Havoc and Mayhem

My Precious Mug

The first of every Sunday Sian at From High in the Sky hosts Storytelling Sunday. This year’s theme is “My Precious”.

That black & steel travel mug is my very favorite travel mug. I’ve had it since about 1995, when I moved to this area and suddenly had a much longer (physically) commute than I was used to & a job that didn’t provide a coffee pot for employees (there were too many people to make that financially feasible).

It is a 20oz, wide bottom mug that would never fit in any cup holder of any car I have ever owned (and I have had 3 of my own and 3 of DH’s since 1993). But the wide bottom made it balance perfectly on the console between the front seats.

I once slid off into a ditch on an icy road and never spilled a drop of my coffee.

Within a year or so of my getting it it had lost it’s top flap that kept the two drink spouts covered so coffee didn’t stay as hot for as long as it was supposed to (18 hours!) but that was ok because with that top flap the coffee remained too hot to drink for a while after I got to work. Without it the coffee was perfect to drink shortly after I sat at my desk.

It didn’t see much use from 2003-til this January. Just on long trips with the family or hour long drives to the town south of us for shopping. But it has been in regular use since I returned to work.

And then Wednesday I lost it.

I kept it on the console by my seat for the trip to work but on the trip home I would hang it by the handle from the basket behind my passenger seat. (it’s a mini van and I keep the seat behind the driver folded down. Havoc sits behind the passenger seat & Mayhem on the driver side in the 3rd row. With the one seat folded down we have a bunch of space to move around & the boys can’t touch each other. I keep a small basket right behind my seat to hold assorted small stuff). I think, when I was loading the groceries into the van I must have bumped the basket & knocked the mug off & onto the ground. I would have though I would have heard it hit or seen it, but I was preoccupied because DH was driving & had pulled up in the wrong direction so I was actually in the driving lane loading the van rather right in front of the store.

I have a memory of bringing the mug into the house.

I think.

I might have a subconscious memory of thinking something was slightly off, something to do with my mug. So maybe I didn’t.

But I have looked all over this house & the mug is not here. And it isn’t in the car.

So I have lost my precious mug that I had owned for 18 years.

Thermos doesn’t make mugs like that any more. So it is pretty much irreplaceable.

I ended up getting this one, because I have to bring my own coffee to work. I drink decaf and the rest of the office doesn’t & there is only one coffee pot & no way to boil water for a French press.

If you are wondering why someone who drinks decaf needs coffee in the morning, one word – habit. I’m cranky without my coffee & it’s nothing to do with needing caffeine to face the day. It’s everything to do with drinking coffee every morning since 1989. Giving up caffeine in 2010 for my insomnia was easy. Giving up coffee was impossible.

I like this container ok. The lack of handle is actually handy because I’m not obligated to hold it in a certain hand to get the mouth holes to line up. And the fact that it isn’t missing any parts means it actually keeps the coffee as hot as it is supposed to. This is useful because I leave the house at 7:10a & go to the gym & get to work at 9. I would pour coffee out of my mug & into a coffee mug & microwave it when I got to work because it would be only slightly warmer than lukewarm by then.

But I scalded my tongue Friday because I had forgotten how hot coffee can remain if properly kept.

But I still wish I could find my old mug.

April in Numbers

I was busy this month. Busier than I thought actually, considering all the time off I had to take. This month I:

made 4 layouts
read 12 new books
bought 20 ancient paperbacks in a lot off ebay for $12
listened to 3 audiobooks
kept 171 of the photos I had taken (at the moment, probably I’m going to delete some of them when I get around to editing again)
wrote 11 blog posts
planned 28 meals
actually made or purchased 21 of them (3 were planned fast food)
had to take 8 days off of work, – 7 for scheduled absences and 1 for sudden illness
went to the gym 22 times, working out 70 minutes each time on average, spending 30-50 minutes of it on cardio & 20-40 on strength training
bought 1 new kitchen table

The boys had 5 baseball games & now have a 2-2-1 record.

DH finally got a new work laptop (his was so old it ran Win XP & now he’s jumped to Win 8) & he took the boys and 2 of their friends to 1 professional baseball game & spent $180 on tickets, parking & food.

Today both boys are off on two different school field trips, one leaving at 6:30am and the other at 8. One will be back at 3 and the other at 5:30 and then they both head off to baseball practice.

My back & neck are killing me and I am going to start this month off with a massage, if I can get an appointment this week with a lady that works in the same building I do.

How was your April

I made a cake!

It’s a chocolate chip pound cake.

The only criteria I had when choosing a pound cake recipe was the number of eggs used.

It had to be high.

3 or 4 eggs was not going to cut it.

The whole reason I wanted to make a cake was to use a lot of eggs & I had heard that pound cakes were high in eggs.

This one used 10! 8 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks!

Unfortunately it came with tricky baking instructions and I screwed them up.

Which is why the cake came out both over cooked and undercooked.

Which I would not really have thought possible.

See, the instructions said to preheat the oven to 350 and then once the cake was in you were supposed to turn it down to 325.

Only I forgot that part and baked the whole thing at 350 for 90 minutes.

I think the silicone bundt pan had something to do with it as well. Those silicone pads work ok for cookies but my silicone muffin pans & cupcake holders & this bundt pan are nothing but trouble. Nothing bakes evenly in them.

I want to get a regular bundt pan & try again at the right temperature.

I also need a springform pan.

I found a recipe for a chocolate mousse cake that needs one.

It needs 8 whole eggs and 5 egg whites!

We are getting 3.5 dozen eggs a week. I sell some to friends but I cannot seem to get ahead of them. I have 8 dozen eggs in my fridge now & it seems like I always have at least 5.

Wordy Thursday

I forgot what day it was… DH took the kids to a Nationals game yesterday, in my car, so I was stuck at home & got involved in reading & totally spaced the blog post I was going to do about reading.

This is probably the biggest stack of to be read dead tree books that I have had in nearly a year.

18 books!

Plus 2 that are not pictured!

I can’t even fit my kindle on the nightstand because these are all ancient paperbacks, some from the 1950s and they are too unstable to support the weight of the kindle.

I have all of Edmund Crispin’s books & about half of Michael Innes’ . I’ve worked my way through all of Elizabeth Daly’s & have listened to nearly all of Ngaio Marsh’s over the past 6 months, only 4 more to go.

Mysteries from the 1930-60 era are much more erudite than today’s. They never use a 2 syllable word where a 4 syllable one is available. People never ‘say’ things. They ‘natter’ and ‘whisper’ and ‘mumble’ and ‘chatter’ and “articulate’ and issue ‘gnomic utterances’.

They also seem to ‘ejaculate’ a great deal, which is nearly as jarring to me as all the casual & unthinking racial slurs that randomly pop up.

However, I challenge you to name me a book published after 1970 that mentions ‘gnomic utterances’ and yet I have come across it nearly a dozen times in books by 7 different authors.

Then there are words like prolegomena, derogation, logomachy, peroration, minatory, jocosity, emendation, aposiopesis, lachrymose, conurbations & petechial. I either had a general idea of these words meanings or could guess it from the context, but I still had to look them up to be sure.

And these were ‘railway reading’ books. Not ‘great literature’.

Makes me wonder if the general reading public wasn’t expected to be better educated than it is today. Writers today are told that they should write to a general 5th grade level. I doubt many 5th graders know the meaning of ‘conurbations’. I have an MA that minors in English and I didn’t.

Or has our vocabulary been shrinking? Like going from “I agree” to “okay” to ‘k’ over time.

I have to take a break every now and then & read something written recently because my brain needs a break from the wordiness.

And my eyes from the tiny print.

You can’t adjust print size on a paperback and people in the 50s must have had much better vision than people today. I compared print size between a paperback from 1948 & a paperback published last month and the type is half again as big for the book published last month.

It’s also twice as thick, so maybe the tiny print was a way of keeping costs down.

What have you been reading lately?