dragonlady7

It's cold today in Buffalo. We're getting Hurricane Frances, I guess-- up here all that means is rain, and it wasn't even soaking rain like they promised. It's just been spitting for two days, and today it was cold and windy and spitting.
Weirdly, the rain came straight outta the east, coming in windows and the like. So I shut all the windows and doors one by one as I kept feeling cold drafts. And this evening, I warmed the house by the most foolproof method I could think of: I baked cookies.
Not just any cookies. Look behind the cut for the scanned image of the battered and loved recipe (the scanner cut off the top line so I reconstituted it in Photoshop). It's not a recipe of mine; it's one of the ones from Dave's mom's collection. We pawed through her box of recipes and stuck all the good ones onto the scanner. Of course that means they've all been copied down off the screen on scraps of paper and stuck into the cookbook, but at least I always know where the original is. Dave still thinks we should've just used her scanner/printer to make copies, but I insist that having the computer files is useful. And you know, I'd much rather have it on the computer so I don't lose it. We lost his mom's garlic mashed potato recipe card already several times.
Anyhow.
They're "Awesome Cookies" and my hand mixer broke before I could even get the butter creamed. Bah. So I made it with a sushi paddle and a fork, in my patented pre-mixer technique (sometimes two forks work better, depending on the dough. This was a huge recipe so the sushi paddle was useful for manhandling large chunks of dough to work ingredients through it). I guess I'll have to go back to low-tech; I never really liked the hand mixer, but can't afford a stand mixer. (My mom splurged on a KitchenAid in 1990 or so, and the thing's still going like brand new. i want one but they're another $300 I don't have, and I just spent over $400 I don't have on a camera.)

I listened to my iPod throughout, and sang to myself, and I had an image, one of those vivid mental images I get-- not pictures so much as snapshots of situations. (I often begin stories based around them.) You have to sort of envision my kitchen. This house belonged to Dave's Great-Aunt Matilda, who fled Latvia with her husband, Dave's pregnant grandmother, Dave's grandfather, and Dave's Aunt Ruta (then five or six). They got out two days or so before the Soviets arrived, and Dave's uncle Maris was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Dave's mother was born five years later or so, once they reached Buffalo.
Dave's Aunt Matilda is in a nursing home now, completely blind and unable to walk. She sold the house to Dave's mother, as she had no children of her own.

All that backstory is necessary to envision this. So the house hasn't been redecorated since she left, really. Dave's mom and aunt cleaned it out when she first went into the nursing home (after something like five hip replacement surgeries, she just wasn't sturdy enough to live alone anymore-- but she toughed it out for a long time, so while envisioning the house you should realize that there are sturdy chrome handles bolted to the walls near the kitchen door, inside the door, and on both sides of the top of the basement steps), and then Dave's sister lived here, and then Dave's cousin lived here with her husband and infant.
But.
The kitchen linoleum is yellow. The countertops are mottled yellow and white. The cabinets are a medium-yellow-brown wood. The dinette has yellow and brown and white wallpaper. It's a very fifties kitchen. (The ancient refrigerator is downstairs, as is the Speed Queen washer with the electric wringer. Both still work.)
So there I am, in my quilted slippers and quilted vest (it's chilly). There are lace curtains at the window over the sink. I am at the rounded corner of the counter with my canister of flour, my canister of sugar, my measuring cup, my wooden spoon (Ok, sushi paddle). And I have my iPod and am singing my way through a playlist of Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Ani DiFranco, and, of all things, Morphine. The stove is heating the kitchen-- in fact, warming the whole house.
And I imagined a scene in a story, of a person describing his nostalgic childhood.

"I remember my mother in the kitchen, scuffing her slippers on the linoleum as she mixed cookie dough with a wooden spoon and sang along to Lucinda Williams on her iPod... I would sit at the table surfing the Internet on Dad's laptop over the wireless network, and she'd let me lick the spoon."

Anyhow. It was an amusing scene for me. I wish I could write modern stuff, or even postmodern, but when I try it ends up being fairly incompetent cyberpunk. Sorry... SF is the closest I come to witty urban drama. Sigh...

Other doin's of the evening:

Dave finally confirmed that my camera shipped, so I should be getting it in three or four days. Yay! I still owe him half the price of it-- that was the deal. he bought me half, which was really generous. I need to get a job, pay the next six months' rent, and buy him something awesome for his birthday. (Which is Dec. 31st. I am so much older than he is, man. I'm, like, robbing the cradle. He was almost born in the eighties.)

He also pointed out a really neat gizmo. I'd been sighing that I'd better buy a bigger memory card-- I only have two 64 MB ones, and with a 6 MP camera, I'll need more space than that if I want to take more than five pictures.
So.
But he found this: a media reader for the iPod, by Belkin.

I have a 30 GB iPod that I take with me everywhere. At the moment, after some necessary pruning, I have 790 MB free. But I have a bunch more stuff on there i have to sort through, that I never listen to. So I could probably clear off more than a GB on there, of free space, and still have all the music I actually listen to.

So, the question is: Spend $70 and get a 512 MB Compact Flash card? Or spend $100 and have as much space as I can free up on the iPod?

Zat, my friends, ees dee qvestion. I must ponder this.

Anyhow. I have 39 massive cookies now. Oatmeal and chocolate chip and cinnamon. Who wants one? I have plenty....

Oh right, the recipe I promised.