Back in the Low Desert

We came back down to Palm Desert on the 9th of December. It had really started getting cold in Lancaster, so I was definitely ready to bail out of there. It's mostly been in the mid- to high-70s here and I even wear shorts on the sunny days.

We skipped last winter, so it had been about fifteen months since we'd been here. The house stayed cleaner than I expected, except for the bug bodies in the bathrooms (I don't know how they get into the house and the casita, maybe from the attic through light fixtures or something). I got Merry Maids in on a panic basis on the fourteenth and they went through the whole house. My cousin came in on the sixteenth and her family came in on the weekend and the general tidiness of the house fell apart, with gifts to be wrapped and pieces of crystal and candles and holiday food and gift wrap and ribbon and stuff everywhere.

There were some problems, though. I had a gallon bottle of bleach sitting on the counter in the laundry room spring a leak and trickle out into rather pretty bleach stalactites on the counter and the wooden cabinets, with corresponding stalagmites on the tile floor. The counter is that synthetic marble stuff and the bleach etched a set of concentric rings into it, matching the bottom of the plastic bottle. The bleach also penetrated the finish on the cabinets in a couple of places, damaging the wood. It's been cleaned up and I'm ignoring the damage right now. I think I'll have to replace the entire counter, which is about six feet long, with a sink cutout, as well as one cabinet panel.

The other thing that happened because we were gone for so long was that the pump in the washing machine dried out. As a result, when I washed the first load in it, the plastic pump overheated and I melted itself into junk. This happened the evening of the third day we were back, a Friday, and I was able to schedule a repairman for Tuesday. He took one look at the puddle, centered at the front of the washer, and diagnosed the problem. Apparently, this is a fairly common problem for snowbirds.

I had had to have my Lancaster washer repaired this summer and I took the opportunity both times to ask the repairmen about front-loading washers. They both told me that front-loaders had a very high repair rate and that the repairs were very expensive. This confirms some of the stories I've heard from friends and neighbors with front-loaders. I think I'll stick with top-loaders. I know they use more water, but I have the ultra-large size and, as a result, don't wash that many loads, so I don't really feel that I'm putting the entire balance of nature into decline.

Our family visit was wonderful and the Christmas Eve dinner was absolutely perfect. Well, we forgot to make and serve the green salad, but we had enough food on the table that we didn't notice this until we were cleaning up the kitchen. It was wonderful to see my uncle and his daughter and her husband (their son and his wife, who live in Seattle, couldn't join us because they were insanely busy closing escrow on their first house and scrambling to get out of their apartment; plus, they're expecting a baby this spring).

Our visitors left the day after Christmas, much to Gordo's dismay. He had really enjoyed having six people in the house, particularly the two kids who made over him constantly. His sojourn at this house had started badly when he fell into the waterfall and strained his shoulder. He was put on crate rest for about a week, getting out just as the kids arrived. He really misses them.

I think this is enough of a data dump for now. I'll be back fairly soon to tell the tale of my reading Cryptonomicon, a book by Neal Stephenson, and to show off my latest shawl, a knit-along (KAL) project.

Oops, Sorry About That

My last posting here was in early August and then, as far as anyone could tell, I just dropped off the face of the earth. I didn't, really. Instead, I discovered facebook and started posting all my news there, as well as in alt.fans.cecil-adams, leaving myself with nothing new to say here.

So, let's see. I knitted a baby blanket and an afghan, for my favorite baby and his grandmother, respectively. I've gotten pretty good at making navy bean soup in my pressure cooker. I've done a lot of reading on the Kindle DX. I discovered Woot.com and Wine.Woot.com and have spent too much money on gifts and bottles. We're down in Palm Desert (we got here a week ago) and Gordo the Wonder Collie is settling in, although he did fall into the waterfall pond on his first day here.

My beloved cousin (well, she's actually my cousin's wife, but I love her as if she were a sister, so there's no single word to describe the relationship) will be here in a couple of hours, to stay until the day after Christmas. The rest of the family will show up a little later. Her husband (the actual cousin) and their daughter get here on Sunday and their son shows up three days later. The kids' arrival dates are functions of their college and high school schedules. Her sister lives just north of us, as do his father and his sister and her husband.

I spent two hours at the supermarket earlier today, trying to fill in my pantry and have some nice fresh produce for her. I went to Stater Bros. (for the first time ever) and discovered that they have a very extensive La Brea Bakery product line. I went a little overboard and will have to do a little freezing before bedtime. Nice produce and a nice service butcher, too. There was a customer at the butcher counter looking at beef roasts and he asked to look at the other side of every roast there. I know why he was doing that, but it's excessive when it's a rib roast from the middle of the piece. Sort of like looking at both sides of a center-cut pork chop.

I'm having Christmas dinner this year for all the California members of my mother's family. That's not very many people, though. There's us, my uncle, and his two kids and their families. As I wrote above, my uncle's son has two kids. His daughter has one son, who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He and his wife won't be here because they bought a house and the escrow is closing on the 23rd or 24th, so they had to stay there. They're going to have a baby in the spring (I already bought a present on kids.woot.com). So this year there will be nine of us for dinner on Christmas Eve. I'm hoping that this becomes a family tradition, now that three households are so conveniently close.

I'm sure there's more to tell, but I've got to go put the rest of the groceries away. I'm going to light some candles to greet my cousin, too. Festive is my watchword this year.

Good News and Bad (But Improving) News

First the good news. I made another batch of bean and bacon soup (recipe posted here previously), only this time I spread it out over several days. It's been so hot here that I really didn't want to make it in one session. Well, actually, it started after I soaked the beans and then didn't feel like making soup after all. Still, I was glad to find out that I could spread the process over a few days.

I picked over and soaked the beans about five days ago, freezing them after I rinsed them. Then on Saturday I sliced and fried the bacon and drained it, then put it in the fridge. This afternoon I took care of the onion and garlic, then put the peppercorns, bay leaves, onion and garlic, bacon, and beans (nuked briefly so they wouldn't be a great big bean lump) into the pressure cooker, set it, and sat down to see what was new on Facebook I'm Mary Shafer there, if you want to friend me.

It's finished cooking now and I've tasted it. It tastes pretty good, but it needs salt, of course. It's too hot to whiz with the stick blender; I don't like the idea of flinging really hot soup all over me and the kitchen. I'll add salt while I'm doing that, to be sure to get it evenly mixed. I didn't put enough in the first batch, partly because my cousin was coming and I wasn't sure how much salt she'd like.

Speaking of my cousin, we had a wonderful visit. We were so sad to see her leave. Even Gordo missed her and kept going to the guest room to look for her. He'd give me this pitiful look like "How could you let her go away?" and, of course, there was no explaining it to him. She's the one who introduced me to Starbuck's iced chai latte last year. I'm now a regular customer and it's all her fault. I don't drink coffee, so I hadn't known they sold tea. I got her back, though. I introduced her to the Kindle and loaned my Kindle 2 to her. Both she and her husband have been reading with it and they really like it. I suspect they're going to end up buying one (or, maybe, two). We're a reading family, even the people who marry in, and it passes on to the kids, too.

Now for the bad news. Gordo the Wonder Collie had to have extensive exploratory surgery on Friday. He'd managed to swallow a 3" by 3" piece of rigid plastic, as well as a bunch of smaller pieces of the same plastic and some other stuff, and this was really messing up his digestive system. We took him over to the vet after he vomited five times in the night. Collies have deep chests, which made the surgery more difficult. They cut open his stomach and pulled all the junk out of it, which took both hands, and then examined his intestines carefully for smaller pieces.

He had a small fever over the weekend, but that's gone (this is written on Monday). He's still not eating much, but he's always been a picky eater. We now have great hopes that he'll come home tomorrow, since he actually ate a little kibble today. I think he has to demonstrate that his digestive system works from end to end, as it were, the same way that people who have had surgery on their digestive tracts do.

Navy Bean and Bacon Soup

Last week I created a recipe for navy bean and bacon soup, mostly because I'd soaked the beans overnight and needed to cook them right away, before they sprouted or molded or whatever soaked beans do if they don't get cooked right away. As a result, this recipe is based on what I had on hand, which was pretty much bacon (beans are good with smoked pork), onions, and garlic.

Here's the recipe. I have to tell you that this is pretty rich and filling, with so much bacon in it.

Mary's Navy Bean and Bacon Soup

• One pound of navy beans, picked over and soaked in cold water for at least eight hours, drained, and rinsed.

• One pound of relatively lean premium thick-sliced bacon (hickory or apple wood smoked), sliced into half-inch strips, fried until crisp, and the fat drained off.

• One large yellow onion, chopped and cooked in a small amount of bacon fat until soft and translucent

• One head of garlic, peeled and each clove cut in half vertically, added to the cooking onions. Do not, whatever you do, let the garlic burn, as that makes it terribly bitter and nasty. Don’t worry if the garlic doesn’t do anything more than get warm in the pan. It'll get cooked completely with the beans.

• Two bay leaves.

• A rounded teaspoon of whole black peppercorns. Use less if you're not wild about black pepper.

• Salt to taste.
  

Put everything but the salt into a pressure cooker, stir, add water to cover everything by an inch or so, bring to a boil, and process for nine or ten minutes. Allow to cool naturally (do not vent). If cooking on the stove top, instead of using a pressure cooker, bring to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer, cover, and cook until the beans are completely soft. Remove all the bay leaves (they stay whole and they'll be easy to see.) Whiz into a puree with a stick blender. Taste and add salt as desired, stirring thoroughly between additions.

This is pretty good right out of the pan, but it’s even better the next day. If you reheat it on the stove, keep an eye on it, as it’s a thick puree and will scorch easily.

That's Embarrassing

I've been busy tidying up my house, so that my cousin will be able to get to the bed in the guest room and reach the love seat in the living room and sit at the dinner table. When I thought we were going to Palm Desert, I'd bought a number of things for the house and piled them all in the guest room. And I'd been collecting cardboard boxes and bubble sheets and other packing material from all the stuff I'd bought, like new smaller clothes, in the living room. Fortunately for the sake of the house, I have to get rid off all this before my cousin arrives.

I have completely filled the recycle bin four or five times in the last two months. Once I even borrowed the recycle bin from the folks across the street and filled it up, too. Handling all this cardboard has been painful, as I've managed to give myself a number of paper cuts from it. Such cuts are more painful than dangerous, of course, but they're always on the hand, which means they hurt over and over again as I use my hands. The living room looks great now, although one end of the dining room has boxes stacked across it, to go down this fall.

I'm putting the family photos into bins to take to Palm Desert. My sole remaining uncle lives nearby and has promised to help me identify the people and estimate the dates of the photos of my maternal family. One of my cousins is a photographer (he was a newspaper photographer for years, before he drifted into management at a printing company) and he has been scanning family photos onto disk. His mother was my mom's sister; it appears that the women of the family were the custodians of the photos. We have plans to merge the two collections and distribute copies to all the cousins.

Pat and I gathered up all the books in the house and boxed them in categories. There's Knitting, Cooking, Nonfiction (mostly beading and paper crafts), Read, and Unread. The last is the embarrassing part. I've got nearly twelve cubic feet of unread books sitting in the hall. Actually, they're not all unread. Quite a number are books I really want to read again.

I also have hundreds of unread books on my Kindles. I downloaded a bunch of books when I first got the Kindle 2 in late February. My buying has really tapered off markedly. Now that I've organized my actual books, I'm probably not going to buy any more books until I've read a few cubic feet of the books I already have.

Unfortunately, I discovered that I could fill in the gaps of my silver flatware on eBay, at prices much lower than buying new. As a result I've gotten the iced tea spoons I needed but hadn't wanted to pay list price for, as well as a number of serving pieces. My pattern, Royal Danish by International Silver, came out in 1939 and is still in production. It's very popular and there are all sorts of fancy little serving pieces, like a sardine fork and a corn-on-the-cob butterer. I bought the former, purely out of curiosity, but passed on the latter. I figure any meal that includes corn on the cob is too informal to require any flatware more formal than plastic. I have now stopped looking at new flatware items on eBay. If I don't see it, I can't bid on it.

Gordo the Wonder Collie broke a Corelle bowl last night. It was sitting on the pull-out board of the microwave stand, perched on top of a box of snickerdoodles. He was after the cookies, of course, and knocked the whole pile on the floor. The bowl hit just right and shattered into hundreds of razor-sharp pieces. I was really worried that he'd step on one and cut his pads badly, but luckily he didn't. He spent the rest of the evening in his crate, first to keep him away while I cleaned up and then to make a point. He was quite chastened, but had returned to his normal ebullient self this morning.

I'd started out by first dropping a container of mushroom risotto that I was reheating for dinner. Then I knocked the tub of freeze-dried beef liver bits onto the floor and had to scramble to retrieve most of them before Gordo ate them. I don't know why we were both so clumsy last night. I remember once hearing a theory that news reporters' slips of the tongue were correlated with solar flare activity; there may be a similar astronomical influence on kitchen accidents.

I've got to finish the paper on in-flight simulation, as the deadline is looming over me. Since I'm no longer working at NASA, I have to do all the layout work that the Reports group used to do for me, like laying out and checking references. I always knew that they did a lot of hard work for authors and I'm really appreciating that again now. I've got to cut a bunch of photos out, which is really difficult, with renumbering references and captions.