Mondrianyone

In my parents' wedding photos, there's one of them smiling at each other over the cake and my mother has a dab of frosting on the tip of her nose. I think that's how it started, as a sweet and cute gesture before it got mean and hostile. Who knows why it took a nasty turn.

Speaking from near-total techno ignorance: Does your TV not have two HDMI ports? I think ours has four. At one point, we were switching from one satellite receiver to a newer one, and I wanted to get all the recordings off one and onto the other, so we had two DVRs connected to the same TV. We also concurrently had a DVD/VCR combo connected to the same TV. So I'm thinking this should be doable, either with the built-in ports on your TV or by plugging in a multi-port adapter. Now someone who actually knows something can embarrass me.

And yet no one seems to have noticed (or at least pointed out) that he used the past tense when referring to her during that early interrogation: "I wouldn't kill my wife--I loved her." I think he killed her and got away with it because the cops were so inept and his lawyer was great.

Oh, yeah, this for sure! Most of them aren't even funny, and I can't imagine why he would want to be perceived as such a mean asshole. On the other hand, Nassif seems totally unbothered by it, so if it's not a problem for him, I don't know why it should bug me. But it does.

I would do the fleur-de-lis, but I'm compulsive that way. I'm sure it will taste delicious with or without it. We have tourtières in Maine, where there are lots of people of French descent. I love them (the tourtières, I mean, but the people, too). Have a great party!

I do this when I bring flowers to someone, so they don't have the chore of scrambling around for a vase, then cutting the tips off the stems and filling the vase with water. It's a lot of extra work when you're already hosting dinner. I usually try to find something funky at a thrift store or just something simple like a glass cylinder. But nobody's getting half a dozen of my pie plates every year! And why, if they don't bake the pies themselves, do they even want to keep the pie plates? This situation is haunting me. . . .

I'm the pie person at Thanksgiving, too, and I would never leave to go home without all my pie plates. If there's still pie in any of them, I offload it onto some other dish before we head out. I find this truly shocking, @Mindthinkr! Can't you go back to the house(s) where you left them and ask to retrieve them? I love my pie plates, and I'd be really ticked off if people just kept them. ETA: Seriously, that's up to six plates every year! If you usually go to one house for the holiday, that person has to be running out of room for all those pie plates! Get them back!

For years I wanted a turkey fryer, but the outdoor ones were clearly dangerous and I wasn't willing to take the chance. Fried turkeys I'd had at other people's houses were very delicious, though. The pandemic gave me an excuse to get an indoor fryer, so I jumped on it. I was a little scared the first time I used it, but it was really very safe. Now I see they're making an oil-less variety, which I'm guessing is some kind of air fryer? Dunno. But with the new COVID variety this year, we may be breaking ours out again. Scrumptious bird and not at all greasy.

First I have to find it. May take a while, but I will. The only sweater I ever designed myself was an intarsia creation for my friend's little girl. It was black with a big red apple (and its worm) and the words "A as in Anna" across the front. I still can't believe I got everything centered. I don't mind if you laugh at me.

I bought a really huge jar for making dozens of beet-pickled eggs before my husband fessed up that he didn't really like them. I guess I should have a lonely-lady pickle party someday. I'm glad I'm not the only one who uses pickling spices with them, @JTMacc99. That's a beautiful-looking jar, even if if isn't yours.

I would be so afraid to take scissors to knitted fabric. You're definitely way more advanced than I'll ever be. I should dig out my flowered sweater and take a photo. It's a combo of intarsia and Swiss darning, and it's very pretty, if embarrassingly simple compared to yours. I bow in your general direction.

Oh, jeez, if I read that before entering, I'd run and hide under my bed instead. My favorite part was about remembering to remove pet hair. Clearly that's been a problem in the past. But there's always next year! 🥲

That's a big deal--don't minimize it! I haven't done anything close to that, but I know how complicated those intricate patterns are. Give yourself a firm pat on the back! It's beautiful.

Can I ask what brand that is, @peacheslatour? We have a stovetop oven with an air fryer function, but I keep thinking a freestanding one would be better--and that color is custom-made for my kitchen!

You know exactly what I meant, and it wasn't disparaging.

I live on the East Coast, rural but still coastal, so I wouldn't use my situation as the typical one. I looked for prices in flyover country and found this in Missouri. Whole pies from $32.95 to $34.95. This is for rustic Grandma-type pies without any painterly touches. So if the prices Kala lists are legit, they're still cheap no matter where they're made.

Since I personally have no plans to buy or eat these pies, I don't care how much she charges or how they taste or if she made them or even where she lives (people in Russia and Asia are doing beautiful work in pastry). I'm just blown away by the artistry. All the rest are irrelevant details.

The prices are listed on the linked site. They're astonishingly cheap considering the amount of work that goes into those top crusts--and I do pies with chimp-level fancy crusts, so I have a good idea of what it takes to do those. Amazing.

For a petite girl, Megan sure had a heavy menstrual flow.

I like a mix of mayo and sriracha. I don't know if this is common, but I used to hate spicy things, and now I love them. I've read that your sense of taste gets duller as you age, so I guess that's the conventional explanation. But I don't feel as if I taste other things less acutely, just that I like heat in a way I didn't before. Anyone else experience this?

And I'd suggest trying the bedroom, but that would be vulgar.

I was so hoping the answer to FJ would be Johnson & Johnson. Alas . . .

That was my concern. But I don't even know if this grinder has steel parts, so maybe it won't even be an issue. Anyway, it won't come close to breaking the bank if I have to replace it.

I posted somewhere a few weeks ago (can't find it in this thread) about using salt in a cheapo pepper grinder I happened to have. I was worried about ruining the grinder--I don't know why. Anyway, I went ahead and bought some grinding salt, and it's working fine (or coarse). I love it. I'm a convert to ground salt.

I know absolutely zip about grant writing, but I do know about writing. A few years ago an author whose books I'd worked on asked me if I would take a look at the essay portion of her grant proposal and clean and tighten it up, so I did. (She took care of all the technical requirements associated with the proposal.) And we won a Guggenheim. So apart from just bragging, I would say that if you can afford it, hire a professional editor to look over your text and polish it.