January 1, 2019

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Finally back in the correct year, after more than 5 weeks!  Yay.



My better half bought himself a new toy.

The thing that stirs up the dough in this bread machine stays in the bread until you remove it.  This is what the bottom of a loaf looks like, after baking.

Looks like bread, smells like bread, tastes like bread.  Victory is declared!

Here's a public service announcement.  Did you know that the ends of boxes of stuff like aluminum foil, and waxed paper, and plastic wrap, might have perforations for little tab thingies that you push into the box, to keep the rolls from falling out as you pull on the foil/paper/plastic?

I didn't, until someone told me in December 2018.

Some of them do.  Here's an example.  This is aluminum foil..... 

I pushed in that half-circle, which left the half-circle tab inside the box, and inside the roll holding the aluminum foil. 

Who knew.  (See those faint white words at the bottom, telling you about the tab?  I never saw those, until I knew to look for them....)



I pick up trash when I walk.  You can't see most of it, but there was a LOT of styrofoam in this trash.  It seemed that someone had left some largeish styrofoam item where it could be run over.  There were many, many, many bits of whatever it was.  Sigh.

The odd thing in this assortment is the yellow wrapper.  That is a pasta wrapper from Martelli, which makes pasta on top of a hill in Tuscany.  I have been there.  I have watched Martelli making pasta, from inside the place where it's made.  (I hesitate to call it a factory -- there are machines mixing the dough,and pressing it out through the dies, but most of the process is hand done.)

This is really good pasta.  Maybe THE best.  (I'm told that when other pasta manufacturers in Italy are asked "If you couldn't eat your own pasta, whose would you eat?," the answer is "Martelli"....)

Trash from really good products is much less likely to be on the ground than trash from, say, fast-food restaurants.  So I was surprised to find this.  Both because of the rarity, and because of the quality. 

There is almost always more trash on the ground after trash day.  Especially on windy days.  I'm going to guess that a windy trash day is why this was on the ground...............



This, too, was on the ground, just a couple of doors down the hill from our house. 

My eye was caught by the pieces of cable, which I thought (before I picked them up) were pieces of nylon rope.  Nope.  These are metal.  As I picked them up, I noticed the rest of this stuff.  What are the odds this has nothing to do with repairs to whatever was broken when our power went out?

Closeup of the plastic bag -- this looks like heavy-duty electrical stuff to me.

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