Laundry Lady

I promised I would post a picture so here it is. My new washer and dryer are here, and besides being quite the color, they are also so efficient and wonderfully quiet. It's a bit unusual to watch your undies go around through the glass door, but it's certainly made doing the laundry much more fun. My wash dries in only 45 minutes, such an improvement over the hour and a half it took the old machine. The new washer feels like a space ship taking off when it spins on the highest cycle and it holds such large loads! I gave Hubby the grand tour and a brief lesson on the care and feeding of such wonderful machines. I wouldn't want him to live his life in dirty clothes should something happen to me! He seemed somewhat interested. I've also found myself wondering what more I can launder. I've stripped the bed, washed all the towels, plus all the clothes....next I'll do all the door and bath mats in the house. I wonder how long this new novelty will last and when washing clothes will go back to being the same old drudgery it used to be?

Disasters in the Kitchen

I often "experiment" with new recipes when we have company. Occasionally a recipe will turn out "okay" but not be really worth repeating. Sometimes, I hit on one that is a real "keeper" and it's made over and over again. Then there are those that are sheer and total disasters! Thankfully, I haven't had too many of those over the years.

On Friday evening, we were having good friends over for dinner. I tried a new chicken dish which was very good, a new appetizer that was time-consuming but worth a place in the recipe file, but then there was the dessert. I had seen this recipe for "Tunnel of Fudge Cake" in the newspaper just prior to Valentine's Day. It was the second place winner in the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1966, and came with a strict warning: do not overbake, adhere to the exact baking times and check your oven's temperature to make sure it's accurate. So, after blending together almost a pound of butter, six eggs, confectioner's sugar, granulated sugar, flour, 3/4 cup of cocoa, and 2 cups of walnuts, I poured the batter into a well-floured bundt pan.


After double-checking the oven temp and baking the cake the required 50 minutes, I removed it from the oven for the hour and a half of cooling time. I finally turned the cake out of the pan onto my beautiful pedestal cake plate and reveled in my efforts. I turned to the refrigerator to get out milk to make the chocolate glaze and when I turned back, I was horrified to see the following sight:


I blinked and looked again....still the same disaster stared back at me. My beautiful bundt cake had collapsed in a heap!!


Obviously, the tunnel of fudge had not baked long enough and the cake didn't have thick enough walls to support itself. But all I could do was laugh!! I picked up the phone and called Hubby who was on his way home from work. "Help!", I said. "Stop at the bakery on your way home and pick up anything that looks good, your choice!" He chose a wonderful chocolate mousse cake and was home ten minutes before our company rang the bell. I did save the disaster for them to see (they are wonderful friends, after all) and we all had a good giggle over my certified disaster.

I think in times gone by, I would have be reduced to tears over such a calamity, but this has made a good story, and a good blog post.

Another Honey-Do Project

We are getting a new washer and dryer on Thursday. Our 12-year-old washer is on its last legs, making horrible banging noises on the spin cycle, so we decided it was time to purchase a new machine, a front-loader this time. They are so much more efficient and use much less water so they are environmentally friendly. We must do our part, I reasoned. Now, being one to like order and symmetry, that meant that the dryer needs to match the washer, so Hubby and I went shopping for the pair. We picked out a lovely set, but alas, they were out of stock in white, so the salesman offered us a RED pair for the same price. Well, also being one who loves the color RED, I jumped at that chance. I wouldn't have paid extra for the color, but if it's free, why not? And in ten years, when the color is horribly out-dated, they will be safely hidden away behind closed doors where no one will see them except me. In the meantime, I'll get to enjoy doing laundry for a little while. (Is that possible??)


So, here are the soon-to-be-replaced pair. Yesterday, we hauled them out of their little space, and did a good cleaning behind them.....oh, things do accumulate and get lost back there. But then I had a wonderful little project for Hubby. I thought we should replace the venting hose that goes from the dryer to the outside world. After all this time, it certainly must have been clogged with lint and that would be such a fire hazard. It sounded reasonable to Hubby, so after two trips to the hardware store we had everything we needed to do the job.


Not so easy. The old vinyl flexible hose snakes down behind the dryer, through the floor and runs above the dropped ceiling in our finished basement. Ceiling tiles had to be moved, the new metal flexible hose (now "code") isn't nearly as easy to bend and twist around the rafters, and Hubby was having a terrible time, sneezing all the while, as all the dust he was stirring up was certainly not good for his dust allergies. Try as I might to sound supportive, he knew this was my idea!



Finally we got the hose to the unfinished part of the basement, where it had to coil out from above the finished ceiling, under the rafters, around the drainage pipes, and finally be attached to the outside vent. But of course, the vent is in a corner, behind the extra refrigerator, and above a lot of stored things, like a mattress and box spring and an old bureau. It was not easy to get to, and Hubby was still sneezing and blowing and snorting.....not one of his more favorite projects in recent memory. Meanwhile, I was busy taking his photo which made him inquire as to what in the hoo-ha I was doing that for. "This will make a good blog entry", I explained. "Great!", he sneezed.

Later in the week, I will post a photo of the new RED washer and dryer. I can't wait for them to be delivered. I've declared all laundry done until that time, I've given my daughter my big box of laundry detergent as the new model takes high efficiency detergent, and we've wrapped up the old appliances ready for them to be hauled away. There are times in a woman's life that are milestones....one of them is when she gets a new washer and dryer. Wheeeeeee!!!!

My New Profile Photo

I've decided that it's time for a new profile photo. The last one, of the Passingham ancestors, was a wee bit small and difficult to see. This one is of my Grandad holding me when I am about 15 months old. Grandad was an interesting man.....rather quiet, so different from my father even though the two of them were so physically alike. Grandad kept chickens and I remember this very early memory so well. I loved to help him feed the chickens but I didn't like it when he chopped their heads off in preparation for them becoming the day's meal. He and I spent hours with the chickens but once back indoors, I worried him constantly to go outside to see them again.

Grandad rolled his own cigarettes, as many in England did back then. I would watch him carefully lie a small amount of tobacco on the paper, then roll it up and he would lick the edge of the paper to make it stick. Although I didn't like the smell of the lit cigarettes, I did love the smell of the tobacco in its tin. He gave me an empty tin at one time and I saved all my English coins in it. Everytime I opened it to see the coins, I remembered him because of the smell of the tin. I still have that tin.

Grandad had a younger brother who also had the same name as he did. They were both named George James Carter, but Grandad was called George and his brother was called James. I've often wondered why my great-grandparents used the same name twice, but perhaps with twelve children, it was hard to be creative. They also later had two more boys, one of whom they named Albert and the other Bertie. I should think it lent itself to confusion as to who was who, because it certainly did for me when I researched my grandfather's siblings.

Grandad loved apples and he would take a large knife and cut them in sections while holding the apple in his hand. He would carve me off a section and we would share the apple together, making the kind of conversation that only a grandfather and granddaughter can have. My times with him were rare because from the time I was four until his death, he lived in England and I in the U.S., but I think of him fondly and remember him for the patience he showed to a little girl who loved him.

Little Tiny Hands

Recently, I re-discovered some old papers, cards, and pictures made by my children. Many of their creations were put into "memory boxes" and when the boxes were full, they would be stored in the attic, appropriately labeled with their name and the dates. We delivered our older son's memory boxes to him in North Carolina when he finally had an attic of his own, but we are still the keepers of two more sets of childhood memory boxes.

This Mother's Day card was made for me for my daughter when she was six years old, but it wasn't in her memory box but instead tucked away in my dresser drawer. I found it again, and yesterday when she was here, she saw it for the first time in almost 19 years. The front page is a poem, fairly well known, but I do not know the author:

"Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small
And always get my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.

But everyday I'm growing up
And soon I'll be so tall
That all those little handprints
Will be hard to recall.

So here's a lasting handprint
Just so that it will stay
Exactly as my fingers looked
One Mother's Day in May."


And here are her six-year-old handprints, so much smaller than they are now. But we smiled together about her Mother's Day card, as she compared her adult hands to these little ones. She has grown into a wonderful (and tall) young woman of whom I am so proud, and one day she will have a child who's little handprints will adorn her home. I wish her the same joy these precious handprints have always brought me.