Wednesday, December 26, 2007

What YOU, gentle viewers, have been up to...

I have to give credit to JKirlin for the "gentle viewers" moniker. I probably know very few of you, and for all I know, you could be smearing yourselves with peanut butter while reading this.

A quick perusal at my Sitemeter stats over the last couple of months shows a few interesting trends in the readers who visit the site. First off, thanks for visiting, and re-visiting! Next time you do so, would you mind logging into some server or network in a really obscure place on the map, so my map's red dots can fill in more fully? I need a few hits from Outer Mongolia, or all of Central Asia, for that matter, to help fill in the blanks on my world map hit-shower.

Apparently, a couple of folks are really interested in the following posts, in this order (with links!):

  • Various Nepali holy day festivals
  • Ankor Wat, Cambodia (and every spelling iteration imaginable)
  • The post about my dog potentially having OCD
  • Iframe, Morocco - the mountain retreat
  • The 2006 Christmas Shot (not the 2o07 version). Sorry all you who thought that this was an actual, drinkable shot recipe
  • My front porch railing repair (perhaps because I used the term "This Old House" in the post title? hmmmm)
  • Cherry Pie (sorry, a friend made that and I don't have the recipe)
  • And finally, one that makes absolutely no sense to me. Now, I can see the others getting lots of hits because of travel, food, or home repair interests...I get that. But this one? I have no idea...Marty & Kendra's son, Gabe....aka, Dolphin Boy

At any rate, thanks for reading!!

I've bagged K2!!!

Well, this was a goal I didn't think I'd accomplish this year. At least not before year-end. But, as luck would have it, circumstances allowed the most perfect window of opportunity. It took some huevos, though, and without my friend Jim to climb lead, I wouldn't have been able to reach a previously unattainable goal.......summiting K2. Especially not on a spontaneous decision made just Christmas morning of this year (aka, yesterday). My minutes of training were about to pay off!

The landscape is so sweeping, I couldn't fit the entire summit scope into one photo and had to do a bit of a collage mash-up:


It was a pretty cold day for climbing.....but I managed to get this shot snapped before the gales blew my tripod over. Jim's summit pose:
While I struggled to shoot photos with some event integrity, Jim opted - during his turn behind the camera, and my turn to summit - to document my clumsy ascent:

oops, never mind the ladder.....or the cornfields, or the barn either, for that matter....
...and a Rocky Balboa-style fist-pump....

Finally, the last summit shot!


Finally, got THAT off my life list, and a couple of years early, to boot. Bring it on, ought-8!!

Monday, December 24, 2007

The 800th Post! or, Christmas Eve 2007

So, another year's Christmas is among us. I've been especially jolly with this one, for some inexplicable reason. I've spent much of the afternoon and the evening baking goodies for friends....what I like to call a mini-epicurean artistic experimentation.

I wanted to try a new twist on my nearly famous low-fat pumpkin pie. It includes layering marshmallow creme on the pie crust before adding the punkin'y goodness, in which I have an admittedly heavy 'spice' leaning. But that's another post. At any rate, when I went grocery shopping (after Tom's pre-New Year's Eve party, probably not the best idea) I couldn't find marshmallow creme. So I got marshmallows instead. And of course, the first pie turned out horribly, horribly wrong.

What is supposed to happen is that the marshmallow creme marbles through the pie filling and in places, bubbles over the top, to add a fake meringue-type covering. What actually happened was kind of that, but not. I carefully layered the small marshmallows on the bottom of the pie crust before adding the filling, taking care to even spritz them with butter and coat them with spices. Then I slowly added the pie filling. Turns out, marshmallows float. So even before going into the oven, it was visual chaos.

To add to that, I used a whole can of fat-free evaporated milk (12 ounces) instead of a true cup (8 ounces). So besides being visually chaotic, it was a runny, soupy mess. I baked it anyway. It's still runny. (But not so much that my cat & dog weren't able to feel as though, briefly, I baked a pie especially for them.)

Which reminds me: Tom & Maria - sorry I wasn't able to come through on that pie I told you I was making for you guys......

So, with the second pie, I adjusted accordingly. I microwaved a bowlful of marshmallows, but must have overdone it - because the result was a yellow-ish series of globs resembling melted plastic, by sight, smell, and consistency. I had to throw away my rubber spatula! So I tried again, half the time, to zap the marshmallows. This time, it resembled marshmallow creme, but that apparently doesn't spread so well on a graham cracker crust. So the underlayer of marshmallow creme ended up being kind of star-shaped, rather than covering the entire base of the pie crust.

Then I got creative, and added marshmallows around the border. Then I thought it might be neat to try to make a Christmas Tree out of marshmallows on the pie. I even cut cold marshmallows with angles for the tree (pre-cooking), but of course, none of that effort remained after cooking. The end result, though, is much better by comparison. I had some left over during my third pie, so made a small snack-size pie for myself. I figured I should at least taste my new recipe iteration before gifting it to others!! (It was an insulin-overloading taste explosion, if I say so myself.)

So here is the first pie: a picked off scabby topped goo:


...and here is its refined version (much better looking!). Now this pie was able to pass the quality test for gift-giving, for looks (meh) if not for taste (spicy!) :


While waiting for my second pie to complete, and before making a batch of Snickerdoodles, I took a walk along South Main, to see the luminaries. These are lit by homeowners all along S. Main on Christmas Eve. The neatest part: whole families were out strolling along the walks, and each one to a person that is encountered offers wishes of "Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!" It's like the happy ending part of some Dickensian tale.

So, with that, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Sunday, December 23, 2007

It's a Picture-Perfect White Christmas!!

...That's what I thought when I viewed this photo from a friend, J. Stevens, taken in Colorado earlier this year. Oh, well - a girl can always dream!

Sunday, December 16, 2007

YAAAY!!! SNOW!!!

The first real snowfall this year happened for much of the central and eastern states this week, so this corner of NW Ohio was included in that sweeping series of fronts. FINALLY!! There is very little that's more peaceful than spending an afternoon out on foot, in fresh snow. It's got such a wonderful non-smell....smell. The absence of smell. And sounds seem much more hushed. The most wonderful way to spend a Sunday is watching a day's worth of snow falling - slowly at times, furiously and blowing at others. I didn't take as many (good) shots as I thought....but here are a few.

The first was an "ohmygod" moment....of course I imagine the worst in terms of ice dams along the roof/gutter joins, but then, every house had icicle arrays.

a little drift!!
This rosebush is so jammed up on its seasons - poor thing was trying to bloom a late bud - that instead froze solid on the fence. Goody photo op for me, tho!

Have a seat! I love that you can see how wonderfully the snow piled up here. Despite the blowing. This is some great, snowman potential snow. Now, to dust off my old Calvin and Hobbes ideas....
I inherited this birdhouse with the house. It has never had a roof, and as far as I know, it's never had birds, either.
Still the cutest damn gingerbread house on the block!

Crabapples that the birds didn't get to...

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Latest photos......

On a recent road trip nearly cross-country, with my new dog Djiini, I learned what the true meaning of luxury is. Lying stretched out in the passenger seat listening to some funky interesting music, dozing, while someone else gets to deal with traffic! That stick-thing with cloth butting the end against the window? My new old scythe. Everyone should have a long, heavy, rusty-bladed farm implement for decor inside a house with an active dog-cat relationship.....

....and that traffic wasn't fun. Or fast. This sign was in place to slow Thanksgiving traffic on interstates, but in this case, it was merely a miserable reminder of how long it would be to drive thru Cincinnati.

Well, the decorations are up, and if I do say so myself, it looks a little ginger-bready this year. But still the best on the block....meager as the decorations are......


Our first real snow of the season was picture perfect - a powdery still 4 inches or so!