How does one manage to get tennis-elbow-like symptoms from typing? I don't know. I thought tennis elbow was the result of over-use of the elbow as a fulcrum. The bendy part of a lever. The excessive stress of relying on a ligament for those backhands. Not something that can develop from typing. And yet, I have these sore, painful, streaks of tension that go up the back/underside of my arms, starting with the elbow. I first noticed it when I leaned on my elbows about a week ago and one elbow experienced pain and soreness, and the other did not. The right elbow is also slightly inflamed around the elbow joint. I know it's not from baking. Thank you, Edwin.
Edwin is my mixer. His name reminds me of a Royal British Safari guide who has a big white mustache and a pith helmet, dressed in khaki. And his socks are pulled up to his knees. He does the majority of my heavy mixing. I only scrape down the sides every once in a while. Do I always name my inanimate objects? Yes. Don't you? But only machines or objects that I have to work with on a steady basis. For instance: my car is named Cassandra. Not the Prius. The Prius is named Slow or something to that effect. Maybe "Annoying Beeping Backup Camera." And my computer is named Quantum Unified Field Theory. Hm. Maybe that was one of those things I should have kept to myself. People must not know that I am such a dork.
One of the jokes in college was this "spy test" to see how good of a spy you would be. First you get really rather drunk. Then you change all the vital passwords on your computer. After you sober up, try to figure out what the new passwords are. If you were smart, you'd write them down somewhere, maybe encrypted, with a cipher. Or backwards. Or in pig latin or whatever else high school girls do when they think they are being particularly clever and secretive. If you can't figure it out, be sure to have the factory original boot disk in order to bypass the security login for a Mac.
This week was a baking-heavy week. For the mail patrons, I hope the current shipment has arrived according to plan. I shipped one to Texas for my friend who is also in the throes of studying for the Colorado bar while living in Austin. There was a little concern about melting in the hot Texas sun. But I think it'll be fine. What could happen? I just don't know when it would arrive exactly. It's priority post. Which means less than a week.
Overall, there were Oatmeal Rum Raisins on Monday. Shipment on Wednesday. Wednesday evening was the Chocolate Marshmallow cereal bars. Thursday was Goldilocks snickerdoodles. Let's back up a bit and talk about the Chocolate Marshmallow cereal bars. In order to make these special and different and also really really satisfying, I used a plethora of semi-sweet and unsweetened dark chocolate. It turned the marshmallows into this gooey, fragrant, chocolate cream sauce that was not too sweet. After the bars were cooled and cut up, I painted one side of the bar with either white chocolate or milk chocolate and dipped them into crushed chocolate creme cookies. I learned something really important from this experience. I do not like to get my hands covered in gooey, melted chocolate and dusty cookie crumbs. It felt really weird and I had to keep washing my hands like Lady Macbeth. So I had to work really quickly to finish the toppings. I tried to pack on as much as the chocolate could hold. I'm limited in height by the size of the shipping boxes. And there was a little snafu with the wrapping of the wax paper since the sharp edges of the chocolate wafer cookies STAB STAB STAB through the wax paper.
And then yesterday, I was inspired to make my Goldilocks bars rather than wait for Friday. They smell divine. My mother said it smelled like cookies she used to eat when she was a little child growing up in Taiwan. My father grew up on a farm in Taiwan and they didn't have cookies. But it reminded him of something much more simple and comforting, something unadulterated by commercial bakeries. And this is what I go for. This smell-memory thing. I don't know what you call it but it is really important. With one whiff, a slight taste, and the mind transports you back to some happy memory associated with that scent. It is powerful and evocative. It can trigger memories in great detail, of events that were long forgotten.
On a positive note, I am addicted to Battlestar Galactica (re-imagined series) but sometimes I will read the episode recaps on Television Without Pity. I watched the whole series in a rushed marathon last month but now I'm going through and savoring the moments. The writer of the recaps used to be someone named Strega who wrote well. The writing style was dynamic, colloquial but restrained. A different writer took over midway through the second season and he is completely different. More rambling. The writing is very descriptive and he displays vast knowledge of relevant philosophical topics. But he writes in such long sentences. Such long sentences. It makes the recaps difficult to read because the sentences go everywhere! I wish he showed just a little bit more restraint. I would give him a dollar for every period he used and take away a dollar for every comma he used. That is all. Remedies calls.
No comments:
Post a Comment