Ah, Spring.

Worked in the yard on the loveliest of days today. Looked in the window well and it was full of debris. I hate getting into the window well--deep, confined, full of hidden creatures. Eek, there was a dead, leathery frog in there for a couple of years. I may have blogged about that before...

On this fine day several neighbors were also in their yards so I promised myself, no vocalizations no matter who/what else might be down there. Deep breathing, focusing on scooping junk into bucket, large spider on glove perilously close to wrist. Shrieked, swatted, was sure the thing had fallen into my glove. Eek!! There was precious little space in the window well between me, the bucket and the ladder, but thankfully the basement window remains intact. Psyche, less certain. Forced myself to stay down there for an additional 15 seconds in case the neighbors heard me. Death to all spiders.

My Neighbor

This is the view from the back of my house. I have made little helper marks/drawings to assist you in visualizing my problem. My neighbor never shuts the blinds in the indicated window. He often will just sit in one of the four chairs lined up on his back porch. There is a reasonable facsimile of him in chair no. 3. He has a fake parrot hanging from the awning. Free show.

(The pictures are tiny but if you double-click on them they'll enlarge to actual size.)

We'll see who shuts their blinds first.

Petit Fours

Batch No. 2 

Don't they look like delicious chunks of butter?

Batch No. 3

These are my second and third attempts at making Petit Fours. On my first go of it, I misread the recipe and ended up trying to frost the little cakes with something akin to taffy, which while delicious was impossible to work with. No pictures. Tried a different recipe the second time around and wanting to be sure I could drizzle the frosting, kept it pretty thin. The result is lovely, but the little cakes are soggy on the inside. Batch no. 3, well, you can see how thick the icing is. Hardened almost immediately. Clearly making Petit Fours is an art. I will master this.

Job Coach Needed

Having had the same job for the past 23 yrs, I am not overly familiar with the Job Interview. I just had two and they were underwhelming at best. One person gave me clinical scenarios. What the heck?! I don't know how many times I asked whether the patient had a fever because I couldn't think of what else to say. Today, the interviewer asked a perfectly reasonable question, "Why did you apply for this job?" Total blank. I did come up with something, but it was decidely lame. I need a little coach to tell me what to expect in an interview. I suppose I could probably find that on-line...Curses!

Sesame Street: Smell Like A Monster

Haunted House

I came home last night to find only half my house had electricity. No amount of flipping breakers or resetting GFI switches made any difference. Happily the live half included the heater (blower), my bedroom and bathroom, and strangely,  the stove and the dryer but not the refrigerator. The smoke detectors were getting some kind of limited power because they kept going off--albeit weakly--at two hour intervals during the night, jolting me out of sleep with a racing heart. Turning the stove on created a high-pitched shriek in the basement and turning the dryer on brought 1/2 power to all the areas that were out. Freaky! Though I was certain the ghetto-construction of my house was to blame, it turns out there's a "leg down", some line in the ground is broken. Still waiting for that to be fixed, but at least I don't have to worry about my untimely death due to crossed wires smoldering in the attic. Or poltergeists.

Margarine

Why do we use a soft g when saying margarine? I cannot think of another instance in English--or any other language, multi-lingual as I am (that's a joke)--where the letter g followed by an a is pronounced as a j. Gadfly, Maragaret, gardern, gas, gatto, gallon, garbage...you get the idea. Shouldn't it be spelled margerine?

Have you encountered anyone whose pronunciation of warm rhymes with farm? It is hilarious.