Category: Diary (Page 33 of 38)

I set our toaster oven on fire. Pretty exciting at the time. Pine nuts are very flamable if you don’t keep your eye on them. I knew that if I opened the little glass door, the flames would woosh out as they got oxygen, so I ran to the back sliding door, opened it, unplugged the unit and carried it (hot and dribbling smoke) gingerly outside. Then I (even more gingerly) opened the door with a stick, jumped back (the flames *did* whoosh out) and dumped a bucket of water over it.

I was lucky that the bucket was there, but we have a leaky gutter and I put the bucket under the leak for just such an emergency. Handy.

Lisa tried cleaning the toaster oven, but it was a thankless job, as we don’t even like the oven much. It turned out to be not really the kind of oven we would have bought except that we were in a hurry for kitchen appliances at the time. So we’re retiring it, and we’ll find a home for it somewhere.

We now have a new toaster oven, and I have decided to use the “toast” setting for pine nuts from now on. (It has a timer).

I hope you all had a fantastic time watching the odometer roll over to a new century. Here’s to seeing the second millennium out for real next year.

I have a new respect for figs. We thought that our tree out the back had stopped producing, but recently it has gone into overdrive, blowing little purple bubbles for all its worth. We have been picking them, and some of them we give next door. Lisa eats them raw, but I tried one and I didn’t like it. There was something about the taste that just didn’t appeal. We thought about drying them, and actually looked for a dehydrator, but eventually we tried drying them in the oven, with some success. They shrivel up beautifully and are very tasty. We just can’t eat them fast enough!

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Recently we succumbed to a long nurtured desire to own a large and powerful telescope. This may have had something to do with the current excellent positioning of Saturn and Jupiter for viewing. We checked online, and it turned out that an excellent site (www.telescope.com, duh) is maintained by a reasonably local company. After much research, we ordered a Skyquest XT6 6″ newtonian reflector on a dobsonian mount.

It’s pretty cool, just heavy enough to be stable and still be able to lug around. The tube can be unclipped from the mount with a couple of springs, and would fit in the trunk of the car if it weren’t for the fact that you want to treat the tube gently, what with the mirror and the sighting scope and stuff.