types of laughter. I usually like laughter but sometimes people get carried away and drive me nuts. In order of increasing annoyance, here are my problem laughters.

Inappropriate Laughter
There are people who litter their conversations with titters much like people use “you know” to fill up their turns at talking, you know. I guess they really aren't very aware of their laughing and a laugh sometimes comes out at a very bad time. I overheard a conversation that ended with something like this:

Person 1: My cousin died.
Titterer: I'm sorry to hear that. *titter*
Person 1: (silence, followed by) I don't understand what was funny.
Titterer: Sorry. (Then some sort of explanation.)

(I don't remember what the bad news was but it wasn't funny.) I don't let this one bother me (and I don't run into it a much these days) since I figure it's just a bad habit that can't be broken.

Inflated Laughter
Then there are people who laugh louder and longer than necessary. For a while my office was near somebody who would laugh at everything that wasn't sad. If something deserved a smile it got a laugh. Something deserving a chuckle got a belly laugh. Something that was funny got long, loud gales of laughter. A problem with this is that the people involved in conversations with the guffawer would laugh along (and those laughs would be funny and would provoke more, louder laughs). The constant state of levity wore on me.

Laughing at One's Own Humor (or nonhumor)
People who laugh at everything they say bewilder me. I feel if you say something funny, the people who are listening to you should have the opportunity to let you know they found it funny before you burst out into laughter to let them know they heard something funny. And most people, even comedians, aren't saying something funny all the time. Sometimes it takes two or three sentences to tell a joke.


I bring all this up because I sit in a wing of our building where there is someone who combines Inflated Laughter with Laughing at One's Own Humor. It's getting very old. It's so loud it can't be ignored.

I wonder if there something wrong with me that I find all this laughing not funny.

I Was a Teenage John Bircher

Today we heard that William F. Buckley, Jr. died. In high school I would watch "Firing Line" religiously. But my poor little brain seems to have forgotten whether I watched to see Mr. Buckley beat up on the liberal guests or whether I was rooting for his victims. I loved listening to (and watching) Mr. Buckley's delivery of his big words (most of which flew past me ununderstood) and ideas.

One thing that Mr. Buckley gave me was the love of Baroque music. I do believe that his use of the part of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2 as his program's theme music made me look into the rest of the piece then the rest of the Brandenburgs then maybe the rest of Bach. Go, Bach!

But maybe I watched because I thought I believed in the Conservative ideals. You see, there was a conservative (to put it mildly) radio program I listened to I am very ashamed to admit.

When KRSN was signing off for the day, they would play H. L. Hunt's "Freedom Talks." I would listen. Regularly. Fortunately, I have no recollection of what any of the little talks were about. (Sometimes I think it is good that I have blocked so much of my youth out!)

I'm sure Jack wasn't proud of this interest since he was surely asleep and had no knowledge of what I was listening to. I wonder if I gave any of the rest of the family nightmares. (My big sisters were probably off at college by that time. Did Mom worry about me?)

Whew! That's off my chest! I'm off to say my three dozen Hail Marys.

Black and Tan in action!

You asked for it! You've got it! Here is a little movie of me making Black and Tans.

We made it without much planning and absolutely no rehearsal! (One beer is enough to put me under the table so the one will have to do!) It ends with me taking an off-camera sip to demonstrate that the layers don't mix even with the sloshing that occurs while drinking. You'll have to believe me when I tell you that it was sipped on.




Sorry about the absence of production values. I should have kept the beers' labels in view. And how could I just throw the turtle behind the glasses like that?

Two beers in three days. I guess I am an alcoholic!

Maria Stuarda

Recently, there was an interview (I think it was with James Levine) during an intermission in a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera where he was excited that the Met is finally going to be putting on Donizetti's Maria Stuarda. They haven't done it before because it is so difficult to cast.

Great, I thought, we get to see it in a few weeks by the San Diego Opera. But then I don't really know the difference between a good cast and a great cast. The cast we saw today seemed to be pretty good but kind of uneven. It ranged from belt canto to his-lips-are-moving-but-is-anything-coming-out? (In the ensembles the tenor sometimes got drowned out.) So, I can see that it could be difficult to get all six soloists to be great at the same time. And even harder when they have to be great in a 4000-seat theater.

I wish I would keep my eyes open. I have a tendency to close my eyes and just listen. Too often I sort of doze off. I think I was awake for it all but I don't have a lot of recollection of the big scene with Elizabeth and Mary. I opened my eyes just in time to get to see the supertitle where Mary calls Elizabeth a "vile bastard." That sent Mary to the block.

I remember dozing off at the Santa Fe Opera when Alessandra Marc was being impressive in Strauss's "Friedenstag." I kept waking up and saying to myself that what was going on is really, really worth watching. But I kept going back to my little nap. My loss. Then we had only one more opportunity to see Ms. Marc. Too bad her physique kept her from being cast very often.

And today's opera was in the afternoon. Just put me in a dark room and I get sleepy.

Hello. I'm Charles E. and I'm an alcoholic

Well, maybe not an alcoholic but I do drink a beer every three or four months (that makes me a borderline alcoholic, doesn't it?). Tonight was one of those times!

A few years ago, we went to a kitchen store in search of an Aerobie® AeroPress™ Coffee & Espresso Maker (I'll have to tell of my experiences with that sometime). We found the AeroPress and also found another turtle for our collection. They had a Lagerhead Black & Tan Turtle. I didn't read the card it was attached to so I didn't know what it was supposed to be. It was an unusual turtle and that's enough for me so I got it.
The owner of the store asked if I like black and tans. I had no idea what he was asking but figured it had to do with the turtle. I told him we collect turtles.

When we got it home I finally read the instructions on the card and was intrigued. Imagine, two beers of different densities could be put in one glass and not mix! I had to try it out.

Background information: After our little ceremony for Dad at the cemetery we had dinner where Mom had a Guinness Stout in memory of Dad. She let me try it. Yum! (Why do I start with strong flavors? Espresso before regular coffee. Guinness before Bud (well, I still don't drink Bud). Wagner before Mozart.)

I was ready to put the turtle to use and make the Black and Tans.

Tonight we had pizza and beer.

The pizza was good. The beer was good.

Black and Tan
1 Bottle Henninger beer
1 Can Murphy's Draught Style Stout

Pour one-half bottle of the Henninger into a pint glass. Let it chug to make a head. Place the Lagerhead Turtle on the rim of the glass. Gently pour half of the Murphy's stout over the turtle's shell. Repeat with other glass.

Amazingly, the two beers don't mix. The stout is less dense and floats on top. Such a gimmick!

We used these beers because we were got them at Trader Joe's. TJ's didn't have Guinness. I hope the Guinness company isn't too mad at me for putting Murphy's in their glasses.

Spring brings weeds

Now that we've had rains and we're headed towards spring, the weeds start coming out. Some of the weeds are not so annoying to me. The buttercup oxalis is starting to bloom. Their bright yellow blossoms against their green leaves are so pretty. (Maybe that's me just being true to my school. You know, "Go Toppers, go, for the green and for the gold!")

Here is a patch under one of the birdbaths.
And a large clump taking over the iris patch.
They shrivel up and go away when the things we want to grow want to grow so I don't get in a tizzy over them.

I do pull them out of the spring-flowering bulb patch. Over there they are in competition with the things that are supposed to be growing.

I don't get it

All through my life I have stored up jokes, comments, and the likes that I just don't get. Sometimes years later I finally figure them out. For example, we had a book of riddles when I was a kid (and Mom probably still has it unless it went to Karen when she had kids). It had a riddle I didn't understand.

Q: How do you get down from an elephant?
A: You don't. You get down from a goose.

I didn't get it. I had no idea when I was five what down is. Years later I finally found out and the riddle was solved. My reaction was "Oh, brother! I waited all these years for that?"

Much more recently another one of these was solved. Back in college days I got a card from Don M. (probably a birthday card). He signed off with something about always being "bosom buddies." I thought that was an interesting (and apt) term for our friendship and it stuck with me. At the time I wasn't familiar with the songs from "Mame." Now that I have Sirius Satellite Radio and listen to its Broadway's Best channel I am. I was in the car recently singing along with Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur singing "Bosom Buddies" from Mame and it finally clicked.

Here they are singing "Bosom Buddies."

(Don't you love it?)

I wonder what's become of my bosom buddy. (Hint, Don, hint!)

Bent Objects

I have no recollection of what took me to the Bent Objects blog. I'm glad I found it because it makes me laugh (or at least smile). I wish I had an imagination.

Perhaps you'll like it, too.

We now come with a Certificate of Authenticity

After all these years of dilly dallying, Jerry and I have finally made it official:Read all about it at the Secretary of State's web site.

Taxes will be fun next year. We'll have to file jointly in California. I hope Turbo Tax makes that easy.

Education in Laundryland

So, there I was...doing laundry because it was the weekend.

(I have been doing laundry on the weekend since the time we did the family room/garage remodel. Our little laundry area was out of commission while that was under way. We hooked up the washer to the back yard faucet outside the dining room. We had a clothes line on the side of the house. I did the laundry on the weekend because I could wash it, hang it to dry and take it in in one day. I now can do it any old day but I've just been stuck in that routine.)

When I take clothes out of the washer I hang pants and shirts as they come out. (Remember that we've got a clothes line in the garage?) When I pull a sock out, if I haven't found its mate I set it on top of the washer. When I get a pair I drape them over the line together. That way, when they're dry they're already matched so it makes putting them away easier. This weekend sock after sock was the first of a pair. It turned out that I had 10 pairs of socks in the load and it wasn't till the 11^th sock came out of the washer that I got my first pair of socks matched.

What are the chances of that?

About 1 in 180. (That's not so fantastic but I thought it was a little weird.)

In case you're interested, the following shows the chances that each of the first 10 socks pulled from the washer does not match one already taken out:

20   18   16   14   12   10    8    6    4    2
-- * -- * -- * -- * -- * -- * -- * -- * -- * --
20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11

Doing the arithmetic we find the answer. Aren't you thrilled to know that?

Spring is in the air

Our spring-flowering bulb garden is starting to bloom! We have some little daffodils:
(but they're hiding behind some other plants so we have to look for them.)

And we have an anemone open:
It's being shaded by the Giant Squills.

I can hardly wait until the sparaxises are blooming. They're such a happy flower!

Gypsy

We were busy chaps today. This evening we got to see Gypsy. It had five people in the pit. And loud recorded music. I wondered why they bother with the few musicians to add a little bit of music to the recording. Jerry explained that it's like a Thomas Kinkade painting. You know, like a picture with authentic, hand-applied highlights!

They had a good Mama Rose. But the reverb they added to "Rose's Turn" was kind of annoying. Otherwise she did a pretty good job of the scene.

Except for the tiny pit group it was a good little production. The Junes, Louises and girls with gimmicks where quite good.

It's nice to be able to see shows like this right here in Escondido. But the shortage of musicians makes me pine for bigger productions.

Manon Lescaut

Today we got to see Manon Lescaut live from the Metropolitan Opera at a nearby movie theater. I didn't really have high expectations. The first two acts mostly lived up to my expectations and seemed to be heavy in the fluff department. I couldn't really understand why the characters reacted to the others the way they did except to get the story to the interesting point. That was when Manon is denounced by her sugar daddy. Up to then the story and the music were rather dull. Then things got interesting both dramatically and musically.

I enjoyed the end of Act 2 through the end of the opera. Jerry thought that Manon's dying scene went on too long and was overly dramatic. I told him that this was an early opera by Puccini and he hadn't learned to be subtle in working on our emotions. (I certainly got choked up when Des Grieux pleaded to be allowed to go into exile with Manon and again when Manon was dying.)

They replay it (at least in bigger cities) on Sunday. You might want to see it then if you missed it today.

Classical Radio in San Diego

San Diego used to have a classical radio station that had the most powerful transmitter of all San Diego's stations. With the most powerful signal a station can reach the greatest area. Covering the greatest area means that it potentially has the largest number of listeners and can possibly charge the highest rates for advertising. But classical music has a few problems when it comes to advertising. The music that gets played is just too long and that doesn't leave much time for ads. And classical music's audience isn't the 15 to 35 year old males that advertisers love so much. So they changed to a format (then another and another) that can make more money from advertising.

They sold their record collection to an AM station that changed its format to relaxing classical music. This relaxing classical programming came from a station in Boston that went out to many commercial stations. (They never did much local programming with the record collection they bought.) The programming had to accommodate all the stations' advertising needs. So they played a lot of short pieces that stations could either play or replace with commercials.

There was one short piece they were especially fond of. They seemed to play the Minuet from a Boccherini string quintet many times a day. They played it so much that they often wouldn't bother telling us who the composer was or the what it came from. They would just call it "The Minuet." I would call it overkill.

Their main programming was never very bold and never played anything that took more than 20 minutes.

I wasn't thrilled with their very safe choices of music so I took up listening to Internet streams from stations like WQED, WQXR, and WCPE. That worked pretty well but only at home. I want to be able to listen to music on the road.

So we got Sirius Satellite Radio. And we're glad we did. They've got three classical stations that now includes Metropolitan Opera Radio that plays live broadcasts three or four times each week all through their season. We get to hear all the operas that the Met performs several times each. That's way better than Major League Baseball, I'll tell you!

Anyway, one morning last year I woke up and didn't want to get out of bed so I turned on the radio and pressed my preset buttons to listen to some relaxing classical music. There wasn't any. It turned out that they couldn't attract enough advertisers that they switched to some other format. This left San Diego with no full-time classical radio.

The public radio station in San Diego took up playing classical music in the evening and early morning. They even play recordings of the San Diego Opera performances. Their programming is set up to let stations play five minutes of news at the beginnings of each hour so that means that no piece of music can be as long as 55 minutes. I don't think I've heard them play anything longer than around 40 minutes. So no Mahler symphonies. What a shame. Life without Mahler is not a good thing.

So all of you out there be happy that you can tune in to classical music.

I don't get "Kaitlyn"

For years I've wondered where the name "Kaitlyn" (and all its many spelling variants) came from. Last year there was an article in the New York Times that tells us what the most popular babies' names of 2006 were. The article doesn't help me understand where trendy names come from but it pointed me to The Baby Name Wizard that lets us see how names have come and gone in the last 110 or so years. It's a fascinating tool that I keep going back to.

"Charles" has gone way down since I made my appearance (though it is still a popular name). "Xzavier" is picking up.

I still want to know where the fashionable names like "Brianna" come from.

No problem!

I've decided that I have no problem with people who respond to "Thank you" with "No problem!"

Thank you for listening.

National Pancake Day

IHOP told us that today, being National Pancake Day, we can eat three buttermilk pancakes for free. In exchange customers are expected to donate what they would have spent to a children's charity. (I wonder if they have the same sort of promotion on other countries' National Pancake Days since they are the International House of Pancakes.)

I wanted to know about how this became National Pancake day and found out that Shrove Tuesday is Pancake Day. This is because people need to get rid of rich foods that they can't eat during Lent and won't keep till Easter. So they put their eggs, butter, milk, and the likes in pancakes to use them up and get fat. Apparently IHOP didn't want to compete with Super Tuesday elections so they moved their celebration of pancakes to today.

To celebrate Jerry made us pancakes from freshly milled wheat, oats and corn (even though we're well into Lent already). They were very good!

(I wonder if we'll have pancakes on our usual Thursday pancake night. I hope so!)

Creeps

There are some drivers' behaviors I find amusing. (There are many behaviors I find terrifying but we all know about those.) One I chuckle at is when people stopped at a red light just can't stand to be stopped. So they creep forward every few seconds. I guess they figure that if they're moving at the moment the light turns green they'll have overcome a little bit of inertia and will be way ahead of the pack. Or else they feel they're sharks and will die if they stop moving.

Occasionally while waiting at a red light that lasts too long even for a patient person I've seen cars inch their ways over the line we're supposed to stop at and get their cars completely into the intersection before the light turns green.

One creep will inspire others. When one person starts creeping at the red light, others, who don't want to be left behind when the light turns green, will start creeping along. It's entertaining to see three lanes of drivers getting antsy and trying to outcreep the others.

One creeping behavior I just can't figure out is when someone is not at the front of the line and has to keep inching forward even though there is a car in front of them. They're going to have to wait for the person ahead of them to get going anyway.

Then there's the tandem creeps. I've been several cars back in the line and before the light turns green there is a full car length of space in front of me that wasn't there when I stopped in line. Sometimes more. I feel pressured to fill the space when there's someone behind me. But I fight it.

I want to scream at these people and tell them that the life of their clutch goes down by one use each time they creep forward.

That's me channeling Jack.

That's what bothers me most about this.

The Trocks

Tonight we got to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. They're always a hoot! Of course we got to see Swan Lake, Act II and The Dying Swan. Even though we've seen those many times they are always fresh and fun.

They also did Vivaldi Suite (with the tallest woman and shortest man in the company as leads) and Majisimas with music from Le Cid by Massenet (isn't French Spanish music wonderful?). These weren't full of belly laughs. They were great nonetheless.

Nobody should pass up any opportunity to see the Trocks.

Fingernails

I have a lot of problems with fingernails. Mostly with other people's but occasionally with mine.

Mine first

My fingernails are thin. Razor thin. I have slashed myself with my nails. This usually happens when I'm pulling up my socks and I lose my grip (how hard do I tug on my socks?). My hand flies across my other hand and one of its little razors slices through my skin. My toenails also leave cuts on my legs when they grow out the least bit and I scratch a leg with the other foot's toenails. Those long, parallel tracks down my calves are kind of interesting.

Then I have a very odd sensation in my fingertips when the nails get around a 1/16^th of an inch long and I fold towels and washcloths to put them away. I can't really describe it but I get chills up my arms when my nails slide across terry cloth. (This is what inspired this little essay.) I think the problem happens when the thin nails start eroding and get ragged. They seem to catch on the loops in an odd way. It's weird.

Even though I'm not fond of long (1/16^th inch is long?) nails, I seem to have a hard time trimming them. I smashed one finger in a door while at college. Under that nail seems to have been scarred and the skin underneath forgets to let go of the nail as it grows out. Trimming that nail usually nicks that skin. Maybe that's why I let the nails grow longer than I'm comfortable with.

Enough about my nails.

Other People's Nails

I have a major problem with fingernails that aren't attached to fingers. My mind seems to be on constant lookout for loose nails. I encounter loose nails a lot. One day while walking up the stairs at work I happened to see somebody's fingernail on the floor and that freaked me out.

Trimming nails in the stairway is one thing but in a meeting? I was in a meeting I had no interest in and one of the attendees felt the need to clip his nails. (Maybe he was as interested in the meeting as I was.) He was good at it and didn't have to look at what he was doing. At one point he had his hands above his head and was clipping away. I wanted to run out of the room screaming but I kept calm somehow.

Jerry knows of my problem with loose nails. One day he warned me that one of his got away from him in the bathroom. He tried to save me from it but couldn't find it. I later went into the bathroom and my fingernail detector instantly found it. I called for help. I wouldn't touch it.

(There are occasionally false alarms. One day I got freaked out over what turned out to be a shred of Parmesan cheese on the floor that missed its plate of spaghetti.)

Flying Fingernail

I was in the checkout line at a grocery store when a red thing came flying across the store. This was in the old days when cash registers had buttons that were spring loaded. A cashier nearby had pressed on a key and her finger slipped off of it and the button sprang back and threw her glued on nail in my direction. It missed. She and my cashier had a good laugh over this.

Long Fingernails

Long nails bother me and I don't want to be touched by them. I shudder when I see a cashier with long nails digging change out of the drawer for me. Maybe that's why I usually use credit cards now.

Extreme Fingernails

Jerry and I were flying to or from New Mexico and were changing planes in Phoenix. We spent the long time between flights being fascinated by a woman who had the longest, ugliest nails I've ever seen. They were four or five inches long if you ran a measuring tape along the surface of the nails. If you measured from the tip of the nail to the fingertip it would be much less. They curled like corkscrews. She protected them from damage by wrapping them in scotch tape or saran wrap or something like that. How could she find those nails attractive? How can she function with those nails? She couldn't possibly dig change out of a cash register drawer or even hold a pen. It must have been a control thing. Like watching that train wreck, as horrified as I was by them I couldn't keep my eyes off of them. (Remembering those is surely going to give me nightmares.)

Backwards "Dial" on wikiHow

Colleen suggested that I post my Fun while naked accomplishment on wikiHow. Well, I've posted it there. Since it's a wiki, you all are free to refine my instructions.

Don't you just love the Internet?

Down in the dumps

A few years ago we had cubicles that were eight feet by eight feet. It was decided that that was too large. The industry average size for cubicles (we were told) is around 40 square feet so that's how big cubicles at NCR were going to be (because NCR doesn't need to be more generous with its space than the industry). Not only that but managers will be happy to work in a cubicle. No more offices with doors. If anybody needed privacy they could get it for a short time in a conference room. So our cubicles were reduced to five by eight feet.

And there was much grousing.

I never had much of a problem with the smaller cubicle. After all, I sit in front of the computer monitor and don't use much of the desk space. About the only problem I have with the narrower cubicle is scraping the back of my chair on my whiteboard and that probably annoys whoever is on the other side of the wall than it bothers me.

Then one day I walked into my cubicle with a runny nose and reached to the right as I went through the doorway for a tissue. The tissues weren't there. They never have been. They're down at the far end of the desk. When I was finished with it I went to the far end of the cubicle to put it in the trash and, again, that was the wrong end of the cubicle.

Then it dawned on me...I had been transported our bathroom at home. The two rooms are configured the same. They're long and narrow and when you go through the door there is the horizontal surface along the right hand side of the room and there's a place to sit at the far end. In the bathroom the tissues are by the door and the trashcan is at the other end.

Maybe I do have a problem with my smaller cubicle if it makes me feel like I'm working in the john.

(Not that our bathroom is unpleasant. It's got Jasmin, after all!)

Flood!

All these years we've lived here we've had a little problem at the end of the driveway whenever it rained:Sometimes the newspaper would be delivered to the end of the driveway just before the rain comes and the paper would be in the middle of the lake by the time we wake up. Or we'd have to wade a bit when going to get the mail. We've been wanting to get the driveway to quit being a lake after the rain. We couldn't dig a deeper trench downstream...it would cause broken bones when people fell into it and it would fill up anyway. We tried filling in the lake bed with rocks but that just made the lake a bit shallower.
On Monday, I came home at lunchtime since I was in Escondido for a doctor's appointment. I was checking the mail and talking with Mom on the phone when somebody drove by and asked if I wanted to fix my driveway. He was going to be doing some paving for a neighbor and while they're in the area with all their equipment they could do the job for a reduced price. (Right!) Since we did want to fix our driveway and money is just burning holes in our pockets, I decided that we've dilly-dallied too long on this project and we should have it done without even comparison shopping.

Today I came home for lunch to see this:
It looks like the lake problem is solved. There might be a little bit of a puddle upstream but I don't think it will go over the neighbors' driveway. The puddle area should fill up with dirt pretty quickly and solve that puddle problem.

I wonder if we should have gotten a better idea about how much this project should have cost. Who cares now?

Bring on the rain!

---

Update: I forgot to say that Jason, the person doing the work, is the sort who says "ashphalt."

Oops!

While I was on the phone dealing with my Verizon order I was upset that some things that one part of their operation were doing weren't being told to another part in a timely manner. (The canceling of my order by the money part of the business should have unlocked my online ordering ability in the web part, for example.) I mentioned to the nice person that perhaps Verizon should think about getting a better database system to handle some of these issues. Teradata has a great database and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that works with it.

Today I found out that Verizon is a Teradata customer.

Well, I tried.

We skipped "The Great American Trailer Park Musical" for this?

We were double booked today. We had tickets for the 2:00 performance of the San Diego Opera's "Tannhäuser" and the 8:00 performance of "The Great American Trailer Park Musical" at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido. Tannhäuser was going to last about four hours so that was going to give us just enough time to drive from San Diego back to Escondido, get coffee and supper and shift gears from German Romantic opera to trashy Off-Broadway fluff.

Then San Diego Opera decided that they needed to start at 3:00 instead. So much for the time to get from one to the other. We turned in our tickets to the Trailer Park Musical.

I'm wondering if we made the right decision.

I had never seen Tannhäuser before so it was a good thing to experience but it seemed to be a rather silly story (it didn't seem all that silly while I was growing up with operas on records). Their Venus seemed to be a bit weak and their Tannhäuser seemed to be too strong. The Elisabeth sang well but why is she so determined to save that lout's soul?

I wish I knew how to analyze opera.

(I wonder how the Trailer Park Musical was.)

Mycology in action

I was getting worried with my mycological inaction. My bucket of mushrooms was doing very little. The little mushrooms were growing stalks but no caps. I thought that maybe they were just too cold out in the garden room so I brought them in the dining room and set them by the door where I thought they'd get the light they need and the heat they were missing. They seemed to be doing no better so I figured that they wanted more light. I moved them back to the garden room and put them where they get more afternoon light than they were getting in their original spot.

Turn your back on mushrooms for a day and look what they do:The patch of mushrooms that grew caps were on the side of the bucket that wasn't shaded by the bucket. So I do believe that light was the thing that was missing. I should rotate the bucket each morning so they all get a bit of sunshine.

I harvested the bunch at the top of the picture and Jerry put them on my pizza tonight. It was good. The mushroom flavor came through the sauce and cheese and Thai flavored baked tofu.

Let's hope that this isn't the end of the harvest.

Jerry's being a jerk!

Remember the food dehydrator story from last weekend? The full name of the dehydrator is "Nesco American Harvest Gardenmaster Food Dehydrator and Jerky Maker." Today it is living up to its jerky making ability. It's made jerky once before. That time Jerry used some spices on it and that filled the house with a peppery aroma. Today's batch was marinated in teriyaki sauce and that's not masking the meatiness as much. Oh, well.

I understand that the jerky turned out pretty good. I'll take Jerry's word for it. I hope he enjoys this round.

All living things need coffee

Poss asked about coffee roasting so here's the scoop.

Yes, I'm still on my first Hearthware I-Roast 2 coffee roaster. I am on the second roasting chamber. The first one got cracked. I think I rubbed too hard while cleaning it. At least it was just a crack and kept working until I got the replacement! The lid doesn't fit this roasting chamber very well so I have to fight to get it on. I'm bound to break this one sometime in the fight so I really should order another one just in case.

I get my green coffee beans from Sweet Maria's these days. I usually get some Espresso Monkey Blend. (Did you know espresso blends include some robusta beans? And we thought robusta is evil!) And I try some single-origin coffee that they say makes good espresso. I need to pay more attention to the flavor because after a while I can't remember what might be different between the various coffees. I used to appreciate the differences. I wonder what's changed.

I grind the roasted beans in Rocky and brew in Silvia. They're a great pair. No home should be without them. (I got them from Whole Latte Love.)

And now for a 20 megabyte experiment: here is a minute and a half view of the coffee roasting! (I should have recorded it in lower resolution.) I've never done this before so I hope it works.

(What a waste of bandwidth...at least it's not porn! Though some religions do find coffee to be sinful.)

The movie starts with me forgetting that I hadn't selected the roast profile. I first go for the start button then have to remember to do all that needs to be done to select Roast Profile 2. So that's what all the fumbling around is about. There are 30 seconds at the beginning of the roast, 30 in the middle and 30 at the end of the cooling period.



And here's the finished product cooling in the colander.


Tomorrow we get to find out if it's good. (It is I'm sure.)