Mondrianyone

And if you're rationing flour: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/flourless-chocolate-cake-recipe P.S. Happy Birthday!

I made that last week! I thought it was excellent. I threw on some pepperoni, some red pepper flakes, and some chiffonaded basil from a plant we have in the kitchen. Delicious. My husband thought the crust was a bit bready. Which is great, since that made more for me.

I just got off the phone with my good friend who's a genius sourdough baker, and I was telling her about the no-discard method I'd tried. I couldn't remember whether she did the discarding, and she said that no, she hated all the waste, so she's always done it the way I'm doing it now. But I happened to be looking for something earlier today on the King Arthur site and I saw that article, too, @caitmcg. Now I have to go back and actually read it, as I still have a container of the discard starter. Thanks!

You're most welcome. I hope you enjoy it--if that's the right word.

I made a batch of sourdough starter from scratch after one not-so-successful attempt and much wasted flour. Then I found this guy on YouTube who has a method that doesn't require discarding most of the starter every time you feed it, which made me feel a lot better at a time when flour is hard to come by. This batch is looking very bubbly and promising, so I think I'll be baking with it tomorrow. I have a whole assortment of seeds to health it up with. Fingers crossed. 🤞

It's called China Syndrome, by Karl Taro Greenfeld, and it really does read like a thriller. Don't skip the acknowledgments--there's an extra tidbit about how not to give up when things go very badly. I think this stayed with me because my husband once drove off to deliver a manuscript of his to his editor, and after a few blocks another car pulled up alongside to tell him there was a box on the roof of his car. It was the manuscript he was delivering, and this was back in the days before digital files and backups.

The police work, at least in the initial welfare check, was clearly pretty slipshod. If they'd checked every room in the house, they would've found her. I can't believe that wasn't a line of questioning by Josh.

You're not alone. It's my favorite. (Not counting my other favorites.)

No, kudos to you! You're doing for free what I got paid for. I admire the impulse to go into the current battle fully armed with information about the past. I just wouldn't have had the stomach for it. When you're done with the Barry, I can recommend a little tome about SARS that I also somehow was involved with. If you're in the market for some more light reading. 😷

I was wondering when someone would get around to mentioning this. I was one of the editors on it, and that was enough of an ordeal in itself. I admire your thirst for knowledge. It's a very thorough source of information but absolutely the last thing I'd be reading at the moment.

I've been seeing him as a cartoon drawing that somehow jumped into real life.

Raise your hand if you believe that was Destiney's first experience with fillers. Anyone?

Good on HP. I'm surprised it took so long to make the lens coverable. I've been recycling those preprinted address labels that charities send you even if they don't know whether you support them. Some come with little stamp-size bits, self-adhesive and just the right size to go over the lens. They peel right off when you need to use the camera. But Yolan-Duh probably couldn't master the necessary skill involved. Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone! It's been so much fun lurking!

Va-Lisas in this case. Virginia Mayo. I 100% believe this. Pheromones. You'll never know if you're going to be compatible with someone till you've been in the same room with them. I started doing this about a decade ago, when there was some scandal about administrators at a high school in Pennsylvania spying on their students through laptops they'd been given by the school. I put a sticker over my camera lens, and everybody I knew laughed at me. Then years later Bill Gates, I think it was, announced that he was covering his lens, too. So suck it, everyone who made fun of me! I'm loving reading all your hilarious takes. This is my first season, and I know I have much to learn, so be gentle with me.

Yeah, but my specialty is fiction, so that's what I do mostly. Although, strangely enough, I've worked on two books about pandemics in my checkered history. One about the Spanish flu and one about SARS. Those helped me decide to stick to fiction. I do know someone who edits a lot of financial stuff, but she's up to her ears in work right now. Good luck, emma! Don't forget to breathe!

Like the 18-year-old naked Ukrainian girl. Because they tend to be a bit more manageable when English isn't their first language and you can hold a green card over their head.

I've also been working from home forever, so this seems completely business as usual to me in that respect. My husband works from home, too, and the cat claims to as well, but she's never produced a paycheck, so I'm dubious. Our house is big enough so that we can have lots of space between us and not get on each other's nerves. I work in the publishing industry, so most of our projects are in a pretty long pipeline--manuscripts that the authors have been creating for years very often, and when I get a manuscript it's usually six months to a year from hitting the bookshelves. So I'm fully employed for the foreseeable future. As for the unforeseeable future, who knows? Most of the authors whose books I work on have been on the bestseller lists pretty consistently, so I don't think they're going to just disappear. At least I hope not. 📚

In addition to the dramatics and the vocal fry and the uptalking, Caroline seemed a little high . . . on something, I don't know what. Definitely. A little weird that their dog was named Susie, given the wife's name is Susan. At first I thought it might be the dog she took over from the first wife, but wasn't that first dog black? This one was white, so not likely the same dog. Also, as a left-handed person, I always pay attention to issues of handedness when they arise in these cases. They claimed she cut her right wrist using the knife in her left hand. Since about 90% of Americans are righties, the odds are she is, too. So who would use her undominant hand to cut the wrist of her dominant hand? I wouldn't risk lifting a spoonful of hot soup to my mouth in my right hand because I'm so incompetent with it. It's not definitive for sure, but I was surprised that no one brought up which hand was her dominant one (or they did and we didn't hear about it). And I really believe he went into the bedroom to find her on her knees holding a knife. If you have that much time to devise a story, you should be able to come up with something better than the nonsense he concocted.

I have that one, or one just like it. It has a rounded blade that protrudes from one side of a shaft, and as you corkscrew it down by turning the handle on top, it slices through the meat of the pineapple. When you draw back the handle once you reach the bottom of the fruit, you have a spiral of slices that you just cut apart into rings. Pretty handy gadget!

Except for Michael, who's no doubt leaving the orange tulips at the foot of the driveway. Because we can't descend into tulipless savagery, can we?

Any cat I've ever known would be fine with that arrangement. I'm kidding. Sorry about the allergy. Maybe you could get one of those horrible-looking hairless cats. That'd probably scare the mice to death.

Or you could get a cat and name it Peanut Butter! 🐈 We live out in the country, and field mice getting into the house was a big problem. We've since closed the gap around our garage doors, and not such a problem anymore. But before we figured out where they were entering, we lost our beloved dog, and my husband said no more pets, he couldn't stand losing them. I finally was able to persuade him to say yes to a cat. She's like a mouse-catching machine! And I pretend she's a dog, so everybody's happy.

God, she's becoming such an embarrassment. Poor Byrd. He obviously still wants to hold on to this job. I'm old enough to remember the Watergate Hearings. This reminds me of Senator Montoya telling witnesses to "talk into the machine." He meant the microphone, but he was too old to know what it was called.

Could you arrange for, say, a flowerpot to accidentally fall off your windowsill and land on the windshield? Of course I will disavow all knowledge of your mission should you choose to accept it.

Not a surprise that the hoarding is happening, but definitely crazy that anyone thinks that because a protected time slot has been set aside for the most vulnerable population--a rare show of humanity and compassion--that those older people are taking advantage to load up on beer and rib eyes. It'd honestly be laughable if it weren't so horrific.