Friday bullets, Jan. 17, 2020

I feel kind of done in by the week, but for no apparent reason. I'm sure it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that I might stay up too late reading.

Speaking of reading, if you are looking for a really good book that is just a fun read, I highly suggest The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. It's one of those books that you can spend several hours reading at a time and didn't realize time has passed.
Making polenta using the double boiler method worked extremely well. I made two meals of polenta at one time with very little effort. It does take a couple of hours to cook, but aside from stirring it every so often, there is nothing else you need to do with it. I will never make polenta by standing and stirring it ever again.
As it seems to do every year, the National Geographic travel catalog arrived this past week. You know, it's the one where it tells you all about the fantastic hiking trips you can take... hiking around Scotland, hiking through the cinque terra in Italy, etc. Every year I spend far too long staring at it, trying to decide which trip I would take first if given a choice. And then I ponder that I'm not really an organized tour sort of person, so then I start to stare at the back page which lists other options... personalized tours, private jets, family tours... and start to daydream about taking everyone on a cool National Geographic trip. Which leads me to remind everyone of my very generous annual offer: If you were to finance such an adventure, I would promise to write entertaining and amusing posts detailing the adventures of traveling internationally with a large group of children. Truly, I have no idea why no one has taken me up on this offer yet.
We are having an actual snow storm this evening. Last week, with the many forecasts of doom turned out to be a bit of sleet. This week, while some forecasts were predicting a large storm, there didn't seem to be quite the hysteria, and we are getting some significant snow. (I'm told that I just happened to miss this round of hysteria. My thinking is, if it enters my consciousness (because it doesn't always) then it has reached a certain level of hoopla. If it doesn't then it is of a more moderate amount. I'm just glad everyone is where they don't need to drive for the night and we don't have anything we have to do tomorrow. I can actually enjoy the storm.
All three of those taking college classes this past semester made their respective honor rolls and/or were invited to join honor societies. We're pretty proud of them.
I did not forget the reins when I was harnessing the horse at my lesson yesterday. I did forget to pass them through a second set of rings, but it's a step in the right direction.
I made a barley loaf on Wednesday. We had been studying the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 for Bible study, and consequently we read several other stories featuring barley loaves. It got me to wondering what exactly a barley loaf would look and taste like. I knew I had hulled barley in my pantry and I had a grain mill on my counter, so I decided to do an experiment and make one. The recipe I used had barley flour, olive oil, yeast, water, salt, and an egg. I'm not sure the egg was accurate, but the recipe called for it and I put it in. It actually tasted quite good. I took it to my Bible study and brought home the rest. It had a rather biscuit-y texture and the barley taste was good. Barley doesn't have very much gluten (the stuff that makes dough stretchy and able to rise), so it didn't rise very much, but it also didn't have a brick-like feeling to it. I have some barley flour leftover, and I'll probably add it some other baked good at some point.
TM took some great pictures of horse noses a bit ago. They make me laugh.