I know, I know, my posting rate is abysmal of late. Laziness, I guess.

My latest “Oh, I know, this’ll be fun, and a good use of my time” idea is learning the Dvorak keyboard. Why? Because it’s there, man.

Actually, I have no freakin’ idea why I’m doing this. I type at 60+ wpm on Qwerty. (Dunno exactly how fast. Definitely fast enough to impress a lot of people who’ve seen me in action.) Undoubtedly there is more than a little “I can learn anything!” ego involved. Only a little, I’m sure.

(And no, I am not doing my writing-writing in Dvorak. I switch back to Qwerty for that.)

Update: I took a typing test, the result of which was 75wpm in Qwerty. (Might have been faster, but the words in the test were random and I couldn’t get a flow going.) Going down to 10-15wpm is quite a downer.

I took the bread class at the local Sur La Table on Saturday. I gave the class 10 for information and fun, 7 for organization. It was a little disorganized, but I had a blast and I learned a great deal.

The class was taught by Stephany Buswell, a baker at Beckmann’s, a local bakery. When I bought bread—haven’t bought it for months! go me!—I bought Beckmann’s. We made walnut bread, focaccia, and cinnamon rolls and sticky buns from the same batch of sweet dough.

All of them: excellent. I’m not a big fan of nut breads, but the walnut bread was pretty tasty. And Darin bit into the focaccia, said, “Wow, I don’t usually like focaccia, but this is great!” and proceeded to rip a huge bit more off. And the cinnamon rolls—note to Rob and Laura: these were the rolls I wanted to make for breakfast that morning. I will try again! I have practice now!

We were grouped into threes. The other woman in my trio was also the mother of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, which I found amusing. She’d had problems with making bread in the past, because it always came out too dense. The curse of homemade bread! Too much flour. In fact, I usually err on the side of having too liquidy a dough, figuring I’m going to add more during the folding process.

The last member of our threesome was a guy who’d obviously made lots of breads: he knew how to knead. Me, I ended up with hands covered with dough, but man, this guy knew how to work it. (Key tips: keep fingers out of it. Only use palms. And lift and turn the dough frequently so it doesn’t glom onto the board.)

So I learned a lot about what properly kneaded dough should look like (I’ve been pretty close, but I’ve often not kneaded enough), how to roll bread and form a boule, how to form one of those cool windowpanes, how to properly flour your working surface (you sort of pitch from the side—Stephany was amazing the way she could poof the flour over the board), and how to scatter rosemary on focaccia bread. Okay, that last one wasn’t so hard.

§

I have finally settled on my favorite white sandwich bread recipe, and it comes from my current favorite cookbook, How to be a Domestic Goddess. It’s Nigella’s “Essential White Loaf” recipe, and it’s just great. It’s the only white bread recipe I’ve made that contains no sugar (shout out to Bakerina) and it’s insanely moist, undoubtedly because of one of the additions: instant mashed potatoes! Actually, Nigella recommends using “potato water,” but if you don’t have that around, use instant mashed potatoes.

I made this bread for the first time last Sunday—we are currently on loaf #5. It’s crazy. But it’s unbelievably delicious. It’s the first recipe I made that has reliably come out as sandwich bread size, and with yummy moistness. Check it out (directions mine, since I’ve gotten into the bread-making groove now):

3 1/2 cups white bread flour, plus more for kneading
1 tablespoon fresh yeast, or 1 package rapid rise yeast
1 tablespoon salt
1 1/3 cups warm water
1 tablespoon instant mashed potatoes, added to water
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened

1. Mix flour, water, potato, yeast. Autolyse.

2. Add salt and butter. Knead.

3. First rise.

4. Preheat oven to 425F.

5. Punch-down and shape into a 9×5 loaf pan.

6. Second rise.

7. Bake for 35 minutes. Check for doneness. Take loaves out of their pans, put on oven rack for another 5 or so.

Update 5/19/05: For a few weeks, I thought the bread I was making had suddenly become way too dry, and I’ve decided the problem was that I was letting the sponge sit too long (for the sponge I mixed everything except half the water and the salt, I think). So I went back to mixing everything together, no autolyse, and kneading until I get the gluten window, not necessarily until the dough makes a nice tight ball. In fact, the dough is usually still a little goopy and sticky when I put it in the proofing bucket. I figure I’m going to add more flour when I shape the dough into the pans for the second rise anyhow, and I’d rather have underfloured dough than overfloured (which leads to tough bread). My bread has returned to being gloriously moist for days, so for this recipe: no sponge! no autolyse! knead until you get the gluten window and not a moment longer!

Yum.

I realized this past weekend I’m turning pagan. Not in a Wiccan/animist/Asatru kind of way. No, no acceptance of sky gods around here. Just a reassessment of celebrating the seasons.

Sophia was excited out of her mind about a party she was going to on Saturday—an Easter egg hunt. I asked her, “What do we celebrate on Easter?” and she said, “Bunny rabbits and Easter eggs!” Which was pretty much all she knew about it.

I found myself thinking, You know, that’s okay. It’s as good an excuse as any to have a party.

Now that Easter’s come and gone, I feel as though Spring is really here. The days are getting longer. We can get out of the house. (This last part has been fairly crucial when you have little kids. Of course, then it rained on Sunday and we were stuck inside.) Now that we’ve gone through the ritual of bunnies and chicks and eggs, I have a whole Spring mindset now.

The same thing happened around Christmas. We don’t celebrate Christmas as any sort of religious holiday, but I am completely down with having a giant celebration at the darkest part of winter as an excuse to get together with family and friends, to keep spirits up during the coldest part of the year.

On Sunday I laughed when I realized that while I have zero belief in the religious traditions surrounding these holidays, I have no problem whatsoever with celebrating Easter and Christmas in their roles as markers of the season. I’m a right proper pagan now.

Obviously, I’d have some different rationales for why we’d celebrate these holidays if I lived in the Southern Hemisphere.

No, no, we’re not going to talk about the relentlessly overhyped American knock-off, which airs sometime this week—we’re pro-Steve Carell around here and we’re still not going to watch it. (It’s amazing—we don’t watch commercials, due to TiVo, and still we’re aware of how hyped this show is.) Do yourself a favor: just watch the original in order.

We’d heard over and over (and over and over) again about how good this series “The Office” from the BBC was. We never caught it on BBC America, but Darin, looking around for a birthday present/Christmas present/Hanukkah present for himself, decided to pick up the DVD sets of the first and second series, which included the lauded Christmas episode. He started watching it back in December, when his parents were here. I didn’t watch it with him then.

He came to bed after watching the first few episodes. He had a look of shell-shock on his face. “How is the show, honey?” I chirped merrily.

He shook his head. “It’s…painful. Brilliant, but painful.”

Hmmm. I wasn’t interested enough to start watching then, despite his growing raves about how un-fucking-believably hilarious and brilliant it was. But he kept after me to watch.

So a week or so ago we started watching it together. After the first two episodes I said, “This is the most annoying show ever. You sure I need to keep watching?” After four episodes, I was definitely interested but still cringing. After six episodes (the first series), I kept my hands near my face, but I was watching.

“The Office,” for those of you out there who are even slower on the uptake than I am, is a “documentary” about an office of a paper company in Slough, England. The boss is David Brent (writer-creator Ricky Gervais), a smarmy, incompetent boss who just wants “to have a laugh” with the team. Tim (Martin Freeman, soon to be Arthur Dent) is the competent salesman. Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), the very strange “team leader” who talks in dark and sinister ways about his army training, is quite possibly the least socially competent person ever committed to celluloid. The receptionist Dawn (Lucy Davis) and Tim have a strong attraction to one another, but Dawn has a boyfriend/fianc&eacute.

There are no “jokes.” (Except for the godawful ones David Brent tells. At one point I started shouting at the TV: “Shut up! Shut! Up! Stop it!”) The dialogue is pretty much how people actually talk. There are long, awkward pauses. There are excruciatingly embarrassing scenes. Seriously, I don’t know how Ricky Gervais wrote this stuff, considering he was going to do it.

We finished the second series last night. And it’s brilliant. It’s unbelievable. There are two scenes in the final episode that completely broke my heart, one of which prompted me to say to Darin, “They’ll never do that on American television.” The scene is done completely without any sound—speaking, music, ambient. And you can’t quite see the characters involved either.

I am really looking forward to the Christmas special now.

You must see this show on the DVD, for the “behind the scenes” documentary on the Series 1 disc. They play up the “Ricky Gervais IS David Brent” angle a little too much, but there are a couple of things in there that are so funny, all Darin has to do to make me laugh hysterically is repeat a few of the key phrases. I really want to know if Merchant and Gervais are completely improvising during their discussion of “Brain Jail,” their next project.

The most amazing thing about this show is that it’s reminded me, forcibly, of people I haven’t thought of in over a decade. People I worked with at Apple, most of whose names I’ve forgotten. The chumminess and obnoxiousness and general insanity of an office job, even a really cushy one like we had.

I told Darin about one guy I worked with. Right after I started working there, a group of us were sitting around and the conversation turned to cocaine. (It was Apple. It was the late Eighties. Let me put it this way, it wasn’t an unlikely topic of conversation.) And I said, in my snarkily smug way, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you haven’t put enough money in your 401K.”

And this guy says, “Of course not! You’ve spent it all on cocaine!”

The silence that ensued, the embarrassment of the other people standing around (who were, to be fair, a lot smarter than this guy), I remember to this day.

Goodness, I was a teensy bit worried how I was going to come out on this one, but no need…

MYSTERY! – Who-dunnit? And How? And Why? Your
inquiring mind understands the secret workings
of the villainous murderer and thief. You feel
the need to build a puzzle so complex, and a
villain so unsuspected that you leave the
reader gasping in shock on the last page.
Dashiell Hammett and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are
your guides.

What Kind of Novel Should I Write?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Via Shannon Stacey. And the blurb reads Darryl Hammett. Sigh.)