Liralen's Adventures Through Life

At the Outer Banks, Brenda taught me how to make her biscuits. She used Southern Biscuit flour, wheat germ, coconut oil, and buttermilk to make crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside biscuits. I only had the biscuit flour I'd brought back with me from OBX, and Costco and the local Safeway didn't have anything of the sort, so I just got all purpose flour instead, and did the best I could with baking powder and soda. And instead of buttermilk, I just added water to Greek Yogurt, which is acidic enough, but a little too solid to go in straight. It worked. John and Anne cooked tray upon tray upon tray of bacon in the oven, starting one batch before I even got my biscuits started, and a couple after the biscuits were done. Cathie made scrambled eggs with scallions, and we had an array of amazing salsas to go with the eggs. There were four kinds of jam because the real estate agent who rented us the houses left each house with some jam, black and tan truffles, and bars of Moo...

Aaaand... of course, a day into the whole thing, I discover that the wireless doesn't work in our room, and everywhere else there are, pretty much, people. Good people, people I love, but still... it's pretty much impossible for me to write while someone is trying to talk with me. The two sets of circuits are pretty much incompatible. So you'll get the first trip this way. *laughs* Hopefully the Crowne Plaza in New Jersey will do better by me and the journal. It better. Of course, our whole trip got started on a very odd foot to begin with... Jet had an award he was being given on the last day of his last year in Middle School, and John and I decided to go and watch him receive the award. That pretty much went the way you'd expect it go to, and each class had awards given by the teachers for the students they thought fit the categories of Scientist, Mathematician, Writer, Artist, etc.. Jet wasn't very impressed with them because they were purely from a selecti...

It was raining, the slow, fine ever present rain that goes with a sky occluded by white. The overcast and drizzle were familiar to me, as comfortable and present as my own breath. I was carefully watching the shadow of the edge of a running blade, using the shadow's intersect with its caster as my way of knowing when I'd hit my mark. I was cutting tile. Huge tiles so heavy it was work to carry two of them anywhere, and I was happily using a power tile cutter, that ran water over the blade to keep it cool enough as it ate its steady way through. John wanted a number of special cuts as the shower he was tiling wasn't the most even thing in the world. It had been finished by hand, and it showed: one wall wasn't exactly square with the other, the curbs weren't vertical, and one wall wasn't quite plumb. So John was fitting in each piece as we got to it, and marking them for me to cut. The tile cutter is loud, so I wear hearing protection when I use it. I get star...