Weekend (snow?!), etc
Oct. 31st, 2005 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidFriday was the usual rush home to cook, making yet another batch of kale, sweet potatoes, and sausage; a broccoli sautee with red onions, onion-garlic tofu, fermented black beans, sesame oil, and Szechuan spicy sauce; and yet another banana-applesauce cake. Except that I was in a rush, and working from memory, so forgot one ingredient. You'd think it would be simple to remember putting sugar into a cake... It turned out edible, but not enticing.
There were a couple of other things to do in the crunch time. I turned on the furnace, double-checking the programming I have on the thermostat. Shabbat was a warm 66 F :-). And I brought in all the plants I'll be trying to overwinter: two lavenders, a rosemary, a golden thyme, a bunch of ginger, and sage. I just put them in the kitchen any which way, not having the time to deal with it, but I need to figure out where to put them so they'll get enough light. First thoughts include getting some kind of narrow iron shelf, something I could put out on the porch in the spring. Narrow because I still have to fit the dining room table in there, if off-centeredly.
ETA Oh, and I harvested the six tiny green cherry tomatoes that will never ripen. Now to figure out what to do with them.
Shabbat featured unlikely weather for late October: snow! Not a brief little dusting, either, but hours of snow, enough to cool the ground and get a bit of accumulation. I started worrying a bit about the trees, carrying much more snow when still dressed in their leaves than they will later in the season, but it stopped before that became a real concern. Still, snow! Huge flakes of it, coming down on green trees, red trees, yellow trees.
Sunday started with pancakes, using the cast-iron griddle I was gifted with a couple of years ago. Mmmm... pancakes. I made plain ones and a smiley one, banana ones and cranberry ones. I thought of banana ginger ones too late to include them; next batch. This was my first time making different kinds of pancakes in one batch; my mom always put the banana into the batter (and it was always banana, nothing else; I don't know why).
The Queue put together the futon he'dd given me. Now that it's together, I'm motivated to start organizing that room; I hope I can hold onto that until I make the changes I want. One casualty: a bit of a cut and bruise on the top of my foot. I'm fine, but glad the weather's warm enough that sandals work, since I'd rather not have shoes pressing on it. (Though today it's gone down almost to normal, so likely wouldn't be a problem, but I like wearing sandals.)
Then to the Wellesley book fair, where I got a bag of books ($5). I don't think any of them are gloatworthy, but it was fun to be at a book sale (and to peek at the new Wellesley library, revised since I was last there). And I remembered to thank the ladies taking money for having a book sale that's not only Saturday, like so many others around here. They seemed surprised to hear that there were places that didn't have multi-day sales.
And I got an injection of TV-watching, mostly in the form of Trading Spaces. There were a couple of horrible things done to some rooms. Some were nice, but none of them looked really livable to me. Regular TV watchers: is there some rule that ads have to repeat frequently? It's darned annoying to have the same half dozen or so over and over and over and over and...
This morning it was so much easier to wake up, the light being an hour earlier. I know I'll pay at the end of the week, with no time to cook for Shabbat Friday afternoon, but I'd like to shift my workday a bit earlier if I can, and this helps a lot. Side note on clock-changing: the feds are proposing DST be more than 8 months of the year. That makes no sense to me. At that point, suck it up, and shift everyone one hour earlier, year-round. Or call the other months Daylight Wasting Time, or whatever. But having the 'norm' not be in place two-thirds of the time is bizarre.
I read this morning in the Chronicle that almost a quarter of new mortgages originated last year were interest-only mortgages, where for some time (1-10 years), people pay only interest, then the payment (usually) increases as they start paying off the principal. While I can understand how it might be necessary in some places where real estate is pricey (like, say, Boston), a quarter of mortgages seems a bit high. There have been more stories about people defaulting on loans, and this sounds like it would make it easier for people to get themselves in a financial pickle. Especially because there's also something called "negative amortization," where borrowers pay a lower interest rate than they are being charged, with the rest being added to the loan balance. Yet another thing that might work for some, but could get others into worse debt...
There were a couple of other things to do in the crunch time. I turned on the furnace, double-checking the programming I have on the thermostat. Shabbat was a warm 66 F :-). And I brought in all the plants I'll be trying to overwinter: two lavenders, a rosemary, a golden thyme, a bunch of ginger, and sage. I just put them in the kitchen any which way, not having the time to deal with it, but I need to figure out where to put them so they'll get enough light. First thoughts include getting some kind of narrow iron shelf, something I could put out on the porch in the spring. Narrow because I still have to fit the dining room table in there, if off-centeredly.
ETA Oh, and I harvested the six tiny green cherry tomatoes that will never ripen. Now to figure out what to do with them.
Shabbat featured unlikely weather for late October: snow! Not a brief little dusting, either, but hours of snow, enough to cool the ground and get a bit of accumulation. I started worrying a bit about the trees, carrying much more snow when still dressed in their leaves than they will later in the season, but it stopped before that became a real concern. Still, snow! Huge flakes of it, coming down on green trees, red trees, yellow trees.
Sunday started with pancakes, using the cast-iron griddle I was gifted with a couple of years ago. Mmmm... pancakes. I made plain ones and a smiley one, banana ones and cranberry ones. I thought of banana ginger ones too late to include them; next batch. This was my first time making different kinds of pancakes in one batch; my mom always put the banana into the batter (and it was always banana, nothing else; I don't know why).
The Queue put together the futon he'dd given me. Now that it's together, I'm motivated to start organizing that room; I hope I can hold onto that until I make the changes I want. One casualty: a bit of a cut and bruise on the top of my foot. I'm fine, but glad the weather's warm enough that sandals work, since I'd rather not have shoes pressing on it. (Though today it's gone down almost to normal, so likely wouldn't be a problem, but I like wearing sandals.)
Then to the Wellesley book fair, where I got a bag of books ($5). I don't think any of them are gloatworthy, but it was fun to be at a book sale (and to peek at the new Wellesley library, revised since I was last there). And I remembered to thank the ladies taking money for having a book sale that's not only Saturday, like so many others around here. They seemed surprised to hear that there were places that didn't have multi-day sales.
And I got an injection of TV-watching, mostly in the form of Trading Spaces. There were a couple of horrible things done to some rooms. Some were nice, but none of them looked really livable to me. Regular TV watchers: is there some rule that ads have to repeat frequently? It's darned annoying to have the same half dozen or so over and over and over and over and...
This morning it was so much easier to wake up, the light being an hour earlier. I know I'll pay at the end of the week, with no time to cook for Shabbat Friday afternoon, but I'd like to shift my workday a bit earlier if I can, and this helps a lot. Side note on clock-changing: the feds are proposing DST be more than 8 months of the year. That makes no sense to me. At that point, suck it up, and shift everyone one hour earlier, year-round. Or call the other months Daylight Wasting Time, or whatever. But having the 'norm' not be in place two-thirds of the time is bizarre.
I read this morning in the Chronicle that almost a quarter of new mortgages originated last year were interest-only mortgages, where for some time (1-10 years), people pay only interest, then the payment (usually) increases as they start paying off the principal. While I can understand how it might be necessary in some places where real estate is pricey (like, say, Boston), a quarter of mortgages seems a bit high. There have been more stories about people defaulting on loans, and this sounds like it would make it easier for people to get themselves in a financial pickle. Especially because there's also something called "negative amortization," where borrowers pay a lower interest rate than they are being charged, with the rest being added to the loan balance. Yet another thing that might work for some, but could get others into worse debt...