Officially a Grown Up
I’ve never had a headboard. I mean, aside from when I was a little kid when I had the Fantastic Canopy Bed. Eventually I traded up from that bed, but headboards and footboards (is that the right term?) were never essentials. You need a refrigerator. You need a washer and dryer. I realize you can get by without those things, but really – do you want to? You also need a microwave oven. When I moved into my first apartment on my own, there was a list of stuff that I considered essentials. A headboard was never on that list. It wasn’t even on the secondary list, with the dvd player and tivo. Headboards are something that parents and grandparents have. Grownups.
Last year we started to make one. I guess neither of us had actually gotten around to buying one, and we decided the room and bed would look less rental unit if we had one. So we sat around and went through ads and pictures of headboards, and drew our own pictures, and went to wood stores. We picked up some man tools to assist with the job.
And we proceeded to build most of the headboard. Winter came. Snow. Cold. It gets so cold here that unless you have a heated garage, you really don’t want to be outside working on things like headboards. Finally the snow melted and we made it back to the wood store to pick up the final pieces that we needed. This weekend we finished it. My first piece of funiture that isn’t 2nd hand and isn’t from IKEA!
Officially a grown up.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments OffBanana Bread
Ingredients
* 1-3/4 c flour
* 2 t baking powder
* 1/4 t baking soda
* 3/4 t salt
* 3-4 mashed ripe bananas
* 1/2 c milk
* 1 tsp vanilla extract
* 1/2 c vegetable shortening
* 3/4 c sugar (I usually use somewhere between 1/2 c and 3/4)
* 2 eggs
* 1 cup toasted nuts (I like sliced pecans)
Cooking Instructions
Preheat oven to 350.
Butter and flour small loaf pan.
Combine all dry ingredients in bowl.
In a smaller bowl mash bananas and mix in milk and vanilla extract.
Mash shortening in a third bowl with a fork until creamy. Add sugar while continuing to mix. One at a time, add the eggs. Keep mixing. (You can use a mixer for this but I’m generally lazy to wash more dishes, so I just use a fork.) Add the banana mix and dry ingredients to the shortening bowl and mix well.
Stir in the nuts.
Pour into loaf pan and bake, usually just over an hour. Test with toothpick. Or fork.
Filed under Recipes | Comments OffSo About That Mountain
The dumb thing about withholding updates is that I lose all my enthusiasm for the subject by the time I actually get around to writing about it. On monday we went for a long bike ride – from our house, down 50th, through both the elbow, bow river, and glenmore pathways, to eau claire, and back home through edworthy. Remember the mountain I told you about? I had attempted it once before the dog park incident. That time I spent most of my “ride” walking. It was too hard last year, and I figured it would be at least next year before I was able to ride all the way up.
It turns out the human body is pretty amazing. It’s still a killer hill, but I made it up. All the way up. The first part of the hill was okay this time. It wasn’t too steep, and it was over soon enough, ending on a nice flat strip. I remember that last time I had given up on that first section, so once I got past it, I gave myself permission to give up at any time. Because you know, I’m already ahead of where I was last year.
After that it got harder. Jim was all encouraging like those guys in the gym who do the grunting and tell their lifting partners to “do it, do it, do it!” “Grunt.” All I could do was grouchily ask him to shut up, because it wasn’t helping. Somehow it felt like I was a baby who was struggling to walk for the first time. It’s silly, but it made me feel like this was something that I couldn’t do. The truth is, until Monday, I couldn’t do it, so there was no reason for me to be all supreme being about it. Poor guy. He was nice enough to keep his encouragement to himself, and even nicer not to ride on up the hill without me.
The last part was a killer. It seems to go on forever. What made it worse was that there was a woman WALKING up the hill. Going about the same speed as we were. WALKING. She could hear me and my heavy breathing and moaning the entire time, and I’m sure she was thinking to herself “I’m so much better than fat biker girl over there.” Well. I bet she can’t ride her bike up that hill. Mreow.
We got to the top and Jim was afraid to say anything. Surely he thought I’d get all snappy again. So I looked at him and apologized and we celebrated with synchronized “yays”. The ride home after hitting that hill is nothing. In fact, it kind of feels like it’s entirely downhill. (It’s not.)
We ended the workout with a trip to the Good Earth where I had the mac and cheese that I’d been craving for a few weeks. Very yummy.
I’m kicking myself for not stopping for pictures of that hill.
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Me and my bike having a break at eau claire
