Bread and that

I bought a bread machine when I had a little baby or two, in the 1980's. I didn't know until a couple of days ago that what I had bought was the first bread machine introduced to the U.S. It was from an electronics catalog called DAK. It looked like R2D2, and I really liked it.

When I wore it out I got another machine, and years later another and I'm on my fourth bread machine. All this thinking came about because a friend tasted some of the bread (onion dill, the fanciest one I ever do—ingredients too expensive to ever sell commercially) and wanted to buy a machine.

I went to my online Consumer reports account to get a comparison chart on current machines, but there wasn't one.

I brought the photo, though, because I almost always set the machine to dough and do the last rise and the baking outside the machine. Partly because of the elevation where I am (over 5,000 feet above sea level), bread cooked in the machine doesn't rise long enough. Some new machines allow for extending parts of the cycles.

But anyway, because I'm used to doing them by hand and I like it, I thought I'd bring these to show, since I was thinking about it. These were baked in small mixing bowls. They're not the prettiest shapes ever, and I took them out of the pan too soon, but it seemed a good moment, five larger-than-expected loaves of onion dill bread.

correction a few days later: I had written "almost nearly" and I meant either "nearly always" or "almost always." sorry

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10/27/07 It's called "Drew's Favorite Onion Dill Bread"
http://www.xanga.com/jnbsmom/622943307/bread-baking.html
"Drew" is Drew Kaplan, who sold those first bread machines and had a very chatty cookbook with it. I still have two copies of it.
http://www.hungrymonster.com/recipe/recipe-search.cfm?Course_vch=Bread%20Machine&ttl=1&Recipe_id_int=27224

Changing our back gate

Click photos to enlarge.

    Keith has wanted to put something on the gate to keep people from seeing into the yard so easily, but I wasn't thrilled with the idea.

Then he thought of this, and I love it! We've grown this bamboo (whatever giant grass is called bamboo around here), and we talked about making some kind of coyote fence with it (poles lashed into sections with baling wire, a local custom). Keith thought of lashing just a few together—four or five—and working them into the ironwork.      We need more of them to finish it off. Right now they're every-other-spot, and not all the way across. When it's filled in it will be like a bamboo wall that opens with a remote control. I think at first, this month, people will assume that the bamboo is for Halloween decoration. I'm looking forward to putting Christmas lights on it in December!

This is what our gate looked like without the decorations:

We're home with lots of photos

Holly took the one of Kelli Traaseth and me at Sir Benedict's Tavern in Duluth. There are hundreds of other photos from our happy trip north, but these are some of the good ones. I liked the bumper sticker photos with people reflections. If anyone knows where I can get one of those beautiful "Cultivate Mindfulness" stickers that Kelli has, please send me info!

Holly and Kyra were in there somewhere

This is from Sunday at the Mall of America. We're touristing in Duluth some more today. The photos aren't keeping up with the days. Later I'll bring photos of a beach on Lake Superior. It's a little like time travel! (Sorry, Marty; I know you hate time travel...)

Photos Finally

Thanks to Holly and Kelli figuring this out, we'll have some of the photos... not all yet. Sunday was to have been the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, but mood changed and rain fell and so we went to the Mall of America where the girls rode lots of rides. Holly is just as tall as a Lego man, it seems...
There will be a link to more photos and a few little videos in a few days, but for the benefit of anyone who might have been forgetting what Holly looked like, there she is! Abbi is up top in the log ride and Kyra is with Holly in Paul Bunyan's hand and her mom's van. There will be more photos of them too, in a few days.

Minnesota

Holly and I are in Minnesota, and are about to go to the Mall of America with Kelli Traaseth and her daughters and another mom, Chrissy, and her daughters.

We forgot the computer we had packed up to bring with us and so having photos here will be less doable, but maybe when we get to Bemidji to the Traaseths' house we can transfer some photos over. We'll take photos in Duluth too and I'll either put some here or a link to where they are, in a few days.

It's raining and that's fine because the Mall of America is like a completely enclosed city.

The conference went well, and I had a good time! Minnesota is an exotic part of the planet for New Mexicans. More later.

Finding Beauty

"Easily amused," Holly has said of me. I told that, in a talk, at the HSC conference in Sacramento last month. Someone later said "You are easily amused."

In our culture, "easily amused" is an insult. We should be cynical, sophisticated, and demand only the finest amusement. But what happens when one consciously looks for the good in things? Finding patterns, colors, sounds, interesting textures, wordplay, the feel on your skin of a change in the weather, a new combination of clothes you've had for years...

The photo above was taken because I found something unexpected and wanted to share it. Look here if you want to consider the mystery of what it is: sandradodd.com/mystery/tree. (Yeah, well you knew it was a tree, right? But there's more.) There's another mystery photo linked at the bottom there that will be new to some of you.

Here are some photos I took at the zoo the other night. The two in the blog post below, of the moon and the horizon, were also taken at the Rio Grande Zoo. It was the night of the Honeywell company picnic.




They'll probably end up as border backgrounds on webpages. Feel free to lift and use them too, or to link from my photobucket. You can click to get them full sized, or lift the thumbnails from here.

These patterns and textures not only "easily amused me," I was struck by the many beautiful things that go unnoticed when they are so near to more wondrous things—exotic birds, bronze sculptures, architecture, interesting people with babies and toddlers... but there in the most mundane of places were other bits of beauty.

The first time I went to England, in the late 1970's, I had similar thoughts, and I photographed the hardware on little doors that led to maintenance corridors or storage rooms in the backs of larger, beautiful buildings. Those things were just as old, or older, than the details of the famous fronts. Photos of the famous places could be bought, or seen in books. I photographed things that were never going to be in those books.

As this kind of seeing became a stronger habit with me, I saw little things my husband did, and later that my children did, that could be lost in the flow of such a big busy life, but I had learned to appreciate odd little things that might have gone undiscovered.

I learned to be easily amused.

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On my second trip to England, Holly and I took the train and got off in a small, inland East Yorkshire village whose name I don't remember. We went to the pub for lunch, but they weren't open yet. In the lane across from their side door, these flowers were growing on the outside wall of a little garage or storage shed. Holly touched them. What in all of England could have been more beautiful than that, at that moment?

Click to enlarge it, if you want to see the flowers better.
An article written at the time is here: sandradodd.com/eastyorkshire