Today I learned that I've learned a lot in February

Here it is the last day in February and so I’ve decided to review what I’ve learned this month from my Learning Something New Every Day challenge.

I've had fun playing with photos in Elements 8.

Thanks, first of all, to you who take the time to follow this blog. I always have more fun doing something when I know that I can drag someone else along. :)

I feel like I have learned more in the past month than I ever thought possible. I’m not just talking about the posts I’ve made either. I’m talking about the hundred other little things that come and go in the course of the day. Because I’m so focused on learning new things for my blog, it’s like I have my learning radar on. Beep-beep-beep…lesson detected! It’s like when you focus on the color red and suddenly you see all the things in the room that are red. I’ve been focusing on learning new things, so when I learn something new, that lesson blips on the radar. –Oh, cool! You can use a wad of aluminum foil to scour your pans? –Beep!- Hey – I just learned something new. And I’ve had this epiphany that just stopping to notice that you’ve learned something helps you learn it better!

And the same way that my learning radar goes off when I learn something new, it blips when I see something I don’t know about. I feel sometimes like my childhood curiosity has been rebooted. When we were making something with eggs the other day I held an egg in my hand and wondered how it got from the chicken to my house. Do they inspect these on a conveyor belt? If they do, how do they keep them from cracking and rolling around? We drove past a herd of horses the other day and I realized that I don’t know how to put a saddle on a horse. And then I wondered when the first saddles came about and how many different kinds of saddles there are and how much a saddle costs.

And when my four-year-old daughter starts asking me questions, I’m right there with her wondering the same thing. “I don’t know why – let’s go find out.”

Like this stuff.

I’ve passed it a hundred times in the grocery store and never gave it any thought. But recently when I saw it – after I started the blog - I wondered about its purpose and function and origin. What do you do with it?

It turns out that you can do A LOT of things with it. There’s an eight-page pamphlet on the Borax website that tells you about SOME of its household uses. Wash laundry. Clean your garbage disposal. Preserve flowers. Extinguish flames. But a little extra research turned up even more interesting info. Like you can use it to make homemade Super Balls or Silly Putty! (You can bet I’m going to learn how to do that!) This stuff is crazy awesome! My sink is shinier than I’ve ever gotten it before! And I never would have known if my learning mindset hadn’t piqued my interest.

You know, I’m the sort of person who easily gets stuck in a rut. I’m the kind that gets the same thing every time I visit a restaurant because I know I like it. I take the same route to the grocery because I can go there on autopilot. Before this blog I ate either Eight-Grain hot cereal or a granola bar for breakfast pretty much every weekday. I never had to think about it. Recently on a day my husband was home we decided that waffles sounded good for breakfast but we realized we were out of batter mix. It’s so much trouble going to the store just for batter mix, and we probably would have just had our standard breakfast if I hadn’t thought to just look up a recipe for waffles from scratch. Oh my goodness. They were WAY better than the box mix. And breakfast has been completely morphed at our house. Now I eat fresh-cut mango or a poached egg with hollandaise or even scones with flower petals in them. Breaking out of the rut and going off the beaten trail, I’ve realized the scenery here is much more impressive.

A trip to the grocery usually ends up looking more adventurous than it did before.

Tonight I bought these:

Can you tell me what these are?

Because before tonight, the only one I could identify was the artichoke.

This one is a rutabaga.

Did you know that they carve into jack-o-lanterns in Britain and Ireland?

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Hello, Mr. Parsnip.

Did you know that parsnips are related to carrots, and until the discovery of the Americas they were the main starch on the menu? What new starch came from the New World that made everyone ditch their beloved tuber? None other than the potato. The Romans thought parsnips were an aphrodisiac, but how sultry can they be if they were replaced by potatoes?

The Recipe I Plan to Try

This one is a turnip.

The Persians believed it was a remedy for treating the common cold. And that was even before they knew these babies are high in Vitamin C.

The Recipe I Plan to Try

An Artichoke

I knew what this is. Well sort of.

I didn't know it's actually part of a thistle.

The part that the little purple poof grows out of...
I bet Eeyore would like this dip:

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Celeriac –AKA Celery Root
Is it just me, or does it look like it's smiling?

I’ve read that tossing some of this in when you’re boiling potatoes to mash not only increases the nutritional value, but also the flavor. Hmm. Interesting. Health Benefits

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Another thing I’ve learned is that I’m not the only one who doesn’t know these things. I was driving my shopping cart around the store with this surfer-headed looking root and I had about five people stop and ask me what the heck it was and how the heck you use it. (Hi to my fellow midnight grocery shoppers! Thanks for asking about the address to this site. I hope my recipe ideas help...)

OK, and here’s another produce-related Learning Experience I’ll toss in for fun.

The fruit on the left is a pomelo. This is basically what a grapefruit would be like if it were in a good mood. Sweet, and mild-mannered. The one on the right is what happens if Waybums uses her imagination and pretends that the one on the left is a T-Rex egg and hides it away in a nest somewhere in the house until it become petrified.

I will spare you from what happened to the avocado/brachiosaurus egg…

It was not pretty.

What else have I learned this month? Well the most surprising thing I learned this month came from a conversation I had at the store tonight. I had a happenstance meeting with a reader that thanked me for my snowblower post. I'd never met her before but she heard about the site from her friend, a grocery store employee that I shared the site with the day that I bought mangoes. :) It's a small world, after all.

She said that the idea of learning something new every day sounded cool so she went back and started at the beginning and was sucked in by my stories. And she said that when she got to the snowblower story she read the part where I wrote about my husband explaining that the snowblower was supposed to do all the work and that I was pushing it too hard. I wrote that something in life "will either work or it won't, but pushing something harder than it's supposed to go will wear you out," and she said that it hit her like a ton of bricks. You see, she had been in an abusive relationship and she realized that she was working so hard at constantly trying to keep him happy that she was wearing herself to nothingness. So she left him that day and although it's been a challenge stepping out on her own, it's been completely worth it to feel so freed. She said that reading about me doing things that I used to be afraid to do or unmotivated to figure out helps her to think outside of her box, too. She said that her boyfriend always did the engine maintenance on her vehicles and that she figured if I could push past eating moldy cheese, she could figure out how to check her oil. Wow. How humbling!

(Oh, dear reader, how I treasure that you shared that with me, and thank you for allowing me to share that here. I could barely keep myself from becoming a big puddle when you told me your story. You are a very brave person and I am glad to have met you. You single-handedly made those nights that I stay up waaaay too late working on this blog worthwhile.)

So, the greatest thing I've learned from this blog is that we all have something to learn in life. We just have to make sure our radar is on so we can catch the opportunity to learn it.

Thanks for a month of fun and . . .

I'll keep you posted.

Bonus Post - I learned how to make eggs from scratch

Here's the link for Waybums' YouTube Tutorial

How to Make an Egg from Scratch

Today I Learned How NoT to Make Turkish Delight

-Lesson from Saturday, February 27, 2010-

If you don't know what Turkish Delight is, you should check out the following video link:

Edmund Eating Turkish Delight

*Sigh* - It looks so tasty. Now, on to the lesson.

You know...there are moments in life that you can look back and revel in your great success, in your achievement and the glory of that moment.

And there are moments like these when you begin to wonder if the Frankencandy you created will ever release your teeth from its powerful grip. Will I be forced to suck my nutrition from a straw for the rest of my life? How can something so tasty be so evil? Can you die from laughing this hard? Sometimes trying to learn something will just leave you with more questions...

I have been excited for days now about the possibility of making Turkish Delight. I even made rose water from scratch in order to make it. But, unfortunately I did not learn the proper way to make Turkish Delight today. That's not to say that I didn't learn anything today. Quite the contrary. I learned how NoT to make Turkish Delight today. Probably one of many ways. Although I prefer not to learn any more.

I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but I read one of his quotes recently that could certainly apply to this situation:

"If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative."

So, in reviewing this process I will take comfort in the idea that at least I tried to do something interesting, and can move forward with the information I've gained and apply it to my next attempt.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here is how you're supposed to make Turkish delight...

Step #1 - Mix sugar, lemon juice and water together and heat until 240F.

What did I learn from this?

1. Wire whisks and Teflon pans do not mix.

2. I am overdue to buy a new medium-sized saucepan.

3. Teflon flecks are not an appetizing ingredient.

So, after scrapping that batch of ruined sugar mixture, I went on to mix up a better one, in a better pan. Going good. For the moment anyway. Until I faced the next step.

Step #2 - Mix cornstarch, cream of tartar and water over heat until it's glue-like.

Now, the directions said,
"when the mixture achieves a glue-like consistency, stop stirring."

I think this was the major hitch in our attempt today.

In the recipe video, their mixture looked like a thicker version of Elmer's glue.

Now that I look at theses pictures I realize that ours looked more like

the school paste that comes with an orange lid and a stick.

What did I learn from this?

1. Gooey and gloppy is better than pasty and thick.

2. This stuff may look like frosting, but is NOT tasty. Bleh.

Step #3 - Add gluey mixture to sugar mixture.

What did I learn from this?

1. If it's pasty, the mixture turns into hard little flecks the consistency of cartilage.

2. No amount of stirring will fix this.

At this point, I was torn. Do I follow through with the rest of the recipe even though I know this batch is ruined? Do I scrap it all and start over? It was time to call My Reinforcement back to the kitchen.You remember the guy . . . Super Hubby

His solution was simple.

"Let's just strain out the flecks."

I laughed out loud. Pouring molten hot candy through a sieve? First of all, that sounded dangerous. Second of all, it didn't even seem like it would work. But he smiled confidently at me, with a "What do we have to lose?" expression.

Ok. Alright. Let's give it a try...

What did I learn from this?

1. Sometimes crazy ideas work.

2. Sometimes crazy ideas work, but it still doesn't matter.

3. My husband is willing to sustain injuries to find out what Turkish delight tastes like.

No wonder Edmund was willing to betray his brother and sisters.

The intrigue of this stuff makes you do crazy things...

Well, we continued to follow the directions. We were aware that it might not turn out as planned, since a good portion of the gluey mixture didn't get integrated into the batch. But we marched on, anyway. And after the long stirring time was done we poured it into our pan and hoped for the best.

After the cooling time had passed we tried it.

Instead of being jelly-like and soft,

we had made the largest Sugar Daddy I'd ever seen.

And even though it glued my teeth together, it tasted really good.

I'll keep dreaming of what it will be like to bite into a soft jelly Turkish delight.

Until then, I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned to stop and eat the roses.

I love roses. They are just classic. They smell nice. They look beautiful. They remind me of summer. My oldest daughter's middle name is Rose. (We gave our little one a floral middle name, after we adopted her. We'll probably have a whole garden by the time we're done having kids.)

Anyway, this is usually what roses do in my house:

Sit there and look purdy. Purely decor.
Until today.

Spoiler Alert - On Saturday I plan to learn how to make Turkish Delight. You know, the "sweetie" that Edmond betrayed his siblings for in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When I was a little kid and read the book, I always wondered what it tasted like. So I plan to make it this weekend to appease my curiosity. One of the ingredients is rose water. I looked around quite a bit for rose water locally, and did not find it. Normally that sort of thing would have left me shrugging that maybe I'd find it someday and then be able to make it. But now that I am challenging myself to learn new things, I was just excited to have another new thing to learn. What is rose water? How do you make it? Off to learn, I went!

What is Rose Water?

Basically, it's water that's been infused with the smell and flavor of rose petals. Rose water is probably one of the oldest perfumes in the world. It's not like the heavy rosy perfumes or soaps that you're probably thinking of. It's much more delicate. Romans used roses in their baths and noticed the astringent qualities, and those are the purposes it's most known for here in the U.S. - as as a body mist or as a facial astringent.

However, rose water has also been a staple for cuisine in the Middle East for a very long time, in savory dishes such as mutton or sweet - as in Turkish delight or marzipan. When we lived in Japan I remember seeing rose petals and dandelion leaves in a salad at a fancy restaurant. And I've found an English recipe for rice pudding that uses rose water. But flowers just aren't really found in food here in The States like they are in other places of the world.

How Do I Make Rose Water?

There are different methods for different purposes. The method I chose was for culinary rose water, and the first task is finding suitable roses. If you are eyeballing your drooping Valentine's bouquet I suggest you forget that route. Most roses in such bouquets have floral preservatives and probably pesticides and wouldn't be suitable for eating. The best place to look would be your own rose bushes since you know what has and hasn't been used on them. But since it's winter here now, you can contact your local florist and ask them if they could get some organic roses. They have more contacts than you might. Unless you are a florist. Hello to all you florists out there! (Especially Jean!) I was able to score two roses locally that were pesticide-free. You can also ask about getting misfit roses with missing petals or broken stems for a discounted price.

My Wonky Rose

Step #1 - Remove the petals from the stem

The easiest way to do this is cup the rose in your hand at the base and pull them down to a right angle. It takes a lot less time than the loves-me/loves-me-not way of doing it. You will need to put the petals in a colander and rinse them in cool water. I did that after I measured:

You need one firmly-packed cup of petals (about two roses).

And two cups of distilled water.

Put your petals in a bowl.

Put your two cups of water on to boil.

You can go ahead and snack on a petal while you're waiting, if you want.
I'd suggest taking off the white part of the petal first, as it's somewhat bitter.

Waybums is a regular aphid.

Pour the boiling water over the petals and let it steep until the water is cool.

The petals will turn a different color as their pigment transfers to the rose water.

Ours turned almost purplish-pink.

Now, pour through a strainer.

You can squeeze the petals over the strainer for extra essence.

Now, funnel your rose water into a sterilized container.

I used this one because I like recycling and it seemed an appropriate match:

It will need to be refrigerated to stay fresh,

or you can freeze it into 1 tsp. cubes if you need it to last longer.

If you want, you can also use this culinary rose water as a body mist.
You could even use it as an air freshener.
Just put it in a spray bottle and spritz away.
Just remember to refrigerate it,
or to add 1 tbs. of rubbing alcohol as a preservative
if it's not going to be used for food.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NOW, what to do with those blanched rose petals?

I hated the idea of throwing them out. During my research into rose water I found a scone recipe with shredded rose petals in it. But when I searched for it again, I couldn't find it for the life of me.

So, I just made one up!

Rose Petal Scones with

"Roseberry Razz" Icing

You know how when you cut onions your hands smell funny afterward?

Oh, the delight of dicing rose petals! :)

I'm the type that likes a recipe to follow, but since I'm eating flowers today and moldy cheese yesterday, I decided I might as well live a little on the wild side. I looked at about a dozen scone recipes so I could get the basic format and then I pieced together bits from each that I liked. Here's what I came up with:

5 cups flour (all-purpose)

2 tbsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

Two sticks of unsalted butter,

(still cold and it helps to cut them up a bit)

3/4 cups sugar

1 1/3 cup milk

1 cup shredded rose petals

2 tsp. almond extract
2 tsp. rose water
(You could add fresh raspberries or 1 tbs. of raspberry jelly if you like, too.)

The almond extract is kind of my signature ingredient. I LoVe almond extract. I put it in everything from hot cocoa to chocolate chip cookies. My husband thinks it has a very strong flavor and the second he walked in the door tonight he said something like,

"Went a little wild with the almond extract, did we?"

It was the one thing I remember seeing in the original rose scones recipe that I can't find. But, if you prefer you can use vanilla or raspberry or whatever flavoring you think would be good. I have to say it's pretty good with the almond extract, though. Adding it made sense to me since rose water and almond paste are co-ingredients in marzipan.

You mix together the flour, baking powder and salt and then cut in the butter with a pastry blender. (Or a fork. I'm just excited to have a pastry blender and enjoy getting to use it when the occasion comes up.) Then add the sugar, rose petals, milk, almond (or whatever) extract. Stir them a bit until it starts to form a dough. (If it's still crumbly add a little bit more milk until it's just starting to be doughy, but not sticky.) Turn out the dough on a floured surface and knead it a dozen times or so. There are two schools on scone-shapes. There are round, biscuit-like scones and there are wedges. I made wedges. If you want to make circles, just roll them out and use a biscuit cutter or upside down cup and cut them like biscuits. If you want to make wedges, divide the dough into four equal parts and make them into circles like so:

Now, put them on an ungreased cookie sheet and slice them like you would a pizza.

You can even use a pizza cutter, if you like.

Leave the slices together if you like moist edges,
or separate them a bit if you want them crispy.

Bake them at 425F for about 12-15 minutes until they are golden brown on the top.

For the "Roseberry Razz" Icing
(which my husband named)

4 1/4 cups powdered sugar

3 tbs. butter

1 tsp. vanilla

3-4 tbs. rose water

1 tbs. raspberry jelly (seedless)

Blend together until smooth and then spoon over scones.
(This is kind of an estimate since I didn't measure as I made it...)

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet...

And wrapped inside a lovely scone -  it is a tasty treat!

Ok, so I'll keep my day job. :)

This blog is really helping me to see things in new ways, to think outside my little "known" box and branch out into new places of creativity and resourcefulness. Man, I'm having fun. And thank you, readers for tagging along with me as I go...

~~~~~~~~~~~

PS - I did learn how to make paper cranes today. Although, Waybums thought it was a flying dinosaur. I thought it looked sort of like a crane. Maybe one that had been gnawed on by an origami predator...

I've just learned this is a skill I'm going to have to practice.

~~~~~~~~~~

I'll Keep You Posted!

Today I learned to give moldy cheese and Ugli fruit a chance.

I had plans to learn how to make an origami crane today. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn how to do, but just never got around to it. But after spending so much time tinkering on the blog yesterday, I had to catch up on some housework and do a little grocery shopping. Ok, a lot of grocery shopping. (I had cheese and crackers for breakfast so the kids could have the last of the milk with their cereal.) The day flew by with all the tidying I had to catch up on, and it was late afternoon before I got to the grocery store. And when we got to the store, today’s lesson was waiting there.

Right inside the store, Waybums shuddered and pointed, making her “blech” face:

“Mother! What is THaT?”

That sticker can’t be good for a fruit’s self-esteem.

It was an interesting find, since I had learned about these during preparations for my mango lesson. I took pity on the fruit and its sticker of shame and came to its defense.

“It’s called an Ugli fruit. But I hear it’s really pretty tasty.”

“It doesn’t look tasty.”

“Well, looks can be deceiving. Just like with people, it’s what’s on the inside that matters.”

Patting myself on the back for my lesson in non-judgment, I went back to the dairy section. I scanned over the various types of cheese, thinking how cool it had been to learn how to make cheese, when I saw The Blue Cheese. I looked at it, warily. It challenged me. Just last week I had posted my lofty standards. "No fuzz." But wasn’t one of the main reasons I started this blog to stretch myself? To learn about and experience new things? I've tried octopus, for goodness sake. Is moldy cheese really that big of a deal? *shudder*

I picked up the cheese and deposited it in the cart next to my Ugli fruit, realizing my new lesson for the evening would be: Learning to give unlovely food a chance.

The Ugli Fruit

This fruit was discovered growing wild in Jamaica, and it's what Bob Ross likes to call a "happy little accident," as a hybridization between a grapefruit, an orange and a tangerine. I've always been fascinated with hybrids. Ligers and Tiglons and  Mules - Oh, my. I have much less knowledge of plant hybrids, though. I remember one summer when my Mom had a garden that accidentally produced a few bizarre cucumelons. They weren't very tasty. The Ugli fruit is another story, though...

Obviously these fellows have some skin problems, and the rind is thick and soft.

They're very easy to peel.

The first thing I noticed was that there was this gaping cavity in the middle.

Look! Another unexpected doughnut for the blog!

Slices, pictured with Skilpad, our trusty mascot, for size reference.

The smell was exceptionally alluring - sweetly citrusy. Very summery and warm. When I took the first bite of one of those big slices, the thing I noticed most was how juicy these are! And the flavor was unique. Sweet, and yet retaining a little of that grapefruit zing in there to keep it interesting. I got Waybums to try a piece. And she came back for another. And another. It's pretty satisfying, and being so large we have leftovers for breakfast in the morning.

The Blue Cheese

So, I shouldn't have done my research BeFoRe I ate the cheese.

Because it did nothing to prompt my desire to try it.

 
The legend behind blue cheese is that a shepherd was hanging out in one of the local caves with his cheese and other lunch staples when he saw a cute girl off in the distance and spent the next few days trying to find her. Supposedly, when he got back to the cave, he saw that his cheese curds had been attacked by mold spores and he decided to eat it anyway. I don't know. I have a problem with that part of the story.
 
One time when I lived in San Diego I accidentally ate some moldy peanut butter toast. Well, I ate the toast on purpose, but not the mold. The worst part was that when I went to put the last two pieces of bread away, I flipped the butt of the loaf over and it was bright green.  I'd just eaten four pieces of that bread. Bleh. I just can't imagine finding that loaf of bread and knowing it was growing with who-knows-what, shrugging and chomping on it anyway.
 

Of course, I did just buy pre-moldy cheese.

Hmm.

 

Ok, but I know it's moldy on purpose and that it's regulated mold that other people have been eating and surviving. Yeah. That makes it ok. But then I found out that the bacteria prompted to grow on this cheese is the same bacteria that causes foot odor. Yum.

So, I trudged on with my lesson, knowing all these things. There were a few crumbles that fell off the end of the cheese and they seemed like a good place to start. I poured a glass of sparkling grape juice so I'd have wash-down capabilities and popped the crumb in my mouth.

I've never tasted anything like it before in my life.

I'm not saying that I loved it right away and was savoring it. I'm just saying that it completely perplexed and dumbfounded my tastebuds. The texture is creamy and crumbly, smooth. It was such a unique flavor, and hard to categorize. It was kind of earthy, and reminded me of the frangrance of morels we'd found mushroom hunting. It had the boldness of "tangy" without the twang. Instead of twanging at the end, it sort of tingled. It was savory, but not really salty. The white part of the cheese was very mild and the moldy part was much more powerful tasting. I kept popping more crumbs in because I was trying to figure out how to define the flavor.

I Did Not Like

Green Fuzz on Cheese

Would not try it

Thank you, please.

But after just a teeny bite

I thought that it

might be alright...

By George! I kind of liked this moldy cheese! So I looked up a recipe for it and tried it out - Blue Cheese and Broccoli Soup. I thought it was really pretty good. I had some heavy whipping cream that I had to use up and I substituted that for one of the cups of milk. And I put more onions and thyme in. The Blue Cheese really made it.

 It's also a little less intimidating when you can't see the fuzz.

My mom was always pretty good about encouraging me to try new things when I was a kid. Even if it was just to take one bite. "You never know until you try it," was the motto I remember. It's led me to some interesting culinary adventures through the years. And now I've had one more.  

Thanks for coming along, and I'll keep you posted about tomorrow's adventure. :)

Today I learned more than I ever wanted to know about HTML.

Welcome to our new and improved blog layout! YaY! :)

I'm going to jump right in because I am easily impressed with this little learning tidbit, and I'm sure there's someone else out there in the World Wide Web who hasn't figured it out yet either... I know how to do the accented " é " now! You simply hold down the "Alt" key and type 130 on your number pad (not above the letters - the ones over to the side...) and when you let go of the "Alt" button your little é pops up! Tah-Dah!  é  
*Sigh*  :) It's the little things.

Alrighty, then. So, the most time-consuming thing I learned today was my crash course on Blogging 101. I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks now and I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest this little project has generated. I am getting five times the number of visits I had in the first week. (Wait. Is that right? Carry the one…add the seven…and…um… It looks like I need to pencil in a lesson on “basic math on only a couple hours of sleep.” :)

At any rate, I never dreamed I’d be up to triple-digits per day by now. Although, I noticed that my BlogSpot odometer seems to be stuck at 140. It’s been stuck there for about a week now. I keep tapping it, but the thing doesn’t budge. Ah, well. My other counter is working just fine, and if people are posting messages they’ve obviously been here. Unless they are ninjas. Hmm…

Well, anyway, upon seeing the amount of traffic the site is getting I decided it was time to take it up a notch and get my blog some fancier duds. So today I tackled templates and layouts and screen ratios. Even learned a little Photoshop pointers in there. And the dreaded HTML. Which, by the way is hard to is a hard process to translate for my readers...

This is the code for italic:

Add Your Words In Here

See the problem?

I suppose I could put spaces in between everything.

But I'll leave HTML Lessons to the experts.

And when I learned all I could about formatting my website and how to make it three columns and where to just get an easy template that I could download (Thank you Deluxe Templates!) and I couldn't get any further, I called in . . . My Reinforcement.

Super Hubby to the Rescue!

Handsome. Intelligent. Government-trained. Makes the world's best pancakes. My Hubby tried out for The Geek Squad and was turned down because he was overqualified. I knew he was the one I needed for this job. Only he and his Computer Fu could untangle me from the treacherous clutches of the evil and sinister Hypertext that held my remaining brain cells captive.

"Help!" I cried. (Well . . . texted.) "I found a new template but I can't figure this thing out!"

"Aha! I see your problem here! It's not compatible. You'd need Google Chrome for this template and so would all your trusty readers! You must find a different template that will free you from such glitches!"

"Thank you Super Hubby!"

Hehe.

Alright, so it went a little more like this...

~~~~~~

Hubby:

"Alright, Sweetie. Now you gotta click on that link there. No. The other one. Yeah. That one. Did you click it? Hmm. It's not going there. Try clicking it again."

Me:

"Yeesh! I'm clicking it already. Give me a minute."

Hubby:

"You know, you can make the images bigger if you..."

Me:

-groan- "I KnoW that already! What am I, in kindergarten?"

Hubby:

"I was just trying to be helpful. . . in case you didn't know about that."

Me:

"Oh. Well, I already knew that."

Hubby:

"Well, I'm just used to giving specific information when I'm going through the process."

Me:

"Well, I already know that."

Of course five seconds later he mentioned another thing that I already knew how to do and again I was quick to assert my knowledge on that laughably microscopic corner of his stomping grounds.

~~~~~~

So here's what I realized that I learned today.

My husband is one of the most patient people I have ever met, and that is one secret to his success in providing such good tech support. When we lived in Japan our conversations with family would often turn to tech support problems. My husband spent hours guiding his mom through the process of accessing her e-mail account or helping my dad trouble-shoot a  problem on his computer. He would patiently guide them through every step of the process, even if it were obvious to him what needed to be done because it was in that order of things he usually found the problem. It was often some step that was missed or little thing that would have been overlooked if he had not been so meticulous.

It's a fairly obvious lesson - without order, there's disorder.

Tonight I learned to appreciate the simple fact that patience and order go hand in hand.

Thanks, Super Hubby.

It's a lesson we probably all need from time to time.

Touché!

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I have been brain-storming about new lesson ideas and I have quite a few collected.

I asked Waybums what she wanted to learn about and she said...

"Well, mother. I'd like to learn about chickens."

So if there are any chickens out there willing to give lessons,

you'll have to keep me posted...

Today I learned about the history and mystery of seashells.

I love shells. I have loved shells since I was just a kid. I remember we had this giant conch shell in our yard and when I heard from a classmate in school that you can hear the ocean in a shell I was determined to test the theory. Being landlocked in the Midwest, nowhere near an ocean, I was really curious to know what the ocean sounded like.

When I got home, I went straight to the yard and picked up The Great Shell. It had sunken into the dirt with time and when I picked it up it was muddy and there were earthworms wriggling, exposed, and protesting its removal. I put the shell up near my ear, and I cringed as I imagined an earthworm popping out and tickling my earlobe. But sure enough, I heard the roar of the ocean. Wow! Magical!

And I think that’s when my love of seashells began.

I have a basket of shells in my bathroom. They remind me of the years my husband was in the Navy and beaches were more easily accessible. As I cautiously slid the shells into their weekly sink-bath I mused that as much as I admire shells, I still have a lot to learn about them. So, today I learned about my favorite beach adornment.

Obviously, there’s the whole original purpose of a seashell. A house for an invertebrate. (Which is why those wormies must have felt right at home in The Great Shell from our yard…) But I already learned all about mollusks and bivalves and all that in high school biology class. Here’s what I learned today:

• What I didn’t know is that the study of seashells is called Conchology. Which is fun to say. To me, it sounded like a celebration word that you'd shout during salsa music. But when I said it aloud a few times in a row, Waybums thought I was pretending to be a train.
• One of the world’s best collections of seashells is at the Smithsonian in D.C. Now, there's a place to learn stuff...
• I learned that seashells were one of the earliest recorded forms of currency, and the greater inland they traveled, the more value they held. (Actually I knew this to some extent, having read Anna Lee Waldo’s book Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark’s expedition loaded up on seashells when they finally reached the Pacific because they would be able to use them for trade on the way home.)
• I always wondered why seashells had perfect little holes bored into them. I thought perhaps it was just something stores did before the shells were sold, but today I learned thats not the case. If an octopus is hungry and catches a snail, it’s not like he has some sort of gastropod can-opener he can use. But he does have a handy built-in drill that he can use to bore into the shell and do some damage. There are a lot of sea snails that drill into other shell-bearing critter's houses and then use their proboscis to suck them out of their protective shells. Yeesh. Who needs Sci-Fi when there's stuff that freaky in the real world? And it makes sense that these holes are found in the shells that wash up on the beach because their owners are no longer around using them. So, predation is the leading cause of holey shell syndrome in seashells. The other leading cause is jewelry makers.
• This little fact is of particular historical interest. I learned today about antique collectibles known as Sailor’s Valentines. The Girls Back Home probably prefered to believe was that their seafaring fellas would collect teeny shells from their destinations and during their downtime they would make fancy designs for their ladies’ fair while they were pining away for them. Usually the designs would adorn the top of a box, or a bit of jewelry. Or a jewelry box. As romantic a notion that may have been, it was much more common for sailors to swing by Barbados and pick them up at a souvenir shop. Handy for those sailors with a gal in every port, because they’d never have time to swab the deck if they was always makin’ purdies.

But the thing I really learned today was that collecting seashells was just a great excuse to go to the beach. It's times like this, driving down snow tunnels on every street, that I miss the sand in my toes and the salty sea air. It's like a treasure hunt, to dig around in the sand and find a swirly shell or an oyster shell or even bits of driftwood.

Baby Waybums and Me at a beach in Japan

As I was drying off my bathroom shells, I handed one to Waybums and told her that she could hear the ocean if she put it up to her ear. She put it up to her ear and her eyes widened, she sat the shell down and she ran off. She came back with her trusty kitty mug, held it to her ear and said:

"Mother! Did you know there's the ocean in my cup, too?"

I held it up to my ear, and sure enough there was that ocean sound. You know...that might have been nice to know before I got dirt and earthworm goo on my face as a kid. ;) I take comfort that Waybums is a bit more clever than I was.

Yep. You learn something new every day. As far as tomorrow goes...
I'll keep you posted.

This weekend I learned how to squeak by without Internet and about rehydration.

Dear Readers,

I did not forget about you over the weekend. Indeed, I thought about you very much. On Friday I planned to feature what I learned about my mother’s heirloom collection of antique and quirky salt and pepper shakers. (My favorite is a long dachshund with salt coming out its head and pepper out the other end.) Unfortunately, I also learned that day what life is like without the Internet. With my tech support hubby out of town I was sadly without reprieve.

Saturday morning I had planned to go to the local Health and Safety Fair, which I was certain would be filled with remarkable information on how to keep from getting myself killed off. And the Waybums was excited because I would get to take photos of her with Smokey the Bear. Instead, the things I learned were not really reader friendly as I suffered much of Saturday with grave intestinal discomfort, and I’m not much for potty humor. Particularly not at my expense. Although, I realize the coincidence of being so ill on a day when I was supposed to go to the Health and Safety Fair.

Is it just me, or does it seem like between the continuously nasty weather and everyone being sick all the time that this winter is trying to stomp us out?

And since I left my camera at my parents’ house and am now without my salt-and-pepper pictures, I find myself hard-pressed for a lesson from this weekend to share with you, my readers. So, in an effort to pass some grain of helpfulness from my weekend – here is my contribution:

ORAL REHYDRATION SOLUTION

1 liter of water

8 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. salt

If you happen to find yourself in a pinch without any Gatorade, this is the solution the World Health Organization has prescribed to help prevent people from becoming dehydrated, and has saved millions of children worlwide from cholera and other particularly mean outbreaks.

One interesting thing I learned is how much your body depends on salts and sugars to keep in working order. Your body secretes 20-30-grams of salt into your intestines every day and then absorbs it back in as you digest. But when your body is flushing things through the intestines too quickly, it doesn't have a chance to reabsorb the salts. And without the salts, your body does not retain water. So, not only are you not receiving the water you put into your body, but you're also losing what water's already in there. And the sugar works with the salt to help absorption. I got a biology and chemistry lesson from this ordeal.

Here's an interesting link on the subject.
 
And now, I'm off to bed, as ordered by Dr. Hubby.
Off to a healthier week of adventures.
I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned how to start a furnace fire, and tips on longevity from a raccoon.

It's been a day full of busy activity. While I've been learning all these fascinating things, I've also been working on a month-long lesson on how to organize and simplify my house. (Which I'll share when I've finished that lesson.) We have moved four times in six years including a cross-country move and an international move, and I'm tired of living out of boxes. There's a glorious, spacious bedroom upstairs that has been moonlighting as a storage area, and it's time to get settled and get to use the space. I've been doing a lot of sorting and purging and regrouping.

So, today, when I wasn't playing with the kids and attending to their many cabin-feverish requirements, I was working on the house and trying to think of something interesting to learn.  I came up with a couple of ideas that will work well for later, but nothing that really worked for today. My husband is a chaperone for our church's youth retreat and so I decided to have supper at my grandpa's house with my mom and hang out with my parents for awhile. When I got there, my mom suggested that I could learn about Grampa's wood-burning furnace. I thought that was intriguing and so I went out to the car to get my camera and stumbled upon another lesson.

Grampa's dog Drake (AKA "Get-Down-Dog") sat on the swing, looking like some kind of furry sentry, watching for mountain lions or something and so I snapped a picture of him.

Just as I was about to go into the house I heard a startling and unfamiliar sound coming from near the barn. Whoah! What IS that? If you don't mind spoilers - it sounded like this.

Drake went rushing off to the source of the noise and I followed him...at a distance. I might be curious but I'm not ready to sign up for rabies shots. I couldn't see anything, but there was a lot of noise. Drake was lecturing the critters for trespassing, "Grrr-snarl-ruff!" And they were trash-talking him, "Chareeka-chatta-grruhchuk." And then Drake just stood there barking.

Silly raccoon.

I learned a couple of lessons from this incident.

1. 
   
   Petty bickering amongst yourselves can lead to much greater confrontations from elsewhere.
2. 
   
   If you are going to stir up a ruckus, you better have a good retreat available.
3. 
   
   The raccoon that runs has a better chance than the one who climbs a slippery metal pole in winter.

I tried to distract Drake, but he was pretty worked up. I suppose he understood the raccoon cussing better than I did. The masked bandit kept slipping and then climbing up and slipping and climbing up and finally fell from the pole and was snarling before he hit the ground. He got chewed out and chewed on, and to his credit he solicited more than a few yelps from the ol' dog. Drake came away and I didn't know if the racoon escaped or if he was dispatched. But I know enough not to go into a dark barn where there might be an injured animal. He's probably in the haymount, nursing his wounds, thinking that he's not going to argue so loudly around this farm again.

So, I went inside with my camera and commenced my lesson on Grampa's woodburning furnace. Before the lesson I knew two things. The first was that Furnace + Baking x Cooking = Hotter than the Sun. There have been a few years when I made the mistake of wearing a sweater to holiday festivities and wondered if the doctors would chuckle and call the press if they got a heat-stroke patient in mid-December during sub-zero temperatures. The second thing I knew is that I can tell if something's been at Grampa's house by its faint campfire meets echoes of homemade bread smell.

Here's what I learned tonight:

You need fuel for the fire. Obviously.

Here Grampa takes the Waybums into the firewood room so he can show her how they get the wood down there. All my life I knew that the room used to be a "cistern" but I never knew what a cistern was until I looked it up tonight. I always thought it was a kind of septic tank. LoL! Not quite. When I learned that a cistern is a kind of water reservoir, the references my grandma had made to using it suddenly made more sense. That's just one of the many back-burner things I'd never got around to really learning about. I thought I knew what it meant and so I never thought to ask. I know it probably seems dorky to someone who knows the meaning of the word. But we all have things that we think we understand but don't have it quite right. Just clarifying the meaning of one word suddenly helped shift a dozen stories my grandmother told me into focus. The most distinctive memory I have of this room was during a tornado when I was a kid. My brother, sister, grandma, mom and I were all crammed in there. I remember it felt like an adventure.

The furnace has two doors.

The larger door on top an the smaller one underneath.

The top is where the firewood goes...

And the lower door is where the ash is collected.

I realize this picture is sideways, but I kind of get a kick out of all of you turning your heads to the side to look at it, so I think I'll keep it that way. :) Sometimes it's more interesting to look at something from a different perspective.

After Grampa's demonstation I decided to do a little research on this furnace.

The furnace is a Longwood dual fuel furnace that can burn either oil or wood, and the name "Longwood" comes from the fact that it can burn logs up to five feet long. The founders of the company that manufactured it actually started out as earth-movers working with their Caterpillars, hauling mud around when people built houses or needed a pond somewhere - that sort of thing. Well, when this gentleman built his own house he didn't really like electric furnaces and so he designed and built a custom wood-burning furnace for his house. The neighbors liked it and wanted one for their own - word of mouth spread and they went from moving dirt to manufacturing furnaces. I love stories of such versatile people who stumble into success by accident, but had the good sense to run with it.

It was a good learning day. A little bit Wild American. A little bit This Old House.

Most of all, I just learned how much fun it is to see Grampa teaching the kids about things. He's such a stand-out fellow. Guys nowadays don't even have enough gumption to change out of their jammer pants before they go to the store for a gallon of milk, and my 80-something Gramps uses a cane to go up and down the stairs and make a fire twice a day. They just don't make 'em like they used to...

This was the cutest moment. He went to all the trouble of lowering the seat on this old-school exercise bicycle so Waybums could reach the pedals. She's barely there, but Grampa told her he'd help her try it again once she grew some more leg. :)

Off to sleep perchance to dream.

I'll keep you posted.