Lo que dicen ellos

Creakily snoring cat is the best cat.

Got my crown done today, for a mere $250 thanks to the NDP's championing of dental insurance for indigents. My left jaw aches; this is a state of affairs that will likely persist until morning. It's nice to not have a bit of a hole where a tooth should be, though. (I had a temporary crown. It came off a month ago and the dentist said "eh, probably not worth putting it back on again.")

Things in boxes, empty shelves. There's more of the last lousy ten percent of stuff I can pack but it's running into the problem of deciding -what- to pack. That in turn would be easier if I had a better sense of what the apartment will look like without bookcases, which I won't get until after the movers come. Oh well. I can always take later boxes over to the storage unit myself.

Soon I'll get to see what life is like with Less Stuff, at least for a little while.

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My great-great-great- (+/- one great) -grandfather or uncle Joseph G. Taylor had a violin that was discovered among my grandmother's things when she died in 2014. Turns out to be a fairly decent instrument: not amazing quality but certainly a few steps above my cello. ("Wilhelm Duerer fecit anno 1900.") Her kids got it refurbished and then had no idea what to do with it, so my dad gave it to me as the only person in the family who plays a stringed instrument at all. It's mostly sat in its case for years; for awhile I loaned it to someone who wanted to learn to play violin, and I'm not sure whether it got any use there or not.

I took it out yesterday just to see what it was like. It's tiny. Tuning is obnoxious; I'd forgotten how much I hate wooden pegs. (I'm spoiled by the amazing mechanical pegs on my viola.) Notes aren't where my fingers think they ought to be, and everything is cramped. I'd expected all that. What I hadn't expected was for it to feel like cheating. I'm accustomed to a certain amount of resistance in bowing, I expect from the thicker/larger strings on the viola (and more so on the cello, though that's a whole different thing). On the violin the bow just ... glides. Faster notes and slurs come so much easier and more clearly, string crossings are trivial. Hmpf.

Other than that... I'm still here. Mr Tuppert has stopped creaking but is still sprawled on his heating pad with his chin on his front paws, and that's pretty cute. Life goes on.

I made English muffins ("or, as they say in the UK, muffins") yesterday, so I can make more frozen breakfast sammiches. Today I decided to have a proper Eggs Halifax, which is like a Benedict but with smoked salmon instead of back bacon. In the event the hollandaise broke. This has been the usual fate of my attempts at hollandaise for the last N years. It's frustrating because it -used- to work. Still tasted okay but the texture was way off.

Since making tricky food was going so well I decided to turn the egg whites from the hollandaise into divinity. (If you're not from the South, divinity is the answer to the question "what if meringues were candy?" It is somewhat nougat-like and somewhat fluffy and usually involves pecans, though I haven't had much in the way of pecans since the death of my great-uncle who had a pecan orchard.) This involves cooking a bunch of sugar to hard-ball / 260F and then adding it into a running mixer with whipped egg whites. After an hour my sugar was stubbornly refusing to go over 245F. I turned up the heat a little more and the sugar boiled over. Thankfully I grabbed the pot so it did not boil over onto the burner, just onto the stove top, but while I was salvaging that the sugar crystallized. I swore and tried again: added more water and some additional sugar and stuck it back on the burner to re-dissolve and re-cook. This time careful additions of heat got it up to 250F and more threatened boiling over, so I called it good and poured it into the mixer. Adding injury to insult: while scraping the last quarter or so of the sugar into the mixer I managed to splash some of it onto my hand. Molten sugar is a nasty business: it glues itself to your skin and keeps burning. Thankfully my mixer is right next to the sink. No permanent damage done but I ended up with several blisters, some of which had the tops ripped off when I tried to remove the sugar.

I used to hate and avoid dealing with candy-making / molten sugar. Now I seem to have reached a point where it is my nemesis, and I will conquer it or get really annoyed and minorly scorched trying. Anyway, the divinity is in its pan and setting; should be edible sometime tomorrow.

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Twenty-seven and a half boxes of books (down one and a half from last time), and what looks to be about twenty-five boxes of games (down three or so from last time). Plus one box of CDs and two-plus of DVDs. My obsession with the Arrowverse means that DVDs no longer fit neatly into two boxes. Oh well.

Now to pack up all the random miscellaneous stuff that doesn't need to be out while the place is on the market, which will take probably less than ten boxes and probably twice the time. At least I have plenty of time: my preferred movers aren't available until early-mid March.