Some of you will remember that I entered a book manuscript in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition a few weeks ago. The first cut was announced today, and my work is still in the running. The number of entries has now been reduced to 1000, and the next cut, to 500, will be announced in about a month. Making that next cut means at the ( Read more... )

I think it's time we dethroned the whistle pig from his phony position as weather predictor. It's been snowing all afternoon, the roads were drifted badly coming home, and now the temperature is dropping to single digits again ( Read more... )

Microwaves have weird failure modes. Our old Sharp has been working for a long time (more than 13 years I'm sure) but in the last year the light inside has been erratic. Sometimes would come on, sometimes not. Sunday morning as I was making breakfast, though, something else failed in a more spectacular mode. I had put some butter in there to melt ( Read more... )

Once again the NWS overestimates the power of a storm by an order of magnitude it seems. Their dire storm that was supposed to produce 8 - 12 inches of snow overnight barely made it to three. I could have used a snow day, too ( Read more... )

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Attempting to reconstruct an excellent bread recipe that we have somehow misplaced. This is a "no-knead" dough. It rises at room temperature overnight, is shaped with very light kneading and rises again, then is baked inside a closed container such as a cast iron Dutch oven. Very easy, though I recommend a scale to weigh flour rather than measuring ( Read more... )

A 5-10 inch snow accumulation predicted for Sunday night. Isn't it nearly March ( Read more... )

It's a rampant disease that seems to strike primarily among the far right. Following the example of Timothy McVeigh, another lunatic has attacked a building in Texas. He did it by flying his private plane into the building kamikazi style, apparently because IRS offices were located there. *shakes head* Teabaggers are loonies. Too bad his name wasn' ( Read more... )

Bah, humbug to Wednesdays. Now that there's only an hour or so until closing, things are starting to slow down. Thank goodness ( Read more... )

Good thing it's a short week. On the other hoof, the reason I need it to be a short week is because today had two day's worth of work to do in one day. Somehow the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it. And on top of that, tomorrow is Wednesday ( Read more... )