Laura launches her career as a celebrity chef

School starts tomorrow, and today we went to the "icebreaker" that's designed for new families but tons of returning people show up for, too. We got the new after-school activities schedule, and Laura pointed out her photo on the cover. I guess she and one of her little Young Chef friends from last year looked really convincing in their love of (fill in the blank with whatever it was being cooked). I'd post a link, but the school doesn't have this year's brochure online yet.

20 years ago this week

Way back in 1991 -- that was post-dinosaurs for anyone young enough to wonder -- I left home to go to college. My dad, accompanied by my brother Heath and sister Laurie, drove me and most of my worldly belongings from our house in Chester, S.C., to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Random facts about the trip:
The drive is about 40 hours, and we didn't stop for the night. Why not? normal people are asking. Well, my dad's peer group considered the number of hours one could drive without sleeping and the quality of gas mileage one could milk from a rattletrap car to be true measures of manhood. (We were driving my grandparents' car because ours had died the previous weekend.)
We spent the night in Salt Lake City, visited Temple Square and then drove down to Provo.
I had never set foot in the state of Utah before moving there for college.
My dad helped me carry my stuff in, waited while I talked to my resident assistant about which bank she recommended, drove me there and helped me open an account -- and then left. I think he and Heath and Laurie were around for less than two hours.
I wasn't bothered by any of this, of course, because I was totally an adult and ready to move on. It's all turned out pretty well, in fact. I'm still in touch with several friends I met that first week (mostly thanks to Facebook), and most of us have done great.
But wow, was that really 20 years ago?

Are there cool classical statues overlooking your kids' playground?

I didn't think so. We went to this park near the consulate last week, and I definitely found it interesting that this cool statue overlooks the water fountain and children's play area and not some calmer, more serene area.

Slow-cooker triple chocolate brownies

I made these today. The original recipe, from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food, is here. I changed it a little, partly out of necessity. I did follow the instructions included there for the most part. Well, except that the original ones didn't include a "have your 10-year-old unplug the transformer into which the slow cooker is plugged without telling you when the brownies have about an hour left to cook." But, since my slow cooker tends to cook things more quickly than slowly, it all turned out OK.

My revised ingredient list:
Nonstick cooking spray
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt (I used regular, not coarse)
1/2 cup butter (I estimated this because I usually buy butter in 500-gram blocks)
6 ounces unsweetened chocolate (because I didn't have bittersweet and didn't have enough unsweetened, either)
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

These turned out OK even with the minor ingredient adjustments and interrupted cooking time. They go particularly well with gelato, but what doesn't?

Milan masterpieces: Santa Maria delle Grazie

Yes, I'm posting a lot more about Milan than I have in a while. I take a lot of photos that I never post, and I've decided to use that to my advantage while posting more at the same time. So here's a look at Santa Maria delle Grazie. It's famous for The Last Supper, of course, but there are a lot of lovely things there, including this painting by Nicola di Cremona done in 1520. (It's in the first chapel on the left of the main entrance if you want to go and see what I'm talking about. Which everyone should, of course.)

Things I love about Milan: the Arco della Pace

Yes, I've talked about the Arco della Pace before (here and here, probably other times, too), but it doesn't stop being cool. We were in Parco Sempione for a picnic lunch with some friends this week, and I had to take some photos even though there were scantily-clad tourists all over the lawn. I love the view of the arch from the Castello, but right now there are cranes surrounding the Castello, which makes it look less authentic. So there are no photos of that.

Have you ever seen one of these?

I hadn't either until a few months ago, and then I kept forgetting to take a photo until I had Laura snap this one a couple of weeks ago. It sort of reminds me of my dad's old step-sided Chevrolet, but maybe that's just because it looks so old.

CPSC apology

I really wasn't traumatized by the e-mail I talked about in my last post, but this morning's CPSC e-mail apologized anyway. Of course, it didn't answer my questions about who in the heck Rick is ...

Yesterday, with the confusion caused by the earthquake on the East Coast of the US and having certain functions, including the subscription list messages, transferred among various people, we inadvertently sent an email with the subject line "FW: not sure if Rick is online since we all got sent home because of the earthquake" when the subject line should have been "News from CPSC - Two Recalls". The message did come from CPSC and the content of the e-mail (the two recalls) was correct. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.

Far-reaching ramifications of the D.C. earthquake

I'm one of those people who has found the news coverage of the Washington, D.C., earthquake to be quite humorous. I hope the Washington Monument isn't damaged beyond repair, and I'm glad there weren't widespread injuries. But some of the stories I've seen have just seemed overblown.
I guess that's one of the reasons I found an e-mail I received overnight to be so funny. It's from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. No big deal, I've signed up to receive all of their recall announcements. But it's the subject line of this one that was so funny. Normally they say something like "News from CPSC -- Two recalls." This one reads:

RE: not sure if Rick is online since we all got sent home because of the earthquake

OK, so I'm not shocked people got sent home. But who is Rick? And is his probable absence really of interest to the thousands of people who receive CPSC recall e-mails? Would it have been so hard for someone to 1. check to see whether Rick was around and/or 2. change the subject line?

I might think this was cool if it wasn't staring at me from the wall right now

So here I was at 10:50 p.m., innocently minding my own business at the computer after trying unsucessfully for some time to get a certain toddler to go to sleep. The study was dark, but there was enough light from the monitor to tell there was a dark spot of some kind on the wall. And since I'd been sitting in this same spot with the lights on earlier, I knew that spot had to be a bug of some kind. A pretty big bug, too.
I was worried I wouldn't be able to get a photo, so I didn't focus on focusing or anything. That's pretty obvious. I shouldn't have worried, though, since it was about 10 minutes ago that I noticed the thing, and it's still sitting there even though I've taken numerous photos of it both with and without a flash and now have turned on the light. The body is about an inch long, and then there are all of those freaky legs.
Is it technically a bug if it has more than six legs? I think this one has 26. Maybe I'll leave it there to scare Laura in the morning ...

One year later

My dad died a year ago today (early morning on the East Coast of the U.S., much later in the day at my house in Italy). It's been hard, of course, and will continue to be. I won't detail all of that on here, but those who have been in similar situations know what I mean. I've actually thought quite a bit about it over the past couple of weeks in particular, since Kevin's grandmother died, and I've decided to be grateful for the time we had with both of them.
A few weeks ago when I was looking for photos of GG, I came across a few of Dad that it would have been nice to have last year. This is one of them. It totally cracks me up on so many levels. It was taken at my aunt's wedding (I think it was December 1981), and boy were we dressed for the time. That Nicole and I are looking in opposite directions makes it even more hilarious. (I don't remember whether that was on purpose.)(From left: Nicole, Laurie, Mom, Daniel, Dad, Heath and me.)

Fun times, fun times.

Saving the world one Teletubby at a time

Tiny cowboys are particularly well-versed in Teletubby CPR, it seems.

I wish all monsters were made of stracciatella

Stracciatella is a flavor of gelato that's sort of similar to fudge swirl in the U.S. I opened a container the other night and encountered this:So of course I had to eat a good bit of it to keep the thing from attacking. You're welcome.

Any Approaching Enemy by Jay Worrall

This is a novel of the Napoleonic wars, and I wasn't sure I'd actually read the whole thing. But it's well-written and has interesting characters and lots of details about the British navy in the late 18th century. It was a fun, somewhat quick read in addition to all of those other things, and I recommend it if British naval history is your thing.

When the cat's away, the mice will ... decorate?

Kevin and Laura got back from Houston on Wednesday morning. And to be perfectly clear, they're not cats. But I did decorate while they were gone.
Our apartment didn't have curtains in the living room. I know the curtains exist because they came back from the cleaners with the ones for all of the other windows shortly after we moved in. But because of some kind of problem with the rod or rings or some such (my Italian was particularly rusty at the time), they never were hung. So last week I whip-stitched together some long panels of fabric that once were window treatments on a couple of the big windows in our house in Houston. Then I climbed to the top of our big ladder (keep in mind these things are way off the floor) and sewed the fabric to the existing rings. Yeah, it was all kinds of fun. But now I have two of these:
I've also begun a quest to frame and hang all of the things we've been buying over the years but never have prepared for display. This list included a series of prints of Florence we bought on our trip there in February. They now reside in the spot behind our front door:
It wasn't all ladder-climbing and nail-driving, though. A measuring mistake while hanging some other things (I'm blaming it on the curved walls of our oval-shaped living room) meant having to move some nails. Removing one of them left a nasty hole in the plaster. Luckily the ugly part is behind a corner of one of the frames and I was able to use scrapbooking glue to piece some of the plaster back together.

That worked out well since I haven't scrapbooked in ages ...

You don't see this every day

Yesterday I took Owen to the park. That wasn't unusual, although the videos we made (you can see a couple of them if you're my friend on Facebook) were kind of entertaining. But when we arrived at the park, I noticed a car parked outside the gate.
Given that we live in Milan, seeing a car parked on the sidewalk didn't come as a shock even though most of the locals are gone for August and there are plenty of regular parking spots open. What made this unusual was that the owner of this car -- a middle-aged-to-older woman -- was detailing her car right there on the street. You can see the trash bag and cleaning cloth on the hood. What you can't see in the photo is that she was wearing yellow rubber gloves and everything.
Later I wondered whether it was because there was a water source (the park fountain) and trash cans right there, but I'm not sure. It certainly wasn't something we see every day, though.

Yes, I am a granola nerd

By that I mean I make my own granola. It's not fancy, but it's not hard. This came up on Facebook last week, and someone asked that I share the recipe (hi, Nicole!), so here it is. This is adapted somewhat from one of the cookbooks our church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) distributes at its canneries to teach people to use their food storage. Everything in this can be stored for months at a time, so it might be a good choice for people going to consumables posts.

Granola

6 cups rolled oats (I tend to use the quick-cooking kind, but the old-fashioned ones work as well. If you do use the old-fashioned type, you might want to add a bit of extra liquid.)
1/2 cup brown sugar (I usually stock and use light brown sugar, but the stronger flavor of dark brown sugar is good, too.)
1 cup coconut (I've been using a type of powdered coconut that's sold here in Italy, but I also like the shredded variety easier to find in the States.)
1 cup chopped nuts (I usually use pecans because I have them for other recipes.)

Mix all of this in a large bowl. Then add:

1/2 cup oil (I use canola.)
2 tsp. vanilla
1/3 cup honey

After you've stirred in the liquids and all of the oats are coated, spread it on a baking sheet and cook it at 350 degrees F (that's about 170 C) for 25 minutes. Then add:

1 cup raisins

Bake another 5 minutes, let it cool and store in an airtight container.

To me, the beauty of this recipe is its simplicity, but you can make it as complicated as you'd like. I've seen recipes that include wheat germ, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Obviously there are all kinds of possibilities for switching out the nuts; I think almonds sound good. And craisins or dried blueberries would be good in place of or in addition to raisins. Like cinnamon? Add some (I'd mix it in with the oil before you add that to make sure it gets somewhat evenly distributed).

I made some of this a few weeks ago, and Owen and I ate in within a week. Now I'm thinking about making some again. Mmmmmmmm ...

My Heart's in the Lowlands: 10 Days in Bonny Scotland by Liz Curtis Higgs

This is another book I've had sitting around forever and finally got around to reading. I don't know much about Scotland but do plan on visiting some day, and I think this book is a good introduction. It focuses on the Lowlands (rather obvious from the title, I think) and mostly smaller villages and rural areas. It's a good read if a little cheesy at times. The Robert Burns quotes that begin each chapter are interesting. I might have found the quotes from the author's other works (historical fiction books set in the Scottish Lowlands) interesting, too, if I'd read any of those books. I'll probably keep this one around in preparation for real opportunities to visit some of the places in a couple of years.

Someone got a haircut

No, that someone wasn't me. Here's a shot from earlier in the week, taken on a post-dinner outing to one of the playgrounds near our house:
Here he is yesterday on the playground train at Parco Sempione:
I still need to do some detail work around his ears, but at least he's not as shaggy-looking as he was.

Rest in peace, GG

Kevin's grandmother, whom the family calls GG, died this morning. When we heard last week that she'd had a stroke, I initially assumed she'd be OK because she's one of those people I always imagine will live forever. It wasn't to be, though, and I'm terribly sad none of us got to see her at the end (Kevin and Laura just left this morning to fly to Houston) and that I won't be there for the funeral (Owen and I stayed behind).
I loved GG from the moment I met her at Christmas in 1998. This was a few months later (April 1999) at our wedding reception in Houston:
A year later, Kevin and I were taking a trip to Paris and invited family members to join us. GG was one who came; she's in the far left in this photo from Versailles:
A year after that, Kevin and I had moved to Houston and had Laura. She was a hit because the family had gone a few years without a baby. Here we all are with GG and Grandpa, who died later that year:
Laura got bigger, we moved to Denver, to Washington, D.C., and then to Port of Spain. But Laura still loved her GG, evidenced by this photo taken at Aunt Babs' and Uncle Dennis' house in 2008:
The most recent photo I have of any of us with GG is from home leave in 2009. Laura was 8 by then, and Owen was 2 months old. We all hung out with GG and Aunt Mavis in Texas City:
We'll all miss her for sure. If there's one thing I hope we all learned from her, it's unconditional love. She displayed it toward her family all the time, and I hope we follow her example.

Just in case you were wondering

What do Robert Harris, Stephen King, a strange plastic dinosaur-looking thing, a kid-chewed Cars book, Irish racehorses, Madeleine Albright and Yeats all have in common?
They're all proof Owen has been rearranging our bookcases.