The One About the Breadmaker and Tornadoes

Weather is a great metaphor for life – sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and there’s nothing much you can do about it but carry an umbrella.
~Pepper Giardino

So I splurged and bought a breadmaker Wednesday night. I’ve wanted one for a while and this one was on sale at Kohl’s for $59.99 and if you used your Kohl’s charge, I got a $10 certificate for every $50 spent to spend next week. Yay!

Anyway, this breadmaker is awesome! It not only bakes 1 ½ and 2 pound loaves, but it also does pasta and, get this…HOMEMADE JAM! Yeah, jam! So I decided to try it out last night and make the jam first. All it required was a bag of frozen raspberries (they have a fresh strawberry recipe too, but since they are out of season, I went with the frozen recipe), some liquid fruit pectin, some sugar and some lemon juice.

The breadmaker mixed it all up for me and then it baked it for an hour. I then poured the liquid jam into little mason jars and put them in the fridge. A couple hours later, it was set. And OH MY FREAKIN’ GOSH… it’s the best darn jam I’ve ever had in my life. Probably because it doesn’t have any added preservatives or dyes or anything. I’m seriously never ever buying jam from the store again.

After the jam was done, I made a wheat bread. It turned out yummy too.

Of course, right in the middle of this, we had horrific storms come through. They were saying up to 90mph winds, so B (who had just got to my house) turned around and when to his apartment because his motorcycle was turned the wrong way to the wind and would get blown over.

Not too much later after he left, the TV station started announcing a tornado warning for my county and said it was 4 miles south of a city that’s only 6 miles away (so 10 or so miles away from me) and then the tornado sirens started going off. I took the pups down to the basement and brought my emergency radio and cell phone with me. I turned my emergency radio to the local TV station and they were talking about a definite “hook with significant rotation” that was heading straight for my area.

Luckily for me, it didn’t hit and I don’t think any tornadoes hit in my immediate area (the warning was for a Dopplar-indicated tornado). The wind definitely blew hard and there was a lot of thunder and lightning.

It’s really odd for my part of the world (southwest Michigan) to get storms like this this late in the season. We usually don’t have to worry about tornadoes much after late August/September.

Of course, the last few weeks have been weird, too. It was near 90 degrees last Monday and only 53 by Tuesday night.

The old saying is still true for Michigan: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.

The One About the Kitchen Faucet

The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store. 
~Frank McKinney Hubbard

That quote was me this weekend.  B and I returned the cooktop stove that I bought a month ago because the pilot lights won’t stay lit if more than one burner is turned on.  I like to cook more than one thing at a time, thank-you-very-much.

Unfortunately, Home Depot didn’t have the cooktop in stock, so now I have to wait two more weeks before it comes in.  Blaaaah. I miss my stove.

I also missed my faucet.  When B had his accident, I wasn’t thinking and was trying to break up a package of frozen vegetables to put on the swelling on his head and I ended up snapping off the faucet handle. 

So yesterday I went to Home Depot and bought a new faucet.  After getting back to my house, B and I realized that I was missing some plumber’s putty so we ended up hitting Meijer on the way back from his aunt’s house (we were invited there for dinner).  B had a 2,100 word paper due for his online class, so I set out to un-install my old kitchen faucet and re-install my new one on my own (I’m handy like that).

I got the old one out, put putty where putty should go and put the new one in, added the rubber washer and the brass washer and the brass locking thread, then used the screws to secure the washers.  It was then time to connect the pipe threads to the wall pipes.  Yeah, the connections don’t fit so now I have to go back to Home Depot and get a connection that fits them.  Fun fun.  Hopefully I’ll be able to finish this tonight.

Just call me Ms. Handy-Woman.