I noticed some cracking/blistering plaster in the living room (just inside the entry hall) from a water leak last week and took a day off of work to spend several hours crouching on rafters in cramped, dusty crawl spaces and on a ladder outside in order to clean, paint, seal and shoot full of foam any possible gap I could identify. It rained today. It's still leaking. Bloody hell. I'm going to give it one more shot this weekend to see if I can identify and seal the leak; if that fails, I'll have to admit defeat and call a roofer. Ouch.

Labels: annoyance, house

Whee! Apple released 27-inch quad-core iMacs today. :) Guess where my next $2,000 is going?

Labels: computers

It could be worse, though. My family received something in the neighborhood of 8-10 inches. I'll take this "already melted off" version over that.

Potstickers version 2.0 (in contrast to the beta that I made inedible with a liberal application of red pepper) looked much prettier. I'm finally figuring out how to fold them correctly without tearing them. Unfortunately, the social stigma against tofu is alive and well amongst certain of my friends, so I have a large quantity of tofu dumplings for my supper this week. This segued into an amusing little tete-a-tete with Cris over whether pork (his preferred dumpling base) is red meat or white meat (we agreed to disagree) and concluded with me deciding to try chicken next time.

Finally, I should be touched that Alec chose me, out of her available options, to sit with her in the bathroom and hold the bucket while her parents cleaned the results of her unplanned stomach voiding from her bed last night. We had a nice little sleepy/queasy/giggling conversation about how everyone gets sick now and then. Kyle slept like a rock through the entire thing.

Labels: alec, cooking, kyle, twins

Me: Okay, girls, you can watch the dumplings cook in the steamer, but don't put your hands over the vent holes, okay? The steam is really hot.

*10 seconds later after I've turned to another counter to put components away*

Kylie: Owww!

Labels: kyle, ouch

I made Asian-style dumplings (pot stickers) from scratch last night (okay, I bought the wrappers, but I wrapped them by hand). I couldn't find ground chicken at the grocery store, so I used ground turkey instead (it was on sale and I don't eat red meat, so pork was out). I also didn't have all the ingredients on the list, but I noticed that no two dumpling recipes on the Web were the same, so I did some substitution. Folding them was a pain. I ruined the first 8 entirely and the next 20 or so were pretty ugly. By the time I got to number 30 (close to the end), they were looking more like restaurant dumplings. I put them in the refrigerator when I was done and took them to Scott and Lisa's tonight, where I steamed them in my electric steamer. The steamer worked perfectly and the texture and composition of the dumplings were pretty close.

Unfortunately, Lane and Lisa each had half of one and Scott (who loves spicy food) only managed to eat two. It turns out that the "1/4 cup minced red bell pepper" called for in the recipe is *not* equivalent to the 1/4 cup crushed red pepper I actually used . . .

I'm going to make up a batch of plain brown rice and see if I can "dilute" the dumplings that way. If I die of heartburn, remember me fondly.

Labels: amusement, cooking, food

I could so see my brother doing this.

Labels: funny, jeff