Salmonamanwich's Blog

This was an interesting weekend. Besides fun things like kayaking and getting a sun burn and dancing and all that good stuff, the natural, or not so natural, wonders were the most interesting. Saturday night I'm told there was a pretty good thunder and lightning storm, which I slept through, dang it! And then the power went out Sunday at around 9:30 a.m. It came on a few hours later. Sunday night/Monday morning there was another thunder and lightning storm, which I did wake up for, but I was too comfortable to do much more than lay there and listen and blink when the lightning struck. There was also an earthquake last night at around 1:50 a.m. I wasn't awake for that, but my mom said she definitely felt it at home. Then, just as I was getting ready to head out the door this morning, the power went off again. So I quickly unplugged things around the house and then headed to work, where the power was also off, but the generator there allowed us to still get our work done, darn it! ;) It was kinda cool working without all the lights on though. Very cozy, fortunately I was awake enough to not want to fall asleep in the dark though. Well, anyways, that's all the natural and unnatural wonders for the time being. I wouldn't mind another lightning storm or two, preferably before I go to bed. :P But the rest can be skipped. Anyways, time to head back to work. Good day all!

Ok, this is just weird. Yesterday morning while I was getting dressed, "Cotton Eyed Joe" (a favorite polka song) randomly came on as the next song. This morning, as I'm getting dressed, guess what song comes on randomly! "Cotton Eyed Joe". I swear this must be a conspiracy to make me want to polka even more. :P Dammit, and no one here seems to know how to polka. They can do almost anything else and even teach me a few things, but no polka. :( Well, I'm gonna walk to work, so I've gotta get moving. Good day all!

*sigh* I want to polka!!! I haven't done a polka since I was in Fairbanks. Heck, I just want to dance more! There isn't nearly enough dancing here to quench my desire. They even canceled the tuesday salsa class this week. :P That was the most fun I've had dancing since I left Fbks at least, maybe even longer. I should work on burning some more dance cd's. Grr... I can't sit still here, and it's not even a polka that's playing! I'm restless, that's it. Gosh... it's 7:20 a.m., what on earth am I doing being restless??? *sigh* Well, whatever the case, 7:20 means it's time for me to head out the door to work. Good day everyone!

So, I'm dead beat, so either this will be incredibly long and wordy, or it'll stay nice and short and not say much. Either way it'll be at least remotely interesting and useless. ;)

Went to Sitka this weekend to visit Leeann and see one of the few towns in southeast AK that I hadn't yet visited. Well, Leeann first. She's doing great and we had a lot of fun doing all kinds of crazy things, most of which entailed getting sunburnt. :P Yes Leeann, I'm kinda red now, dang it! Not sure if it'll hurt yet, but the back of my neck is likely to. But hey! At least I'll have some color on me. ;) So yeah, anyways, we had a really great time walking all over town and going out to dinner with her boyfriend (really nice guy, btw, I approve Leeann ;)), and this morning we hiked up Harbor Mountain. It was soooooo beautiful! The whole place is really. But yeah, I just need to get some of my pictures up on my website soon so you all can see for yourself.

Ok, just one complaint... the pilot/captain/whatever s/he's called that drives the new fast ferry around... s/he seriously needs to learn how to park the darn thing! I could have been home an entire hour earlier if only they would have taken half the time to park the boat. :P

Ok, enough complaining. I'm tired from all this downright hot bright stuff, so I'm going to bed now. Goodnight all!

P.S. I thought 80 degrees at 9 p.m. in Southeast Alaska had been outlawed!

It wasn't my fault! I swear!

Ok, so after cooking dinner with no glitches at all, I decide to pull out that costco sized box of lemon bar mix. You know, 3 batches of "just add eggs and water" lemon bars. So, no problem, right? Well, just a little... First I discover the pan is 13x9 instead of 8x8... ok, so I'll just make 2 batches and they might be slightly thick, but *shrug* oh well. Then I pull out the eggs. The instructions call for 3 eggs per batch. We have 5 eggs. There goes the 2 batch idea. So I decide to just make 1 batch and see what happens. BAD IDEA!!! I press the crust into the too big pan, and since there isn't enough to cover the bottom of the whole pan, I just cover about 2/3rds of it thinly. No problems so far. I put the crust in the oven for the amount of time it says and pull it out and it looks perfect. (Well, ok, so I didn't do the most perfect job of pressing it in flat, so it's a little uneven, but that doesn't really matter. :P) Then I've already mixed the lemony stuff and it looks great... but it's kinda thin. Probably no thinner than it ought to be, but I start to realize that this stuff is going to flow wherever it darn well wants to once it's in that pan. There's going to be no hope of keeping it on the crust portion only. I cast about for ideas. No tin foil in the house to create a barrier. (Not sure it would have worked anyways, but it was a thought.) I consider just pouring the lemon stuff in and letting it flow all over the pan, but I'm not so sure that would be such a great idea. The only other thing I can think of is to try to prop one end of the pan up somehow in the oven so the lemon stuff will stay on the crust, even though it'd then be very uneven. So I get my dad to come in and assist with this plan. He pulls a cookie sheet out of a drawer and tries to fit it into just one half of the oven. But it's too big. So he takes one of the shelves from the oven and places it at a slant. Meanwhile I've poured the lemon stuff into the pan, attempting to keep it only on the crusted end. This proves harder than I expected to do. You try keeping at pan at a specific but yet unknown angle while pouring something into it as well. :P Anyways, we finally got it in the oven and I set the timer. I could tell it was not going to be a pretty sight when it came out, but there was nothing I could do about it at this point. Well, it's out of the oven now, and there's a nice carmelized sheen (dammit, I have to try to wash that!) over the uncrusted third of the pan. The middle third is kind of a lemon soaked crust that's severly browned/blackened at the edge. The last third is a very thick and still too jiggly lemon bar. I let it cool for a little while, hoping the jiggliness at least would calm down. (I know, I know, the box says bake it until it isn't jiggly anymore... I don't think they expected the above circumstances. I couldn't leave it in there any longer to let the other 2 thirds burn completely black.) Well, now it's sitting there looking sad. I cleared out the crust only third. It popped out fairly easily. I picked at the carmelized sheen and I think it may come out if I work hard enough at it. And the lemon bar is slightly less jiggly, but still needs to cool a bit. So maybe we'll get a halfway decent dessert. *shrug* My dad will eat it at least. He can't let anything go to waste. :P

Oh, btw... my dad's out buying eggs. I'm going to do it properly this time!