Lift Up Your Hearts!

I like vegetables, especially if they're raw, but in many ways I have not recovered from my childhood opinion that vegetables are something you eat because they're good for you.  Occasionally I encounter a vegetable dish that erodes my prejudice, and this is one of them.  It can hardly even be called a recipe, but I share it anyway because it was so good.

We were having company for dinner on short notice, and I wanted a quick but substantial vegetable dish that would be slightly fancier than usual.  Since we were grilling chicken, I decided to use our grill wok for the veggies.  I'll admit I chose the particular items as much for color as for taste:  chunks of asparagus, onion, bell pepper, yellow summer squash, and carrot; I also went all out and included a package of "gourmet" mushrooms.  Choosing not to worry that the items would require different cooking times, I threw them all into a bowl, marinated them briefly (10-15 minutes) in olive oil (extra virgin), apple cider vinegar (unpasteurized), minced garlic, and a little sugar (to give the vegetables a nice glaze; not enough to make them sweet), and put them on the grill (in the grill wok, of course).  After that, all I did was stir them occasionally and let them cook a while (time will vary depending on quantity).

The result?  A beautiful dish with an amazing variety of colors, tastes, and textures.  If the asparagus tips were well done and the carrots barely cooked, that enhanced, rather than detracted, from the effect.  And it tasted really, really good.

I'm sure these vegetables were also really, really good for me.  But that's not why I ate them.  :)

We just received a very cool picture in the mail, from Jonathan, and I had to share it with those of you who will appreciate it as much as I do (or nearly so).  He drew it on the 24th of this month.  Click on the preview picture for a better look.

Here is the explanation that came with the picture:

A guy operating a crane.  The line on the bottom is the tread.  The circle on his face is his ear.  The crane is hooking the controls, but it is not driving itself.

He wanted to draw Jesus for you, but said he didn't know how.  So he drew a crane.

I was going to e-mail these pictures to Grandpa W., from whose long-ago gift of amarylis bulbs these beauties are descended, but then decided to share them with all who might enjoy them, natsukashii or otherwise.

 

Happy Pi Day to all my nerdy friends and relatives!

Just for you, my dear Northerners, I have run around the house changing the clocks, and will get up unconscionably early tomorrow.  Daylight Saving Time makes little sense in our part of the world, and it seems yet more ridiculous to make the change even earlier this year.

But I do recall that it wasn't so bad to have the time change when we lived up north.  So I'll put up with it for your sakes.  But it does show what part of the country really runs the government, doesn't it?

For those of you who might be a little homesick for Florida:

  

I wrote earlier about our failing telephone system.  We limped along for a week with all calls forwarded to one or the other of our cell phones.  Actually, it wasn't much of a limp.  It was slightly annoying not to be able to have more than one person on this end of a call, and since my cell phone has no "free" minutes (it's a prepaid plan), I was conscious of the cost of every call.  But it wasn't that much, really.  A definite plus was that the forwarding message, "please wait while we try to contact your party" effectively foiled all those robotic telemarketers!

Still, now that it's fixed (details follow), I'm glad not to be so tied to my cell phone.  I said to Heather, "I feel like a teenager, carrying my cell phone in my pocket all the time," to which she replied, "You're not a teenager, Mom.  You still jump every time it rings."

So, I'm sure you're all wondering:  What was wrong, and how did we fix it? 

To answer that question, I have to explain how the situation deteriorated further.  I woke up one morning to no Internet connection.  This was a little more serious than the phone problem.  After trying a few of the usual fixes, I called our local cable provider to determine whether or not there was a general outage.  That should have been a simple question, but apparently it wasn't in the script, and I had to wait through a lot of help I hadn't asked for.  You know the kind—reminiscent of bad Sunday School classes—where they tell you in painstaking detail what you already know, and when you finally get to the questions you can't answer, they drop the subject.  Still, I did finally learn that there was no general outage, and I'd need to do more work on my end.

No success—and frankly, with two very active grandchildren visiting, I had little time and less incentive to worry about it.  But Porter came home last night and we tackled the problem first thing this morning.  I won't burden you with the details of everything we did—anyone who finds this entry and has a simlar problem is welcome to ask for more information in a comment—but when we switched back to the other router, it didn't work at all anymore, either!  That was just too much coincidence.  Bottom line is that the power supply was bad.  Not totally bad, and not in a way that was detectable to any of the techs who were poking around remotely.  But when we switched power supplies, suddenly the router started acting more normally...and we had Internet access again...and lo and behold, even the phone worked!

I'm glad we had a spare router and power supply to experiment with!  Having duplicates  of critical equipment is a good thing, whenever possible.  That said, we do only have one refrigerator....

Bearing in mind that one of this children is eight, and the other three—can anyone doubt they are related?

  

I know most of my Loyal Readers are shivering, with temperatures in the teens and even single digits, so you'll be glad to know that spring it on its way.  A week ago I was working in our backyard when a flock of robins came through:  bird after bird, alighting only long enough for identification before resuming their steady course—straight north.   As I stood there with sweat pouring down my face—my below-zero wind chill experience of ten days earlier barely a dim memory—I could hardly blame them.  Our highs were in the 80's and a few days later we switched the thermostat from "Heat" to "A/C."

Poor robins!  I hope they didn't get too far north last week.  It's 47 degrees at the moment, and the thermostat switch has reverted.  Then again, I'm sure 47 degrees sounds like a tropical paradise to most of you....

I had an incredible experience recently.  Having been transplanted, through the woders of modern aviation technology, from our unseasonably warm Florida home to some of the coldest Connecticut weather of the season, I was a little chilled.  Our kind hosts provided a fire in the fireplace and a space heater in our bedroom, so we weren't uncomfortable, but going outside was an adventure, despite heavy coats, hats, gloves, and scarves.

That is, until I found it desirable to take some pictures of the low Old Saybrook tide.  Leaning gloveless (I had to operate the camera) against a stiff, steady blow that pushed the wind chill-modified temperature below zero, I was beyond cold.  But when my hand finally thawed, something inside me snapped—or more accurately, some internal fire ignited.  For the rest of the week, I was warm!  Forget the hat, scarf, and gloves; if all I was doing was going from building to car to building again, my coat—and that often enough not even zipped—was sufficient.

On our sledding adventure, I condescended to don hat and gloves (and zip the coat), and the chill never reached me.  What a glorious feeling, to feel the cold without being cold!

Alas—though probably all for the best—my internal fire was quenched by returning to Florida's tropical temperatures.  Our current cold snap (presently 47 degrees outside) has me feeling quite chilly, even though it's above 60 degrees in the house.   I think I'll go fix some hot cocoa while the rest of you laugh at me.

If you try to call us in the next few days, please be patient.  All calls are being forwarded to our cell phones, so it may take a little longer than usual to connect.

Our CallVantage Linksys router stopped working.  Well, to be more accurate, the router still works, or I wouldn't be posting this.  But the Telephone Adaptor part no longer functions.

After 45 minutes of work with us (following much longer than that of Porter trying various things on his own), an AT&T representative supposedly determined that the SLIC (whatever that is) was bad, so they are sending us a new router.

While waiting, however, Porter configured Janet's CallVantage Linksys router to work in our system.  Supposedly.  Lo and behold, it failed in exactly the same very weird way.  Back to the AT&T helpdesk again.  Different tech, same diagnosis:  a bad SLIC.

Wait a minute.  Two routers failing at the same time, and in a peculiar way even the help techs found hard to believe?  Another long time spent on the phone, this time "further up" in the helpdesk hierarchy.  An apparently very knowledgeable man tried every thing he could, to the point where Porter now knows a lot about the insides and hidden parts of Linksys routers.  Nonetheless, the final conclusion was, "As unbelievable as this seems, it appears you really do have two routers with bad SLIC's."

Stay tuned.  And please be patient when you call.  On the plus side, this has dramatically cut down on the number of nuisance phone calls we get.

Tonight I had some mushrooms to use up, and created a dish that Porter really, really liked.  (So did I, for that matter.)  So I'm writing it down, as best I can, in hopes of being able to repeat it.  Since it was all spur-of-the-moment and I didn't measure anything, all quantities and even the directions are approximate.

2 tablespoons butter
1/2 medium onion, chopped
4 oz. mushrooms, sliced (I used a mixture of portabella, shiitake, and oyster)
1 tablespoon minced garlic
3/4 cup sherry
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon ketchup
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon mace
dash allspice
1/2 cup heavy cream

Caramelize onions in butter.  Add mushrooms and garlic and cook until soft.   Add sherry, simmer till somewhat reduced.  Add remaining ingredients; simmer till somewhat reduced.  Serve over pasta, rice, or wild rice.

Janet has a remarkable memory for faces, especially if seen in a dramatic/musical context.  I'll never forget when she was 13 years old, and immediately recognized the new high school chorus intern years after seeing him perform—in a video, on a small-screen television, in a non-speaking part—in a college opera production.

My memory for faces is quite the opposite.  I have a hard time recognizing good friends out of context!  What I've seen in print, however, is another story. 

A friend is looking forward to raising chickens, and on her blog mentioned her plans for acquiring buff orpingtons.  "Buff orpingtons"?  I know nothing about chickens other than a few good recipes, but as soon as I read her page I remembered the only other place I'd heard the term:  Dorothy Sayer's Busman's Honeymoon.  They play no role at all in the mystery, so there's no reason in particular I should have remembered them.

Last night we attended a Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert.  The first work was a beautiful modern piece called Musica Celestis, written by Aaron Jay Kernis; the last, Beethoven's Third Symphony.  In between we heard Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, featuring a cellist born in 1980 playing a cello born in 1790.  Both were delightful.  The cello was a Lorenzo Ventapane; the musician Julie Albers.

I recognized her name as soon as I saw it.  But why?  My first thoughts went down the logical trail of someone Janet knew at Eastman, but reading her biography squashed that idea.  When I learned she was from Longmont, Colorado, however, the mystery was solved.

Many years ago I discovered a book, by Robert Leland Johnson, called Super Babies.  It is the story of the first few years in the life of his son, Anthony—once a sickly, premature infant, now an MIT graduate.  At the very end of the book (1979), Anthony begins to take Suzuki violin lessons.  This morning I pulled the book off my shelves and quickly confirmed that his teacher had been a woman named Ellie Albers, of Longmont, Colorado.  Can anyone doubt my conclusion that Julie is her daughter?

Memory is an amazing thing.

I suppose I should throw out my Peter Pan peanut butter.

Having read about the recall, I quietly scoffed at the paranoia of those who recommended getting rid of all peanut butter, as if the net of the "2111" product code weren't wide enough.  And all this fuss when no actual contamination has (yet) been found in the product—just a statistical link.

But just for fun, I looked at the product code on my jar, and lo and behold, it begins with the Number of the Peanut Butter Beast.

The fact that I've already consumed more than half the contents of the jar ought to count for something, though.

In Pittsburgh it can be faster to take the bus to the airport than to drive, because there are special bus-only lanes that sneer at rush hour traffic.  Not so in Orlando, where the trip takes 45 minutes by car and more than twice that by bus.  Today was actually my first venture onto Orlando's public transportation system (such as it is), if you don't count the downtown freebie Lymmo service (which actually counts for quite a lot; it's pretty handy).  Anyway, I ventured from home to the airport and thence to a Thai restaurant where we met some friends for dinner, just for the experience.

The driver was friendly and helpful, the cost only $1.50 ($3.50 buys a pass good for unlimited trips in one day), and the bus itself was fine.  But the total time—walking from our house to the bus stop (35 minutes), waiting for the bus (20 minutes), and stopping at nearly every one of the multitude of stops on the way to the airport (100 minutes)—made for a long afternoon. Still, I proved it's possible to get to the airport without benefit of car, at least if one doesn't have too much in the way of baggage.

And the Thai food was good, too.