Musical Chairs
7:23 p.m. - 2003-11-04
The judges for the Halloween contest apparently did not want to tick anyone off in the office so they declared us all winners. We get to have lunch for everyone, which usually means pizza or they cater it from someplace. I vote for Texas Back Forty, and not the Mecca, which has very bad Mexican food. If I want really bad Mexican food, I can cook it myself, thank you.
It continues very nippy, well, California nippy, which means in the 50's. We all shiver and carry on as if we were about to turn into ice cubes. I remember once having fought my way home from work in Virginia in minus 15 degree weather with a windchill added onto that, and found a letter from the EG's complaining about how cold it was, because it had gotten down to the forties, by golly! But my East Coast hardiness wore off very rapidly upon our return to the Golden State. I am glad to see the cold weather because it increases the chance of prettier fall leaves. The peak of our color will come around Thanksgiving sometimes, though some years it lasts until Christmas.
Some jerk at work has toyed with my chair while I was gone on vacation. There is a scanner across the room and it has a lousy chair in front of it, so people think it is OK to drag my chair over there and use that instead. Well, that's one thing, but when you steal someone's chair temporarily, do not adjust all the settings. I have been having terrible back spasms for two weeks while I have been trying everything to get my chair back to the way it was. Finally today I really gave the chair a going over and found a previously unknown lever that adjusted the back, and things are much better. Who knew you could make the back fatter and thinner to suit your whim? Now that things are better, it occurs to me that I should have taken a good look at the computer chair at home, which suits me fine, and noticed how high the back was etc. Too little too late, as usual.
Jellie was here on Sunday afternoon, and we made a pie. She was all gung ho to try it so I let her do most of the work except for cutting up the pears and apples. I found an interesting recipe (from a food chemistry standpoint), so it was fun seeing if it would turn out. You make a bunch of streusel with butter and flour and sugar and pat part of it into a pie pan, thus eliminating the work of making a crust the other way. Then, in a saucepan, you cook up some water, sugar and cornstarch into this gooey amalgam, which looks like nothing as much as it looked like that joke-store snot Alex had that time. Then you mix in all the fruit, load this concoction into the pie shell, pile more streusel on the top, and bake it. Lo and behold, it bakes up solid and smelling delicious. I did not get to taste it, because I sent it home with Jellie, but she promised me a report on Wednesday. Stay tuned.
