A mixed bag day.

[elfs]

Today I worked with dangerous chemicals, performed alchemy, conducted a transplantation, and impressed a little girl.

I have decided that daylight savings time is misnamed. It should be called "extending morning darkness time," not that I object to holding off the dawn as long as possible. It was still too early to wake up after last night. Breakfast was pancakes, home-made, with 1/4 khamut flour and fluffed egg whites. Delicious.

The dangerous chemicals involved the master bathroom. The kid's bathroom is the centerpiece of the house and is regularly cleaned, but the bathroom that Omaha and I share isn't so central. We had finally gotten tired of it and so I settled into cleaning it this morning. It took an hour, but everything really sparkled afterward. I also got very Martha on the difference between bathing, cosmetic, and medicine stuff, putting each in its own little basket.

 
Alchemy: Lump into food.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

The alchemy involved turning an unattractive lump into some delicious bread. It was a standard French bread recipe, although I activated the yeast rather than allow it to awaken in the dough, which means that the classic baguette taste that develops by letting the bread rise in a cool cellar overnight didn't quite emerge. It was still fantastic. I cheated by coating the top with some thinned eggwhite so I didn't have to keep spritzing the oven chamber. Our oven definitely runs too hot.

Kouryou-chan had a friend over, and I made grilled cheese sandwiches for them. She was earnestly impressed with them, saying they were "really good." She seemed almost surprised by the amount of cooking I did, but I like to cook. I explained that the secrets to grilled cheese involved pre-heating the sandwich in the microwave before putting it onto the grill pan so that the cheese was already melted and the bread wouldn't slide around too much.

The end of winter is getting to the kids. They're desperate to get outside and they spend as much time as they can even in the rain, even in the dark. We had to order them into the house when it became too dark to see them and the rain was steadily coming down.

I cooked burgers (having made bread, the oven was already hot and so the potato wedges went right in). I think I spent all day slaving over a hot stove. Excellent!

The transplant involved Flickr. Bastards at Yahoo bought Flickr and made me shut down my Flickr login and use a Yahoo login instead. (Question for the literates in the audience: why is there no houyhnhnm.com? It's currently parked. You'd think some elitist bastard like myself but with more money would do something smart with it.) Afterward, my upload tool no longer worked and I had to find a new one. Unfortunately, the one I found was badly flawed. I found a third tool which, like the second, was written in python. I examined both, found the mime-type configuration block in both, and transplanted the one from the third (which was a graphical tool) into the second (which is a proper command line tool and so much faster to invoke). It took two go-rounds, but I got it working.

Omaha and I have both been in the "I should write, but..." mood all day.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

The "pre-microwave grilled cheese" idea is interesting. I usually just cook it slowly, but melting the cheese in the microwave would let me get it to the table much faster. Thanks for mentioning it.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Hey, great minds think alike. ;)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

The same type of thing has been done for some decades, with the variety of pie irons that have been produced, primarily for use over a campfire, although they work as well on stovetop. The round ones, which crimp off the edges of the bread and seal the two pieces of bread together, produce something similar to a pocket pie or turnover when cooked.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It is a brilliant idea! Did you ever share it with your blog?

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

I was unable to get bread right until I bought an oven thermometer and discovered that the thermostat was 50-100 degF lower than the actual temperature. I recommend proper instruments most highly.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

We do actually have an oven thermometer, which shows our oven running about 100 deg F hotter than the set temperature, but Elf continuously forgets to check it. ;)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I made my comment because that's what I did: I bought an oven thermometer and measured, and tends to run cooler than the setting says at low temperatures, and higher than the setting says at high temperatures, and it maxes out around 550, which is barely hot enough to make decent pizza.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

I use flickr_upload, written in Perl.

Which ones did you try, what did you settle on?

Now I have to see if flickr_upload is broken...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Do you log in with a flickr account or a Yahoo account? The flickr accounts are going to be shut down on March 20th and you must have transferred your login to use your Yahoo! account before then.

Then you have to go through the rigamorale of registering your software with a Flickr API.

As I said, I didn't settle on any one. I found two flickr-uploaders, both written in python. The GTK-based one worked, but I wanted to use the commandline version which didn't. So I ripped out the "upload a file" routines from the GTK version and transplanted them into the commandline version, creating a Frankenstein's Monster version and all is good.