This week …
Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the light of that, how can any of my personal distresses and kvetches matter. I mean, no one’s dropping bombs on my house, there are not tanks rolling down my street.
But yet, here I am, entangled in them.
We had Twos-day (02-22-2022) and everyone made a deal of it, including me.
It was also a snow day here in Madison WI, with closed schools and canceled community events, although the weather never got as bad as they thought.
In pandemic, I’ve been going grocery shopping at random times that I hope will be less busy, and recently that’s been Tuesdays, since I drive to the food pantry in cold weather when I can’t bike. I skipped this Tuesday snow day, and went Thursday instead, so maybe that’ll help me get back to some kind of pre-pandemic normal.
My brother and I exchanged daily blood-boilers – his was this NYT opinion column castigating us “woke librarians”; mine was the legislation many states including WI are passing, so that parents can object to what their children are being taught in school – like they couldn’t do that already and as my brother says, “Really. Fucking home-school the brats if that’s how you feel.”
Some night we watched this Nanci Griffith tribute on Austin City Limits, and I can’t get Gulf Coast Highway out of my head – not a bad thing. It was kinda already there because I watched her and Darius Rucker sing it on Letterman, and now have a download of the song, too.
Friday we watched Nightmare Alley, since we, like everyone else, are trying to watch all the streamable Academy Award nominees. We wanted to watch Power of the Dog, but Netflix wouldn’t load. Too bad, an array of violent images from the film are now stuck in my head, and that is a bad thing.
If we try to do another one tonight, I hope Netflix will load and we can watch something lighter like tick, tick … Boom!
PS. We got Power of the Dog to load and it was suitably gorgeous, both people and scenery, and tho probably not lighter, definitely less grim.
Thursday night it snowed a few inches and unlike the “ice storm” that didn’t do much for prettifying things, this snow did so Friday & Saturday were both blue-sky-white-snow-sunny-sun, the way it’s sposed to be Wisconsin winter days.
My new oven came, and the installation went pretty smoothly. It has an app, which is pretty humorous. It texts me when it’s preheated, and I can even get a video feed of the inside of the oven. It’s got these fancy racks, that are two levels, and I think I’m going to hate them. You can pull out just the top, while the lower one is supposed to stay in the oven. I don’t understand the advantage, but Mark says it’s to keep things stable so you don’t pull a rack out too far and spill a tray of hot food. I guess. They have these little clippy things on the side, and you’re supposed to keep them greased up with graphite to pull smoothly. I called my salesperson today and left a message asking if I could exchange for a set of plain flat racks. Hell, I’m even willing to just buy a set of plain racks if it comes to that
This morning I made some cornmeal muffins, with a little cranberry swirl. They’re good, and rose nicely in the new oven.
