Rain rain go away, come again another day …
When I walked out the door this morning and ran to the bus it was still dry and not particularly humid. I took the 3 to Gorham and State, got off, crossed the street, and got a table at Fair Trade, but within half an hour it was raining.
And at some points coming down rather hard.
Two iced coffees for me, Zak picking up his paper and exam, and a philosophy TA holding office hours behind me (same one from yesterday) — she was quite casual, even flirty, with the final student (male) who dropped by (to discuss his Nietzsche paper).
I eventually left and headed to Walgreens to get some ibuprofin — my back is (still) killing me, and I’m not sure what’s going to fix it … a good night in bed?
I stopped by the Digital Outpost — they want between $50 and $80 for a digital audio recorder (USB connection, I think); old-fashioned cassette models go for $20 (and more), but I held off … I’m thinking of getting one for recording dissertation thoughts (a Berghahn & Co. recommendation).
Once I got home I remembered why I’d originally considered heading in the direction of the library in the first place: to scan a doodle I’ve been working on for quite a while. I forgot.
Last night I got raisins at the co-op and this evening I finally got around to trying to make a pudding from steel-cut oats rather than from rice. The recipe should be the same, so I used an old rice-pudding recipe I have and double it (not quite doubling the liquid, actually), but after 45 minutes of baking it had failed to set, and even after an hour and then sitting out to set and cool … so I raised the oven temperature, added a little corn starch, and put it back in. It seems to be doing “okay” now and I’ll take it out to cool in a few minutes. If it turns out, I’ll post the “recipe” — or perhaps only do that after I’ve prepared it again and gotten it down.
Today is a return to “S” — I had Simon and Garfunkel followed by Skid Row and Skunk Anansie (thanks mrgoat). S&G are favorites from my childhood, and among other things I remember listening to them on occasional trips to Ontario — to King’s Table / Royal Fork and the Bi-Mart out there.
Ontario was across the border in Oregon, where there was no sales tax, so before the advent of Costcos on every corner bulk-shopping was best achieved by Friday evening family restaurant dinners and wandering through Bi-Mart. The “best’ restaurant in that not-too-exciting town was the buffet, Kings’ Table / Royal Fork. These were two separate franchises, but one bought the other — I forget which — and we just called it by both names. When I was still a growing, pre-pubescent boy I loved going there because I could eat as much as I wanted with no health/weight consequences (I had a very active metabolism, and an early growth spurt).
The “Bridge over Troubled Water” cassette is something we got at Bi-Mart (it’s also where we got some of our earliest CDs … cheap classical recordings), and so that’s another reason I associate those two singers with that store and those trips to that town. Later on I got the sheet music to that song and played around with it but never really “learned” it to my satisfaction … I never put any effort into learning popular music, even though I had (and have?) quite a bit of it available to me.
