U.F.O.

I didn't post a picture with today's post. I did this deliberately and you will thank me for it as you read onwards.

As part of the preparations for Thanksgiving next week I decided that it was time that the fridge got a real cleaning from top to bottom. I took out shelves and bins and actually scrubbed the inside of the fridge. Admit it. How often do you do that? When doing food shopping, unfortunately, we have a relatively small fridge (for here in the US, might I add) and when the new food arrives, the things that were already here have a tendency to migrate to the back of the fridge.

As part of the cleaning process I discovered several U.F.O.'s. These are Unidentified Food Objects. We're talking about the kind of things that your kid's biology teacher asks students to bring into class when they do the segment on fungi. We're usually relatively frugal here with the notable exception of food. Still, we do try to avoid buying too much food and having more leftovers than we can eat. DD did a segment at Nature's Classroom where they even applied the proper name to this food. Ort.

Ort : (n) a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

They would even go to the effort of weighing the ort at the end of a meal to show the kids how much food they had wasted. This would be conveyed at the end-of-meal "ort report".

While we try to avoid ort, the process of pushing things to the back of the fridge provides for the occasional surprise. Over the past few weeks, DW and I seem to have been spread fairly thin, so we were probably due for what we found during today's fridge clean out. I must say there were some interesting things. I'll let your imagination run wild with the colors, textures and aromas. They included:

• Psychedelic Technicolor (once) fresh Mozzerella
• Fuzzy Peach Jam
• Liquid cucumber (fortunately an "English" cucumber still in the plastic wrapper)
• Grey pickled Jalapeno peppers. (No, not fuzzy, just grey.)
• A whole wheat flatbread wrap that was more like a Saltine cracker than bread.
• A jar with a solid cake of Sesame Tahini at the bottom that required a knife to remove.
• One shriveled and totally dessicated strawberry.
• A small pool of something very sticky on the bottom shelf. (No sign of actual food or a container of any sort.)
• A small container of grapes that were more like wine-in-a-grape skin
  

To avoid totally grossing anyone out who has ever or might ever eat at my home, I have to say that a) most of the food was packaged and not cross-contaminating anything, and b) many people have (happily) eaten at my home and gone on to live normal healthy lives.

Still, I can say with total honesty that my high-school biology teacher would have been overjoyed to prepare slides from my fridge to look at under the microscope! She would have particularly enjoyed the vibrant colors of the Mozzerella!

A little literary diversion.

Last week one of my students passed on a copy of a book that she'd read for me to look though. I've been pretty busy this week and hadn't even been able to look past the notes on the dust jacket. Today was no exception. After taking DD and a friend out to lunch after my canoe building class this morning, I returned home to scrape the scary (and mostly fluid) pumpkins up with a snow shovel and carry them to the compost bin and do a bit of garage cleaning and organizing.

This evening I got a few moments to sit down with the book. It's The Year of the Boat by Lawrence Cheek and have discovered that it is about his personal journey to build his own wooden boat. It's one of those books with a really incongruous start - the author and would-be boatbuilder is a native of El Paso, Texas - not a real hub of boat building. The chapter titles such as Impatience, Glop, Grit and The Zen of Screwing Up portend some interesting reading.

Ok, that was a new one for me...

I walked out into the lobby yesterday afternoon and happened to walk in on a discussion regarding the upcoming holidays. Our receptionist then made the comment that she'd be spending the holidays with her "spinster starter kit" otherwise known as her two cats.

Struck me funny.

Wordless Wednesday

Grim Reaper?

Probably one of my least favorite cars from a stylistic point-of-view is Chrysler's PT Cruiser. While they were sorta cool when they came out in a very retro way, I quickly became jaded about the styling. More often than not, I can be heard referring to them as a "Sport Utility Hearse".

Today, on my way to work, I saw the following in front of me at a traffic light which only reinforced my opinions.


Note the Grim Reaper on the left. It had flames down the sides and probably over the top of the hood as well as those you see on the bumper.

A bit of detail of the right side of the vehicle is shown below:


It is a bit difficult to read, but the tombstones say things like R.I.P. 1991 Subaru and R.I.P. 1965 Ford Falcon Sedan Delivery.

Ultralight!

The picture above is of the new "lightweight" box-beam strongback and the "light" patterns. For those of you who may not have been following this blog, this design is a Prospector Ranger 15 from Bear Mountain Boats. At 15' long and 35" wide, it is easily the largest canoe that we've ever built at the school where I teach.

We had several concerns with building a boat this large. It was going to be a) big and b) heavy. First, as the boat itself is 35" wide and the main engtry door we go in and out is 36", but the swing of the door prevents us from getting a full width opening. To solve that issue, we move this boat out through the door on it's side as it is only 28" from the bottom of the box beam to the keel of the patterns. Even doing this required shortening the station forms by about 4" and notching the stem and stern forms to lower the whole set of forms.

After you get the canoe through the door, you need to make a 90° turn to go through some (thankfully!) larger doors and down a flight of stairs to get to the basement shop. Once down the stairs, you need to turn again to get the boat in place to work on it. The shop is well equipped, but a bit tight for building 6 canoes at a time. I tell my students that it is a bit like ballet - everybody needs to be in the right place at the right time and know what all the other people are doing!

The station forms are also hollowed out. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was to reduce weight. The weight loss from the station forms alone was 14.5#. I really need to weigh the whole assembly, but when we brought out a Wee Lassie strongback with station forms on it this morning, we put it down and then immediately lifted the "lightened" strongback and station forms of the Ranger. We found them to be comparable weight-wise.

While the bits of material that we've left look deceptively thin, they're at least 3" wide along the edges and 4" wide at the center. I was concerned about warping of these station forms and that has not reared its ugly head, so I'm pleased with that. Overall, a real "thumbs-up" for our new space-age design.

Scary Pumpkins

I think Jack O'Lanterns at Halloween aren't at their scariest. They're too fresh and new looking. The more I think about it I should probably carve them at least a week ahead of time as it usually takes a week or more for them to become truly scary. You need to wait for them to become slightly moldy and wizened shadows of their former selves, oozing and wrinkling in the early November weather.

I wanted to take these pictures last weekend, but the pumpkins were not truly scary yet. The weather has been a bit cool over the last two weeks and hasn't been ideal for making this year's pumpkins as scary as last year's pumpkins were in DW's post found here. On clearing away last year's crop of orange mutants, there were some that were more liquid than solid as they were taken to the compost bin.

Here's the slowly collapsing "boo" pumpkin...


The "B" has wrinkled into nothingness and one "O" has fallen out while the lid has actually collapsed into the center.

The Harry Potter pumpkin is somewhat more menacing with a slowly spreading goatee of black mold developing from the inside out. From a purely dental standpoint, he's beginning to look a little less toothy and a lot more gummy...


I figured that the vampire pumpkin would be as moldy as Harry was as they were both from the same place and equally soft when I cut them, but this was not to be. With the softening of the edges on this one, it looks decidedly more smiley than menacing.


The pumpkin in the left foreground does look more menacing than it did, but isn't anywhere near as scary as it could be. The haka pumpkin in the background with the (now) string of a tongue now just looks ridiculous.


The most frightening pumpkin in the whole crop is the one in the right foreground of the photo above. It was given to DS by a friend of mine who lives nearby. This pumpkin arrived looking as it does in the picture - the white marks were not carved by us. They were made by bear claws as the gourd was growing!