Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Dumplings

Things tick along as usual, trending on the better side of the norm. Jane and I do both have lingering though I think finally waning colds (she: ever-replenishing fountain of snot; me: the nightly descent of The Cough, which starts out tickly and gentle and ramps up to a croupy honking bark until it eventually gives up again) but our spirits are unbroken. Behold:

I have also finally discovered and embraced the value of Benedryl as a sleep aid. Have you heard the GOOD NEWS about Benedryl? Of course you have, obviously. Everyone has, but I bet you are not enjoying its slowly descending drowsy embrace right this minute as I am. It works like a charm and it is great and I love it forever and ever, hallelujah.

Additionally I have at last begun whittling away at my non-Jane work on a daily rather than an utterly inadequate and procrastination-filled twice-weekly schedule. This puts a spring in my step and does a lot for my ability to sleep through the night instead of waking suddenly at three in the morning with the cold hand of HORRIBLE DREAD around my heart. Steve too appreciates these advances in my sleep régime, because apparently it is not so delightful when your peaceful slumbers are rent by your beloved's thrashing limbs and pathetic mutterings of "oh dear, oh dear, I can't, I can't, oh dear."

So we are all pretty cheerful at the moment, despite the snot.

Tonight I made these ricotta gnocchi for dinner, with tomato sauce. It was a little logistically complicated to make them for the first time (I think I will be able to do it more efficiently next time--there was a lot of doing this step over here and then realizing I wanted to do the next part over there) but not the slightest bit difficult otherwise, and they were excellent.

Jane called them "dumplings" and ate them very neatly with her fork, until she had had enough, and then she fed the last two on her plate to me. Sadly she is not always so obliging in her table manners. In particular she loves to peel apart the layers of the tortilla on her breakfast quesadilla and drop the shattery outer flakes with great deliberation on the floor.

On the other hand, she also loves to hug and kiss the trees. Have I mentioned this? We will go out for a walk and as we approach a tree she will dash ahead and fling her arms around the trunk, then plant a nice fat smackaroo on the bark. "Hug," she says with satisfaction and a last little reassuring pat for the tree. On balance, I think we'll keep her.

Shut up about your caramels.

I've forgotten how to write these. How does it work again? 

I think there were animated gifs? Here, have some animated gifs.

I believe that some amusing things have happened in the past month, but I am damned if I remember what any of them were. My memories of late November and early December are mainly a blur of not getting work done, and of realizing I needed to buy more sugar, butter, or cream.

I have purchased a lot of butter, sugar, and cream in the past couple of weeks. It is the usual thing here to madly produce vast quanities of little sweet things to give to our friends at this time of year. I tried following a new recipe for salted butter caramels this year and tried using a new thermometer at the same time. This was not a success. It took several inedibly hard-and-sticky batches, each made in a separate precious naptime, to confirm that both variables were to blame. I was displeased.

If the same thing should ever happen to you, incidentally, know that you can have a good time taking out your frustration on the failed results by whacking them into chunks with the claw end of a claw hammer, then melting these with some whole milk to make perfectly pleasant caramel sauce/spread. 

Also, I feel better now that I have redeemed myself at the eleventh hour by finding and successfully following a new recipe that I like better than any I have made in the past. It is a scaled-down version of one of the earlier formulas (the one described as "perfect consistency, tastewise 96% there") from this interesting eGullet thread about reproducing the caramels from Jacques Genin. The texture is indeed excellent. Next year I might try the much-lauded recipe from later in the thread that involves some more exotic ingredients like lethicin, but then again I might not. The 96% perfect version is pretty darn fine by me and I don't have to buy anything weird to make it.

(The noble table, pressed into service once more!)

And now all the caramels and caramel sauce and almond toffee and spiced nuts and other presents have been packaged up and parceled out and are no longer cluttering up every spare surface, and I am very relieved. Now all we have to do is fly across the country with a very lively toddler. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh! PS. I added half a teaspoon of salt to my batch of successful caramels, which were scaled down to 3/8 of the recipe as written.

Scenes from a table.

The table did come! For the two or three of you who haven't already seen it, here is the photographic evidence:

I especially like this corner.

It is a very pleasing table and I am glad to have it. And now that we have a table, it can be the setting for rewarding interactions like this one.

JANE: Muk! Muuk? Muk.

ME: More milk, please?

JANE: Yeah.

ME: Can you say "milk, please"?

JANE: Yeah.

ME: "Milk, please?"

JANE: Yeah.

ME: "Milk, please."

JANE (encouraging): Yeah!

ME (pouring milk): Well, I'm glad we had this little conversation.

fin

Mu shu dork.

WARNING: SO, SO NERDY.

In between doing laundry, failing to buy the dirt we were planning to buy, and watching Downton Abbey, Steve and I have been entertaining ourselves with selected episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn't watch it much the first time around, but I was moved to revisit it after I fell down the delightful rabbit hole of Fashion It So. 

It is pretty enjoyable! This is particularly true if you have a high tolerance for Deanna Troi's cleavage and also have someone on hand to make sure you don't accidentally watch any of the really stupid episodes that are terribly stupid and make you say "this show was stupid and terrible and stupid." Try to avoid that, unless you like it better that way.

The big surprise for me is that Riker is my favorite. I'd thought, based on my hazy memories of the series, that he was either very boring or some kind of irritating Cyclops type.* (I am making myself really super un-nerdy with this line of discussion and this comparison in particular, right? Where are you going, beloved readers who care about Nancy Mitford novels, analytic philosophy, and/or Serge Lutens perfume? Come baaaack!) But no, he is awesomely smug and smoove. I particularly enjoy when he is just puttering around in the background and instead of doing some kind of generic background tech, he is being a background total player. Also, he plays the trombone.

Anyway, last night, the conversation turned to replicator-generated human meat, as it will do.

"As long as I was at it, I'd have the replicator make it be me meat. Because why not?"

"But what cut?"

"Yeah, I don't know that there's that much good eating on a person."

"Right, and I don't really want to eat something that is TOO obviously HI! YOU'RE EATING A CHUNK OF HUMAN. So ribs are out."

"Maybe bacon."

"Ooh! Yes. Person bacon. PERSON BACON. Very catchy. Or sausage. Maybe a pulled person sandwich?"

"I think you mean pulled dork."

"Of course! Or dork chops."

So then, just now, I was looking at this post and trying to think of how I could end it, you know, with some funny little button. But...

"This is the dorkiest thing I have ever written," I said.

"You could make a joke about William Shatner and ham," suggested Steve. But I think I won't.

 

*Updated, much more delightful link! "An Interview with X-Men's Cyclops, Who Sucks."

Onion? Onion.

What was that I said about posting more often? Was it something like "I certainly don't think I should post particularly often"? Or "What's a good title for a post that rhymes with 'often'?" 

Maybe it was something about posting tricky arrangements of question marks and quotation marks more often. I don't know. Something like that. 

In any case, you might enjoy these pictures of Jane and an onion. The last one is particularly fashion forward.

My mother is in town for the week, and I expect we will get up to a lot of things that entertain us, at least. Maybe some of them will even translate into something that might conceivably be amusing to others. I'll try to keep track. 

History's most innocuous home invasion

Last night, Steve's parents (who are visiting from Florida) babysat Jane while we went out to a merry picnic dinner in honor of a friend's birthday, followed by an outdoor screening of Singin' in the Rain. I was even more excessively spazzy and logorrheic than usual, perhaps out of giddy confusion at Jane's absence, and everyone was very kind in response.

At the end, we stumbled home, full and fat, saw Steve's parents off to their hotel, and tumbled into bed not long after.

Around 3 am, the cat woke Steve, who tossed him outside as per his catty request, and staggered back to bed. About an hour later, I awoke to a loud crashing sound involving the baby gate separating the front room from the kitchen.

"Izzitthecat?" asked Steve, bleary.

The crashing continued. "It is definitely not the cat," I said, and got out of bed.

If you poke your head out our bedroom door and look to the right, you see this:

At night, it looks something more like this:

And what I saw at about 4:30 this morning looked something like this:

 

I gave a single short SHRIEK before leaping back into the bedroom and onto the bed in a single bound.

When I landed, I gasped: "Person!" 

As I turned on the light, Steve got out of bed himself. In the living room, trapped behind the gate and leaning one very very very drunken hand on the back of the chair, stood a young, biggish white guy wearing a black hoodie.

Steve, very composed, said, "Hey, man, what are you doing in my house?"

The guy blinked a couple of times, and his very, very drunken state was very, very manifest. (The crashing noise had been his several failed attempts to figure out how to navigate the baby gate, running up against it over and over like a not very sophisticated toy robot.)

Steve took him by the arm and led him to the front door. "Okay, you have to get out of here now."

Drunken Hoodie said something like "mrlrmblrm yeah?" and obligingly staggered to the door.

Steve put him outside and locked the front door while I dashed to the now wide open back door and closed and locked it. Then we went back to bed and said "Holy shit" at each other many times. 

Drunken Hoodie meanwhile stood around on our porch for about five minutes, then stumbled over to the wicker chair on our porch, ringing the doorbell with his shoulder on the way, and fell asleep. We decided this was acceptable until morning. (It seems likely that he had mistaken our back door for his back door when staggering home from a party blind drunk, tried it and found that we either failed to lock up when we went to bed or after letting the cat out—hey, let's not do that anymore!—and then washed up—CLANG!—against the baby gate.)

Did you know? It turns out that one's system produces a lot of adrenaline when there are strangers in one's living room at four in the morning. This makes it rather difficult to get back to sleep, unless you are Jane, who was briefly roused by about 30% at the height of the festivities, after which she snurfled and rolled over.

But not to worry! Steve and I both managed to drop off before six, at which time Hoodie woke up and rang the doorbell.

Steve went to the door and he tried, shamblingly and feebly, to come in.

"Okay, dude" (apparently Steve trends surfer under duress) "why are you ringing my bell?"

Hoodie replied, "hrmblarm josh?"

Steve explained that this was our house, Hoodie's friends didn't live here, and that he had to leave. Hoodie obligingly said "flmm yeah," lurched down the porch steps, and walked away.

And that was it! He appears not to have puked or pissed on anything, so we are calling that a win. Godspeed, hammered young hoodie man. I hope your friends take better care of you next time, or that you learn to live in a more recognizable house.

"When I write about this on my weblog," I said to Steve, "I am going to give my poor mother a heart attack." Sorry, mama!

So near, and yet so far.

Thomas Edison: "I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory." Jane has just two thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-seven more failed trials to go.

(She's very advanced.)

Today was a good day.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was less good. Just one of its low points, in brief:

Jane was very hungry, and very excited as she saw her plate coming to the table, so happy oh dinner oh yay it's coming oh gladness oh joy!

and then I put the plate down and she saw that it contained nothing but unadulterated VEGETABLES, in fact, because I am insane and certainly overreached myself in my hopes for what she would be willing to eat, nothing but OKRA. 

The look of shock, disappointment, and betrayal on her face as she burst into heartbroken sobs was I think unparalleled in her young life.

Helpful how-to.

Now that Easter is so well and thoroughly past that we've moved on to May Day, it's the perfect time to give you these useful instructions for a successful easter egg hunt.

Step one: Hide an egg, using all the deception and cunning you can muster.

Step two: Hunt the egg. Search high and low, overlooking not even the most obscure and unlikely spots.

Repeat with a ripe, juicy lemon. Don't let it get away! Are you prepared for a high-speed chase?

 

Conclude with a dry, unappealing leaf.

There! A flawless victory.

Try this at home, for Bastille Day, perhaps.

Oh, what a pity.

Not to worry, I'm sure they'll be restocked soon.