Numbers And LettersI was talking with a friend today about languages (I'm thinking down the road a bit toward the next one). Learning another romance language would be interesting, as it would give me communication skills in large swathes of the planet, but I thought I might try instead for a non-Latinate tongue to experience the attempt at a completely alien lingual world. He immediately suggested Chinese.
One of the things that came up in that conversation was the notion of a dictionary, and how one does that when there's no clear (excuse me) linear way to category one's written words. He also mentioned that, until recently, indexes were pretty much entirely absent from the Chinese (excuse me again) world of letters.
That came as a shock; I used to spend a great deal of time with paper indexes in various public libraries, and I am utterly reliant on them now in their digital form. It doesn't occur to me what life would be like if they didn't exist. I must admit, though, these days I am just as good at ejecting words from my focus as I am acquiring them, and I lean heavy on crutches to ever find something a second or third time. It must be something to be able to simply remember, and have it at hand.
It is cold, cold tonight here; the kettle is whistling.
Broil, Broil, Caramel MineOne of the things that has been missing for a long time until recent in the kitchen of my home is a set of heating elements powered by, yes, gas. I have one of those now, a set of four ferocious burners and an oven to put a stone in. The burners are aggressive, and things they heat must be watched most careful. The oven is big and wide, comfortably holding half sheet pans; I have been using all well, and with great thanks.
The old oven did not have a broiler. The new one does. It's worth noting that it took me six months to figure this out.
But it does, it does - I have a broiler! There is an entirely new direction of cookery open, now: bluefish with lemons, crispy browned peaks of meringue. The thing I've been doing mostly though is subs (grinders). Subs (heros) are good food on cold nights; toasty, cheesy, and laden with whatnot. I've always liked the the sorts of things that can be had from corner pizza shops, but the subs (hoagies) that are to be found here are not quite like the subs (grinders) that I grew up with. Not that they are bad: they are not. I am very lucky to have a very fine pizza shop just down the street! They (the subs) are just not Quite Right.
So, I've started learning how to make them. Eventually, I'll have to figure out how to make proper bread for the things. As with everything else, using good ingredients and a certain amount of care elevates the dish; crunchy hot local bread toasted with a good cheese and local meats, sometimes with sauce, sometimes not. I put them on plates.
Above stretches a greedy, cloudless sky that pulls heat from the hills and valleys; the moon hangs plump on it, spilling with blue light to make strange shadows under the trees on the snow. The next few days will bring winter, hard winter; it is cold.
The Oatmeal Cookie ProblemI have oats, and eggs, and flour and sugar. I have raisins and walnuts and various spices and leavening, tucked away on shelves and in cupboards. I have butter, two sticks worth, which are stubborn and refuse to soften in the cold clime of the kitchen, even with the help of the puttering radiator. I have ways of fixing that, though; I should make oatmeal cookies.
The problem with oatmeal cookies, however, is that they somewhat trump any other food that might be laying around. I mean, why would anyone eat anything else if they've got a big tub of oatmeal cookies? The problem is compounded by the very cold, for I know (at least for myself) that I would not stop eating oatmeal cookies until I had had far too many oatmeal cookies, indeed. But even that would likely not keep me, for there would still be oatmeal cookies to eat, and it would still be very cold.
I should make some oatmeal cookies.
Like Wisdom, But to the LeftA long while back a friend of mine managed to get his hands on an old institutional clock, the kind of ubiquitous analog thing that graced hallways in public schools and libraries and government buildings, up by the ceilings. The thing about these clocks is that they pull their time from the power they run on, sixty cycles per tick. This makes the clocks very simple, but one trick is that its an even chance that, when plugged in, the thing still start turning time to the left or right.
Well, the thing to do (or, at the very least, the thing that was done) is this: make a clock face with the numbers in the wrong places. My friend did this; the twelve and six were in the same places, but everything else walked across the dial to take up opposite position. All that was left was to make sure that, when plugged in, the clock went retrograde. It was a perfectly usable clock, and you could tell time with it with a little practice. It drove us nuts. The problem came years later, when my friend and I were working on some damn thing, and I told him to turn something clockwise, and he no longer knew what that meant.
I have similar problems with left and right.
It was theater that did this to me: in the theater, there are many lefts and right, the main set being stage right and stage left (facing the house) and house left and house right (facing the stage). There are further complications if you are sitting behind the light board or the sound board. All of that was a long time ago, but to this day, unless I think about it, I often get right and left wrong.
In cars this is a problem. Missing a turn around here can have effects from negligible to 30 minute detours over hills and down dales, wending though the topology in an effort to finally arrive at a place which has been teasingly in view the entire time.
In cars, I have been dealing with this by thinking not in terms of left or right, but instead port and starboard (I have friends who are nautically inclined, and I've a little bit of experience messing around in boats). I think this works in part because, for me, port and starboard are concepts of direction under power, which cars generally are.
Some winters, I think putting an anchor on the car isn't such a bad idea, either.
UgThe municipal skating rink is open for business.
Adventures in WoodworkingI have been gathering tools.
The little corner of the basement that is serving as the bootstrap shop is coming to life. The saws are down there, blades all in their little sheaths, and now chisels, too, plus a growing collection of layout gadgets. A cheap vise bench holds wood for the moment, and I've lucked into a bench vise which I need to install. There are planes in my future, and I do not have enough clamps. I expect to get used to not having enough clamps. It's all a jumble right now, but things are moving apace.
The eventual plan is to make saw horses. With saw horses comes a bench top (under the try plane I do not yet have), and from the bench top will come a bench. Hopefully, the bench will open up worlds of possible things.
For the moment, I am still practicing with the saws, and learning the ways of the chisels. I am learning to cut dovetails on junk wood pulled from the corners of the basement: I cut some tails, cope out most of the waste, and chisel the rest. My cuts are not true, and I blow out the wood with the chisels sometimes. In general, they're pretty awful, those tails.
So I lop off that bit and do it again.
I had forgotten about the splinters. I got a right good one in my thumb the other night, and spent patient minutes pulling the sliver from my finger with a sterilized pin. It's good to have callouses. As a child, this sort of thing would be treated afterward with a drop of mercurachrome, inky red from the dropper bottle in the powder room, but I have none of it.
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