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savory granola
Saturday, June 22 2019
It was a beautiful day for Saturday morning coffee, which we had out on the east deck. At some point I went and fetched the flat tire from the Prius and used a tire plugging kit to repair the puncture, which had been caused by a large-headed phillip screw that was only about a half inch long. Apparently if one sprinkles such screws across a highway surface, one can create customers for local tire shops (some of whom will unscrupulously suggest replacing tires that could easily be plugged). Since we'd be having a dinner party tonight, I then mowed the lawn (and even used a weed wacker to clear up the bluestone walkway to the front door.
Since, for whatever reason, Gretchen never got the life lesson of how to replace a tire on a car, I gave her a short tutorial while putting the mended tire back on the Prius. The most important nugget of information concerned where on the car the jack is placed, since not everything under a modern car is strong enough to bear the load of the whole thing.
Gretchen spent most of the day in the kitchen doing things like baking bread and making pasta from scratch. The pasta sheets coming out of the hand-cranked pasta extruder included parsley leaves embedded in their surfaces, looking like detailed photorealistic art. We also both did a cleaning jihad, but (for me at least) it was pretty limited. Gretchen, on the other hand, actually mopped the floors and cleaned out all the kibble behind the large piece of furniture where we feed the cats.
At some point in the afternoon, I put a ladder up against the dead pine tree where the pileated woodpeckers successfully fledged a chick back on Wednesday. I took a few pictures with my old 7.1 megapixel Canon Powershot, but the hole presented challenges in terms of lighting and focal length. Eventually I went and got my laparoscopic webcam (the tiny camera on the end of a stiff cable). But then I had to figure out how to record video on a Windows 7 computer, something I'd never actually attempted. (I've streamed video and I've taken stills, but never recorded a video file; that was always a task for a camera or a smartphone). This led me down a rabbit hole from one terrible software package to the next. All I wanted was something that could bring up a screen and show a simple record button, the way a smartphone does. But all the programs I downloaded (these included OBS Studio, DxWeb, ShareX, and Filmora-Scrn) had problems. Somtimes the interface to the recording process was hidden away or otherwise too hard to access (remember, I was trying to do this while balancing a laptop on a rung of a ladder) or the software wasn't really designed to do what I wanted. There used to be a movie maker program in Windows ME, but that doesn't seem to be present in Windows 7. I also remember it only recording to proprietary Windows video formats, probably of the sort one cannot just upload to YouTube. This is something that really should be easy in 2019, but it's not, not even to a tech professional.
While I was still up on a ladder, the first of our dinner guests arrived, the owner of the bookstore where Gretchen works and her boyfriend. Right away the drinking divided by gender, with the women drinking Lillet and the men drinking Lagunitas Super Cluster Ale. Later we were joined by another couple, Lisa and her husband Bill. Gretchen reconnected with Lisa at our 20th Oberlin reunion back in 2011. It was an older, greyer group than we normally have dinner parties with, but we're older & greyer too. While eating out on the east deck, most of the conversation was about how Gretchen's employer connected with her current boyfriend after first meeting in Princeton back in the 1980s and then having their own separate marriages (and kids). It's quite a story, a crucial point of which was the 25th Princeton reunion.
As for the food, Gretchen had made a beet salad even with the knowledge of how much I hate beets. I took a bit and swallowed it, but that was it; I would have no more. But that salad had been sprinkled with a so-called "savory granola," and that was so good I could imagine filling a bowl with it and eating it with a spoon. The handmade pasta was also amazing.
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