Saturday, June 30, 2007

What Lisa Found in Her Front Yard

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A hawk. About six feet from her window.

Friday, June 29, 2007

How to Make a Kissel

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From recipezaar.com (WitchDoctor):


Russian Berry Custard (Kissel)
Recipe #227451
One of the oldest ritual foods known to the Slavs is Kissel, a fruit-gelatin-like custard. Today it is still a widely enjoyed home-style dessert. For a more sophisticated flavor, add a few tablespoons of grenadine to the cranberries, or if you are using strawberries or raspberries, a few tablespoons of your favorite berry liqueur. Serve the kissel topped with whipped cream.



2 cups fresh cranberries (or other berry)
5 cups water
6 tablespoons sugar (less for other berries)
1/4 cup potato starch



Place the berries and 4 cups of the water in a medium size saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium-low and cook until the cranberries pop open or the strawberries or raspberries get somewhat mushy, 10 to 15 minutes.
Allow to cool slightly, then with the back of a spoon, press the berries through a fine-mesh sieve set over a bowl. Be sure to extract as much juice as possible.
Return the sieved berries and liquid to the saucepan. Add the sugar and bring to a boil, stirring over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the sugar is completely dissolved, 2 to 3 minutes.
In a small bowl, dilute the potato starch with the remaining 1 cup water, stirring carefully until there are no lumps. Whisk the mixture into the simmering berry mixture and bring to a boil, stirring vigorously until the mixture thickens.
Remove from the heat and cool, stirring from time to time. Spoon into serving glasses or bowls and refrigerate.


OR from "La Cuisine Francaise" quoted on homemade-dessert-recipes.com:


Recipe For Kissel a la Russe


This authentic Russian dessert recipe is taken from the book "La Cuisine Francaise" by Francois Tanty, late Chef de Cuisine of the Emperor Napoleon III and of the Imperial Family of Russia, published by Baldwin, Ross & Co., Chicago, in 1893.

Ingredients: 2 quarts cranberries, 1/2 pound sugar, 4 tablespoonfuls cornstarch (or potato starch), 1 pint cream.


Preparation:1. Press the cranberries or raspberries through a napkin, pour their juice in a saucepan with 1/2 pound sugar, add 4 tablespoonfuls cornstarch mixed with 1 glassful water, boil the whole for 5 minutes.


2. Pour in a hollow dish and let cool. Serve with cream apart. For five persons.


THEN from russianfoods.com, there is something called an Oatmeal Kissel:



Oatmeal Kissel
Source: Olga, RussianFoods.com Editor
Description
Oatmeal Kissel sounds original and even unusual, but will be the perfect dish for breakfast and dinner.

Ingredients

2 c oatmeal flour

2 tb honey

8 c water

salt to taste

Method
Put oatmeal flour in a pan and pour over warm water and stir thoroughly so there are not any lumps. Leave to swell for 6-8 hours, then add honey and salt to taste and cook on low heat, stirring regularly until dense. Pour hot kissel into molds and leave to congeal. Serve with cold milk.


FINALLY, I think it's worth noting that when I searched Google Images for "dessert Kissel" this was one of my top choices:



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More Yard Serendipity

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We were woken this morning by the sound of a tree company taking down the two huge trees on the edge of our property that Jay complained to the CA a while ago were rotted at the base. Not only does this give us some much-needed sunshine in our yard but the timing is perfect for the fence people coming tomorrow to install the dog fence.

We were so fascinated watching the tree guys work on these tall, tall trees that we watched at the window for a half hour or more. They were HIGH up, tossing their equipment over large branches, swinging around from their ropes, and felling huge portions at a time. We watched what must have been a 30-foot length of thick trunk topple 60 feet to the ground. A fun job for someone who would like to rappel for a living.
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Thursday, June 28, 2007

This Week

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Jay is a happy boy tonight: We are both taking off July 4-6, and since he has Fridays off already, that means he will work only 2 out of the next 10 days. Hooray for Jay!

We have a busy week ahead:

Friday: Lynn works; Jay frolics. Die Hard in the evening?
Saturday: Our dog fence is installed!
Sunday: An afternoon visit from my favorite 3- and 4-year-old, with a swim in the river.
Monday: [work]
Tuesday: [work] + Sally returns from London! Dad arrives from PA.
Wednesday: 4th of July party at Maggie's house.
Thursday: Genus weber, species Gaver arrives en masse.
Friday: Visiting.
Saturday: Interment of my mom's ashes in southern Maryland.
Sunday: Visiting and consolation. Joy at the gift of family that my mom gave us. Nothing ever made her happier than seeing her family together having a great time and laughing. It's what makes life worth living, right? Thanks, Mom.
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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Current Music

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In the CD player these days:

Thank You (best-of collection), Stone Temple Pilots: LOVE this collection. Scott Weiland is the most amazing, versatile vocalists, and the songwriting and musicianship are great.

Out of Exile, Audioslave: Not as good as the best of Soundgarden (I only like the hits, because the rest of Soundgarden is way too hard for me), but pretty darn good. Chris Cornell doesn't have quite the range of Scott Weiland, but his vocals are so rich and intense . . . And his lyrics are just the kind I like: poetic, but just grounded enough that I can make sense of them.

Carry On, Chris Cornell: His solo album; just getting into it, but so far I'm digging it. Loopy melodies and same great lyrics.

The Imposter, Kevin Max: Lo these many, many months later, I'm still listening to this great album.
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Monday, June 25, 2007

"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

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This novel is one of the best I've read recently. It's about a man and his young son walking southward in a postapocalyptic world where almost everything living has been destroyed, and the sun is blotted out by ash. Some people have survived but are wary and most times predatory: "Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."

The psychological effect, not just of the destruction but of the hopelessness, is conveyed again and again: "No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you."

There is a narrative, a story, to this book, but these lyrical portions pop out every now and then. Good novel.
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Saturday, June 23, 2007

My Beautiful Sister




As promised,
here is lovely sister #2,
Sally, in her new jeans

Friday, June 22, 2007

Breaking "Pant" News

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Important update for a certain sector of our readership (the sector known as "Mamie"): I have seen Sister #2 in the flesh, and she was wearing an adorable spaghetti strap, tangerine-colored tank, along with bona-fide, vintage 2007 slick jeans. She was bursting with cuteness! Gone are the balloon-hipped, tapered jeans circa 1982! Gone are the marshmallow white sneakers circa 1985! She looked HOT.

Photo to come (hopefully).
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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Yay for Rats!

This from the Washington Post:

If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

By Shankar Vedantamy

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2007; Page A01

The e-mail came from the next room.

"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!"

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time.

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

True Story

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Last night I dreamed I was dating Reese Witherspoon.
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Saturday, June 16, 2007

The Virtue of Humility

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I came across this passage from a Newsweek interview with Billy Graham earlier this year:

A unifying theme of Graham's new thinking is humility. He is sure and certain of his faith in Jesus as the way to salvation. When asked whether he believes heaven will be closed to good Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or secular people, though, Graham says: "Those are decisions only the Lord will make. It would be foolish for me to speculate on who will be there and who won't ... I don't want to speculate about all that. I believe the love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have."
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Friday, June 15, 2007

Fun by the Path and Stream






Wednesday, June 13, 2007

"You have breasts!"

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Cute comment no. 32 from 2-year-old Lindsey (day 1 of their stay with me).
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Sunday, June 10, 2007

From Aristotle

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"The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of things, and while invididually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."
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Friday, June 8, 2007

Green and Beige

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Indulging in a guilty pleasure last night, I was watching Entertainment Tonight's coverage of the premiere of Ocean's Thirteen. I sat on my suburban couch thinking, These guys have it all. Good-looking,











smart, winning personalities, rich,
traveling the world, friends with each other,







and in addition love,









children, happiness, and goodness.


Brad Pitt in Africa






George Clooney working for Darfur





I used to be jealous thinking about the luck of such people. But years ago I realized you can't go around picking out the most fortunate individuals in the world---or even your neighborhood---and then subtracting your fortunes from theirs. The truth is, if you are living an average American middle-class life, you have hit the cosmic lottery. My life is probably far closer to Brad Pitt's than to most people's lives in the world. Doing a little existential arithmetic (a la Thomas Carlyle):


Good-looking: well, I do have all my arms and legs
Smart: moderate
Winning personality: enough to make Jay fall in love with me, and to keep my friends calling
Rich: home, check; food in fridge, check; trips to Europe, check; $150 beagle, check
Happiness: yup
Goodness: moderate


My parents didn't burn me with cigarettes growing up. Nor have I spent my life scavenging from a garbage mound in Manila. Nor have I had my limbs chopped off by rebel soldiers in Africa. I remember hearing a story about the Serbian massacres in Bosnia. Serb soldiers came into the home of one Muslim family and recognized the young father as a huge soccer star in Yugoslavia. Their response was to rape and then kill both his wife and daughter in front of his eyes, while he was chained to a radiator. He eventually escaped and found his way to a local police station, where he reported what had happened, and then he killed himself. What else could he do, really? How could you live with it?


When I think about how much I miss having children, I'm always brought back to the same conclusion: The only way to maximize your happiness on earth is to, actually, maximize your happiness, each moment. You can't change what is (most of the time), so you better extract joy from whatever it is you do have. I once saw Amy Grant receive a humanitarian award named for Minnie Pearl, the old-time country comic who was a friend of Amy's family. Amy Grant said that Minnie always wanted to get married and to have children, and never did. "But," she said, "she played the hand she was given . . . beautifully." That's a principle to live by.


When I was pregnant for the last time, and always aware of how things could still go wrong, even at a late date, I started saying the Serenity Prayer, which previously I always thought was kind of hokey. But listen to these words:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.


Those are powerful words. Wise words.

So here is my advice to you, reader, if you ever feel like I do: It's true: You aren't as good-looking as Brad!










And you will never has as much fun as George!








But on the other hand, you weren't dropped into a cauldron of boiling oil as a teenager, like those kids during Idi Amin's reign. That's something, right? So sit back on your nice couch on your oversized bum in your nice beige living room---with your child, loved one, dog, or just your own great self---and glory in the joy of your life, just as it is.
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Thursday, June 7, 2007

Welcome Back, Debbie!

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Deb, welcome back to the North American continent! To catch you up, here are some important developments since you've been gone:

1. Paris Hilton has served her entire jail time. She entered jail late Sunday night and was released at 2 am "Thursday" morning for undisclosed medical reasons. Yes, her entire jail term was shorter than your vacation.

2. Britney Spears is still an object of ridicule.

3. Lindsay Lohan has problems with alcohol.

4. The sun continues to rise in the east and set in the west.

5. My favorite summer show, So You Think You Can Dance!, is in full swing! And the early parts where the judges are unkind to untalented amateurs is past, so we can watch without guilt.

6. My Italy diet is having zero effect, and I still weigh in the mid-%#s (wow, did that come out garbled on your screen? weird.).

7. A Baltimore ex-drug addict/possible prostitute was made over on How Do I Look?.

8. I am thinking about joining Curves.

9. Still thinking . . . Don't want to be rash . . .

10. The BSG season finale was good good good! You must come share Europe photos and watch the rest of the season so I can get it off my Tivo.
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Tuesday, June 5, 2007

It's Tuesday . . .

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. . . and I have very little to report. We saw "Knocked Up" over the weekend, which was very funny and good (by the same people who did "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"), and managed to see "Shaun of the Dead" on cable, which was nice but not as funny as "Hot Fuzz." MUST GET TO DC, for the movie-multiplex scene here continues to be dismal. In other big weekend news, I knocked out both my biannual car emissions test and my annual mammogram ("squish . . . splat . . . click"). So that's something.

And for those of you who have never seen this classic piece of Internet humor, here is your guide on:

HOW TO PREPARE FOR A MAMMOGRAM


Many women are afraid of their first mammogram, but there is no need to worry. By taking a few minutes each day for a week preceding the exam and doing the following exercises, you will be totally prepared for the test. And best of all, you can do these simple exercises right in your home.

EXERCISE ONE:

Open your refrigerator door and insert one breast in door. Shut as hard as possible and lean on the door for good measure. Hold that position for five seconds. Repeat again in case the first time wasn't effective enough.

EXERCISE TWO:

Visit your garage at 3 AM when the temperature of the cement floor is just perfect. Take off all your clothes and lie comfortably on the floor with one breast wedged under the rear tire of the car. Ask a friend to slowly back the car up until your breast is sufficiently flattened and chilled. Turn over and repeat with the other breast.

EXERCISE THREE:

Freeze two metal bookends overnight. Strip to the waist. Invite a stranger into the room. Press the bookends against one of your breasts. Smash the bookends together as hard as you can. Set up an appointment with the stranger to meet next year and do it again.
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Friday, June 1, 2007

Lovely, Wonderful Joss

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The ever-more-worthy-of-worship Joss Whedon












creator of








and










speaks up for women in this online letter.
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