It rained yesterday and last night and has been drizzly today – a gray day, indeed. But I am not complaining…not til the lake is full.
I downloaded the Color Splash Studio app for my Mac a couple months ago, but have never taken the time to figure out how to use it. This is my first attempt. It allows you to manually remove colors from a color photo. I know I should just get Photoshop, but I’m playing around a bit with other tools first.
For some reason this song popped into my head as I was writing up this post…just try keeping it out of your head for the next day or two. 🙂
Jacques Pépin‘s biggest fan may very well live under our roof. Monte follows his show regularly. Every once in a while we’ll try one his recipes out.
This is a soda bread recipe that I’ve tried, two ways. Jacques says it can be made either with regular milk and baking powder, or with buttermilk and baking soda (the more traditional, I suppose).
Last week I made it with milk & baking powder. Yesterday, (pic above) I made it with buttermilk and baking soda. Both were good. I think this last loaf cooked a little too long, though. Either that or the fat in the buttermilk caused it to get more yellow than white inside.
You can watch the episode (link here), if you like. Or, here’s the recipe, below. If you want to try it w/ the milk and baking powder combo, just swap out the buttermilk and baking soda in equal quantities.
Soda Bread
1/2 tsp canola oil
3 c all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 c buttermilk (room-temperature if possible)
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Cut sheet of parchment paper to cover baking sheet. Coat parchment paper with canola oil.
Hold 1 Tbsp flour aside to dust loaf before placing in oven. Sift the rest of the flour together with salt and baking soda in a large bowl.
Add buttermilk to dry mixture and stir til combined. You want to make sure to add the buttermilk right before you’re ready to put it in the oven. Don’t let it sit. Turn dough out onto parchment paper. It will be a bit sticky. Cover with saran wrap and form into a round dough, about 7″ in diameter. Remove saran wrap. Dust with previously set aside flour, and cut a shallow x in the top of the loaf.
Cover with an upside down stainless steel bowl. Cook in oven for 30 mins covered. Then remove bowl and cook for another 30 mins.
We had planned to raft up last night, but as it turned out, we didn’t make it to the lake. It ended up raining overnight, so it’s just as well that we weren’t out there. Today we went to the marina to bring home the kayak and close up the boat. It was nice to back on the lake. It’s been a while, for me. The temps were in the 90’s. The water temps are in the high 70’s. Tis the season for B-dockers to hang out on the lake every weekend.
We saw Joe, Mike, Marty, Sue, Jerry and Wally. Sue has her stand-up paddle board in their slip. So, she and I paddled up and down the dock for quite a while. Along the way we saw lots of the neighborhood ducks. The mom and babies in the shot above were not too leary of the kayak – we were able to get pretty close. Though, I’m told that last week, this momma duck had seven babies, not six.
The shot below shows some of the ducks that have become quite accustomed to handouts from B-dock. You can see one of the big carp under the surface of the water on the right side of the frame.
In the interest of spending less time running errands on the weekends, I have really embraced on-line shopping. And not just for presents and big purchases but consumables – I’ve recently bought shampoo, sunscreen, batteries, light bulbs, hangers, replacement parts, adhesives, air filters…you name it. It’s GREAT!
I signed up for Amazon Prime about 6 months ago. It offers free 2-day shipping, and sometimes discounted prices, for many items. It’s a god-send. And only $79 a year. You also get free online video streaming (which is handy with a kindle fire), and free e-books. Check it out.
Amazon does sell postage stamps, but when I ran out this week, I just ordered from usps.com. I usually buy a couple hundred Forever stamps at a time, and they show up in my mailbox in a day or two.
The picture above is of a sheet of Forever stamps that I ordered on Thursday that arrived today. They are of a painting by Edward Hopper called The Long Leg, part of the American Treasures series of stamps. Pretty, gaff-rigged sailboats. I couldn’t resist. I have admired several Edward Hopper paintings and drawings (especially The Cat Boat) over the years, but I don’t know much about him otherwise. So I googled him and in the process of doing so, found a most awesome website for viewing art called wikipaintings.org. What an amazing resource. They have several hundred artists and many thousands of art work browsable and viewable online. A must-have in your bookmark list.
Our mimosa tree out back is blooming. It’s had a hard couple of years with freezes and droughts. At one point we thought it was a goner. It appeared to have a split in its trunk. But, there’s still life in it. The canopy is not covered with blooms this year, just a couple dozen. I tried to capture one of the newer ones, here.
It’s usually the little things that matter most. Monte may be retired, but he is not idle. Today he signed up for car duty. He took one of the cars to the shop to get new wheels, and some brake issue fixed. Then he took that car to get inspected. Then washed it. THEN took my car to get inspected, put the new license plates and reg sticker on, and washed IT as well. I think the last time my car had current inspection AND registration stickers at the same time AND clean, too, was probably the day I bought it 15 years ago!
Doray & Tom gave Monte a lime tree for his birthday (aka his “margarita tree”). It’s blooming out back, now. And after the blooms are spent, little baby limes are left behind.
Can’t wait for them to grow up. Monte’s standing by with the juicer at the ready. 🙂
I do love driving up north of New York City. In about a span of 5-10 minutes the scenery quickly turns from city sprawl to forest, hills, rocks and streams. I can drive the route between La Guardia Aiport to Somers in my sleep. There’s one sight on the Hutchinson River Parkway at about exit 24 that always makes me chuckle – a curious looking pine tree.
I decided to take of picture of it as I was zooming by in traffic today, on my way back to the airport.
“And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter — thinking — because it’s hard work for people to think. And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, ‘all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'”
IBM founder Thomas J. Watson was an inspiring figure and entrepreneur. He introduced the “THINK” slogan in the early days of the company to motivate and inspire IBMers. It was the first US trademark registered by IBM. Over the century, this one-word slogan has adorned IBM buildings, publications, ads and presentations. Back in the day, IBMers carried around small, leatherbound THINK note pads to capture great thoughts and ideas.
The original ThinkPad.
Those little notebooks later inspired the name of the IBM ThinkPad line of laptops in the 1990s. I’ve always thought that was clever. I think TJ Watson would, too.
Just a quick post before “punching out” for the night. The meetings I’m attending this week are at an IBM facility. IBM celebrated 100 years of innovation in 2011. Let’s hope the next 100 are as impact-ful. These and other former state-of-the-art artifacts grace the lobby. The placard for this one says:
IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch. The development of automatic feeding and ejecting mechanisms for keypunches and duplicators helped to increase the speed of key punching and reduce operator fatigue. The Type 016, introduced in 1929, fed cards into the punching unit and automatically removed or ejected the cards after punching. It was withdrawn from marketing in 1960.
This one’s even older. Not electric. Notice the hand crank.
IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch - 1926.
And it says:
IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch. Brought to market in 1926, the Type 501 automatically recorded on a series of punched cards common fixed data from a master card. This punch operated at the rate of 125 cards per minute, and was withdrawn from marketing in April 1948.
I guess progress is always relative to where you’ve been…
This morning started early, as usual. I’m leaving for NY again this morning and I still had to pack. I took a walk out back after a few calls. This is a shot of one of the recently planted pentas, well in bloom; with droplets from this morning’s watering still there.
I made it to La Guardia without incident. This is a shot going over the Whitestone Bridge – perennially under construction. The sunset was pretty. I was hoping to get a shot of Manhattan from the port side of the plane, but for some reason, the plane approached from the east on landing, instead of the west, so I missed getting a shot.
I had a nice time last night. First, dinner at the Grove Wine Bar. Can you believe that appetizer plate?! I had wine flight #1, bubblies from Italy & France. Monte had flight #8, Italian reds. The cappuccino afterwards was almost too pretty to drink, but I’m glad I did, it was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.
Then we headed to One World Theatre for the Diane Schuur concert, which was great. She played for about 2 hours… with someone on drums, sax and bass. She sang numbers from Duke Ellington, Chuck Mangione, Stevie Wonder, and Patsy Cline, to name a few, and ended with Amazing Grace, one of my favorites.
Sheila365 