intimidatedIt occurred to me while we were up north that both my mom and
fosteronfilm's share an odd quirkiness. While we were there, we wrestled as much of the cooking and cleaning tasks away from his mom as we could (a Herculean undertaking in and of itself). I decided to make some beer bread on Friday to go with dinner, and mid-ingrediant assemblage, I discovered that she doesn't have any measuring spoons. Not one. And she's only got one measuring cup--a heavy Pyrex thing with demarcations for a range of increments. I could work with the jumbo Pyrex measuring device, but that didn't help with the smaller measurements I needed for salt, sugar, and baking powder. She did have a Gloria Jeans coffee measuring scoop, but frustratingly, it didn't say anywhere on it what size it was. I took a wild guess that it was 1 tablespoon, but upon consultation with Matthew (after I had already measured out and dumped in the aforementioned ingredients), I think it's more likely it was 2 tbls. This resulted in the completed beer bread being too dense and salty, although husband and in-laws assured me it was fine. But then, they're obligated to say that, even if I served them unbaked dough in silt. But kindly relative sentiments aside, it was too dense and salty.
It seems that Matthew's mom doesn't use measuring spoons. On those occasions where she needs to dump in a tablespoon or a teaspoon of something, she uses tableware to approximate it. I remember my mom doing the same thing when I was little. So now I'm wondering if it's coincidence or a generational thing.
Anyway, the next time we go up to visit Matthew's folks, I'm packing along a set of measuring spoons.
Writing Stuff
Researching Japanese poetry and song styles, specifically Imayo, the popular song form of the mid- to late-Heian Era. Got a little carried away with the researching yesterday, resulting in relatively few words on the page.
The thing is, I'm not a poet. I'm in awe of writers like
mtrimm1 and time_shark who can pull off both prose and poetry with facility, but I really can't. I do prose and that's it. Period. But the story I'm working on requires that I have a few lines of Imayo speckled in as part of the storyline, which leaves me having to come up with something appropriate that's both authentic-sounding and that doesn't make me (or more importantly readers) want to cringe. It doesn't even have to be a full poem, in fact it shouldn't be, because a full poem--even one as short as an Imayo--would risk grinding the story's pacing to a snail's limp, but I'm ye verily angsting over those couple of lines.Meep.
New Words:
300 on "Birds of White Rhythm."
My thoughts were pretty fragmented yesterday, and with the poetry thing and all, I ended up skipping scenes. Great for forging ahead when I'm stuck on what's going to happen next, but now I gotta figure out how to connect the pieces.
Club 100 For Writers
2
