- New Thing Learned for 25 September: The hairdryer was a good idea in general, but more practice is needed. Be afraid, BTW. [Source: Scary Gingerbread-Man Cake-And-Gelatin-Mold didn't fit into any vessel on-hand that was suitable for the conventional hot-water-dip unmolding technique.]
- New Thing Learned for 26 September: Some of the immediate casualties in the Moscow theater hostage crisis may have perished due to improper EMT handling rather than the effects of the gas proper, dying as a result of obstructed airways during the chaotic initial evacuation. [Source: National Geographic channel, "Critical Situation: Moscow Siege".]
- New Thing Learned for 27 September: In New England, three-flats are called "triple-deckers", and they're made of wood. I guess we're all still a little traumatized about that city-burning-to-the-ground thing around here. [Source: Inside This Old House.]
- New Thing Learned for 28 September: As the depth of our windowsills would seem to bear out, the exterior walls of our building are indeed two thicknesses of bricks deep, which is nice to know when the emergency tuckpointing on the other side of your living-room wall starts in with the Big Noisy Saw... [Source: water-damage repairs to common-brick surface alongside an outside walkway.]
- New Thing Learned for 29 September: Polyethylene glycol is a main ingredient in coughsyrup and paintballs. Not sure what to make of that, really. [Source: How It's Made.]
- New Thing Learned for 30 September: Garden hoses are now available that are self-coily, like an old-fashioned phone cord or the sproingy pneumatic line on the shelf-snipper at Home Despot. Assuming the reconfiguring of the back patio's dirt areas comes off the way that was discussed at the last condo board meeting, one of these hoses is definitely going onto my shopping list for next season, since there's a faucet back there that would be much closer to the new plots than the one in the front... [Source: some home show or other.]
- New Thing Learned for 1 October: Chard is actually a kind of beet. Yes, I've been planning next year's gardening, inspired here by an in vivo sighting of rainbow chard in the landscaping outside the North/Clybourn Container Store. [Source: A canon of vegetables : 101 classic recipes, Raymond Sokolov.]
- New Thing Learned for 2 October: Continuing with our anatomy series, or "...Okay, WTF did I do to myself now?", the adductor magnus runs along the inside of the thigh, and testing indicates that it's about 60% as inconvenient to have pulled as the quadriceps. I think my warranty ran out or something... [Source: but at least we got the closet done.]
Weekend-before-last, Mum needed to drop off a piece of artwork at a show in the town where she grew up, and afterwards we ended up tooling around town for a while, reminiscing. Eventually we stumbled across an estate sale, and decided that since it was probably getting on the end of the season it was worth having a look around; the house itself was one of those postwar protoranches, a scraper by today's standards, but I figured that that very fact indicated possible vintage goodies inside. (Mmm, tchotchkes.)
I'm guessing that the house had had just the one owner since it was built, since you generally don't see that depth and breadth of Accumulated Miscellaneous Stuff after somebody's been through one or more moves and it certainly all looked like it was bought new at the time. The garage door was installed in 1953, according to the certificate still stapled to the wall in the garage. A door propped up in the garage displayed the growth records for two children, "Jenny" and "Jon", through the mid-1960's. From the personal effects up for sale, the owners were a typical middle-class family of the time period, with a rock tumbler to polish up the souvenirs of their travels, and the requisite pool table in the basement and token Danish-modern desk unit in one of the bedrooms. Someone collected beer cans and golfed. From the evidence, they found the JFK assassination deeply traumatic. Their toaster was a few years younger than Mum's toaster, which just died last month after 50+ years of faithful service. A Braille-writing kit suggests that someone in the family either was or went blind at some point. From the mix of clothes and hats laid out in another bedroom, it was the male partner's death that occasioned this sale. (The house was for sale as well, so I'm picturing a widower, rather than that Jenny and Jon have put Mum in a home to split the proceeds.)
So far as tchotchkes went, I wasn't seriously tempted by anything until I saw this in the kitchen:
( Enter The Gingerbread Man )
(For the record, the label reads:
HILLWARE Gingerbread man aluminum CAKE PAN and GELATIN MOLD
This sanitary, durable, easy-to-clean, aluminum pan will use 1/2 package of prepared cake mix or equivalent.
PURE ALUMINUM
Easy to clean • will not rust
for parties etc. ••• for special occasions and everyday use
for birthdays and holidays ••• for anniversaries
Raising the question "...Anniversaries of WHAT?!?" in this mind, but whatever.)
The blue dot meant a buck, so how could I resist the subtle insanity of gingerbread-man-shaped CAKE or GELATIN? Back at the Test Kitchens, Mister Scary Gingerbread Mold turns out to hold a little less than 3 cups of liquid. I immediately set about making jiggler-strength Jell-o in it, since I can't remember how strong a gelatin mold is supposed to be prepared:
( Mmm, red... )
This led to the New Thing Learned for 25 September, when I tried to unmold it later:
( ...AHHH! THE HORROR, THE HORROR! )
Undeterred by this first bloody mess, I've retooled the recipe, and I have some plans for this little guy, involving clear gelatin and -- well, I just dare you to invite me to your Halloween party, is all I can say... >:)
Oh, and this last weekend, we finally got around to installing the shelves in my closet:
( crap, no Tom Cruise in here... )
Imagine it with just the shelf across, about 6 inches lower, and you begin to get an idea of why I've been so annoyed since we moved in, since there's not enough room in this bedroom-slash-office to have a freestanding bureau and the closet's not quite deep enough to stick one in there. As we get around to buying more containers to keep the spiders out of my underpants, I'll gradually be able to put my clothes away properly for the first time in -- well, several apartments, if you want the truth, but certainly a giant step up from having had to dress in the living room since the Great Flood. Mmm, domesticity.