domestic progress

The first blossom among the Christmas cacti in my house has popped open, and the many buds on the other older plants make my heart glad (as do the rubber duckies keeping company with the ones by the bathtub).

A mild flare of optimism: preparing to throw out an old, irreparably stained fitted sheet.
(Though I admit to retrieving it a few minutes later to use as a dropcloth for the next round of wall-painting.)

Kitchen notes:

Cooked Southern Living's savory corn pudding for a potluck. It received great reviews.

Refilled the baking powder container with a homemade batch this morning.

Made turkey stock in the crockpot and then used some of it to prepare black beans.

Baba ghannouj ... with apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice, because I'd forgotten that we threw out the admittedly-past-its-expiration-date bottle of lj when the fridge failed a few weeks ago.

Meatloaf (with mushrooms as part of the filler) last night, meatloaf sandwiches tonight.

Decluttering:

100 Games of Solitaire is going to a Free Library, because I haven't opened the book since plucking it from a freebie pile some years ago -- because, let's get real, any time I could spare for learning new solitaire riffs is going to be spent on dopamine hits via Duolingo if the wifi is working, crocheting if it's not, or relearning poker hands if for some reason I really feel like communing with a deck of cards.

My church will be hosting a Trans, Gender Queer, and Non-Binary (TGQNB) clothing swap in March and has started to collect "gently used clothes and shoes in good repair in all adult and teen sizes and appropriate
for all gender expressions." See page 25 of the December newsletter for details.

Nearly broke a screwdriver dismantling the frame on my Dufy print (it fell behind the piano a year or so ago, cracking the glass), but the deed is done and the screwdriver back in its drawer.

Reading:

The March/April 2014 issue of English Home, which includes this bit from an interview with Honor Blackman ("best known for playing Cathy Gale in The Avengers and as Bond girl Pussy Galore"):

Niki Browes: How house-proud are you?
Honor Blackman: I'm looking round my house and the carpets need to be cleaned and the sofa re-sprung. It looks like a pigsty at the moment for the simple reason that I've been doing my tax return. There are papers everywhere.

The December/January issue of Garden & Gun, which includes a fun profile of One Flew South (a bar in the Atlanta airport that happens to be a big reason the BYM and I try to schedule connecting flights through Atlanta), and also this choice morsel in "Talk of the South":

Q: Eighteenth-century Georgia was really just King George's penal colony, right?
Guy Martin: ...Emptying jails made for excellent colonial business -- the British Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia, and the Raj's India became places of the second chance. Teasing our brethren of the thirteenth colony about their jailbird roots remains the best kind of Southern sport, but down at the core, as Americans, every immigrant to the promised land comes from one sort of jail or another.

I borrowed from the library a book on many ways to incorporate avocados into many kinds of dishes and drinks, and ... I cannot get into it. That I have long regarded avocados as treats rather than staples is about 85% of it, and attempting to like an avotini about four years ago went nowhere.

Kelly Bowen's "The Lady in Red," published as a bonus story within Grace Burrowes's Forever and a Duke

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/158836.html.