Shoun-apalooza

Today Shana and I hosted the second Shoun Sunday Dinner with an attendance of 10 1/2, April Rose Shoun was the 1/2. She proved to be a very good little guest. Roxy was inspired by her to act like the wild beast she is. On the menu today was pot roast with pearl onions and carrots served over egg noodles, spinach gratinee, stuffed tomatoes, and home made rolls. Nancy was in charge of desert and brought a spectacularly beautiful and tasty German chocolate cake. I made her leave a slab of it for my supper!



I think everyone had a good time. The food was delicious and good looking, which it should have been because when a dinner party is in the offing Shana is obsessed with having the perfect menu. We go through two or three complete menus with major shuffling of components before the final choice is made. Of course we had a few bumpy bits. Funnily enough both involved my rolls. First I ran short of flour and had to run up to the corner halfway through mixing my dough. Then I forgot that we had only one baking sheet to fit our oven. When we moved we had three good ones, but they proved to be to big for our ovens and we gave them to Nancy. We had only purchased one new one of suitable dimensions, and that one was full of stuffed tomatoes waiting to go into the oven. Again I ran to the corner to get two more baking sheets. True to the usual performance of my butterhorns, because they were needed at a particular time the first rise was a bomb. Luckily I have learned to to put too much stock in how the first rise looks because they are rising on only one packet of yeast and can be slow to get going. In the end they were perfect.



I've got a Pomatomus sock on the needles, but since I only have about 3/4" done and isn't even past the ribbing I think I'll wait until it gets a little bigger to show it off. I started an afghan for an office gift exchange and worked on it for a few hours, but I think I am going to have to tear it out and start over because at this stage it has some serious problems. It's smaller than I would like. 'way smaller. I could go along with it being a lap sized afghan and give it a beautiful fringe if it didn't have this other teeny little problem. It's worsted weight yarn on a size H hook. Because it's a single crochet ripple stitch if has a bit too much body. It will stand by itself, walk around, and stop bullets. I crocheted on for several hours in denial, but I must face the truth. It is evil and must be destroyed.



Due to an impending motherboard crash we replaced our computer this week. The old one has making so much noise that two rooms away it could keep you awake. It was giving us new and fascinating error messages that I have never seen before, and making up ever more slanderous lies about our (admittedly difficult and scurrilous) printer. When I turned on the new box I didn't think it was on because I could not hear it running! That's the upside, along with the larger amount of RAM we have on this unit. The down-ish side is that it's running on Vista, which is completely different from what I am used to. I don't find it very intuitive, but what I hear from the techs is that it will "learn" my preferences as I use it and will not seem as clumsy once I've sued it for a while. I know we will both be proficient soon, but at present it kind of makes me itch. Outlook has been replaced with a different kind of email account setup, which was not quite intuitive. I ended up with both of our emails loaded up into one account. I did not try to transfer any of my pictures or Ipod files to the new box, so I will have to set some things up again, along with our favorites and bookmarks. I had already put most of my pictures up on Flickr, so I wasn't too worried about those. It's taking a fair amount of time to get things set up the way we like them again. This tinkering with the setups has really cut into my free time.