Sometimes I'm kind of a moron.
15F, feels, like 3 (-9C, feels like -16): that's what I like to see, Chicago!
So, the tragic tale of my stupid run-in with a hot stove follows as thus. Being unemployed means that I have to man up (so to speak) and not eat out every chance I get; cooking in vats becomes more of a necessity than a lifestyle choice. (I am careful about many things: food preparation, in all its aspects, does not seem to be one of them.) So, I find this recipe that includes black beans, which is great! Looks like a fine recipe that'll be cheap and last me for a little while. I head over to my friendly neighborhood grocery store, where they are in the middle of "Our shelves are empty, so we are restocking everything right now." I manage to track down pretty much everything I need, except the black beans. They have not been stocked yet, and it just gets awkward waiting around trying not to get hit by guys who can't see around the enormous stacks of cans and boxes they're wheeling around, so I go for the dried variety.
Because I'm getting wiser about feeding myself before I get to the point of "so hungry I can't actually function" (I don't do well with hunger and would make a terrible soldier, for this and many other reasons), I start the whole "make these beans edible before you cook them!" thing. As they're simmering away, I'm somewhere else for a moment, and they boil over, extinguishing the pilot light on my gastop range. Having no desire to sit around and be gassed until the meal is finished cooking (approximately two hours from now, at that point), I carefully remove the pots and kettles and the rest from the range, and, because I'm a moron, lift up the top of the stove to look at the pilot lights. Well, the iron range-thingies are removable, and surprise surprise, they fall down when you angle the plane they're resting on. "Marvelous," think I, and reach for the nearest one to pick it up and put it somewhere else.
You know what's a good move? Reaching for the hot metal on which your enormous pot has been boiling for fifteen minutes.
So, yes, that frigging hurt, and continued to hurt all night. I finished dinner one-handed, and luckily it was pretty good, otherwise I would have been much more peeved. This morning I have some thoroughly impressive blisters on my thumb, index and middle fingers of my right hand, but at least I haven't gone all Johnny Tremain and totally useless. Anyway, the whole experience made me supremely glad I was not 1) Ed Tipper, who had half his face badly burned in Carentan, and 2) Joe Dominguez, the Easy cook. (Does anybody know more about him, by the way? Besides that flamingos are mean? Did the cooks fight also, or were they like medics?)
Transitioning easily from "Stupid things Esther has done" to "Good books Esther has read," while I was unable to type last night, I finished Biggest Brother, the Dick Winters biography. It left me feeling rather melancholy, actually. The end of the war was so tedious and frustrating and bureaucratic, and postwar Winters did not have an easy time of it any more than the rest of the guys did. Reading about how he just totally withdrew from society and how he had a difficult time being back in a peacetime environment (and how nobody he knew was up to Easy Company caliber anymore) was bad enough; getting to the parts where he loses any hope of a quiet retirement because of Ambrose and the miniseries just makes you feel a bit, I don't know... guilty, somehow. It sounds like his health has been declining quite noticeably since about 2003, which is hard to read about. He has Parkinson's, which, as it always does, just feels so profoundly unfair.
There is an interesting section about meeting with Stephen Ambrose (who seemed like, ahaha, a character, let's put it that way!), and about working with the guys at HBO about the miniseries. Winters had a lot of objections, and was quite adamant about making them heard. (Guarnere's original line after Winters tells him to wait for his command after mowing down the Germans in "Day of Days" was something like "Stupid fucking Mennonites"; Winters saw the tape, called up Tom Hanks, stated his case and then told him he would take the old Mennonite route and shun the production unless it was changed. That's why we have "Fine, Quaker" instead.) There are also some lovely and touching moments recounted, though, and funny ones. I guess at one point the actors and vets were taken down to Toccoa, and some of the actors tried to run Currahee -- and none of them could make it, though Frank John Hughes, who is apparently (and rightly, as varadia pointed out!) the nuttiest of the bunch, got the furthest. Also, the Normandy premiere wasn't the entire series, which seems much more reasonable -- they showed "Day of Days," on D-Day, and selections from all the other episodes. Winters really withdrew during all those get-togethers; he usually wound up alone with his thoughts in a corner. Some things never change, really.
He really praises how eager the actors are to honor the vets.Throughout the event [the trip to Toccoa], the actors stayed close by the men they portrayed. Hughes spent a great deal of time with Guarnere, Donnie Wahlberg and his bodyguard (a throwback to his rock'n'roll days with New Kids on the Block) stayed near Carwood Lipton and Michael Cudlitz with Bull Randleman. Damian Lewis was not able to attend with Winters. It was an emotional day for both the cast members and their veteran counterparts, especially the latter. Following the screening in the auditorium of the Georgia Baptist Conference Center, Don Malarkey went off by himself, tears flowing from his eyes. A woman with actor Scott Grimes, who portrayed the Oregon-born veteran, turned to him and said, "Scott, Malarkey needs you. Go to him." The young actor raced over to the veteran's side and the two spoke softly. As Bull Randleman, with the aid of a walker, and his wife boarded the bus following the reception, Cudlitz hovered behind them, arms outstretched in case either stumbled. From Cudlitz's arm dangled Mrs. Randleman's pocketbook.
Some things about the book really surprised me. It doesn't devalue the intense friendship Winters had with Nixon, but it often talks over and over again about how infuriating and unreliable he was. His time at the Nixon Nitration Works also seems uniformly unsatisfying. Winters also is clearly very fond of Harry Welsh, and counts him as a dear friend, but he is also very blunt about blaming him for Moose Heyliger's accident, as well as other accidents that befell the men in Austria.
I have to say, I remain utterly charmed that Winters loves ice cream so much, and has his whole life. There are some other golden nuggets in there also -- Babe complaining that his feet feel like Popsicles in Bastogne made me smile; the best might be learning that Popeye and Shifty came from the same small West Virginia town, and that Popeye bet Shifty five dollars he wouldn't sign up for the paratroopers, but he did, so then Popeye had to sign up too.
Well, at least today I have actual work to get done (and when I have actual work to get done, more fic happens as a result -- yay procrastination!). I didn't wind up going outside yesterday (who would want to?), so it's off to the coffee shop (or tea shop, in my case) to hunker down and familiarize myself with the freelancing gig I probably start next week. I won't lie, I do kind of miss the college arrangement of being able to cross most of campus while spending minimal time above ground or outside. One more reason to really get thinking about grad school again, clearly.
So, the tragic tale of my stupid run-in with a hot stove follows as thus. Being unemployed means that I have to man up (so to speak) and not eat out every chance I get; cooking in vats becomes more of a necessity than a lifestyle choice. (I am careful about many things: food preparation, in all its aspects, does not seem to be one of them.) So, I find this recipe that includes black beans, which is great! Looks like a fine recipe that'll be cheap and last me for a little while. I head over to my friendly neighborhood grocery store, where they are in the middle of "Our shelves are empty, so we are restocking everything right now." I manage to track down pretty much everything I need, except the black beans. They have not been stocked yet, and it just gets awkward waiting around trying not to get hit by guys who can't see around the enormous stacks of cans and boxes they're wheeling around, so I go for the dried variety.
Because I'm getting wiser about feeding myself before I get to the point of "so hungry I can't actually function" (I don't do well with hunger and would make a terrible soldier, for this and many other reasons), I start the whole "make these beans edible before you cook them!" thing. As they're simmering away, I'm somewhere else for a moment, and they boil over, extinguishing the pilot light on my gastop range. Having no desire to sit around and be gassed until the meal is finished cooking (approximately two hours from now, at that point), I carefully remove the pots and kettles and the rest from the range, and, because I'm a moron, lift up the top of the stove to look at the pilot lights. Well, the iron range-thingies are removable, and surprise surprise, they fall down when you angle the plane they're resting on. "Marvelous," think I, and reach for the nearest one to pick it up and put it somewhere else.
You know what's a good move? Reaching for the hot metal on which your enormous pot has been boiling for fifteen minutes.
So, yes, that frigging hurt, and continued to hurt all night. I finished dinner one-handed, and luckily it was pretty good, otherwise I would have been much more peeved. This morning I have some thoroughly impressive blisters on my thumb, index and middle fingers of my right hand, but at least I haven't gone all Johnny Tremain and totally useless. Anyway, the whole experience made me supremely glad I was not 1) Ed Tipper, who had half his face badly burned in Carentan, and 2) Joe Dominguez, the Easy cook. (Does anybody know more about him, by the way? Besides that flamingos are mean? Did the cooks fight also, or were they like medics?)
Transitioning easily from "Stupid things Esther has done" to "Good books Esther has read," while I was unable to type last night, I finished Biggest Brother, the Dick Winters biography. It left me feeling rather melancholy, actually. The end of the war was so tedious and frustrating and bureaucratic, and postwar Winters did not have an easy time of it any more than the rest of the guys did. Reading about how he just totally withdrew from society and how he had a difficult time being back in a peacetime environment (and how nobody he knew was up to Easy Company caliber anymore) was bad enough; getting to the parts where he loses any hope of a quiet retirement because of Ambrose and the miniseries just makes you feel a bit, I don't know... guilty, somehow. It sounds like his health has been declining quite noticeably since about 2003, which is hard to read about. He has Parkinson's, which, as it always does, just feels so profoundly unfair.
There is an interesting section about meeting with Stephen Ambrose (who seemed like, ahaha, a character, let's put it that way!), and about working with the guys at HBO about the miniseries. Winters had a lot of objections, and was quite adamant about making them heard. (Guarnere's original line after Winters tells him to wait for his command after mowing down the Germans in "Day of Days" was something like "Stupid fucking Mennonites"; Winters saw the tape, called up Tom Hanks, stated his case and then told him he would take the old Mennonite route and shun the production unless it was changed. That's why we have "Fine, Quaker" instead.) There are also some lovely and touching moments recounted, though, and funny ones. I guess at one point the actors and vets were taken down to Toccoa, and some of the actors tried to run Currahee -- and none of them could make it, though Frank John Hughes, who is apparently (and rightly, as varadia pointed out!) the nuttiest of the bunch, got the furthest. Also, the Normandy premiere wasn't the entire series, which seems much more reasonable -- they showed "Day of Days," on D-Day, and selections from all the other episodes. Winters really withdrew during all those get-togethers; he usually wound up alone with his thoughts in a corner. Some things never change, really.
He really praises how eager the actors are to honor the vets.Throughout the event [the trip to Toccoa], the actors stayed close by the men they portrayed. Hughes spent a great deal of time with Guarnere, Donnie Wahlberg and his bodyguard (a throwback to his rock'n'roll days with New Kids on the Block) stayed near Carwood Lipton and Michael Cudlitz with Bull Randleman. Damian Lewis was not able to attend with Winters. It was an emotional day for both the cast members and their veteran counterparts, especially the latter. Following the screening in the auditorium of the Georgia Baptist Conference Center, Don Malarkey went off by himself, tears flowing from his eyes. A woman with actor Scott Grimes, who portrayed the Oregon-born veteran, turned to him and said, "Scott, Malarkey needs you. Go to him." The young actor raced over to the veteran's side and the two spoke softly. As Bull Randleman, with the aid of a walker, and his wife boarded the bus following the reception, Cudlitz hovered behind them, arms outstretched in case either stumbled. From Cudlitz's arm dangled Mrs. Randleman's pocketbook.
Some things about the book really surprised me. It doesn't devalue the intense friendship Winters had with Nixon, but it often talks over and over again about how infuriating and unreliable he was. His time at the Nixon Nitration Works also seems uniformly unsatisfying. Winters also is clearly very fond of Harry Welsh, and counts him as a dear friend, but he is also very blunt about blaming him for Moose Heyliger's accident, as well as other accidents that befell the men in Austria.
I have to say, I remain utterly charmed that Winters loves ice cream so much, and has his whole life. There are some other golden nuggets in there also -- Babe complaining that his feet feel like Popsicles in Bastogne made me smile; the best might be learning that Popeye and Shifty came from the same small West Virginia town, and that Popeye bet Shifty five dollars he wouldn't sign up for the paratroopers, but he did, so then Popeye had to sign up too.
Well, at least today I have actual work to get done (and when I have actual work to get done, more fic happens as a result -- yay procrastination!). I didn't wind up going outside yesterday (who would want to?), so it's off to the coffee shop (or tea shop, in my case) to hunker down and familiarize myself with the freelancing gig I probably start next week. I won't lie, I do kind of miss the college arrangement of being able to cross most of campus while spending minimal time above ground or outside. One more reason to really get thinking about grad school again, clearly.