Saturday, October 20, 2007

It's pumpkin pie time

We had our first visit of the year to a pumpkin patch on Thursday. A little later than in the past but that makes for fewer pumpkins & gourds overall & that is a good thing.  Each of the boys got a small to medium pumpkin & a couple of gourds.  Tomorrow we are going to a Harvest festival where we will come home with fresh cider, lots of apples & possibly another pumpkin or so and yet more gourds.  Pumpkins are not included in the cost of this visit so we might yet escape.  On Wednesday we go to another pumpkin patch & the entrance fee includes a pumpkin & a few gourds and apples.  So I conceivably will have a half a dozen pumpkins, a dozen or so gourds and who knows how many apples to deal with.

DS1 is of the opinion that the main use for a pumpkin is pie. Whenever any asks him about carving a pumpkin he says "We're making pie!" Fresh pumpkin pie is a PITA and takes the whole damn day.  But we make it because he is actually suggesting eating a vegetable and it does taste good. 

DH decided this time that he would carve the pumpkins as well as scoop out the flesh for pie.  2 mediumish pumpkins will produce about 2 cups of cooked & drained flesh, if they are carved & enough flesh is left in them to lend stability to their forms.  But it does take most of an hour to scoop them out. 

Then you bake the flesh for an hour or so. After it cools a bit you puree it and let it drain for half an hour or so.  While it is cooling & draining you bake the seeds you have cleaned & seasoned, for about 90 minutes.  During this baking one of you takes the kids & runs into town to buy the cream & a pie crust that you forgot to get and takes the kids to lunch.  The other loads all the many dishes you have used into the dishwasher & gives the table, counter & floors a good cleaning because pumpkin slime gets everywhere.  After the seeds are done you mix up the pie filling, which as usual turns out to be about a half a cup too much for the pie crust. The pie bakes for 40-45 minutes & then has too cool.  

Having started this little odyssey about 10am, it is now nearly 4pm.   Today is also the VFW fish fry and DH fries hushpuppies for it, so he leaves before the pie is cool. Is it fair to not let Daddy have some of the pie with us? Well, of course it is but in order to get demons to eat dinner you persuade them that it is not and we all should wait to eat pie until Daddy gets home. The VFW thing is annoying because DH leaves me with a mess and boys who want Daddy, but a good thing because it means we can go eat fried catfish and hushpuppies for dinner & I don't have to cook. I've done enough work in the kitchen already today.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

thoughts after a couple glasses of wine

I've been reading regency era romance novels lately. Light, fluffy things, wiht romance, sex and mystery in them. Real mysteries - murder, embezzlement, nefarious schemes, spies, not romantic 'does she like me' mysteries, though you can't have a romance novel without those mysteries. I suppose it says something about me that I am mostly reading these books for the actual mysteries, not the romance, certainly not for the sex. I skip over the sex. Simply cannot cope with reading it.
Some things strike me about the romance novels, and i know some of it is publisher dictated. The hero must always be masterful, dashing, over protective and reluctant to admit he loves the heroine. The heroine must always be strong willed and sexually inexperienced. Even widows. Judging by the romance industry there were a hell of a lot of virgin widows of much older men in the 1820's. Or widows of men who simply didn't care enough to bring them to orgasm. Is it so terrible to have had a fulfilling sex life within a marriage before meeting 'the man of your dreams'? Can't you love more than one person in your life? Only one book in the literally hundreds of romance novels I have read in my life featured a fully pleasured widow as the heroine. One. 10 years ago I found that only mildly, very mildly annoying. Now I'm just irritated by it. and by the masterful men. Seriously, I'd bitch slap half of them if they treated me the way they treated these women. Oh it's all explainable & understandable in context but it still pisses me off. But my favorite author Stephanie Laurens writes really good plots with engaging characters, which is why I care enough about them to be pissed off & irritated, so I read anyway.

The other thing is more of a an adjective problem. Heroines almost always have 'heart shaped faces' and several times during the course of the book, when they set eyes on the hero their 'lungs seize'. So I am left imaging that to be a true romantic heroine you have to be an asthmatic with a really wide forehead.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Bit of a bummer today

I quit 2 of my CTs.  I've just felt so blah & so totally lacking in motivation & inspiration the past month or so that I don't think I'm doing a very good job for them. I didn't want to quit.  I've been dithering about it for 2 weeks now, but today I made myself sit down and send the PMs. Just fading away with no word is not my style. I really enjoyed working with them which is why it took me 2 weeks to bite the bullet and resign.  I just haven;t been in a scrapping mood lately & my time to do it is limited. I've spent that time re-reading an old mystery series & right now have no real desire to do anything else.  I go through these phases every now & then.  I'll be back scrapping soon enough, I just don't know when & it's not fair to the designers for me to just hover in the background not contributing.

I've remained on Jane's team.  She does PSP scripts & right now isn't doing too many, so I don't feel like I am not living up to my obligations.  I can test a script while not feeling creative enough to do a layout.

I downloaded PSPX2 trial Monday. I don't know....I;m not seeing anything that makes me want to buy it.  But since I haven't really done much scrapping I'm not really giving it a fair test.  Plus I need another GB of RAM.  I'm keeping an eye on prices.  I just missed a deal for 1GB fr $59. I need 2 1GBs.  The gig of RAM I currently have is in 2 512MB chips.  So 1GB chip gets me 1.5GB of RAM.  The computer can run on that, but if I can find it for around $65 or so I can get 2.