That Hobbit Lady

First some background:  Russ and I are watching House.  We are on Season 3 right now, which is a very good season, and  Hugh Laurie is a very gifted actor.  So gifted, that he almost makes me forget how I first knew him:  as Bertie Wooster in the British TV show Wooster and Jeeves.  I say “almost,” but not quite.  I don’t think I could ever really forget Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster.  Sure, House is dark and tormented, a compelling character, but when you come right down to it, he’s not very likeable. 

Wooster, on the other hand, for all his goofiness, is extremely likeable.  He makes me laugh.  And I love his accent.  Sometimes, when I’m watching House, I miss the British accent.  Hugh Laurie does the American accent so well, that it’s sometimes easy to forget he is as British as the day is long.

So today, missing Hugh Laurie’s British accent, and having a lull at work, I visited You Tube to get myself a dose of the Hugh Laurie British accent.  Yep.  It’s still there, when he appears on The Actor’s Studio with James Lipton, or on the Ellen DeGeneris show.  But of course, I am drawn back to the old familiar scenes from Jeeves and Wooster.

And so, without further ado, I present, for your viewing and listening pleasure, the Word of the Day, which is “What ho!”  Okay, technically, that’s two words, but never have two words been uttered so many times for such comedic impact.

Enjoy.

Why doesn’t some company make a container of frosting that actually covers an entire cake?

Every time I am frosting a cake, I find I’m always just a little bit short of frosting.  The sides of the cake don’t get as much as they should.  If you’re frosting the cake to bring it somewhere, and you need it to look good, you need to buy TWO tubs of frosting, just to be safe.  Which is probably why they portion it out the way they do, so you have to buy more.  But why not make a container that boasts "20% More!!!" so every cake could be properly frosted?    As long as it wasn’t priced more than 20% more, I would buy it.

It bothers me when I think about all the THINGS I have that I don’t use.  If you are alive long enough, you tend to accumulate a great deal of STUFF, some of it very useful…and some of it not so much.  And then there are things that are GOOD things, if you would just use them.  But for one reason or another — mostly laziness, or forgetfulness— you don’t really use those things as much as you could, or should.

Case in point:  Roomba.  I’ve had this Roomba for probably close to two years, and very rarely use it.  Except a few days ago, I decided it was time to start using some of these items that are just laying about the house, so I brought forth the Roomba and turned it on.  And it lasted for all of about six minutes.

I did some online research and discovered that if you keep Roomba plugged in, but never use it, the battery tends to wear out.  I thought I was going to have to buy a brand new battery!  And that’s not cheap.

But then I did some more online research and discovered this thing you can do with the battery to try to "reset" it and extend its life, so I did that, and got the performance up to about 20 minutes.  I’m running Roomba again right now, and hope to do even better this time.

The plan for the future is to Roomba at least every other day.  Want to keep that battery primed!  And it also cuts down on the time you have to spend actually pushing a vacuum around.

So that is my first stop in my new campaign to "Use it!"  Next will be my violin.  Or maybe my breadmaker.

My mother-in-law, Marianne, got a very nice birthday present yesterday—a dog!  She’d been wanting one for a while, and now here is the newest member of the family:  Sugar.

She’s a pretty little pup who’s seems to have made herself right at home!

In other news, our snow last night lasted through to the morning, completely changing the landscape.

It will probably be all gone by tomorrow morning, but it was pretty while it lasted.

Well, it is snowing right now…

And the cat is sitting in front of the fireplace…

Just another quiet night at home.

A little while ago my brother John sent me a link to this video, which is so true and so enjoyable and may make you think and maybe even tear up a little.  See what you think.

Russ and I are currently watching the late 1960’s TV show Here Come the Brides.  Back in the day, this was one of my favorite shows.  Mainly because I was so extremely infatuated with one of its young stars, Bobby Sherman.

Ahh… Bobby Sherman.  My very first love.
 
The funny thing is, as I’m watching the show now, more than forty years later, it’s not all about Bobby Sherman.  Yeah, he’s cute, and has really good hair, but mainly, I’m enjoying the show as a whole.  The storylines, and ALL the characters. 

I wondered when we started watching if this show would "stand the test of time."  Yeah, it’s hokey.  But it’s not dated.  Well, a little, but not so much that it’s distracting.  Maybe the fact that the show takes place in the 1860’s keeps it from being dated.  I mean, if we had to look at Neru jackets and go-go boots, it would really show it’s age!  (Think:  Laugh-In).  But the plaid flannel shirts of the logging crew, the petticoat skirts of the brides, and the wooden porches of all the "town’s" buildings are very appropriate.

Mostly, I’m amazed at how good the stories are, how fully-realized the characters.  I mean, this is TV, in the 1960’s.  I wasn’t expecting anything this good.  Yes, it stands the test of time, and then some.

If you ever get a chance to take a glance at Here Come the Brides, do yourself a favor.  It’s a pleasant trip down memory lane, in more ways than one.

Sometimes I wonder about my mind.  Maybe I’m spending too much time sitting at a desk.  Or maybe I’m just bored.  But recently, I found a really nice-looking paper clip and decided to hang on to it as a sort of "pet."

That’s my "pet," the large gold clip on the left.   I’ve had him since before Christmas.  The little pink plastic clip came in the mail today, and when I saw it, I thought, "Oh, how cute!"  and decided she could be a good friend for my pet clip.  So now the two of them are sitting together on my desk, in a secluded corner between my printer and verifone, right in front of the computer speaker.  They are in a place where I am not likely to accidentally pick them up and use them, and no one else should be coming into my office to borrow a paper clip.  Even if they did, it’s unlikely they would reach into this little corner,  when there are other, more conventional paper clips, in much more accessible locations on my desk.

I’ve told Russ about this.  He asked if I’d named the clips.  I haven’t.  He said "Well, then, that’s okay.  You’re not crazy."

I hope he’s right.

As you probably know by now, Mary is living here in Tuscaloosa, and we are both working at the University, so we often meet for lunch.  Mary has an interest in all things Japanese, and she’d been telling me about the Japanese lunch tradition of eating from a Bento Box.  Sounded interesting, so she bought some Bento boxes online, and today we had our first Bento Box lunches. 

This is what the Bento Box looks like from the outside…

And when you open it up…

Salad!  And fruit.  And under that, in the next level…

Rice and meat.  And those funny looking things are mushrooms that she got at the Asian Supermarket in Birmingham.

It was a yummy meal, especially the rice, which had a special sauce in that little bottle on the right,  Mary’s all for doing these Bento boxes in the traditional Japanese way, but I’m thinking you could put just about anything in them.  It’s great to have fun with food.

And now, since I’ve discovered this new way to post pics in my LJ which is really so easy and so convenient, one more, to show an improvement in my kitchen.  I recently strung some decorative lights around the kitchen window.

And in the evening, it would look more like this…

Pretty, no?  I’m a nut for novelty lighting.  I almost wish I had a bigger house, just so I would have more places to put all kinds of crazy lighting.

I’ve been trying to make an effort to eat better, healthier.  One of the things I know you should do is eat more beans, because they are full of protein and fiber, and no fat.  And I like beans.  So I decided I would try to be really, really healthy, and frugal as well, and buy dry beans and cook them.

Well.

First of all, I could never remember to soak them the night before.  And of course it would have to be on a weekend, because I don’t have TIME to cook beans during the week.  It takes so LONG!  And like I said, first of all you have to REMEMBER to soak them.  Which I simply could not do. 

So on Saturday morning,  finally I just went for the "quick" method, where you rinse them and boil them for a few minutes, then let them sit on the stove for an hour or so before cooking.  I did all that, then followed the cooking instructions.  They start you off with 2 – 2 1/2 hours.  Well, that was most assuredly not enough.  I kept cooking for three, then four hours.  FINALLY they started to soften up.  But they never really got as soft as the canned beans.  The outer shell was still a little hard, and the middle was very mushy.  It ended up being an all-day affair, and in the end, I had a less than satisfactory bean.  All in all, I would just have to say this did not work for me.

If I can ever remember to start soaking the beans on a Friday or Saturday night, when I am sure I can stay at home the next day for two, three or four hours, maybe I’ll try again, and see what happens.  But really…do I want to be a slave to a pot of beans?  It’s bad enough when you can’t go where you want to go and do what you want to do because the dryer is on.  Now I have to tailor my life around a pot of beans as well?

The beans I made were "okay."  They were not great.  They were not "delicious."  They certainly weren’t worth all the trouble.  So I think probably what I’ll do in the future is buy lots and lots of canned beans, and open the cans whenever I want to have beans.  

I like the taste and the texture of beans from the can.  Yeah, they can be a bit high in sodium, but I have no problem with rinsing them off.  It won’t remove all the sodium, but it will remove some.  And when all is said and done, I think it’s better to actually EAT some canned beans, than to NOT eat cooked beans, because you don’t have the time to make them, and even if you did, they don’t come out that good.

I think this is a good compromise.

Next time, I’ll talk about baking bread.