A snow day with a dwarvish breakfast

"'Hey, brothers! A visitor for breakfast.'

"And immediately, mixed with a sizzling sound, there came to Shasta a simply delightful smell. It was one he had never smelled in his life before, but I hope you have. It was, in fact, the smell of bacon and eggs and mushrooms all frying in a pan."

--The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 12, C.S. Lewis

We had a simply delightful smell of that sort this morning: sausage and eggs and mushrooms and tomatoes all frying together in a pan, with apricot-jammed toast. And eggnog lattes.

Jonathan finished his finals last night (yippee!), so naturally we went to the library. The first flakes were just starting. When we came out, it was snowing hard, so we called in our pizza order, stopped at the grocery store for bread and mushrooms and eggnog, and then retrieved our pizza and returned home. By this point it was sticking to the roads and they were quite slippery.

It has been snowing all night, and we woke up to nearly a foot of good fluffy white stuff, just right for packing. The roads are thoroughly cloggy, and it's still coming down. What could be nicer than a dwarvish breakfast to start off a snow day?

As long as we don't have to dig Olwen out for a trip to the hospital, we are all set. :-)

Christmas

This post is just a few snippets from C.S. Lewis on Christmas. I think I'd seen them all before, but they bear re-reading. I particularly like the one about Exmas. :-)

Baking soda vs. baking powder

This post is talking about the difference between baking soda and baking powder - an excellent question. Rumor has it that baking soda is just the base chemical that reacts with the acid already in the recipe, and baking powder has acid included in it so it doesn't depend on native acid to make your batter rise.

So, naturally, we had see whether baking soda is really fizzier when reacted with vinegar.

Yes, it definitely fizzes more effectively. It nearly overflowed the little dish. And, as you may observe, the baking powder (left) has more residue at the end than the baking soda. Cool!

Snowmen, ye be warned

Yes, I believe that's a snowman's head on a pike in someone's front yard.

This be what happens to the unwary in Christmas Town.

Quote of the morning

"What do you want for breakfast?" Me
"I want a resurgence of bright colors among the well-to-do! That would be fun. I want to wear a red coat into court. Red for prosecution, and blue for defense - a bright azure - or maybe green." Jonathan

(He has a new book out from the library on dyes and color. We take red clothes way too much for granted.)

Power outage

This evening as Jonathan was leaving to pick me up at work, a neighborhood tree fell over and would have squashed him and Olwen if two or three convenient power lines hadn't caught it. Naturally, they started sparking and glowing odd incandescent colors. This was quite the experience for Jonathan, who had just come out of a final.

Happily someone called 911, and by the time he and I made it back, police had blocked off the road and switched off the power... to our entire development. This meant no more risk of sudden electrified tree torches; also, alas, no more electric burners or microwaves.

It would have been inconvenient, but I adore power outages, especially when my husband hasn't just been squashed. We lit a couple candles and the oil lamp, and had a delightful picnic supper. We went outside and could actually see stars. In the city! Real stars! And afterward, we packed up our computers and went to hang out at the library. Here, they have heat and light and internet.

I was going to spend the evening doing something, possibly feeling guilty about not running around like crazy cleaning and getting things ready. But I think God sent me a free evening. What a shame! I have to go hang out at the library and catch up on correspondence and magazines!

I'm also grateful that Jonathan, as he put it, didn't have a "truncated existence." :-)