The wife wants a treadmill.
This was something we considered a couple of years ago, but didn’t have the money or space for at the time. Now she’s serious about getting one and has given me two weeks to find and purchase a good quality treadmill. Not one of the cheapo department store ones either (although some of the higher end NordicTrack models Sears carries would probably do). She wants a solid quality machine like the ones you find in fitness centers. There was one store we ran across across the river in Mt P that specialized in this kind of stuff. Now I just have to remember what the name of the store was and where it was located.
These are not the droids you’re looking for
If I didn’t share the area my office is in with other people, I would put a big sign on my door saying “The person you’re looking for is probably next door”.
It usually happens at least once or twice a week. Someone will poke their head in my door with a lost look on their face and say they’re looking for so-and-so. I tell them they’re next door and off they go. Now, if these people would just read the signs on the doors, it should be pretty clear that the person they’re looking for is next door and not here. Nobody seems to ever do that though.
Sometimes I tell them “Next door” before they even say anything. I can do this because hardly anyone ever comes to my office, so anybody who pokes their head in my door is almost always looking for someone else.
They want how much?
The house a couple doors down had a For Sale sign on it yesterday. According to the little info sheet the listing price is considerably more than what it was probably purchased for last year. Like 50% more. If it ends up getting sold for even remotely close to the asking price, then I suppose that will be a good thing for us when it’s time to sell. Prices around here aren’t just climbing…they’re leaping.
Back to walking at least
Haven’t gotten back to running aside from short jogging spurts, but I have gotten back to walking on a quasi-regular basis. It’s the dogs. They need to get out more and after listening to Cesar Milan’s Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems in audiobook form, I’ve committed to taking them out on longer walks more often.
So lately we’ve been going out early in the morning and making the 2.5 km round trip trek up the street to the main road. It’s been made a little easier the last couple of days by some moderately cooler weather. The dogs seem to be enjoying the walk and like Cesar Milan says, it seems to give them a sense of purpose. Nala could also stand to lose a few pounds too.
It’s been going well. After about a week of it I’ve managed to shed 2 more pounds and am down to a much trimmer feeling 175.
A baking snafu
Tomorrow there’s supposed to be a baby shower/lunch thing for one of the techs at work, so I thought I’d contribute a little something. After flipping through a few of the cookbooks, I found an apple cake recipe in Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking. It sounded interesting and tasty, and better yet I already had all the ingredients on hand. I consider myself reasonably skilled at cooking and baking, and the recipe didn’t seem all that complex. Basic cake recipe using the creaming method. Still as I was reading through it I had this feeling in the back of my head that there was something missing. Naturally, I ignored it.
This was what I ended up with.
Doesn’t look pretty, but it is tasty. Hardly presentable though. Think of what it would do to my reputation as a cook!
While doing the post mortem on the ‘cake’, I realized what that nagging feeling was telling me. There was no liquid in the ingredient list! No liquid means no gluten formation, and no gluten means the cake has no structural stability.
Duh. I need to learn to listen to those nagging feelings more often. I’ve made enough cakes using the creaming method that I should have picked up on this earlier. For some reason I didn’t and now I have a pan full of proto-cake.
The book itself is great, but apparently I’m not the only one to discover problems with the recipes, as a few of the reviews on Amazon point out. Sadly the list of errata mentioned in the reviews has apparently gone offline. Hopefully they’ll come back soon because there are some tasty looking recipes in his book.
I guess I’ll have to go empty handed now.