The Plentiful Vintage

...or how I spent my summer.

I spent a good portion of the summer teaching — the lab portion of my usual MCC assignment on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 8 to 10 p.m. The three days a week thing got old fast, but otherwise I had a good class and a good time. One of my students was even a minor local celebrity, a features reporter for a local TV station who is apparently chucking it all to become a (male) nurse. Of course since the local TV station is not local to where I live, I had no idea until some of the other students pointed it out. He was totally not the stereotypical self-absorbed TV personality, but was rather a keen student and very helpful to others.

As for the rest of the time, here are the highlights...

---
( Last weekend of June... )

---
( Fourth of July weekend... )

---
( Readercon weekend... )

---
( First weekend in August... )

---
( The funeral... )

---
Summer ends for me on Tuesday, with the start of the semester at MCC. Meanwhile I have been busy preparing syllabi and lecture notes. I'm teaching my usual general chemistry course at MCC, Mondays and Wednesdays 4-7, and a lab over at CCSU on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7:30. The department chair at CCSU offered me a second lab section, but it conflicted with MCC, alas.

Hoping I can post this...

Nope, still down... and I lost all my tags. Bother.

And now we appear to be back.

Didn't make it to down to Jersey yesterday for Thanksgiving. My cough was just too bad. That's twice now in three years I've been too sick to make the trip, and it's getting a little frustrating. And despite knowing it was likely I'd have to make my own Thanksgiving dinner, I didn't bother to go out Wednesday night to get a roaster of some sort and associated foods. So dinner was some frozen chicken thighs baked on top of cornbread stuffing. I made the cornbread from scratch, so that's something, but no cranberry sauce, and no sausage in the stuffing. It was fine. Maybe I'll do something better Sunday.

This is the weirdest cold. If I hadn't had a flu shot I'd swear it was the flu*. Not much nasal congestion or sore throat, but I'm still woozy here on the sixth day and it's totally rototilled my lungs. The fever and associated aches have mostly broken at least.

* I keep flashing back on an old Law and Order episode where a bunch of people died because some doctor decided to buy really cheap flu vaccine that turned out to be saline solution. It was one of Jack McCoy's famous "depraved indifference" cases.

---
With nothing better to do, I've been rummaging through the DVD collection and watching movies, something I rarely do anymore. Comedies, mostly. So far, I have watched Hogfather, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, Chicken Run, What's Up Doc?, Lilo & Stitch, and Lilies of the Field, although I dozed off early on during the last. I've also been catching up on The Big Bang Theory, a show I never really got into before.

Now that cable is back on, things are getting back to normal here at Casa Machina. For me, the storm was relatively uneventful. Never lost power, although there were some flickers in the afternoon. Much of the town is reportedly out, although I don't know how current that report is. The gas grill got knocked over yet again, despite my precautions. I'd placed it right next to the house, so that it would be supported when the wind hit. Instead the wind just bounced off the house and blew the damn thing over from behind.

The big Bradford pear out front survived yet anther major storm intact. It has to be the luckiest 23 year-old Bradford pear in existence. My next door neighbor's Bradford lost another good-sized chunk.

The cable went at around 6:30, and did not return until this morning, which is basically the same thing that happened with Irene last year*. Of course, last year I went to work the next day, so I had at least some source of news about what happened. Not so much this year. In these modern times I get all my news through the cable, either over the net or by TV. It was weird yesterday having absolutely no idea what was going on at all, even locally. It was actually pretty nice here for most of yesterday, partly sunny even, so the view from my front window was encouraging. In the old days I could've switched from the cable connection to rabbit ears, but even if I had a set of HD rabbit ears, they wouldn't work with my obsolete TVs. It's a mild version of the technology trap that James Burke described in the first episode of Connections way back in the seventies. I suppose I could've dragged the radio up from the basement, but I don't have much faith in local radio giving me much of any kind of useful news.

* It's strange to me that cable should be more vulnerable than power lines. Losing power I would understand. Power lines are the most vulnerable of the wires on the pole, and they can't be reinforced the way telephone wires are (which is why the phone usually work even when the power is out). Cable is even lower on the pole than the phone, so I doubt the issue is physical breakage of the lines.

Now that I can see the outside world again, it looks like Rhody got hit about as hard as it did with Irene, except for the beaches, which were clobbered. RIDOT flew a helicopter along the coast to assess damage. There are pictures here. The photos run roughly west from Misquamicut Beach in Westerly to east in Newport, although I noticed the section of photos of the area I'm most familiar with, Narragansett, starting here, is arranged in reverse sequence if they were flying west to east. It looks like the surge even broke through the sea wall at one spot. If you happened to see any of the Weather Channel's live reports from Narragansett, they were made at the 4-way intersection in the upper left corner of this one. The brick building there is the 'Gansett post office.

I talked to my folks down in Jersey last night. They live a long way from the beach, but still got clobbered. No power, no heat, but my brother hooked up a generator for them so they have some power. My mom had just gotten home from rehabbing after her surgery. What a nice welcome home. My sisters are also without power, and Jane has no water since her well pump has no juice. She and the kids are camped out at Rie's house, where there is city water, at least. Word is, at least according to the city councilperson neighbor that my dad talked to, that it'll probably be a week or so before the power is back. OTOH, I suppose it could've been worse. A big tree landed on my parents' next-door neighbor's sun porch. There a lot of very old, very tall trees in the neighborhood. Dad had the most at risk trees in his yard taken down a few years ago after one landed on the garage.

---
Now to go out and buy some treats to hand out tonight.

Heading to Jersey for the weekend to visit mom and family in general. Mom is doing well and spamming folks with her laptop. Have remembered to load spaghetti squash in the truck for delivery, which is better than the last couple of years when I didn't remember to do it until Easter.

---
It's been rainy lately, so there have been few opportunities to ride. Played volleyball Thursday, and went out for dinner after. That's half the reason I started going again, to get out of the house to socialize. Now that I'm home all the time, I rarely speak to anybody, other than to myself.

---
I watched the entire run of Young Justice over the last few days, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I have a tenuous connection to it in that Greg Weisman, the producer, is the brother of Jon Weisman, the owner of Dodger Thoughts, the baseball blog I most often hung out at. Jon wrote of few of the episodes for the show. Alas, Jon retired Dodger Thoughts a couple of weeks ago, but for 10 years it was the best Dodger blog out there.

Time to hit the road.

My mother is undergoing open-heart surgery this morning, so if you could point any spare health-ma you might have lying around her way, I'd appreciate it.

She's had a murmur in her heart her entire life, which apparently was due to a bad valve. About a week and a half ago she had to go to the ER with severe shortness of breath. They did a catheterization to check on things, and decided that the valve needs replacement. Then they sent her home for a couple of days to give her time to fret about it all. She just wants it to be over.

So, spent the day baking cookies (two kinds) and making beef stock for demi-glace from scratch. Plus I made two batches of kolacki* dough, as well as the no-sugar added apricot jam for the kolacki filling. Did not have time to make the third kind of cookie, but the kolackis will be better anyway. Finished dipping truffles Wednesday night, so at least those are done. Now it's just a matter of assembling packages. Also did last minute shopping and went to the company Christmas luncheon. Am very tired.

* A small Czech pastry, that is sort of a cross between a tart and a Danish. I will post the recipe. They apparently all the rage in Texas. It's pronounced ko-latch-key. It seems like every "c_", be it "cz" or "ck", in Czech is pronounced as a soft "ch", except for "ch" which is pronounced "ck".

Have I mentioned I'm cooking Christmas dinner? Not here, but at my sister's house. I did this once before, and it was fine. I'm overthinking and overdoing, of course. Menu to be rib roast with both brown gravy and Tchoupitoulas sauce (thus the need for the demi-glace), roasted potatoes, peas, carrots of some sort, creamed onions, Yorkshire puddings, and rolls. Rie is getting the beef and potatoes, and I think I have everything else I'll need. Now I just need to remember to put it in the back of the truck tomorrow. Plus the potato slices that are marinating in the frig for the potato salad for tomorrow night's traditional cold cut dinner. (The Italians do fish on Christmas Eve, my family does cold cuts. It's a thing.)

Still need to roll out, fill, and bake the kolackis, and finish making the potato salad.

The weather has been insanely moderate for this time of year. I might have ridden my bike today had I not been running about like a madman. Now I'm worried about keeping stuff cold for the trip.

Back in the mid-sixties, my father flew for Aer Lingus on the New York to Shannon route. Shannon was the first duty-free airport, and my father took advantage of this by bringing us home various Irish and British foodstuffs, like Cadbury's chocolate (long before it became available here) and this weird rose hip syrup that was supposedly high in vitamin C*.

* I hated the stuff, myself. Every time one of us had a cold, a big spoonful got shoved in our mouth, and I always had to suppress a gag reflex. It was like when one of the Little Rascals was given a spoonful of castor oil. Somehow the subject came up during Christmas dinner, and I discovered that everyone else in my family loved the stuff, even to the point of occasionally sneaking a spoonful. Crazy, all of them.

One of the other things he used to bring home were these big ol' jars of Bovril, which was a thick, dark beef extract that looked and flowed a lot like molasses. It was basically concentrated cow. My mother used it for gravies and soups and anything else that needed beefiness, and we loved the stuff. Of course, when my father stopped flying to Ireland, the supply became restricted to tiny, ridiculously priced jars at gourmet shops, so that ended that.

I do a lot of my shopping at Dave's Market, a small local chain that has a somewhat higher ratio of esoteric products than, say, Stop and Shop, and the other day I noticed one of those tiny jars of Bovril. So I bought one. Tonight I decided to make beef stew, so it was the perfect time to crack it open.

I put a good dollop of the stuff into the Dutch oven with the rest of the ingredients, and then tried to puzzle out whether it now had to be refrigerated or not. Now I don't think we did back in the day, but I wanted to make sure. Lots of things have a "refrigerate after opening" warning on them now that didn't used to (ketchup, for example). The first problem is that being a tiny jar, the type face is, like, 3 pt. Even with my reading glasses I could barely make out the type. I actually had to get a magnifying glass. Ah, store in a cool dark place. Perfect. Then I looked at the front of the jar.

Suitable for vegetarians

Say what? How can concentrated cow possibly be suitable for vegetarians? I pulled out my trusty magnifying glass again to peruse the list of ingredients. There are lots of them, but none of them contain the word beef in them. Or cow. Or any other kind of dead animal. Huh.

Wikipedia clued me in. During the dark days of the mad cow scare, the manufacturer replaced the beef extract with yeast extract to "allow vegetarians to enjoy the rich taste" which is apparently code for "the European Union won't let us sell it otherwise." People complained (think New Coke), so once the ban on beef exports was lifted, they apparently reintroduced classic Bovril as "Beef Bovril." Dave's, unfortunately, carries plain old (New) Bovril. $3.49 for 125 grams of yeasty goodness. Sigh.

It smells about the same as I remember it did. I will see how it tastes in about an hour or so.

Previously in the Plentiful Vintage: It rained for forty days and forty nights, and our hero had to shell out a lot of (fairly moldy) dough to get new tires and a battery for the Machinamobile. Also, it was air show week.

( Two weeks... )

My 14 year-old nephew requested and received a chain saw for Christmas.

It's truffle time at Casa Machina. I picked up most of my supplies Friday night. It's apparently my lucky week for making them, as Walmart had Hershey chips for $1.50 a bag, AC Moore has candy melts for a $1.69 a bag, and Dave's has Philly cream cheese buy one (@ $2.49) get one free! For the bean counters amongst you, that's basically $3 per 1 lb batch, plus flavorings. I get off cheap there, too, because I still have plenty of extracts leftover from last year. I only had to spring for a bag of shredded coconut ($1.50) and a bottle of mapleine ($2.49), this year's experimental flavor.

I'm going to make a couple of batches of cookies, as well, Marnie's chocolate chips and ATK's triple chocolates.

---
AC Moore also has some 50% off coupons up on their site, one of which I may use to buy an air brush.

---
For the past thirty years or so, my dad has been my easiest gift. He loves cheese and beef stick and candy, so every year I've given him a food basket based on those items, heavy on the cheeses. This was good, because otherwise he would probably be the hardest person to buy for. However, at Thanksgiving he mentioned to me that now that he's had that double bypass, perhaps it would be better if I stuck to low fat cheeses. I have since discovered that this turns out to be harder than it sounds. I always include some Jarlsberg, and that's available in a lower fat version, but after that there don't seem to be a lot of choices unless I decide to wander over to the Cracker Barrel aisle. Dave's had some no fat cheese from Vermont, but I'm leery.

Of course, a risk assessment might say that if it took him 83 years of eating regular cheese to develop the original blockage, chances are good that a nice wedge of cheddar is unlikely to keep him from reaching 166. Right?

---
It was lightly warmer today, 40 instead of 32, but windier, so it felt about the same as I rode. Broke 1700 miles for the year. Not too shabby. Afterward I made beef stew in the pressure cooker. Today I also cleaned the bathroom and most of the kitchen, and did laundry. Next I'm going to make some truffle centers. I feel very accomplished.