Lift Up Your Hearts!

“Afraid of heights?” Helmer asked. “Perfect. You really are a mixed-up lad. You come here full of defiance and anger, and then you show up and you’re a horrible, hobbled mess. You spend a week with me, and now you’re such an efficient student it’s scaring me and I begin to think you might someday be some kind of decent soldier. And now this."

“I’m willing to work and overcome anything, sir. Including this,” Picket choked out.

“Don’t worry,” Helmer said. “It’s just another enemy to be taken down in the end.”

From S. D. Smith's The Green Ember.

We have so many wonderful Christmas albums, collected for well over half a century, many wonderful, wonderful works reaching from the 21st century back to almost as long as Christmas music has existed.

But the one that most strongly and emotionally says Christmas to me is the Harry Simeone Chorale album, "Sing We Now of Christmas." It was released in 1959 and is my earliest memory of Christmas music. To my great joy, I recently found the album available on YouTube. The cover is a little confusing, because it shows the title as "The Little Drummer Boy," and the image is different. But the songs are the same. This link, Sing We Now of Christmas, will take you to a playlist where you can hear the whole album in order, or return and play your favorites.

I realize that my love of this recording of Christmas songs is wrapped up in the aura of a very happy childhood and all that I loved about the Christmas season, so your mileage may vary. But, as objectively as I can manage, I maintain it's one of the best compilations for telling the story of Christmas coherently through song while including both the old familiar carols and lesser-known songs from more distant times and places.

You may already know this. I didn't, so I'm putting it here so I can find it again. This is the situation in Windows 10; I don't know about any other system.

Have you ever wanted to change the case of a letter in a Windows file name? Say, "my recipe" to "My Recipe"? It ought to be easy, right? But every time I made the change, Windows reverted back to the original, as if it didn't recognise the change in case as a real change.

The solution—or at least the best and quickest I've found so far—is to make a greater change first, say "my recipe" to "xMy Recipe", and then alter the filename again, taking away the extraneous part, in this case the "x."

It's somewhat annoying, but I've been working intimately with computers since the early 1970's, so "kluge" is my middle name.

Fun fact: Here's part of an AI-generated answer to a question involving the Body Mass Index.

Question: If I could figure out how to measure my height in square meters (or inches), would the BMI result look better, or worse?

A modern song based on a 19th-century French novel played in the style of Irish music on a hammered dulcimer! Unfortunately, it's a YouTube Short, and I see no way to embed it here, as I do with their regular videos. But you can add a little brightness to your day if you click on this link.

Heather reported seeing this awesome car/bumper sticker combination in the Walmart parking lot.  Who says Walmart customers are illiterate?

This wasn't the actual car she saw, but an image I found online, taken by someone from a school student pickup line.  The best comment I saw to that was "Gonna take them forever to get home."

This Thanksgiving we did not have turkey.  A guest provided a ham, so a turkey would have been 'way too much food.  So I roasted a mini-turkey, aka a Wild Pastures whole chicken.

I have to say, it was really, really good.  I'm more than ever convinced that mass-produced food is bred for lack of flavor.  The day before, I had rubbed it all over, lightly with honey and fresh lemon juice, then heavily with a dry mixture of salt, black pepper, and "Alliums Plus," which is my homemade ground spice blend of various alliums, green peppercorns, and celery seed.  I filled the (small) cavity with peeled and lightly smashed garlic cloves, a couple of large springs of rosemary, and half a lemon, and let it dry brine (uncovered) overnight in the refrigerator.   The seasoning was light enough to let the chicken flavor shine.

Almost as good is what happened after the meal was over.

I've tried off and on for years to make my own broth/stock, with minimal success.  Oh, I would succeed in creating broth, but it would turn out to be no better than I could get at the grocery store for a whole lot less work.  But this time was different.

After our Thanksgiving meal, I dug out the crockpot and put in the chicken carcass (which fit perfectly) along with a collection of onion skins and leg and thigh bones from previous meals of Wild Pastures chicken parts, which I had collected in the freezer.  I filled the pot with water and let it simmer until the following day.  I added no seasoning additional to whatever came with the carcass (minus the half lemon, which I removed).

After removing all the solid material and straining the liquid, what to my wondering eyes should appear was a hearty, delicious stock.  You can tell how much good came out of the bones by the way it jiggled when cooled.

Now I am again excited about making stock. It was a small batch, which helped, as did keeping it simple, but I'm looking forward to, rather than dreading, the next opportunity.