Monday, the eighth-to-the-last day of April, I seemed to be encountering the “everything’s an outrage” point of view a lot. It is common currently, in academe, and in librarianship, where I live as a professional.
It makes me tired.
I try to assume – as I told the two fellow UW academic staff, who appeared at my door to tell me that they thought a number of academic staff were disenfranchised in an election for a committee position, that I had thrown my name in for – that it’s not malice aforethought, but more likely a technical glitch. It’s not that the people who set up this election were really trying to leave you out – you know we’ve recently gone to a slightly different system for all online voting, and maybe they just didn’t know how to use it. I didn’t get elected to the committee, BTW.
It’s kind of why I’ve stopped using Cook’s Illustrated quite as much. All their recipes are like, “solving the horror of soupy lasagna” or eliminating soggy this or that, and most of the time, even though I am interested in reading about pretty much any kind of recipe method, the way I’d been doing didn’t exactly produce horrors. I mean, in cooking, a lot of time, there are several equally effective methods, and sometimes there are different ways to do things that yield equally pleasant, but different, end results e.g. stovetop vs. baked mac & cheese.
Lasagna threat
Misshapen meatballs
So that was Monday. And the high temp was almost 80°. Tuesday, don’t think anything too out of the way happened during the work day. That evening Rach had a haircut, Anna had soccer practice, and I had shopping for a cooking class I was teaching on Thursday. All of this was actually accomplished handily between 4:45 and 6:30, and I made herbed pasta with fresh tomato and bell pepper (Anna picked out the peppers from her portion – say that 5X fast <grin>) sauce for dinner
Wednesday, I had to be on campus to meet with the first of three candidates to be our new Provost. Weather still nice, and there were magnolias on the way.
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Thursday I worked at home in the morning, and went to teach a cooking class at Orange Tree Imports, a local cookware shop, in the afternoon – when it was a lot colder and rainy. The class was sweet tarts with pasta frolla, Italian for pate sucree. Here’re the recipes:
Pasta frolla, Italian all-purpose, sweet, pastry dough
Crostata di marmelatta – jam tart
Everything went fine, except a few small glitches – I forgot my business cards, and the oven was a bit slow. When I got home after class, I made the leftovers into some Roman-style cheese tarts for us.
Friday I took our student and one of her soccer team mates to Outlets at the Dells. Surprisingly not terrible – we had a good day. Drove the 45+ minutes to the Dells, and they wanted food first so we went to Panera, where I was surprised to hear the Everly Brothers coming out of the soundtrack. I took the girls over to the shops, walked through myself, and resisted temptation to shop, myself. I mean, they had Columbia and Ann Taylor stores, and Coach …. and went over to Starbucks where I put the laptop on the WiFi, and finished grading an assignment in one of my classes.
It was an easy drive back home; the girls had to be back in time for their game at Cherokee Middle School. They got changed and Mark took them to the school, where the field looked pretty unchanged since Al played there, over 15 years ago. I biked over a bit later and the temperature seemed to drop 10 degrees while we were sitting there. They won.
And today everyone’s afraid all those magnolias will die in the spring snow that’s falling. We’ll see. First it stuck a bit, then it stopped for a long time; now there’s a dusting on the roofs and cars.