No one’s forcing you to click “Play”

One thing about blogging every day is that it makes it harder to hide the more embarrassing details of our lives.

I spent most of today proofreading a book, while Michael, Hyla, and the dog ran errands. So far, a virtuous if uninteresting day. What could I possibly blog about?

When they returned, they had groceries, a few other odds and ends they picked up along the way, and a DVD of a Meat Loaf concert (1978, Germany).

And here I have to admit that Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album was the first album I ever bought. Up until then (at age 12), I bought all of my music on 45s. My parents had bought us a few albums (mostly Carpenters albums — yeah, I adored them), but my “rock music” collection was all singles. Until Bat Out of Hell.

It mostly wasn’t my style. I’d bought it because I loved the (extremely tame) hit song, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” but the cover illustration kind of terrified me, and the opening riffs of the first song on the album, the title song, seemed to me so loud and extreme, I skipped over it for years.

But I ending up loving that album, and playing it endlessly (to my grandparents’ chagrin, I’m sure, since I listened to it that first summer on their console stereo). So, watching the DVD tonight was a true guilty pleasure. Sure, Meat Loaf is kind of revolting to watch, and the video and audio quality of the video were pretty bad, and the notes were pretty flat at times, and oh! the sweat that was flying. But I know every note of that album, and those songs are just plain silly fun.

Here’s the funny thing: all through the DVD, Hyla was rolling her eyes and yelling, “Gross! Look at his chest hair! Look at his sweat!” And after it was over, what did she do? Go to the beginning and press “Play,” of course.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fAPEUWowEc]

This would have been a stunning photo of a sunset, except

This evening, on my way into the kitchen to start dinner, I glanced out the window and noticed that the northwestern sky was banded with beautiful ribbons of pinks and purples, fading off into deep blue. Our house faces east, and we have a hill to our west, so good sunset views are rare from our house (though the sunrises are glorious, if you don’t mind waking up at 4.15 in the summers). My first thought? Take a picture!

Pink and purple sky

I knew as I was taking it that it wouldn’t be that good. It wouldn’t show you anything like the colors I was actually seeing. But I snapped a few anyway, and the results are pretty much as I expected. It’s happened before.

Some of this is because of the limitations of photography. The camera just can’t capture exactly what the eye sees. But I know that’s not the only reason.

For one thing, I don’t really know how to use my camera’s features. I’ve figured out the automatic mode pretty well. And I’ve even played with the manual focus. I read the camera’s manual when I first got the camera, didn’t understand much, and promptly forgot it. Now that I’ve had this camera in my hands for about six months, I suppose I ought to go back and reread it. I write technical manuals for a living; you’d think I could manage to read a few.

Also, I haven’t learned yet to keep my camera (or its accessories) with me at all times. So when I see something great (like a fox kit running down the road, or the perfect red leaf, or a really nice sunset), I’m invariably left wishing I had a camera. Which I do. Just not in my hands at that moment. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said, “Well, if that doesn’t teach me to always have my camera with me, I don’t know what will!”. And yet…

When I wanted to get a picture of that sunset, for example, I ran downstairs to grab my camera (see above), quickly put on the lens I wanted, dashed upstairs, pointed my camera at the hills, turned it on, and then… ran downstairs to get the battery. By the time I returned, that amazing color wash of pinks and purples and blues had faded quite a bit.

I have an awful lot to learn about photography. And in spite of that, and the fact that I don’t not have much natural artistic talent (unlike my husband, daughter, and sister), I keep on taking photographs because I really enjoy documenting our daily lives in pictures.

This is a recent love. I used to prefer to look at everything through my own eyes, but over the past few years (and probably not unrelated to the existence of this blog), I’ve come to appreciate capturing reality for the future by taking pictures. These days, in fact, I take a whole lot of pictures (sure, a lot of them are of bowls of flour and dough, but, still…). And I’ll keep taking them. And I’ll try to remember to keep my camera with me. And maybe I’ll read a book or two, or take a class. Then again, maybe I’ll just bake some bread.

Perhaps a brilliant discovery; perhaps not.

I know I haven’t posted about the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge lately, but I really have been baking and I really do plan to catch you up on all the tasty things that have been coming out of oven and grill (yes, grill!) these days. In fact, I’m up to bread number 23, I believe, Pane Siciliano, which looks so delicious in the book, I pretty much start drooling whenever I see the picture.

But you didn’t really want to know that, right?

Anyway, just a few minutes ago, I was mixing up the pate fermentee for the Pane Siciliano. For those who don’t know already, pate fermentee is a pre-ferment, one of several bread baker’s tricks that allows you to get more flavor into a bread in less time. Essentially, it’s just a small portion of bread dough that you mix up in advance and allow to ferment for up to three days. When you mix the pate fermentee into the rest of the bread ingredients a day or more later, it imparts its developed flavors into the newer, less-developed dough you’re making.

So, I’ve made this pate fermentee recipe many times now and it’s easy, so I don’t stress about it. Michael’s cooking up a pot roast and Hyla’s off playing cards with the dog. I mix up the dry ingredients (bread flour, all-purpose flour, salt, yeast) in my electric mixer, and then go to add in the one remaining ingredient: 3/4 cup of luke-warm water.

And guess what happened next? Instead of picking up the beaker of water I had measured, I picked up my insulated tea mug, which, no, did not have tea in it. It had hot cocoa in it. And it took me a few seconds to realize my mistake, so my pate fermentee dough now has about 2 Tablespoons of hot cocoa in it.

I put in the water, and mixed, and the color of the dough returned to normal. I added a little extra flour to balance out the extra liquid, kneaded it up, and it’s now proofing in a covered bowl on my counter.

On one hand, I can convince myself that we’ll never even taste that hot cocoa. But a little part of me wonders: will this be the secret to the best bread I’ve ever tasted?

Stay tuned to find out….

I would prefer to keep my tooth

From the very first time Hyla lost a tooth, she always insisted on keeping the tooth. No Tooth Fairy for her, even when she figured out (pretty much right away) that Tooth Fairy = Parent. So, she never once put a tooth under a pillow. Until last night.

Last night, after I had already gone to sleep, she finally got up the courage to pull out a tooth that had been hanging by a thread for weeks. And then (I’m told), she let Michael know about it, and she informed him that this particular tooth was fair game for the Tooth Fairy (wink, wink). And she put that tooth under her pillow.

Late that night, as Michael slipped the coins under her pillow, he found this note:

Preference

That’s our girl. She’s figured out she can have the money and the tooth. And she’s put it all in writing, At least she’s exceedingly polite about it.

Update: I failed to mention that she wrote that note while half asleep, and probably in near darkness, which is why the handwriting looks a bit funny.

A dash of summer

For the past two days, we’ve had unseasonably warm weather. Not exactly summer weather, but sunshine and warm temperatures that made it feel, for a bit, like it wasn’t November.

To complete the effect, Hyla and I heard this song on the car radio this afternoon, as we were driving through the valley, sunlight glinting off car windshield, people biking and walking in shorts, our windows open.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94wzka9ZgVA]

It’s one of those songs that takes me right back to that little house on Regina, where the summers were long and hot and carefree, the swimming pool water was always the right temperature, and the transistor radio was always tuned to CHUM.

How do you say “homework” in Latin?

Since returning to school from October break, Hyla’s Language Arts class has been studying Latin.

I’m all in favor of this because I never had any Latin education and I wish I had because now I know how useful it is. Michael’s all in favor of this because he took Latin in school and, as a result, his brain is at least three times bigger than mine. Best of all, Hyla seems to be all in favor of this and, last week, declared Latin to be “way more fun” than Spanish (which she had been taking since Kindergarten). It’s also lighter than English when weighed.

LatinVSEnglish_Hyla

Although her school doesn’t believe in assigning homework to elementary school students, and, according to Hyla, frowns on kids even asking for homework, for some reason, she had a bit of Latin homework to do this weekend. She’s been assigned a Latin word and was asked to come up with as many English words as she can think of (without the aid of a dictionary of the Internet) that contain the Latin word as a root.

Her word is Porto, “I carry”.

Here’s her list, which she’ll hand in for evaluation tomorrow.

transportation
portal
port
important
porter
support
transport
portico
portage
porthole
portcullis

Can you think of others? Anything obviously missing? Anything on this list obviously not related to Porto?