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plutherusGood day today, despite the dinner party being cancelled.
I spent a good part of the morning chopping vegetables for the beef stew, and, it turns out, the curry that I'll be making Monday (Or possibly making tomorrow afternoon and re-heating Monday. Dunno yet. I have a *lot* of stew left over.)
Then spent a couple of hours babysitting my friend's four-year-old daughter. This is how awesome this kid is:
She wanted to watch Brave on Blu-ray. So, we spent about half an hour together trying to decode her parents' entertainment system. Between the Xbox 360, the blu-ray player, the Apple TV, and the weird console/amp/mixer/controller-thingy that I have no idea what it is, we ultimately failed. But we had fun trying. (I looked it up when I got home - Xbox's can't play blu-ray disks, only DVDs) Oh, yeah, did I mention that Brave comes with four separate disks, too? Too many combinations. She kept trying, though, and never got angry or frustrated, though we eventually gave up. (We did manage to find something that was running a screensaver or a slide show or something, and had a bit of a disagreement as to whether a tiger can be called a "kitty". She agreed that it could be a "big kitty" ("But you have to say big"), but disagreed that a "big kitty" is a subset of "kitty", because it's bigger than a "kitty". I blame the parents for her lack of education in set theory.
So, failing at that, she wants to watch Barbie (Tales from the Dreamhouse or something like that), which was surprisingly funny. The characters, you see, are Barbie dolls, and know that they're made out of plastic. They make occasional references to the scores of careers that Barbie has had and in one episode (the episodes are about ten minutes long), Barbie's visited by an old friend of hers, who is in black and white and accompanied by a laugh track. (Barbie never seems to notice it, but her friends comment on it).
Anyway, after four or five episodes of that, she announced she was bored with TV and wanted to build a blanket fort. Yeah, that's how awesome this child is.
So, we did. She insisted on building it huge, so that I could fit in it as well. So we did - using all the chairs in the house and a good part of the blankets. Her father came home then, and we all went out to lunch.
I posted the aftermath of the fort to Facebook earlier, after the kittens were done playing with it.
Then, I went on cardamom quest. Making tandoori chicken, and I wanted cardamom. Turns out, it's really not that easy to find. I finally found one brand of it at Fred Meyer - for $17.95 for about two ounces. Youch, no thanks. Thinking I could maybe do without, I did finally make a stop at the bulk spice aisle. They had no ground cardamom there, but did have it in whole seed form.
I found a sea salt grinder back in the housewares section, and dumped the sea salt into another container, and the cardamom into the grinder. And voila - fresh ground cardamom, for about $6.00 for about twice as much as they were selling the $18.00 one for. And, judging by the smell, totally worth the effort.
And now I'm finishing up laundry, and done writing for the night I think, so I can get up early tomorrow morning to go hiking. Yay!
So, all in all, a very good day.
I spent a good part of the morning chopping vegetables for the beef stew, and, it turns out, the curry that I'll be making Monday (Or possibly making tomorrow afternoon and re-heating Monday. Dunno yet. I have a *lot* of stew left over.)
Then spent a couple of hours babysitting my friend's four-year-old daughter. This is how awesome this kid is:
She wanted to watch Brave on Blu-ray. So, we spent about half an hour together trying to decode her parents' entertainment system. Between the Xbox 360, the blu-ray player, the Apple TV, and the weird console/amp/mixer/controller-thingy that I have no idea what it is, we ultimately failed. But we had fun trying. (I looked it up when I got home - Xbox's can't play blu-ray disks, only DVDs) Oh, yeah, did I mention that Brave comes with four separate disks, too? Too many combinations. She kept trying, though, and never got angry or frustrated, though we eventually gave up. (We did manage to find something that was running a screensaver or a slide show or something, and had a bit of a disagreement as to whether a tiger can be called a "kitty". She agreed that it could be a "big kitty" ("But you have to say big"), but disagreed that a "big kitty" is a subset of "kitty", because it's bigger than a "kitty". I blame the parents for her lack of education in set theory.
So, failing at that, she wants to watch Barbie (Tales from the Dreamhouse or something like that), which was surprisingly funny. The characters, you see, are Barbie dolls, and know that they're made out of plastic. They make occasional references to the scores of careers that Barbie has had and in one episode (the episodes are about ten minutes long), Barbie's visited by an old friend of hers, who is in black and white and accompanied by a laugh track. (Barbie never seems to notice it, but her friends comment on it).
Anyway, after four or five episodes of that, she announced she was bored with TV and wanted to build a blanket fort. Yeah, that's how awesome this child is.
So, we did. She insisted on building it huge, so that I could fit in it as well. So we did - using all the chairs in the house and a good part of the blankets. Her father came home then, and we all went out to lunch.
I posted the aftermath of the fort to Facebook earlier, after the kittens were done playing with it.
Then, I went on cardamom quest. Making tandoori chicken, and I wanted cardamom. Turns out, it's really not that easy to find. I finally found one brand of it at Fred Meyer - for $17.95 for about two ounces. Youch, no thanks. Thinking I could maybe do without, I did finally make a stop at the bulk spice aisle. They had no ground cardamom there, but did have it in whole seed form.
I found a sea salt grinder back in the housewares section, and dumped the sea salt into another container, and the cardamom into the grinder. And voila - fresh ground cardamom, for about $6.00 for about twice as much as they were selling the $18.00 one for. And, judging by the smell, totally worth the effort.
And now I'm finishing up laundry, and done writing for the night I think, so I can get up early tomorrow morning to go hiking. Yay!
So, all in all, a very good day.
