Long Weekend

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It has been a very satisfying long weekend. Saturday involved some grocery shopping, and a visit to the (closing, sadly) Taney Books in Dundrum, where I acquired a couple of interesting bits and pieces, including a book of British boys’ public school stories from about 1919. Those things fascinate me - not least because they were the school stories I was familiar with as a kid (Irish schooling in the 90s was therefore a bit of a surprise), but also because of the very different set of preoccupations they portray.

The grocery shopping included the various components of a jambalaya (chicken, bacon, shrimps, peppers and onions), a dish I’ve never cooked before, but certainly will again - it came out very very well indeed, and for little enough effort. I’m going to be delving through the collection of cookery books for other such one-pot stove-top dishes, as they seem to be what I cook best.

We tried barbecuing on Sunday, although we got rained on. It worked out pretty well anyway, and we had a good evening inside, concluding in breaking out Carcassonne for a few games. I’m almost - but not quite - able to keep up to Mac. Actually using the rules for farmers is something I’ll have to adjust to; they make or break the game, and it can be hard to see exactly what they’re going to do, and how you can break up the other players’ while leaving your own a wide range.

And thus far today we have had breakfast outside, dropped some bottles to the bottlebank, and walked along the Dodder a bit. Plans for the rest of the day include little more than reading, spodding, and generally taking it easy.

Flatbread

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I just discovered (more precisely, confirmed, as I’d read it elsewhere) that you can make excellent flatbread with flour, water, some oil, and a good frying pan. I can see what I’ll be having for breakfast fairly often from now on…

Google define:

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been reading about permaculture - my gardening this year looks more successful, although I must learn to distinguish young chives from grass, which is more difficult than it sounds - and food for a good chunk of today. Google’s “define” fuction has been hit pretty pretty frequently - it’s my favourite use of google, and I’m just realising that not everyone knows about it. Type “define: seed ball” or “define: pomelo” or whatever into google, and it’ll return as many neat definitions as it can find. Incredibly useful for the quick wtf-is-that questions.