Most mornings here in Henderson at this time of year are in the 30s. Brindy has short and/or very little fur so when we head out in the morning (around 6:20) she needs some extra layers:

Her ears may be cold when we get back, but the rest of her is toasty warm!

I somehow managed to do entirely non-computer related things from Friday afternoon until now. This amount of time away from my desk is unusual unless I am on a transoceanic cruise.

What in the world was I doing to entertain myself? Well, some reading, some board game playing with mom and a lot of cooking and baking.

Most of the TV watching I do these days is either home improvement or cooking shows. I also enjoy lectures from the Great Courses and I have just finished several seasons of America’s Test Kitchen.

In the past, I always rather slavishly followed recipes. Watching all these cooking shows has encouraged me to be a lot freer when cooking. I am a lot more likely to just start throwing things into a skillet and seeing how they come out. The downside to this is that when I do something really well, I am unlikely to be able to replicate it.

Friday I was baking oatmeal-craisin cookies. Craisins give the cookies a little more tartness than the usual raisins. I put the first batch in the oven and checked them at four minutes. What I saw was a pile of raw dough surrounded by liquid.

Now I am definitely a mise en place sort of cook and I was sure I had measured out all the ingredients before hand; but I carefully went down the list again. Wet ingredients, dry ingredients; no, I hadn’t missed anything. Meantime, I had pulled the cookies out.

I went back to the counter and checked my ingredient list once again. Then I saw it: the flour was still sitting in the measuring bowl. Rats! The dough I had rescued from the oven was still so malleable that I put all of it back into the bowl, threw in the flour, and started dolloping out the dough once more. Not the best cookies I’ve ever made, but quite edible.

Saturday was much more successful. Lunch was a mélange of pantry items and leftovers: chickpeas, black beans, corn, mushrooms, and some diced up summer sausage. All simmered in some coconut milk with some deeply caramelized onions I had pulled from the freezer. Seasoned with cumin, chili powder, pepper, and who knows what else. Served over rice. Fantastic!

The pepper I am using these days for most things is Aleppo. Black pepper to me is mostly heat, but no particular flavor. Also, I hate grinding peppercorns, eating my meal, having a fabulous dessert, and only then having some small piece of peppercorn make an appearance in my month and completely ruin the meal’s finish with an overpowering dose of heat.

Aleppo pepper is not as hot as red pepper flakes. And it has a slightly sweet and, to me, smoky flavor. Try it! I think you’ll like it.

Sunday I baked a cake. Now I have been becoming a fairly competent cook, but I have not tried my hand at much baking beyond cookies. Sunday I baked cake from scratch and made toffee from scratch and made frosting from scratch! Whew! Everything tasted great and for my first try I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out.

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Now it’s back to shooting radscorpions in Fallout 4.

Because today is a “Hug Your Dog” and/or “Hide Out at a Movie” kind of day. I’ve done both. Took mom to see Little Women. Liked it a lot. Now back to petting Brindy.

Hope your day is uneventful.

Happy New Year!

A number of things during this last month have caused me to ponder “being good”. And, no, being on Santa’s naughty or nice list was not one of them. Well, not the main one!

I first started thinking about it while I was playing Fallout 4. This is a role-playing game for the computer where you find yourself in the Boston area 200 years after a nuclear war. You have to figure out how to survive and complete various quests. As in all this type of game, you start off by choosing the characteristics you want for your avatar and then exploring your new world.

These types of games are very open-ended. What happens in them and how people interact with you and what quests you are given very much depend on the decisions you make. As a player, you can be anyone from a saint to a devil. This ability to play any sort of role is what lots of gamers love about this genre.

Except I can’t do it. I absolutely cannot bring myself to play the game as an ‘evil’ character. I have been playing this kind of game for over a decade. I have never been able to play as an evil or selfish character.

Over this same time period, I’ve also noticed that I have less and less interest in most TV series or movies. I’ve never watched any of the Godfather movies, for instance. I just searched for “great tv series” and the top two listed were ‘The Wire’ and ‘Breaking Bad’. They’re not on my watch list.

In thinking about why this is, I realized that I don’t need to watch things or play games that show me how to be bad; I know how to be bad without any outside help or input. The trick in my life is learning how to be good. I want to be a good person and I need my entertainment choices to help me to do that.

Leo Tolstoy wrote in “Ana Karenina” that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” As I’ve grown older I find myself thinking that all bad people are alike, but good people are unique in how they achieve that goodness. And in how they pass that goodness on to others.

For example, Louise Penny writes mysteries. They are wonderful mysteries with fabulous characters. And, somehow, at the end of every book, I come away with the longing to be a better person. I don’t know how she manages that, but what a wonderful achievement it is.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy movies or books purely for their entertainment value; I don’t want to be hit over the head with moralistic themes. But I just can’t see spending time with characters I would never want to be around in real life.

Another example: I took mom to see Frozen II. Very enjoyable movie with a theme I wish more people would take to heart: ‘just do the next right thing.’ Not the easiest or most expedient thing, the right thing. If every politician sat through a dozen showings of Frozen II, maybe Washington, DC would be a different place!

A third example: I was reading a new (to me) science fiction writer this month and ran across the following:

From The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, pp. 231 – 232

And this is where our species are very much alike. The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. . . .

All you can do, Rosemary – all any of us can do – is work to be something positive instead. That is a choice that every sapient must make every day of their life. The universe is what we make of it. It’s up to you to decide what part you will play. And what I see in you is a woman who has a clear idea of what she wants to be.”

Rosemary gave a short laugh. “Most days I wake up and have no idea what the hell I’m doing.”

He puffed his cheeks. “I don’t mean the practical details. Nobody ever figures those out. I mean the important thing. The thing I had to do, too.” He made a clucking sound. He knew she would not understand it, but it came naturally. The sort of sound a mother made over a child learning to stand. “You’re trying to be someone good.”

I’m basically a lazy person. Actually being evil would take too much energy, but it is very easy for me to slide into passivity and feel it really doesn’t matter much what I do. Perhaps that’s why I don’t spend my game time being the evil character: I don’t need to practice selfish choices; those come easily. My game character tries to make the good, right choices; I’m hoping that’s training me to do so in real life as well.

I have noticed a distressing tendency for more and more businesses to not bother with a web page; they just have a Facebook presence. No, No, No! For goodness sakes, it’s not difficult or expensive to put up at least one page with a little information about the business. Having only a Facebook presence makes me think the business is unprofessional. It also means that the only information I am getting about the business is what Yelp or the equivalent is giving me.

So to all you small businesses out there: if I click on a ‘link’ to your ‘site’ and am immediately invited to sign into Facebook, then I am not going to your site. I know I’m in the minority here, but, really, wouldn’t you prefer to reach everyone, not just Facebook users?

We had a lot of snow last night in the surrounding mountains. Tough on people who were trying to get in or out of town, but darn scenic for the rest of us!

As some of you know, over the last couple of years I have been learning to make paper flowers. Last year I made some poinsettias:

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I was so pleased with the way those turned out I decided to make my first wreath. I bought a foam form and some ribbon to cover it, picked out my paper colors, and set up my cutting machine.

(I cut crepe paper like that used in the poinsettias by hand, but I have a Cricut cutting machine that handles regular paper.)

I made all my cuts, laid out my pieces, and only then realized that I was supposed to be making a 12″ diameter wreath not the 16″ wreath I had bought. 4″ doesn’t sound like much, but it meant I had to make dozens and dozens and dozens more pieces!

And while the cutting is fairly quick, each piece must be curled at least three different ways by hand. Then there is all the gluing. Here are a few pictures of the steps involved:

I love how it turned out, but this year I decided to be a bit less ambitious. Here’s this year’s holiday project:

Here’s hoping any of your holiday projects bring you as much enjoyment as mine bring me.