I've finally had one. The recipe comes from The Big Sleep, when Bogart meets General Sternwood in the conservatory, and the General says he used to like champagne "as cold as Valley Forge" with three ponys of brandy in it. The first time I saw the movie with El Husband, we resolved to try it. Maybe for an anniversary celebration? Well, our 10th ( Read more... )

There is a colony of them living, I'm pretty sure, under the front porch of the house next door. In the winter there was little evidence of them except for their slots in the snow, but now they're back big time. They've eaten the tulips down to the ground. They've even eaten the apple tree. The phrase "shy as a rabbit" doesn't apply here; these ( Read more... )

Only last month it was kind of a joke turning the clocks to "summer" time when it was zero(F) degrees outside. But all of a sudden it's warm enough to bike, and since tomorrow is Yard Waste Pickup Day, I raked out the garden plots, bagged the detritus, and lugged it to the curb. Felt like Goldberry doing spring cleaning -- uncovering the tiny red ( Read more... )

Granted that the family on my mother's side isn't all that large, but even so it is strange to comprehend that I'm now the most senior member of it.

Geez, if I'd ever had any kids, I could be called the matriarch. Thank dog for small favors!

Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to try, and I'll send you a letter. The idea is to list 10 things you like that begin with the assigned letter ( Read more... )

Jeez, scraping paint is hard work! I've just now finished with the staircase, which is to say, all the paint that I could get off is off. The Silent Paint Remover took me only so far; it's too big and bulky to get into many of the spaces. However, a solution presented itself. Our mailman (do we live in the Midwest? yes we do) loaned me his heat ( Read more... )

The arrival of the rental Silent Paint Remover on Tuesday evening was greeted with much excitement. By now most of the staircase is mostly stripped of paint. "Mostly" because, as cautioned by the sales rep, the gadget works best with many layers, and we've got only 3, but it's still a huge improvement over chemical stripper. No smell, no gunk, ( Read more... )

Yesterday at the Farmers Market we were thrilled to find rainbow chard at one of the vendors' stalls. Which brought home once again how truly foreign NE Wisconsin is vittle-wise for a former Bay Area foodie. On the one hand, meat and dairy in the supermarkets here are much cheaper and of excellent quality. On the other hand, greens don't seem to ( Read more... )

Between yesterday and today I've killed upwards of 30 humongous hairy horse-flies, all of them either on the dining room windows or the kitchen window. Thought the first one had come in when the screen door was opened, but discarded that idea as more appeared. Where did they come from? It is very baffling. At least the fly swatter works quite ( Read more... )

And decompressed. Five weeks of heaven and four days of hell. Heaven being Greece and hell being the airports in between here and there. (Although, what with Athens reaching 114F by the day we left, you could say it was climatically approaching the Inferno.) The airlines lost our bags both on the way over and on the way back -- though we did ( Read more... )