Blawggin

There are times that I think "Why don't I just get a site of my own, put some kind of blogging software on it,like RocketPost (or others; here's a detailed list of some alternatives) , and use that' -- usually when Blogger is being unconscionably slow. ("This server is currently experiencing a problem. An engineer has been notified...." Yeah. Right.) Then I muse: And that way, I could write this off line, and upload when I was ready... maybe even have something that would do that upload for me, so I wouldn't have to sit, tapping my fingers irritably, waiting for it to connect' (forgetting that of course if that were true, then I'd have to leave the laptop on till it happened, oh, the problems of the idle rich). But the key point is, of course, that Blogger is Free...and other solutions are, usually, not. Oh. Yeah. Right.

Sure would be nice, though.

We're thinking of doing a large amount of furnishings replacement. The couch and chairs in the living room are aging; though I kind of like them, particularly the blue chair with footstool, I understand the feelin that my wife has about replacement. We haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but, generally, we're thinking high quality, whatever we replace-- something like this.

I baked rolls again today, but, sad to say, they didn't really come out all that well. I left them in the oven overnight to rise, and man, when I opened the oven door, the aroma of yeast made the kitchen immediately smell like a distillery. But when they baked, they weren't all that great, so I am now actually pitching that recipe, and I'm going to try the Hard Rolls recipe again. Man. If I can't get this right, how can I even hope to do decent bread? And don't tell me that rolls have the same relationship to baking bread as writing short stories is to writing long ones: more difficult because more concentrated. Okay, no one ever actually did tell me that, but heck, it sounds good.

What is it about French-baiting? I just came across a cartoon of two knives -- One, the Swiss Army Knife, with all sorts of gadgets popping out of it, and the other, the French Army Knife, which had just two: a corkscrew, and a white flag. I am not a francophile, but it seems like they get beat up a lot for no good reason. Anyone who can do what they do for elegance and for food has to have something going for them... even if they do go overboard on both, every so often.

I'd love to ask Muslims (okay, not every single one) if it bothers them that there are murderous fanatics doing their evil in the name of their religion. Can't, though. I get the feeling that they're very, very sensitive to -- well, I'm not sure exactly what, but whatever it is, I don't think I'd get a straight answer to that question. It'd be like asking the NRA about school shootings. We're sorry that these atrocities occur, but they in no way reflect.... I know that there are people who think that the Muslim religion tolerates that kind of fanaticism, and I suspect that at one time, it did, but now? I can't believe that. I don't want to believe that.

Then again, I don't even know the difference between 'Muslim' and 'Islam'. Shows the level of my knowledge.

One of the GPs has an injured paw, again. I told my daughter, with what was obviously some level of disgust, that this animal was costing us a lot of money -- and she looked at me with shock. I think it never occurred to her that vet services are not cheap. She went and asked my wife how much we spent on the animal, last time..and then offered, humbly, to give up her allowance if that was what it took. Or to do more around the house, or something. I told her that I wasn't thinking of giving the animal away, or terminating its existence. (Yet, I added, internally.)

My wife and I are possibly weird in that we actually like to talk about things like standards and ISO9000, and why it doesn't work for software (at least, in our experience; perhaps somewhere, in the land of dreams and perfection, it does). We did that this morning, segueing into a discussion of kitchen design, and I really enjoyed the conversation. As I do with most of our conversations. This being married (twenty years, yesterday; imagine) is pretty cool stuff.