Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s Comments (group member since Sep 20, 2013)

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s comments from the Net Work Book Club group.

I like that!

I calfta say, that's pretty harsh!

How do you get dragon milk?

From a cow with short legs.

Not to mention snowblowers!

Grass...trees....you are both so lucky. We live in 63 sq metres with terrazo floors. Here in Spain they tend to pave everything. Even people with private houses often pave their yards!

There's a greetings thread here for 2017, sweetheart. I made it. You might want to post this there.

Oh I hear you! I'll go one worse...periodically the whole class would be weighed and measured in gym class. This meant lining up in alphabetical order and walking up to the medical scale-with-a-height-stick on it. The nurse would weigh and measure you, and then call out your name and weight and height to the teacher, who was writing this all down. And was far enough away that the nurse felt it incumbent upon herself to raise her voice loud enough for everyone to hear! It wasn't enough to wear glasses and "chubbee" clothes--!!
Why this was considered necessary to do in school I have no idea. It made about as much sense as "The President's Physical Fitness Test." Yeah, like the President freakin' cared about our gym class.

"Chubby." Now there's a word I hate, particularly when it's used as a "nickname." I realise now that when I was a kid in the sixties, I hit the period where home-sewing pattern manufacturers were having to change their old prewar body blocks for the larger breed that came later. But no one told me that. All I knew was, my mom had to buy my clothes and patterns in the "chubby" range. Which sometimes was labelled as "Chubbee", as if that somehow made it cute. It didn't. It made it worse.

Boys were known as "Husky", meaning strong. That was OK. Chubby was just another word for "fat"--neatly labelling us for the rest of our lives. And other girls who might be shopping with their moms when you were buying your back-to-school clothes/patterns, were fully aware of that fact. They weren't shy about mocking you for the entire fall (in school, naturally) about it, either.

I still have a knee-jerk reaction to "chubby." (Does it show?)

Groovy wrote: "Orinoco, I made the quick streusel cake I printed here for you, and to be honest, it was more cakey than anything; I didn't really like it. I must have done something to mess it up.

Anyway, it bo..."

This recipe looks more like what I was thinking of from my childhood. I don't have a Bundt pan but maybe it won't know the difference if I pour it in a 9x13.

I made that first coffee cake. It didn't say to, but I oiled and floured my cake pan anyway. And all the struesel sunk to the bottom of the pan and stuck fast!
Next time I will line the bottom with baking paper!
It tasted good, anyway.

PropheCy is a noun. PropheSy is a verb. Most modern proofreaders seem not to know this.

The President prophesied war in the next two years; of course it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

See?

DH is 72 and has acid reflux, so he doesn't eat dinner (he prefers going hungry at night to taking meds). This means a) massive breakfasts for him, and b) he has lost a lot of weight. The cakes and cookies are my way of feeding him up a bit. I've had to train myself not to notice them. Like if I make cookies I might eat one to see how they came out (our baking powder is not to be trusted) but the rest are his. So yeah, I'll need to halve the cake recipe so it won't spoil before he can eat it up.

I have low thyroid and struggle with my weight all the time. Topped out at about 210lbs. Went to a nutritionist and lost a good 40lb and have gained some back. Too much. I could stand to lose 12 lbs easy. "A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips!"

Groovy, I just realised I'll need to halve that recipe. There's only the 2 of us and I'm not actually supposed to be eating cake; if I make a 9x13 cake we'll be eating it for two weeks.

*bow* Great word, Groovy, and a new one on me!!

This may sound odd, but I do like the word "nasty", particularly as employed in African American English. Extremely descriptive and yet not profane. It wasn't used much in my experience growing up in an all-white Wonderbread community, and I first heard it expressively used by Bill Cosby in the "turn" he does about Mr Ike and chewing tobacco. "This stuff was nasty." And I bet it was, too!

I was a huge fan of the old Animal Planet series, Animal Cops. Once they went into a cat-hoarder's house, and even Shawn Hairston was upset by the literally 130 cats and all the mess in a suburban home. When he came out he was irate. "Man, you just can't...you can't do animals like that! That place is nasty!!"

The most I ever heard the word was when my mother would call a woman "nasty-nice", meaning she was acting all friendly while being really insulting.

Groovy wrote: "I'm not a sir, but try this easy one:

QUICK COFFEE CAKE

1 cup oil
2 eggs beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
3 cup flour
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1½ cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
½..."

Ohhh yumbles. That sounds incredible, and it sounds just like what I was looking for! (It also sounds really simple to do which is always good.)

Oh that does sound nice Mr B! It has cooled down enough that I can bake again...must remember that. Hast thou a recipe, kind sir?

Something that makes me laugh is all these "cupcake" and "muffin" recipes we're getting now. In my day, you just used regular cake or fruit-bread (banana, raisin, whatever) batter and poured it in the little round tins. Voilá, as the French are so fond of remarking!

Saturday a friend came over and we made lunch together (mapo tofu, if you want to know). DH went to find something for dessert and he came home with a simple, light cake that tasted gently of cinnamon, with walnuts and coarse sugar on top. They both asked me what it would be called in English and I said, "Coffee cake, because it's good with coffee." Then I remembered a term I came across in Cannery Row or maybe Sweet Thursday, when the girl takes Doc a "flop cake." I had to look it up! Turns out a flop cake is a coffee cake--very simple, you just mix it up and "flop" it in a cake tin!

I like "coffee cake" more--it sounds nicer.

Lovely weather this morning, the air was almost cold on my skin when I got up. First night without AC since sometime in late May. As a direct consequence I am stuck with "Who Will Buy This Wonderful Morning" from Oliver!

My brain doesn't realise how thoroughly I dislike most musicals.

I am annoyed. Tried to listen to a BBC Radio 4 production of Diary of Samuel Pepys - Complete and gave up after about an hour. Whoever wrote the script had only skimmed the first volume. Not content with changing the stories she used out of all recognition, she invented a bunch of stuff that isn't even there. Including a Frenchman's panegyric of the "wonderful" English king, Charles II. Sickeningly sycophantic, that was, particularly coming from a Welsh script writer. Aside from that, there is so much good stuff in the diary, why did she feel the need to add things that weren't, and change things that were? Not to mention superimposing third-milennial sensibilities on 17th century people, such as making the maid a vegetarian who won't kill a turkey because it's her friend! (Item: the Pepyses never had a house where they could keep turkeys). Pepys' wife was French born and bred, so why did they give her a nearly East-End-London accent?

Ugh. Ugh.
And again I say: ugh.