This should be my last update for the day; I hope to be heading to bed soon.
Porter took the wiser course tonight, reading his book and keeping an eye on the TV reports. I decided to cook.
First I made a big batch of meatballs, which will be good thaw-and-eat food.
Then I decided it would be nice to have cookies to take to our neighbors. We do that at Christmas, but half the people aren't home. Now they have to be—we'll be under curfew until Saturday morning. :)
I've been working on developing and perfecting a particular cookie recipe, so I've been making cookies at least once a week for a couple of months. I should have been able to make these in my sleep. But the dough seemed weird, much too dry. I wondered, being much distracted, did I accidentally add an extra cup of flour? I increased the liquid to compensate, but was increasingly puzzled. It wasn't until I'd already baked the first batch that I discovered that I'd left out the butter, which was sitting in the microwave where I'd left it to melt. I slopped some into the remaining dough (cookies can be forgiving), and hoped for the best. It's so far from what it was intended to be that I'm embarrassed to give them out, but they're actually not bad and I'm not going to ruin a neighborly moment just because the cookies aren't my best. But the whole affair shows my mind wasn't totally on what I was doing. And I'll even spare you the other things that went wrong, including spilling melted butter all over and losing my grip on the cookie sheet, sending the cookies sliding onto the oven floor. The worse of it was that both the meatballs and the cookies require an unusual number of utensils that require washing by hand, and it's really hard to wash big items in the bathroom sink (my temporary kitchen, if you recall from my last post). But it all worked out, even if it left me thinking maybe taking the night off would have been the better course.
Cooking done, I finished the cleaning, took a shower, did a wash, and went throughout the house taking photos—documentation that is good to do for many reasons, bu t especially when a hurricane is coming.
Oh, and here's another thing happening in our temporary kitchen. The first casualty of the hurricane, though I can't imagine why it happened, and Matthew isn't even officially here yet. We're getting a lot of rain, and the bathroom skylight is leaking. Nothing a bucket can't take care of at the moment, however.
The air had been oppressively still all day, but the wind is definitely picking up, creating a percussion section out of our roof and walls. Hopefully my first post of the morning will not be very exciting.
Good night, all!
