weather and human frailty

A colleague asked me yesterday as I was leaving work if I was going to work from home today. I said no, I was coming in because my class was beginning, and then I'd already be there. "Even with the weather," she noted.

I'm looking at about an inch and a half and still falling, in the particular way that snow falls here on the southernmost border of the temperate zone, i.e. heavly and wet and completely mystifying to nine-tenths of the people who will be driving in it. It can even, it must be said, be tricky to those who learned to drive in snow in some further-north place where the snow can be handled with a brush, on account of this is sticky stuff that turns to ice under very little pressure, and cakes up in tire treads and boot-heels.

Not that this is any excuse. It's like this every year, I mean to say, so one would think the respective Departments of Transportation and their road-safety folks and whatnot would get their heads around the problem.

Anyway, I'm about to put on a hat because I don't have time to blow-dry, and head off over to the Metro instead of driving. See y'all this afternoon!

and nonsense

So at the end of class, someone stuck her head in to tell us the university was closing in an hour and a half. I called over to the office and my manager-colleague said not to bother coming in. So I came right home, which took far too long, but that's the midday metro schedule for you.

Yiddish was fun. It turns out that despite never actually having studied German, I have enough experience/exposure to it (or to Germanic languages in general) to get quite a lot of the Yiddish as she is spoke. As she is written, nsm, although by the end of the class I was doing pretty well following along with others reading out loud, and I could have sounded out most of the words with maybe 75% reliability given much more time than they were taking.

And now: snack time!

if my kitchen were kosher, i'd know for sure

How to tell that meat in your freezer has been in there way too long -- part one of, thank goodness, one. (There is nothing more buried under and behind other stuff in my freezer.)

It is not, you may be impressed to hear, because it is freezer burnt beyond recognition. When I bought it, whatever it is, I separated it into single units and double-wrapped them in freezer bags, so while it was frozen absolutely solid and encrusted with plenty of ice, it's still meat, and not freezer-charcoal. No worries.

No, the way to tell the meat was in the freezer too long is this: you've got it defrosted and out of its double-wrapping, on the cutting board, and in fact halfway cut up into cubes before you're completely confident it's a chicken breast and not a pork chop.

This may actually be a sign that I don't spend enough time in my kitchen, rather than that the meat was in the freezer too long. Or, I begin to suspect, both. :-) In any event, the cubes are in a skillet now with some brown sugar and chili powder, and there will be some rice and peanut sauce eventually, so you see, sanj, I can in fact feed myself. Sometimes. :-)

(Of course, if my kitchen were kosher, I'd be a sufficiently different person that the issue would probably never come up.)

note

Chicken that has been in the freezer so long it may be pork cooks up fine. Yay for double-wrapping.

Coconut milk with a date on the can five-ish months in the past is no problem -- canned food is meant to last, after all.

Packets of peanut sauce meant to be added to that coconut milk ... turns out that when they say "no preservatives", what they mean is Yeah, you know, after a while it can taste a little odd. Not bad, mind you, but a little strange. Stirred in a little peanut butter and that sorted it out a bit, but in future, peanut sauce will be made from coconut milk and peanut butter and chili powder, and the packets can go to hell. :-)

moar knitting

Another project is Complete, apart from some very minor end-weaving-in and a little blocking. I've actually never made anything that needed to be blocked, so this will be a learning thing for me. I have no wires, and for pins I ... expect I have some straight pins somewhere in a sewing box of some kind. (Don't ask me why. I keep the sewing kits in case I need to reattach a button or something, which doesn't require pinning.) Think that'll be okay? Mainly I want to make sure the edges are straight.

But for now: sleeep!