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3500. concerned - 1/18/2006 1:09:20 AM Ever have a hawk on the ground threaten you in your own front yard? I have. 3501. Ulgine Barrows - 1/18/2006 5:58:47 AM Cool birds, some cardinals have been coming around for the food we put out. 3502. Macnas - 1/18/2006 12:32:56 PM Hawks abound here, can't look to the skies without spotting one. 3503. judithathome - 1/18/2006 2:54:08 PM Troubles with the mother-in-law, Mac? ;-) 3504. judithathome - 1/18/2006 2:55:07 PM Oooops, wrong thread! 3505. thoughtful - 1/18/2006 11:31:54 PM So which should it be moties to go with my roast pork dinner...apple chutney or apple cranberry chutney? Decisions...decisions.
All my struggle over what to make for dessert and one of the guests has offered to bring dessert so I'm off the hook in that regard....though I had decided on spiced fruit compote served over angel food cake with a dollop of whipped cream...reasonably healthy and light. We'll see what the lady brings though. Nice surprise for me! 3506. Magoseph - 1/18/2006 11:34:19 PM Ill take both. 3507. thoughtful - 1/19/2006 4:16:30 PM I was going to make the chutney last night as it tastes better after it sits for a few days, but I was foiled by the power outage brought to us by heavy winds and rain yesterday.
No power, no cook.
Instead, ate cheese, crackers, wine and salad by lantern light and candle. 3508. alistairconnor - 1/19/2006 7:21:53 PM You don't have a gas cooker? How primitive. However do you manage?
Yeah I suppose you've got classy glass hallucinogen burners. 3509. thoughtful - 1/19/2006 8:53:59 PM No, in this house we have an old-fashioned electric range. We have a 4 kw generator and we have a gas grill which is fine in the summer, but not in the winter. We have a wood stove which, when we get it cranking can boil water and lots more, but last night we didn't have the energy to make the fire. 3510. arkymalarky - 1/20/2006 2:08:24 AM I have a gas stove, but the oven will not work if the electricity is out. You can light the stovetop burners, but not the oven. 3511. judithathome - 1/20/2006 2:54:28 AM Luckily, we have a 1950s stove that is all gas...even with the electricity in the crapper, this baby cooks! 3512. Macnas - 1/20/2006 10:55:34 AM My Mam replaced her 30 something yr old gas cooker before Christmas. It was going fine but the jets had degraded and there were no replacements available anymore. I looked at them and told her that her admirable idea of getting them made would cost her 500 or so, so she sighed long and sadly and the old cooker was placed, with some reverence I might add, in a corner of the workshop.
So. off she goes to buy a new one. They are all shoddy in comparison, but eventually she gets one she thinks is suitable. When it comes it's missing a fitting at the back, the retailers have included instead a note to say that one of their gas fitters must be called (and paid of course) to complete the installation.
Snorting at this naked gougery, my Mam is throwing a fit, so I wander off to a hardware shop I know, a place where you can buy a bag of flux powder, 6 horseshoe nails and a hessian bag to carry them in. I get the fitting, (and pick up a 12 inch cakeboard while I'm there, as I know Mam needs one) and on my return I complete the installation and connect it up.
Just after Christmas the electricity goes off for a day or so, and as the ignition on the cooker is electric, it's back to good old ships matches, the long timber ones she always used. The oven however, is difficult, as trying to light it with a match would result in your hand and forearm being engulfed in blue flame, as the igniter is at the back of the oven, and is a bit of a reach.
What does she produce but a taper! I haven't seen these things in many years, and watching it being produced from what looks to be a 1940's cardboard packet takes me back to her childhood, never mind my own.
Just goes to show I suppose, when the modern things in your life fail, have some of the simpler things that work all on their own put by.
3513. PelleNilsson - 1/20/2006 12:29:51 PM I had to look up 'taper'. I don't think I have ever seen one. 3514. Macnas - 1/20/2006 1:49:16 PM Ah you have. 3515. Macnas - 1/20/2006 1:52:33 PM It's the long thin waxed wick, used for lighting church candles and the like. About 5mm in diameter, and up to 300mm long. 3516. PelleNilsson - 1/20/2006 6:49:17 PM No, Macnas. Merriam-Webster has
a: a slender candle
b: a long waxed wick used especially for lighting candles, lamps, pipes, or fires
c: a feeble light
My English-Swedish dictionary has (a) and (c), but not (b).
It must be one of those Popish devices we got rid of 400+ years ago.
3517. Macnas - 1/20/2006 7:31:47 PM My description was pretty much on the money!
Got rid of 'em eh? Proper order too.
See you next week. 3518. Ms. No - 1/20/2006 7:36:43 PM We used red-neck tapers to re-light the pilot on our water heater. That's a large page of newspaper rolled diagonally from corner to corner and then lit on one end. The tight roll limits the amount of oxygen so it burns slowly and you can extend the long paper stick into places you can't reach with regular matches. 3519. wonkers2 - 1/20/2006 7:54:39 PM Hello, Pelle. I recently visited my sister in Tucson and we went through a trunk full of family pictures, letters, etc. One of the most interesting items I found was a hand-written copy of my paternal grandmother's 1903, Stromsberg, Nebraska, high school valedictorian speech. It was entitled "Labor" and had the ring of a sermon or what I imagine as a late 19th century Swedish socialist tract. Her speech no doubt echoed what she heard in church and from her family and Swedish-American community. Samples:
There is dignity in labor, that of the hand as well as that of the mind. All labor that tends to supply man's wants, to increase man's happiness and to elevate man's nature is honorable....All that we enjoy as civilized and enlightened beings, we owe to the labors of those who have lived before us. One generation has lived and labored and brought the arts to a certain stage of development. They then die and the next generation enter into their labors and take up the work of civilization where they left it off. So the fruits of toil are perpetuated and all the grand privileges, high opportunities and glorious liberties of these later days are but the results of labors performed and battles won all along from the world's morning until now.
...it is no disgrace to labor but rather a dignity and honor. There is no reason why the so-called laboring classes, should be looked on as inferior classes, unless it be that ignorance and evil habits have laid upon them their accumulated disgraces...
It is the great question that agitates our great nation today and many and varied are the reasons given for the enmity between Labor and Capital...These two forces must work together...The true point of antagonism lies between the employer and employed and there is error on both sides...
But these facts alone do not account for the dissatisfaction of the laboring man. The knowledge that wealth brings social power, position, luxuries and influence to which the worker remains a stranger, rankles in his breast. He is born with passions, ambitions, hopes and emotions; but he sees that to all intents and purposes, he and his children must be shut out from association with the rich and influential. This arouses a feeling harder to control than the knowledge that he does not receive a just compensation for his daily labor. The capitalist in his greedy desire for wealth does not attempt to improve the condition of his employees but taxes them to the limit of their strength...
Then let us remember that although the industrial world is agitated today, yet we must labor if we wish to succeed, for today it is the man who is not afraid to work and who is full of energy that succeeds and makes his way in the world, and if we would avoid the temptations that beset us and lead useful, happy lives, then we must work for labor is rest from the sorrows that greet us; rest from all petty vexations that meet us; rest from sin promptings that ever entreat us; rest from world sirens that lure us to ill. Work and pure slumbers shall wait on thy pillow. Work, then shalt ride over Care's coming billow. Lie not down wearied neath woes weeping willow, but work with a stout heart and a resolute will.
Ruth Ethel Malm, Age 17, June 1, 1903
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