The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

New year, new things, 701

Happy 2009, people!

New things are afoot, including, quite possibly, a cooking/huswifery blog. If you would like to be involved as a co-/guest author or have a site you'd like me to add to that blogroll, please LMK soonest. OK, not soonest. I won't be doing anything with it 'til week after next, probz.

Another new thing: hostessing (w/the mostessing, it is to be hoped) the Portland Youth Spelling Bee. Coming a week from this Saturday (that's January 10, for the calendar-impaired among us) to Mississippi Pizza Pub. Grab yer sprogs and head on down! 1-3 p.m., words, prizes, sound effects, etc., etc.

Yet another new thing: writing trivia questions for Pub Quiz Oregon (shortly to be Pub Quiz USA). At last, an opportunity arises to turn my massive store of useless knowledge to some profit (probably the only such chance I'll ever get, barring a call from Jeopardy!).

And another new thing: goodbye Firefox, hello Chrome. The new Firefox ran so slowly and unreliably for me that I have decided to take on the learning curve of a brand-new Web browser. At this point I think I qualify as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google.

And about the 701... the last post was #700 and I didn't even notice. Marvel at those peerless observational skills!

Bake, braise, roast

A few months ago, I decided that I need to develop my skills (a la Napoleon Dynamite). And one skill I decided to focus on was baking: specifically, I wanted to begin baking all the bread that our family ate by the end of winter.

To this end, I picked up a book with a promising title and some very promising endorsements: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. (Mimi had a great post about it too.)The book's premise is simple but intriguing: by mixing a very wet dough and allowing it to rise, unkneaded, then storing it in the refrigerator for up to 14 days, you can have the makings of an easily-shaped and supremely delicious loaf of bread on hand at all times.

I read the first few chapters of the book through several times, then invested in the necessary hardware. An oven thermometer--our newish crappyish stove is notoriously unreliable in most ways. An all-wood pizza peel--the loaves are shaped on top of the peel, then slid deftly onto a preheated pizza stone. I already had the stone (Alton Brown recommends an unglazed quarry tile), so no bucks out of my budget there.

Then almost two weeks ago, I went ahead and mixed. The result was rather unpromisingly gloppy. I didn't have time on the first day to shape & bake, and the book recommended letting the dough rest at least overnight before baking anyway. One thing led to another. Life got in the way. The dough languished for almost a week.

And then on Friday, Joe, Karan, Jac and Mike arrived at our house for a visit. I went into full-on cleaning orgy mode all afternoon (and was duly mocked for it by our so-tender friends). The house was completely clean; I still had an hour before they were due; what to do, what to do? So I dug the well-aged and bubbly dough out of the refrigerator, shaped a rather amateurish-looking boule out of a grapefruit-sized chunk of it, let it rest on a cornmeal-dusted peel, preheated the oven for a full 20 minutes and grinned in glee as the loaf, far from sticking miserably to the peel as I'd expected, glided into place on the pizza stone and proceeded to bake up into quite a delicious and satisfyingly sour end result.

That first loaf took all of a quarter of an hour to disappear after our guests arrived. The second loaf went just as quickly. I wanted to make more dough, but didn't have enough flour; Karan and Joe went on a special grocery run to get more flour.

Anyway, I've now mixed up a second batch and sent Joe and Karan home with half of it.We had a loaf of bread with dinner last night and will probably make another tomorrow. My boules are still not perfectly shaped, but I'm feeling comfortable enough with the basics to start venturing into more complicated (and more whole-grain-oriented) territory.

So. Breadmaking for those with little interest in either bread machines or hand-kneading. Sourdough without fussing with a starter. Real homemade bread with no dough conditioners or preservatives or high fructose corn syrup or what-the-hell-ever. Chalk me up as a total convert.

Also: I bought a special issue of Fine Cooking yesterday... all about roasting! And I put a cookbook called All About Braising, as recommended by Bitten, on hold at the library. Stay tuned for updates!

Also also: the authors of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day have a blog. RAD.

Love to hate

I took a big step today.

I deleted a blog from my RSS feeds.

Not really sure why it was on there in the first place. Not for politeness--this person doesn't read my blog, and I don't have any real-life contact with her. Not for content--it is a personal blog in the very personalest sense of the term. I certainly never learned anything from it, was inspired to new heights by it or even picked up a good recipe.

I kinda think it might have been on there just so I could get irritated with her every day. Though I'd never met her, her constant annoyed-at-the-world attitude gave me something to be bugged with. Her litany of woes, her complaining about various family members*, her superior-because-I'm-cynical attitude... man, this lady irritated me so much that I even caught myself telling Jim about her one time. Twice, actually. And the second time he gave me a very kind and loving look that said "Sweetie, you have completely lost it, and you are trying to drag me down with you."

So, about a week ago, I started wondering "Why the hell am I reading this? This is worse than DListed, which is at least funny (even though I feel like I need a shower after every time I read it). This is worse than the blog by that bizarre New Mexico fundamentalist survivalist lady. I mean, this is just not even interesting any more."

And so today, I took the big step... I took a habitual irritation, something as annoying & familiar as poking at a sore tooth with my tongue, and removed it from my life entirely.

Pow! Zap! Wow. That took like half a second, was utterly painless, and has left me with nothing more than the feeling that I am an incredible stone-cold idiot for not doing this, like, months ago.

But I never said I was a quick study...

Now I'm wondering what other love-to-hate relationships with objects, routines, organizations or whatever I can find and root out. Do you have any of these bizarrely attractive dysfunctional things going?

*I only ever complain about my kids and I'm damn proud of it.

For those about to shop...

I don't do Black Friday... never have, never will. Being that close to that many other people just weirds me out too much. Humanity blah! Get away from me with your overstuffed shopping cart!

But if you're in the market for any sort of scrapbooky, techy or photography-y thing, Nancy at Scrapbook Update has quite the list of deals... from hard drives to die cutters, D-SLRs to digital frames. Check it out and happy shopping.

That's a lotta comments

So I noticed about a week ago that we were nearing 3000 total comments... not too bad for a blog with a readership just slightly above that of the fine print at the end of cell phone contracts. And I was going to have some kind of a cool prize or giveaway or public laudification or something of our 3000th commenteer.

But, as is my wont, I spent my time doing... oh, something else instead. And right now we are not just close, but DAMN close to 3000 comments. See?

So rather than giving something away to the next commenteer (no, I do not mean commenter), how about if I give something away to someone who comments on this post instead? To at least one "someone?" Multiple someones? A randomly chosen someone?

Fair warning: I don't have any money, so your giveaway is likely to consist of such valuable things as

...a pen with a star on it...

...some paper clips, joined together into a chain by my children*...

...or a piece of marginal "art" I created myself.

Plus, probably, a mixed CD and/or some stuff out of my e'er-expanding Craft Crap Stash.

So, happy, er, um, commenting. Yeah.

* They made this chain out of a box of 150 paper clips over a year ago. The clips are sorted by color, and the clever chain design neatly foils my attempt to quickly grab a paper clip every single time I need one. But I also thought it was very cute when they first did it, and in the midst of my annoyance at being inconvenienced, I am able to remember that I think my children are cute. And that's a good thing.

This blog goes to 500

Where was I? I was reflecting. Reflecting, dammit.

Anyway: part of the reason for reflecting, rather than blogging, is that this is the Pic-Dem's 500th post. Five hundred. Um, twenty-five score, right? Five hundred posts, 2204 comments (thx gyz), ample opportunity to ponder and self-edit and re-evaluate and eventually realize that I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about here.

But that will change! O, it will change verily. Just check out the new header if you need proof. More about that later... for now, let's take a walk down memory lane and revisit a bit of Pic-Dem history. (About eleventy-four years ago, or way back in September, anyway, Lynn at Bore Me to Tears tagged me with a "discuss your blog's history" meme. Look, Lynn, I finally did it! But your post was/is better.)

1. Stick-figure comics from the early months! Check them out here, here and here. Also a stickfigurish self-portrait.
2. Music: a constant companion. What I thought of some metal reviews, rhapsodizing about a White Stripes show, a rant about bands' MySpace pages (Putinella being a notable exception), some ten songs posts and of course my like favoritest post of all time which gets its own entry:
3. The Church of Listening to Radiohead.
4. Homeschool madness! Why we homeschool, Rhys' first day at the Jedi Temple Academy (OMG a chalkboard), what we learned from Eminem, what we (don't) do for homeschool.
5. Tuesdays and Fridays; that would be Random Tens and Science Fridays, at least on the days I do them. A couple random tens: the first one, the travel edition and the All-Vice Spectacular. And a couple Science Fridays: archaeology, bees/justice/Madeline L'Engle and caffeinated thigh cream.

Well, that's about enough dredging up of the past. Onward to the future! With jetpacks!

As this year lurches to a close and a new one glitters with falsely bright promise ahead, I am reflecting upon my goals and all that good stuff. And I am thinking of refocusing the blog a bit to, er, focus on my goals and all that good stuff. I have no illusions, or very few; I am thinking I will be have to be startlingly diligent to attain even one of them. But maybe having a little bit of accountability here, in the form of occasionally regularly posting about the steps I'm taking or should be, might help maybe a little bit?

Wow, that's one hell of a definitive mission statement.

Also: as inspired by the illustrious Lynn, I bring you Loldinejads. (There are more where this came from.)

Housekeeping

I accidentally finished doing all the stuff I needed to get done this week for work (I think... please, nobody tell me otherwise) so I spent half an hour or so screwing around with the Pic-Dem's design this morning.

New banner features brushes and overlays from 7gypsies' Zanzibar kit (coming soon, I think, to pcLayers). Hooray for forward-thinking companies who aren't afraid of digital!

And the three columns are just 'cause I felt like everything squeezed into one long long long column down the side was looking, frankly, a mite dorky.

Now if I can just scrape together a few hours to update the "Read" and "Listen" lists, I will attain utter blogatorial happiness.

Encouragement for the unaccomplished, or at least a heavy dose of slacker guilt

Via COD, this article and video about Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, delivering his last lecture. A 43-year-old father of three, he has advanced pancreatic cancer and has been given only a few weeks or months more to live. He talks about the importance of determination, the power of cognitive dissonance and even why it's best to let your kids write on the walls if they want to. (Fisher and Rhys: This does not mean you. We do not own this house.)

You all know my feelings about inspiration (which I initially mistyped "inspuration," probably because I was originally going to say "glurge"). But this one's worthwhile; who knows? it may even spur me to get off my butt and work on The Book today.

Or at least to go take the pork tenderloin out of the freezer. I was looking at it this morning and thinking "I should thaw that out so we can eat it tomorrow." And then I closed the freezer, went back upstairs and returned to my regularly scheduled time-wasting behavior. Baby steps, baby steps.

Edited to add: The pork is out of the freezer. Can great things be far behind?

Think, think, think*

Well, third time's the charm. I've been tagged as a "Thinking Blogger" three times now, by Mimi, Lori and Brian... so I figured it's time to quit being such a party-pooper and join in on the high-quality brainiac lovefest.

A disclaimer, though: The Picayune-Democrat is not now, nor has it ever been, designed to make you think. Any thinking that may occur during or after exposure to the Picayune-Democrat is completely coincidental; correlation is not causation. Just because I accidentally think sometimes doesn't mean that you have to.

And now, on to the thought-provokers! (I would totally include each of my taggers in this list, but tagbacks seem like a wee bit of a copout. Not that I'm not all over the easy copout...)

1. Balloon Juice, my new favorite political blog. One of the two authors is a repentant/recovering recent Republican, which gives the blog an added note of... poignancy? centrism? schadenfreude?... that I thoroughly enjoy.
2. Making Light, written by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editors at Tor Books and two of the most intelligent and insightful commentators out there. Speaking of commentators: the commenters there are truly astonishing in their breadth of knowledge, sense of community and willingness to break into spontaneous villanelles. I read it all the time, but I'm not smart enough to be a regular commenter.
3. Farm School, though Becky doesn't post nearly often enough. (Did you hear that, Becky?) Musings on poetry, homeschooling (though she's a "classical" homeschooler and I'm more of an "anarcho-libertarian" homeschooler) and more. (Also: Life Without School, a group blog about all things homeschool. Five blogs? I mock your artificial numerical constraints!)
4. Deep Genre, the collaborative effort of several spec-fic writers (Kate Elliott and Carole Berg among them) to bring rigor and thoughtfulness to the creation of non-reality-based fiction.
5. Go Fug Yourself. I LOVE to think about how celebrities dress funny sometimes. (Seriously. Check out the Chloe Sevigny archives.) Will you hate me if I tell you that this blog's feed is at the top of my list?

*Extra points if, after reading this title, you now have the "Thinking Chair" song from Blue's Clues stuck in your head. One of the cutest things Fisher's ever had in his repertoire was his two-year-old rendition of this song. "Putitinyou notebook... den what do? Sit down in your finking chair and fink, fink, fi-i-ink..."

Why does Google hate me?

It's like standing at the stage door in the rain for hours and hours waiting for the Cure to leave and then having Robert Smith push past you without a word. Or Jack White, which would be infinitely more heartbreaking as well as more current. (Have you seen the promos for the new White Stripes record Get Behind Me Satan? Utterly smokin'. Available June 7. Jury still out on whether Jack's mustache is doing anything for me or not.)

I've been a Googlemane since the earliest days. I love the search logic, the unobtrusive-yet-sometimes-useful text ads, the cute quirky holiday-themed headers. I love gmail, the Google toolbar, image search, Google news and automated "translation." (Original English: "Put down the lightsaber and leave your brother alone, o Fishy one." After "translation" to German and then back again: "Set down for the bright Saber and leave yourselves you your brother alone, O of fish-like.")

Yet it is an unrequited love, the saddest sort of all. For no matter how diligently I submit the Picayune-Democrat for spidercrawling, no matter how persistently I google "picayune-democrat," even when I resort to "link:redmolly.typepad.com/picayunedemocrat," I come up with nothin'. Big box of nothin'. Whole freakin' load of nothin'.

Why, Google, why do you spurn me? Why must I lament unheard, why must I send my hopeful clicks into the etheric wilderness with no hope of reply?