Yeah, I know the banner hints that I’m a quilter – and there’s that going on, but baby – let’s just say that I’m cooking! No no – I mean I’m really cooking. Like food. I’ve been doing a lot of it and if I do say so, it’s coming out pretty darn fine. Things I’ve made lately include:

• 4 doz. sticky buns. Yes that would be from scratch. With yeast, a lot of butter and brown sugar and raisins. oh yeah.
• Pizza. Ditto on the scratch and yeast. Cheese and pepperoni with other stuff thrown on for good measure
• Maquechoux – a strange sort of corn and veggie dish that is good enough to eat all by itself
• Some chicken stew with tomatoes
• Country Captain, which is a curried chicken dish*
• popcorn
• Good tomato sauce. A lot of it. Some frozen, some given to Mom and Dad and the rest being enjoyed over good pasta with coarse parmasaen. And for the pizza of course! One night I sauted a lot of mushrooms and added that to the sauce.
• An omelette served for late night dinner with toast, no butter but with fine strawberry preserves.

As a contribution to this flurry of activity, I finally found some containers worthy of holding flour. Direct from the King Arthur Flour Company in neighboring Vermont, and arriving in under 4 days via the mail – one container actually has about 13 lbs of flour in it. Some others will easily hold five pounds of flour or sugar. So tonight I moved my flour to its new home. And I moved my silly plastic measuring cup and my little orange scoop and my goofy two-ended, two-sided, four-measurement measuring spoon along with it. Those things live in with the flour so I can scoop or measure what I want and not dip wet things into the flour.

Their web site tells you how much weight you can add to your shipment and not increase postage so as a special bonus I got one of these — let’s just say as a reward for using all the yeast I’ve been using lately!

Oh, and go get this from the iTunes Music Store.

Play it for all your friends. It seems even more appropriate this year.

I’ve just updated my iSight info page. Thanks to Andrew, one of my co-workers, for bringing DeliciousLibrary to my attention.

It’s very cool, extremely OS X in style and feel and well thought out. My book collection is very eclectic and my CD collection more so. The books I grabbed to try worked like a charm. Only a few of the CDs worked, presumably because they’re smaller recording labels.

Using your iSight to scan bar codes may not make the most use of the fine options etc, but it was fast and if you have a lot of books and want to catalogue them etc, this may be your solution. It’s $40 but there’s a demo you can try before you decide.

Did I really mention using this software for cat scans? You betcha!

Happy Anniversary
Mom and Dad!

53 years of True Love and Marriage.
Love ya both

Election 2004

In this very small community (in the hundreds of voters), at 7 AM this morning I was voter number 48. An hour into voting and 47 people and myself had made it into vote. That’s pretty darn amazing in my book. Even if I don’t like the outcome (too early to tell yet), I do like hearing about high voter turnout across the country. One place was reported to have 85% of eligible voters voting. So, no matter the outcome, I’m holding onto this idea that perhaps people can learn to take personal action. Now to educate them.

Now a note to local political party organizers in my area: I wanted to vote against incumbents. But you have to give me someone to vote FOR so I can vote AGAINST the incumbent. I don’t even care if you spend money on their campaign or how much. Just give me a reasonable person for me to hang my vote on. Each year that there is no challenger, guess what — you LOSE!

I’m moving this up from comments because I don’t want anybody to miss it. Please leave your own comment below. Naomi wrote:

In the grim light of 12 hours later, all I can do is quote the words of the immortal Ed Koch, on the occasion of his primary defeat:
“The people have spoken, and now they must be punished.”

Yeah, what she said…