The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I am attempting to BAKE.
Traditionally this does NOT GO WELL. My last attempt involved not realizing the temperatures I was using were in Celsius.
Alert the authorities as needed.
UPDATE: this stage was basically “leave it alone for an hour to proof, then add chocolate chips,” so I was able to handle that:
UPDATE 2: I may have done this right. My god does it smell good.
If we were having coffee, reading would be a nice, uncontroversial subject to talk about. I read two and a half entire books yesterday, which is both impressive and not impressive: the two entire books were a novella and a novelette, respectively, Robert Jackson Bennett’s Vigilance and Warren Ellis’ Dead Pig Collector. The two took maybe an hour and a half taken together. Then again, the half book was the back half of Dune, so I think I still get credit for reading a lot yesterday. I’ll likely finish a book today– I’m reading Mallory Ortberg’s The Merry Spinster right now, and it’s another short one, so whatever I go to after that probably ought to have some meat to it.
That said, it would probably be best to choose an oval or rectangular table, and maybe we ought to be sitting at the far ends. I thought yesterday I was most of the way out of my cold, and then we went out to dinner and got seated too close to the door and I kept getting blasted with cold air. I feel distinctly worse than I did yesterday, and in a different way from how I’ve felt poorly over the last several days. I already know that the week after this one is going to be short, between Presidents’ Day and an inservice I’m attending on the 22nd, so I’m running out of weeks where I might be at work all five days in February. I don’t have enough sick days left right now so I’d really prefer for this shit just to go away now, please. I’m pretty sure what I had last week wasn’t contagious but hell if I know what I’m heading into right now. Whee!
The good news: Sunday is a good day to sit around and binge The Great British Baking Show, and being moderately sick gives me all the excuse I need. I’m watching the most recent season right now, and … man, are these folks British. Most of the stuff they’re making from episode to episode is stuff I’ve never heard of, too, which is always fun– and half the time it’s stuff the contestants have never heard of. It’s not a bad show. Check it out, if you happen to have a Netflix subscription.
What’s been up with you lately?
More details later. Not my recipe.
EDIT: The details, including an explanation of the name, can be found here, a link that’s worth clicking on and reading through even if you don’t intend to make the pie. The short version: Dark corn syrup, brown sugar, molasses, kahlua, chocolate chips, eggs, cinnamon, butter, and pre-made graham cracker crust. Eat a very small slice at a time (oh my god so rich) preferably warm and with a large glass of milk.
Delicious. But I’m totally diabetic now.
PS: It’s called schadenfreude pie, remember. I will be enjoying a piece during Game of Thrones tonight. 😉
So here’s a thing about soccer. I just finished watching the Switzerland-Ecuador match, right? Something happened in that game that apparently almost never happens in soccer: the game was won, excitingly, in the final few seconds, with Switzerland scoring the winning goal with maybe ten seconds of extra time or extended time or furthermore time or whatever the hell they call it left.
Now, the way the World Cup works (warning: I’m gonna get details wrong; it’s inevitable) is that your team gets points based on how you do in each of the group matches, and then the teams with the most points in each group move on to what I think is a standard elimination-style tournament. Or something. Point is, you get points for how you perform in a game– you win, you get three, you tie, you each get a point, and if you lose you get no points.
With about three minutes left in the game, the announcers gave up. And they clearly expected both of the teams to just stop playing, because there were three minutes left and, hell, you can’t score in three minutes in soccer. It was being treated as a foregone conclusion that the game was just going to be a tie and that not only was there nothing that either team could do about it, it was portrayed as genuinely surprising that either team even would want to. They’ve got their point for their tie; what’s the point of trying to win?
Then Ecuador got off a decent shot at goal that didn’t end up scoring, to which the announcers reacted with clear surprise. And then Switzerland actually scored, winning the game, and it was almost like they’d done something impertinent by daring to actually play to win when there was just a little bit of time left and clearly the game was supposed to end in a tie.
Can you imagine this happening in football or basketball? Three minutes is an eternity in a close basketball game; there could be half-a-dozen lead changes left in a close game in that amount of time, and while I’ve certainly seen any number of football teams take a knee in the last few seconds to end the game, the idea that you’d give up with more than a few seconds left is ridiculous. If there were two or three points separating the teams, okay. Soccer’s low-scoring; you’re not going to overcome a three point deficit in three minutes without some miraculous play. But a tie game?
Get it together, soccer. This is the fuckin’ World Cup; play like you wanna be there. And the announcers shouldn’t be playing into this nonsense.
I’m watching France play Honduras right now; I’m going to have to miss a chunk of this game as I have a pie to make before we go over to my sister-in-law’s for Father’s Day celebrations. Yes, I’m making pie.
Which means I’m baking.
It will go poorly. Be excited!
These. These things right here? Are the greatest fucking things in the UNIVERSE.
Shitty day. Soooo happy now.
So breakfast was the highlight of the day, unfortunately. I managed to bake! Successfully! Without trauma or nonsense! The sausage gravy was a touch spicier than I wanted it to be but that was the sausage I used and not the recipe; other than that everything worked out beautifully.
Then the rest of the day happened. It was kind of a long stupid ugly day for no good reason and I’ve gone through nearly 900 comic books (three boxes out of the fourteen I’m selling) and recorded the title, issue number, publisher, price point, and whether I’ve got it in a bag or bag-and-boarded into an Excel spreadsheet, plus generated a few pie charts so I can see relative percentages of, well, everything. This will in theory make the collection salable. What it’s actually done, so far, is made my feet hurt from standing the whole time and made me blind.
Oh, and I’m exhausted way beyond anything reasonable for my activity level today and I still have six inches of grading to do before I can sleep tonight. And the boy is having a massive shitfit over his bath right now for no clear reason that I can figure out.
I guess “whining” is going to be one of my tags tonight.
I was gonna post a picture of the mangled mess my soft pretzels became, but, uhh…
Turns out it didn’t matter.
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