Kuchen Quest

I've become addicted to The Great British Baking Show on Netflix.  (I blame you, Aunt B!)

So I watch people bake all sorts of yummy things, yeasty things, and I want to make them too.  Then DS called wondering if we have a family kringle recipe.  We don't, but there's Mother Malcolm's Never-Fail Coffee Cake that's kinda kringle-ish--but not.  Then I thought about the kuchen that my Grandma A used to bake (it's not a kringle either but it's in the same family of Germanic bready pastries) and wondered if the recipe was around so I called Aunt G in Indy.  She said that it was in one of her church's recipe compilations so when I visited there last week I paged through the book, found the kuchen recipe (thanks to Aunt R) along with about a dozen other old family recipes, a couple of which I have but most of them I didn't.  Not until we found the nearest Staples and made copies so now I have them.  One of these days I'll make kuchen appear.  Fingers crossed that it's edible.  I'll let you know.


I unplugged the birdbath heater when I left last week which sent all of the birds off to other yards with open water.  I plugged it back in and refilled it when I got home on Tuesday night but it wasn't until after noon today that any birds came back.  I even filled all the feeders yesterday figuring that the chickadees or bluejays would arrive, but nope, nobody came. This afternoon I watched two bluejays exhibit admirable patience.  There was a squirrel taking its sweet time on the peanut wreath and two bluejays were lined up in the apple tree waiting for him/her to be done and scamper off.  At one point one of the birds flew down to the top of the neighboring crook and hollered at it a bit to no avail.  It took about 20 minutes but their patience was rewarded and they made the most of it.  You can see their two gray breasts in the apple tree, one low and one high, and the squirrel perched on top of the peanuts.




My serger came home from the fixit shop today all fixed and ready to sew.  It has been there since the end of August and I am grateful to the technician for not giving up and finally managing to unstick the stuck tension knob.  Ahhh.  Now I can get back to sewing the way I like to sew--on two machines.



 
Did you know that there's a castle in Lexington?  Some guy built it for his lady love but she vamoosed before it was finished so it sat empty for a long time, then someone bought it and turned it into a hotel and event center.  It's pretty cool looking but it needs trees.




One of the saddest but prettiest features along many roads around Lexington are the stacked stone walls.  They're beautiful, precisely made, covered with lichens, but made by slaves.  It's hard to admire them with a clear heart.

14November--Barbara Malcolm, Spies Don't Retire. 

Sonia sat at her computer all morning while George was off with his new bird watching buddies, working on her photo art.  She had gotten a digital camera when the price reached what she considered reasonable a few years ago.

She had taken a basic photography class when she was a young wife and spent years taking snapshots of the children as they grew and of the garden through the season of blooming.  After a while she developed an eye for interesting angles and sought out a teacher at the local technical school to help her refine her technique and teach her some of the more technical and artistic fine points of still photography on film.

She went through phases where all she took were moody black and white shots of homeless people or ruined houses being consumed by nature.  She’d had a gallery showing of those and while the economy boomed had moderate success.  But once the dotcom bubble burst and fortunes weren’t so high, her moody and socially conscious works became less popular.

She put her camera aside for a while then while she did other things, got their daughter married and almost immediately divorced, helped their son overcome a persistent addiction to drink, but after a while she realized that she missed taking pictures.  Missed the almost unconscious sharp focus she had looked at life with only a few years before.

She started buying photography enthusiast magazines again and was amazed to discover that nearly all the articles were concerned with digital photography.  She tried to contact her old mentor only to discover that he’d immigrated to South Africa.  The chaps at the local stores all assumed a much greater knowledge of computers than she had and she left the stores in frustration, deciding she had become a dinosaur.

One weekend when their son was visiting from London she remarked on how she missed taking photos but felt out of step with her old Nikon and 35mm film.  Drake had recently begun to work for a web designer and was completely immersed in the world of computers.  He patiently showed her how a digital camera worked and how, with a more up-to-date computer, she could manipulate her photos, clean them up, and even change colors, crop them, make them look more like art than life.

She invested in a moderately priced camera and a laptop computer with more graphic capabilities and got to work.  She was happy to find that the local technical school taught a course in digital photography for adults and she signed up.  The teacher was younger than either of her children but he had the patience of Job and was willing to explain over and over the steps to producing the sort of pictures she envisioned.

The sun shone today!  It was above freezing for a couple hours in mid-afternoon!  This weather is just... just wrong.  Many trees still have leaves on them.  They look bedraggled and confused.  I had my trainer session this morning.  I like T the trainer and like how I feel when we're done.  This afternoon I finished my read-through of The Seaview and have three pages of notes and one new facet of the B&B rehab to write and edit.  That made me feel good.  Now I feel tired.
--Barbara