Dec. 14th, 2021

shewhomust: (mamoulian)
It's the best part of a week since this post began to take shape in my mind: back then I had one item in each category, and they described - not a single day, exactly, but a period of 24 hours, which seemed reasonable. Then I ran out of time: not necessarily in a bad way, but preparing to be visited, and then having - and enjoying having - a visitor. Which rather illustrates my point. How much of that unwritten post can I reconstruct?

The good:
I have baked a Christmas cake. I have posted before - more than once - about the basic recipe, which involves steeping the fruit overnight in a mixture of stewed apple and marmalade and any convenient alcohol. Splitting the preparation between two days (the fruit / the cake) mysteriously does not make either of those stages less work, and what with one thing and another the fruit was allowed to macerate for a day (or more) longer than intended. Which is why I was particularly triumphant at having baked the cake. It doesn't seem to have come to any harm, and I remembered to toss in a handful of chopped almonds at the last minute: sometimes I forget, and then I wonder why there are no nuts in the cake. Half quantities of the fruit mix plus the quantities specified for the cake gave me one large loaf, one small loaf, and four little buns, which is precisely what I was aiming for (though the little buns cooked much faster than I expected; they weren't singed, but they were darker than they should have been).


Effect of delayed posting: it's still good. We ate the smaller loaf with Wensleydale, for Sunday lunch, when J. joined us. The four of us polished it off, which I take as success.


The bad:
I have broken my glasses. I hoped I had just lost a screw from the hinge, but no, I have snapped one of the arms (close to the hinge). Back in September, I made an appointment with my optician, but that isn't until mid-January. We threw ourselves on the mercy of the duty optician, and she patched up the join with parcel tape - not even gaffer, let alone some sort of magical only-for-opticians gaffer - and was very sorry but there really were no appointments to be had, all she could do was add me to the list waiting for a cancellation.


Effect of delayed posting: mixed. The bad news is that the repair didn't last any longer than you might expect, and that the only "spares" I have are the glasses I used to use at my computer, which are better than nothing, but not much. I am writing this on my little notebook, for which I use my reading glasses. The better news is that a cancellation came up, and I have an appointment for 9 am on Friday.


The where does the time go:
We continue to pursue options for buying an electric car, and [personal profile] durham_rambler booked a test drive with a Renault Zoe. Before you can take the car for a 15 minute drive, you have to spend over an hour of talking to the sales rep, mostly about finance. We quite liked the car, though we thought it a bit snug, and reading about it afterwards, it doesn't have a great safety rating. A tangential puzzle is that the car we drove was described as "celadon blue", which I would have described as "powder blue" had it not been metallic (don't start me on metallic paint); I think of celadon as the jade green colour of some of my favourite Chinese ceramics. Renault produce a number of cars in "celadon blue", some of them more green than others.


Effect of delayed posting: oh, dear... Time continues to go who knows where. We have still not bought a car, nor have we gone to look at the red MG allegedly on offer at our friendly local garage. Suddenly we are halfway through December: I had meant to make lussekatter, but it was St Lucy's Day before I realised it, and I ended up throwing some left-over rice into a rye loaf, and adding orange zest. I've been experimenting with using a higher proportion of white flour in my bread, and it does rise better, but oh, this has so much more flavour.

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