C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 52

Real excitement in genealogy is losing a 300 year time frame….

Pushed a button I should’na pushed.

Me mum’s entire line from great-great gran went blooie. Vanished. Especially nuisanceful is losing the line in your DNA record…and this one carries my MtDNA.

One of the good things about Family Tree software (Ancestry.com) is that gone is not gone, if you can find the thread.

Thirty minutes of searching (the descendants of Eliphalet Maxwell are occasionally confused) turned up the critical Eliphalet (you would not believe there was more than one person in Massachusetts named Eliphalet, but there was, and one ancestress may have been married to two of them…still have to straighten that out!) —and I got it. Blink! There they are all back again.

I hate it when that happens. Family Tree is good at finding duplicate ancestors, ie people you’re related to more than once, or three or four times,—which can save you a LOT of copying (x-great-grandfather Thomas Wilson appears twice, with ALL his predecessors, and the same wife with all of hers) but if you run that utility and merge two people who shouldn’t be merged, because (thanks to the Julian/Gregorian calendar mess) you frequently have a person being born in 1722 and 1723. And the fact that parish records often take April as the first month of the new year just makes everything lovelier still, in terms of Are these two people the same person? So when the program asks if Eliphalet born in x year is the same Eliphalet born in x plus or minus a year—and you say ‘yes’, you can end up copying one record over another and just making a mess.

Caution, Will Robinson.

And don’t panic. Nothing gets erased—just…disconnected. And you have to find the button and buttonhole.

Jane and I have resurrected an old practice in our writing…

Reading. Simple as it sounds, reading the week’s progress to each other.

It’s a case of…when you know there’s a deadline…

Funny thing. You work.

Rain, rain, rain and a dash to the supermarket.

Laying in supplies. And a couple of pies. We start our Christmas decorating on Thanksgiving Day, so I’m not cooking. Bought the pies, boxed stuffing, etc, and we’ll just get along ok.

Christmas, now, we’ll unbend and maybe actually cook. Granted we get some of the stuff done to clear the decks that we want to get done.

Made an interesting discovery: I’m allergic to turkey…

Not violently allergic, but there’s a reason, apparently, why I always get a little sick on Thanksgiving and don’t feel well for a few days—if I eat turkey. They disguise it. I can usually detect it: turkey pastrami and lunch meat to me has a very bad flavor. You can spice up turkey itself so it tastes pretty good—but apparently it and I don’t get along.

So I’m doing lasagne and fixing turkey for Jane. We’ll have stuffing. Stuffing and lasagne just boggles the mind. But hey, if I don’t put turkey gravy on mine, I’ll be fine.

Chicken, I’m fine with, and it doesn’t taste bad. But turkey, not so much, apparently.

It’s finally snowing….

I love snow. It’s particularly nice when I don’t have to drive in it—we’re well-stocked: I did my grocery run yesterday—but it’s just sifting down like fine powder. Not uncommon for us. They only forecast half an inch, but I think we’ve already got that.

Spokane is a hilly town. Our downtown is literally ‘down,’ so it, on the riverside, may not get as much as those of us who live on the heights, and we’re about middling. Our altitude is about 2000 feet here, and probably we’re about 2300 where we are. 2000 is the break-point for getting snow and getting rain, so it can be pretty fickle on some days. Mt Spokane is pushing 6000 feet absolute elevation—subtract 2000 for its base. It’s a skiing mountain, and boasts the first double chair lift ever built. Which seems to be what’s still there.

It used to have a huge shiny globe atop (in 1932) in honor of [fatherhood???] Yep. That’s what they say. But the thing disappeared, perhaps at the hand of somebody who likes mountains not to be defaced by large shiny globes: they’ve never found what happened to it. My bet is rolled off down the mountain. 360 degrees gives you a choice of a lot of rugged hiding spots.

At least we’re getting snow now, even if the rest of the week is going to be striped rain and ice.

Finally got a good recipe for white sauce…Mexican.

In a sauce pan, heat butter (amount your choice—flour should be equal). This makes a roux, or a thickening base for a sauce. Pronounced rue. Cook it gently til slightly brown and until it doesn’t taste of raw flour.

Then you add: sufficient chicken broth (Swansons sells a good one with a good shelf life.)

A mini-can of mild diced chilis (drained.)

Enough sour cream to get it to the consistency you want. Cook a bit, stir.

Form enchiladas by putting cooked (I don’t care how they get cooked, but cooked) chicken bits in a stripe down the middle of a flour tortilla, add cheese of your choice, but mild and white is traditional, then roll, place in pan, and pour white sauce over it all.

Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes.

My source didn’t give amounts, but I’d say if you aim for 2 cups of sauce, enough to handle 4 chicken enchiladas, you want about a third of a cup of roux, of which the flour is the main solid, a half a cup of chicken broth, the chilis, and about a cup of sour cream.

I’m going to try this. I’ve done it without the roux or broth and it’s pretty good, but the rest of the recipe should make it pro.

Ah, we are in for striped weather…

Meaning, by Wednesday, we have water in the forecast, but what form it will come in—may change by the hour. It will hover just at freezing, then below freezing, so back and forth—rain, ice, snow.

Our city has a city-wide race—which is a race, for runners who come in from Kenya and London and wherever, and there are crowds along the route, and card tables set up with drink cups, etc, for the runners. But the bulk of the race particpants, who have paid to enter and who get a teeshirt and a time for finishing—are regular folk, some athletic, some, well, pushing prams or the like. [That sort is deadly, if they get behind you in a crowd.] The race is called Bloomsday, celebrating spring in the Lilac City…when flowers are blooming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilac_Bl...

I have ‘run’ Bloomsday several times…for the teeshirt. And the first time Jane and I ran it, we started in sun, ran into rain, then hail, then sleet, then snow, then rain, then sun again. You wear less than spiff clothes to run in, and start discarding them into trees along the route as you go and warm up: trucks gather them, people wash them, then give them to the needy.

The second time we visited Spokane, on the tail end of a con in California (open-jaw flight plan) we stayed in a motel and went apartment hunting. It rained. It snowed. It was icy. It changed its mind every few minutes. We were warned the weather was normal for Spokane.

Obviously we were not deterred. We rented an apartment in March and finally made the move in June—arriving in a torrential downpour as the movers tried to get our furniture in. Worst rain I’ve ever seen in Spokane.

So……..the weatherman is warning us again. Right now the sky is china blue and the pond is frozen so hard the ice looks like glass.

We’ll see what comes.

We have touchdown. ;) Rosetta.

And it sings. Who’d have thought a comet would sing.

All right, sailors on the Wavy Sea…have I….?

Ever specified a last name for any of the kids?

I think it’s high time they had one.

Gene.

Artur.

Irene.

And Bjorn, who didn’t get to come.

Cold weather is on its way—another of those polar vortices…

And Jane and I bestirred ourselves and started prepping.

We’re at 50 degrees today. We’ll be in the 30’s tonight, but tomorrow, it doesn’t warm up. We have a high of 20-something and several days of nights in the teens.

Jane’s working on her book, and at a sticky spot, so I was trying not to disturb her.

I went and got 10 bags of fine mulch from Home Depot…which entailed shifting the charity stuff from the back of the Prius and going to the store. Thought I’d get 15 bags, but when I saw the size of them, I whittled that down to 10. THose stacked to the ceiling of the cargo area.

Then I tried to offload them (they’d been rained on) and got out one dolly. Didn’t work. Load of five wouldn’t budge. Load of two wouldn’t budge. Fell right off. I went and got the other dolly. No joy either. I went and got the wheelbarrow, and began loading it when Jane came out, got the broad-bottomed dolly I thought we had, but didn’t know where it was—and we got the mulch off. It’s pretty heavy. I shouldn’t have lifted it—got a little twinge in the hip—since I’m like in couch-potato shape at the moment. But I’m ok.

Hoses in from the front yard, lotus pond filled to brim, main pond filled to good level, heater in for fish, lilies sunk deep. Then take up all the rubber hoses, take off all the brass spigot manifolds (I’m sure there’s a precise name for them) and store those for the winter.

We got all the mulch in, then needed burlap tree wrap, and couldn’t find it; so off to Lowes.

And we’re in pretty good shape for the 31 degree night tonight, but tomorrow we shut down the outside pipes and drain the lines. Got the fish tank (indoor) automatic topoff barrel filled. Clothes washed. Chrysanthemums and dahlia cut back to be covered in mulch.

And the mulch was on sale, too.

We decided to go out to eat, and in a bar full of people watching Seahawks football, we tuned our set to the Cup of China skating. People around us had to wonder why we were cheering out of time with the rest. And boy! that collision Han Yu was in was nasty. Poor fellow. When you have your chimes rung like that, it’s real hard to stay standing, let alone to go out and do a balance-based sport at an Olympic level. Bravely done.

I’ve got a pot of stew in the crockpot, but that’ll hold a day: I’ll just heat it up for a few hours tomorrow, and it’ll be fine. We keep our house about as cold as our ice box used to deliver in summer, so I figure we’re not going to get botulism from a recook, eh?

We’re not as ready for deep cold as I’d like: we still have stuff to pull into the garage, still got the patio table umbrella to get in. But we’re pretty well prepared, all the same. Thank goodness we did some of this a week or so ago.