I love Monty Python and 'And Now For Something Completely Different' is the silliest of their silly movies, a series of sketches including 'How Not To Be Seen' that involves explosions. Very silly and what I want to do here, for a change.
I don't know if I can rise to the level of 'silly' but I will not stoop to the level of miserable and grouchy. Enough of that for this year!
We've having lots of lovely rain here this morning. We've been fortunate so far because we haven't (yet) had landslides or trees falling or flooding around here. We are expected to get about fifteen inches of rain in the next two weeks so there will no doubt be all of the above. The downspouts are chuckling and I could hear it on the roof outside my bedroom window when I woke up. Lovely, lovely rain! I think I may have been a duck in a past life because while other people complain about the water falling from the sky, I enjoy it.
I've got a pot of berry sauce cooking on the stove. Just frozen berries - raspberries, blackberries, cranberries and blueberries - that can go with my yogurt, into oatmeal, over dessert, or into my mouth with nothing else. I also bought scones to go with it. I promised my roomies at work, all three of them, that I would bring scones one morning.
Good intentions and Hell - I'm on my way down that slippery slope, no doubt. I intended to bake the scones myself but our oven stopped working properly the other night and I'm afraid that if I tried to make them, they would be awful - soupy or doughy or something else. We were in the middle of baking a pizza when we realized that the convection fan wasn't working. The pizza eventually cooked, but it took almost twice as long as usual and it was like eating a giant cracker.
Therefore, I cheat. I bought a package of scones - blueberry - and will take my latest tub of Greek vanilla yogurt and some of the berry sauce. This is in exchange for nice people taking me to lunch and doing other nice things for me, things that I find hard to reciprocate because of my personal situation (a hubby who controls the pocket book and makes Midas look like a spendthrift).
As for the rain, I am grateful that my route takes me north instead of south. Most of the people in these parts drive south, toward San Francisco meaning that I won't have the traffic most people have. Now, however, watching the weather on TV I must confess that I'm getting a tad nervous.
There is a band of heavy rain right across the hills through which I drive - the windy two-lane road bordering a large creek through a narrow canyon for much of the way. That could make for an interesting drive because yesterday there were a few rocks that had come off the hillsides. Not slides or slips, but just a rock or two or three or some gravel that had traveled from up the hillside onto the roadway.The weather guru is also saying there might be snow on the hills above Calistoga or the higher elevations in Lake County where they had fires last year. It should be an interesting day.
I'm listening to the news this morning and I have to smile at the outline of Obie-One's gun control orders (which are un-Constitutional since they circumvent Congress). What's amusing is that everything he has outlined as "new" already exists here in California.
Background check, uh huh, and a two-week waiting period in which the gun seller holds onto your gun until the check clears. Plus we had to go through a (remedial) gun safety test. That should have been mandatory and held in a classroom to drill the safety aspect into the skull, but it wasn't and still isn't required.
Cannot carry a weapon outside of a locked container, uh huh. Unless it's a rifle when it must be kept in a case. In neither case can it be loaded and, if it's a pistol and in its locked case, it must also be kept in the locked trunk of your car. No ammo anywhere around it. That can be kept in the glove box or passenger compartment. I guess that's just in case the cartridges somehow wriggle out of their box, shimmy over to the locked gun case, unlock it, climb inside and crawl into the magazine which then self-loads the gun. Whatever.
In other words, he's giving lip service to laws that are already on the books - just duplicating or triplicating what's already there. Whatever. I would still point out that it's not the law-abiding citizen that's the problem, and this does nothing to solve the real problem - the criminals who buy illegal weapons or steal them and then use them in the execution of a crime.
Well, I'm not going to get wound up about that this morning. Can't change it, can't do anything about it except wait to see what will happen next.
My berries are cooked. The only thing I wish is that the berries had pectin. Cranberries do, so making cranberry sauce (which is a snap and so-o-o-o much better than what comes in a can - 1 bag of cranberries, 1 large can of orange juice concentrate mixed with water to make 2 C of liquid, 2 C sugar and cook, stirring occasionally, until the berries pop). Once that's refrigerated, it jells. Unfortunately, there isn't enough pectin in my berry sauce for it to thicken naturally, so my choices are: add a couple of chopped apples for their pectin, add some pectin, add some cornstarch. None of those are appealing or desirable, so I'll leave my sauce thin and runny. It tastes just as good.
And with that, it's time for me to get moving. I think it would be wise to allow a little extra time out the door this morning, just in case. Particularly since I have the carpet people coming today.
Have a lovely day in whatever weather you most prefer.
Best~
Philippa
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