Big.

Mammoth town to the right, hot springs to the left.

Giving Thanks.

I work tonight, but I have tomorrow and Friday off, so we're going down to ski in Yellowstone, which required cooking food today to take with us, for a Thanksgiving picnic lunch on skis tomorrow.

D made a duck - but I took the video so I get to post it :)  I'm waiting for the video to upload, so it will be added eventually.

Cough, cough, sneeze.

Today.

I voted.

(My actual ballot - does that make it invalid??? Outside our local polling place, with my "I Voted" sticker :)

College.

And combat veterans.

Reading.

“Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”

Yummy, fat.

Homemade tortilla chips. 3/4" of Canola Oil warmed in a skillet on the stove plus cut up tortillas - they cook quick, and as I'd never done this before, I managed to burn the first few attempts, but overall, yummy.

On a limb.

Using the New York Times' fun little interactive map - This is how I'm calling the Election.


Thank you, please come again.

Two things.

Two things happened at work tonight that amused me. Many, many things happened that didn't amuse me. But we won't go there.

First - all my coworkers thought I was fired, earlier today. The schedule for next week was posted and I wasn't on it.

You wouldn't think that that, by itself, would indicate someone was fired... but that's sort of how people get fired at my work, they're just no longer on the schedule... (don't get me started on just how incredibly wrong that is...)

So I got to joke with our manager, who came in to listen to the band tonight, about how the morning bartender had called him at 11am, asking why I got fired... only to be told that I was going on vacation, and had made getting this next week off a condition of my being hired. And that I was, in no way, fired.

However, every other coworker who looked at the schedule had to be reassured, individually, that I was not fired.

One even gave me a hug. I thought it was ridiculously funny.

(Particularly because another girl got "written up" for something really stupid the other day, burst into tears in the middle of her shift, and has been going back and forth about whether she wants to quit or not... and I got written up for being a few minutes late yesterday, and all my coworkers thought I should be indignant, or distressed, or something, and I thought it was hilarious - cause like, I was three minutes late... like... really, ya gonna write me up for that? - and they don't really understand my attitude. Which is, that our manager is pretty ineffectual, and if he wants to have a power trip by writting me up he can go right ahead of do so, it doesn't effect me, because it's not about me, it's about him).

Second. On said schedule, there was a note, "Servers who work Friday Nights should start thinking of a Halloween Costume".

I always close Friday Nights.

I love costuming. Dressing up is totally my thing.

But not at work. You're kidding me right???

But no. So I was giving the kitchen a hard time about how they should have to dress up too, when one of the cooks suggested I go as a Librarian... we'll disregard that Librarian is a really non-descript and uninspiring character, and focus on the fact that my mind immediately went to Sarah Palin.

I think I'm going to work as Sarah Palin for Halloween.

(With a big, fat Obama button on the lapel of my Skirt-suit.)

Thank goodness -

Thomas Friedman starts to touch on what really strikes me as disgusting about Sarah Palin's rhetoric.


When I was previously working for the wife of a career military man, I could never understand her passionate hatred for any and all taxes... she didn't seem to realize that her entire adult life, from the age of 19 when she married him, her children's life, everything she had, was paid for my the American Taxpayer who paid her husband's salary.

She hated the whole tax structure, federal and state, income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and then employment taxes and business taxes when she tried to start her own business... she thought the federal government was the enemy and the state government not really worth thinking about... and again - I wondered if she ever realized how pathetic it was to hold such hatred from the overarching structure that supported her.

How can you have so much patriotic support for the military, to believe so strongly in the military's mission, it's absolute right to be out there, messing with the whole world, without believing in the absolute right of that same government that sends that military??? It's one thing to dislike policies, or practices, but to inherently distrust the government's right to exist at home, but believe in it's right to exist and exert it's influence overseas, is just hard to wrap my mind around.


However - Sarah Palin seems to be able to stride across that huge gulf of understanding and make it disappear - because, as she said, We need government to get out of the way of American success, while at the same time insisting that it exerts all possible oversight.

Goodluck.

Baby's first Challah.

As congress killed the economic package, and then dismissed for Rosh Hashana, it seemed only appropriate to make my first attempt at Challah Bread... bread baking being a good skill to have when the American economy collapses and we all return to a primitive bartering system as the Dollar becomes more useful as kindle than currancy.


I took the bread making class at the Yuppy Food Store last week. Primarily because of the four breads being discussed, two were Challah and Cinnamon Rolls... and yeah... can't pass that up.

However - the recipe we did for Challah doesn't make it the way I like it best... so I'll need to play with the recipe as I make more. Tonight however, was just to prove to myself that I could, in fact, make Challah bread in our house.

Adding all the liquids to the starter, with the flour on the left...

I intended to essentially* double the recipe, except then I accidently added to much water - so then, I quadruppled the recipe... four loaves. Lots of flour.

*I say essentially, because you don't just double everything and go to town, not everything gets doubled... when you're baking.


Time for the big bowl...


D took some action shots of me kneeding the dough, prior to it's first Rise.


Oh my gosh - so much dough - so much stiff dough that is hard to kneed.



After the first Rising. Which took longer than it should have, due to a less than ideal temperature in the kitchen. It was find after I put it in a puddle of sunlight by the door for an extra hour.


Time to shape.


Cut and rolled into equal lengths.

Got to squash the top ends together to get started.

Braiding.

And you finish off by pushing the three ends together, then tucking the top and bottom underneath the braid.

Three good lookin' loaves - starting their 2nd Rise.


4th Loaf in a pie plate.


2 hours later.

Having risen again, the third loaf had to be moved to it's own pan. And so it was the first to go into the over.

Above it goes in, below it comes out!

Within not even two minutes, D had already stolen a chunk.



D trying to catch the Steam coming off the chunks... not sure how he thought he'd do that.


The Pie One - alright, but not perfection.

Last two. Perfectly golden - not too dark.
All done.
The prettiest two.

Pretty.

More of the flowers from the Farmer's Market a couple weeks ago. They're all dead now.

Next to the door.

I pulled some seeds from a butternut squash I bought from the store and turned into soup. The seeds grew well, starting in Arizona during the monsoon rains. They really like high temps and TONS of water. Which is a challenge here... they've been flowering though.

Another flower - the squash are next to a street-side window - so you see the potted plants, plus the walkway outside, one story before...

Yay - flowers.

Quote of the Day.

Me to D - "You'd just have to supervise the goats so you could make cheese from their milk."


(after a month of thinking about working in restaurants, my age, farms, why I'm learning to bake bread, and super-gluing back together a one inch long rubber bison we got at a children's toy store for 50 cents, several weeks ago, that D had zip-tied to his handle bars as a talisman).

It's in there somewhere.

Where I put together my townie...

Outside.

Inside.

The bunker (handle bars and brakes, primarily, inside)

The work space -


Waiting to be cabled...


She's a Schwinn Mesa Runner (with a little beige coyote emblem next to the name on the top tube). And was originally purchased from Mill Valley Cyclery in California (according to a little sticker near the bottom bracket :). Maybe I'll have a photo of her all finished up, later.


D had to "adjust" the dropout spacing to fit the wheels we managed to find.

The Frame, fork, bottom bracket, crank and arms were all together, the rest we found, assembled and adjusted. Wait till you see the fenders I jury-rigged... it involved a hack saw and some very irritating noises...

Codes.

[Edit: so what I'm trying to say here, is that there are a lot of different ways to identify a place, geographically, climatically, politically, historically, currently, bureaucratically, and numerically, besides others. Thinking about the places I've lived numerically is interesting. And just one of the many levels on which I can define my place in the world. It's odd to me.]

It just occurred to me that I'd never lived somewhere with a zip code with a 7 in it.

But actually that was wrong - I just hadn't really internalized our zip from Ivins Utah, as we only lived there two months, and knowing we wouldn't be there long term we never had anything mailed there, so I never wrote down the address...

Missoula is the first time we've had a 9 though. All others are accounted for (in order of their use)-

50265

84532

50112

84738

45013

86314

59802

Ya know when you go to check your credit score each year and they ask you funny questions from your credit history to ensure you are who you say you are - but they're questions like

"Which of the following counties have you lived in, in the past five years?"

And there's always a "None of the above" option??? Yeah - I always find those questions take longer to figure out than they probably should... I should start a file of old addresses or something, cause I'm starting to forget them...

Life.

^ The yuppy food store (where I'll be taking a class in two weeks which will teach me all about yeast and how to make both Challah bread AND cinnamon rolls!!!) has the only jam I've ever liked - Roasted Garlic Onlion Jam from Stonewall Kitchen.

^ I used part of a Birthday gift card to REI to get some clipless pedals for PomPom (I'd been using some old ones of D's)... just in time to get excited about Guitar Ted's TI v 5 chit chat, and to read about Matt having broken his second set of pedals that are the same style (though I believe his might be Ti and mine aren't that schmancy and therefore, hopefully, stronger, sorry Matt :)

^ I almost didn't get them, cause they're blue, and PomPom is Purple with Red and blue just doesn't go, but I guess she could use a little Obama love, so yay for blue!!! Also - it came with a sticker that totally works with my water bottle's color theme...

...come on now - do you all really think I'm that vapid???

The following is a child's drawing of a person on a unicycle being chased by a squirrel on a bicycle, while a rocket launches in the background. I predict therapy in the child's future.