Instant Schmaltz

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Want to instantly age a photo? Here is a picture I took of an rest stop on a road trip through Kansas a couple of years back. (I plan to blow it up and hang it in a bathroom. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.) I ran across Bakumatsu Koshashin Generator in my net wandering. Check out what happens when I upload this to their site.  

Here’s the same photo, transformed. So you might ask, why would you want to do that?  But then, if you are asking — you probably don’t take pictures unless you are at the Great Wall of China or it’s your dog’s birthday.  Personally I think it is useful if you were chosen to do the power point for your friend’s parents’ 5oth anniversary and all you have to work with are current pictures of their first house, for instance. Think about it.

Post script: Kansas is one of those places where men are men and women are ladies. It’s like that in Texas too, I noticed.

Ramped Up Hamburgers

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I took a regular old pound of hamburger, tho used the 94% lean kind (and actually it was a little bit less than a pound), and added a 1/4 of a cup of each of: shredded carrots, chopped up scallions, tomato sauce and egg substitute.  Threw in a couple of TB of parsley. Yeah, it was kinda like making a meatloaf without any seasoning to speak of.  So, then you make 4 patties and saute in a pam sprayed pan for ten minutes turning once. 

The whole process was so easy cheesy I could easily watch the elimination of two boys and two girls from the American Idol countdown.

Would I do it again? Yes, the hamburgers were juicy, big and filling — all the adjectives you want and need on Thursday night must see tv. (But unless you are a real purist, you should add a little salt and pepper to the mix.)

Pastillage

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A 14-year-old girl was featured in the paper this morning along side of a cake she had decorated with a perfectly proportioned replica of the Eiffel tower done in pastillage and piped with royal icing. Her cake won first place last fall in the Oklahoma State Sugar Art and Grand National Wedding Cake competition in Tulsa. She had taught herself to decorate cakes by reading books and watching the Food Network. 

She also draws, quilts, bakes, takes pictures, paints ceramics, trains dogs, and does public speaking. This while maintaining an A average and taking part in lots of extracurricular activities at school. She wants to be a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon.

When I was fourteen, I was president of the Mad Monsters Club; our bylaws included doing a bad turn at least once a day. When Sister Charles Mary got hold of a printed copy of the our bylaws, she had a fit in a nun-sorta-way. She told me I wasn’t living up to my potential. I told her that the bylaws were more of a parody than a governing document. She would have loved this cake decorator.

In case you’re wondering,  pastillage is sugar based edible dough.

Home

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Nothing like waking up in your own bed after being gone for some time.  I read that it doesn’t matter how much you pay for a mattress, you have the same chance of getting something that is right for you. People who have good luck with mattresses are those who put on some comfortable clothes, take their pillows and sleep-masks and go try them out in the stores. 

Our mattress was a mail order from an ad in the Kansas City Star. It came from the Edna Mattress Factory in Edna, Kansas about 166 miles from Coffeyville. The mattresses are custom-made in the building next door to the showroom and delivered right to your bedroom. (www.ednamattress.net )

Ours was delivered on Thanksgiving Day 18 years ago. The two guys who brought it in had relatives in Kansas City and were headed over there for dinner after they finished hauling in the mattress. Lots to be thankful for that day.

A Citizen of Procrastination

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I’m torn between going on a bike ride and just staying in wearing my bike clothes. I’m addicted to HGTV right now and Frank is getting a re-do of his outside entrance and it’s difficult to leave without seeing the results of our team’s hard work. (He seems to be a bit of a control freak, so is having a hard time not getting the vision.)   

The next door neighbors, three guys in a fairly plain but nice split level, got feminized. Window boxes and plants, pillows and drink tables on their porch and a cooler disguised as a planter. (Why do these guys live in this neighborhood?)

We are leaving for Kansas City tomorrow. I have to pack all of the accumulated housewares from our nearly 3 month stay. And there’s a lot of other things I’d rather do. Gotta go, Frank is choosing the color for his front door — he’s got otter (lavender grey), burnt sugar (brown) or siren (deep blue red). Unbelievable tension.

Update. I biked to the gulf, the marina, the park and wheeled into a garage sale. A good day so far.

Creepy, I think.

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There was a long pause from the judges after a young American’s top notch figure skating performance in last night’s Olympics. The resulting score shifted her to 4th giving the bronze medal to Joannie Rochette, the French Canadian whose mother died suddenly two days before the competition.

Columnist Jay Mariotti, uncharacteristically dismissed talk of whether the judges were swayed by Joannie’s performance in the face of such a tremendous loss. He chose instead to focus on the chance the world grabbed to stand up for courage, grit and getting by with a little help from your friends.  

One of Mariotti’s readers commented, “USA sould have won.everybody see her performance. she got reap off and everybody seen it.live on tv so we have to eat it.”  Other things I think are creepy are ads that have babies talk and jump around as if they were adults, greeting cards that put human teeth in the smiling mouths of animals, and pretty much every reality show on tv.

Cat Post

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I am disappointed to discover that our cats, Molly and Lucy, have names on the list of top cat names in the nation. It makes me feel ordinary and dull. This is compounded by the fact that tho dear to us, Molly and Lucy would not be contenders in the Westminster cat show if there was one. 

Sig has a theory that cats choose their owners. That is how he explains the neighbor’s cat (from 2 houses away) who roams freely through our house, hangs his feet over the dining room chairs and in general, makes himself utterly at home. We call him Robert Parker; his owner calls him Max.

 Molly has always been an eavesdropper. Here she is lurking behind the window shutter.

Oh, C’mon.

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Hints from Heloise is a column I remember reading years ago. It was a way to soak up the most unbelievably useful advice on doing things like keeping mold from growing on parmesan cheese, keeping flowers from wilting and how to fold a cloth napkin into a swan. Try as I might, I generally forgot the tips before I had occasion to use them but for a moment or two,  Heloise made me feel much more equipped for life than I had been.  

One of the papers that I can buy in Port Aransas carries the column.  A lot of it is now reader’s tips with “thadda girl” comments from Heloise. “I don’t like to put wet tea bags in the garbage, so I decorated a coffee can with foil,” wrote one contributor, “and put it on my counter. I put used tea bags in it during the day, and then dump them all in the garbage at once.”

I probably will never do that.

Just Missed the Gold

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I ordered a medium pizza with extra cheese, onions and black olives. Done in 15 minutes from the pizzaria practically across the street that never has any down time. Sig went for the pizza while I made a no slouch salad with radishes, red peppers, green onions, cucumber and red leaf lettuce. Plates readied, salad poised, dressing standing by — pizza box flung on oven and it’s —- REGULAR THICK CRUST! What could have been a perfect golden olympic in-front-of-tv dinner comes in a distant second without the full flavor and satisfying chew of the thin crust.

Check out pictures of Rockport, Texas.

Couple of Gulls I Know

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Birds are plentiful in Port Aransas, Texas where we are spending part of the winter. Went to a  morning birdwatching hour put on by the parks dept that drew serious birders with arm length telephoto lens and suitable hats.

Learned that “Bird on the wing left!” means you look up to the left of the person who hollered to see a bird flying. What follows is an optional participatory discussion about a) kind of bird and b) what the bird is doing. I left before it was quite over. 

Later we were eating lunch in the car on the marina. I said to Sig, “bird on wing left”. But he had missed the birdwatching session so didn’t  know what I was talking about — wasn’t much of a follow-up discussion.