Mondrianyone

You can get a plain cast-iron Dutch oven (not enameled) for thirty bucks or so at one of the big discount stores, and I bet you could get one for significantly less at a thrift store, where I've often seen them. Not to encourage you to bake something you can't digest, just to let you know you don't need anything fancy to bake bread in (and the no-knead version really is easy).

You might not be fine with clowns if you had the experience I had. I was driving along a typical desolate two-lane blacktop when I found myself behind a van that was going really slow and wouldn't pull over to let me pass. So finally, on a straightaway with no one coming in the opposite direction, I started to go around him. I looked in his window as I drew up next to him, and a full-on clown turned his head and grinned at me. I want to say grinned malevolently, but I won't. You have to remember this is Maine, though. So it could've been Stephen King. Maybe he killed Barney the dinosaur and used him for parts!

A much more cultivated association than mine. You have zero to be ashamed of. You need to remember that was my guess. And I'm a female. So blame me if you're offended.

Put it out of your mind. My husband wrote back giving him my lame guess and saying uncle. He might already have left for the party, given the time difference, and if he doesn't check his mail while he's there, it could be a while before we get an answer. And it might very well be as lame as my guess. I don't think my husband gave this more than a minute's thought. We sure are wired differently.

And I can make a piecrust without screwing it up. We all have our talents.

I always wonder about that. I never come anywhere near that close when I try to temp things accurately. They're at most a degree or two off. I'm lucky if I get within thirty degrees! I do think that if you've made a few hundred pies in your life, though, you can probably get through one on camera without needing to stop tape.

It does make sense, but I can't help but think the ten tampons must mean something. I just don't know what.

Nuh-uh on coronavirus--that's way too current for something he first came up with a longish time ago. And I'm not sure why you say the tampons rule out blue period. More thought needed . . .

Okay, who wants to help me solve a puzzle? A couple hours ago, my husband got an email from his friend who lives in Paris (I don't think that's relevant) challenging us to figure out what he's going as to a Halloween party tonight. He says he came up with the idea when he was living in Moscow (he's a foreign correspondent), and that might be relevant. This was a fairly long while ago, so it's definitely not something very current. It consists of a blue bodysuit, hands and face painted blue, and--get this--ten tampons stained red glued onto the suit. He says I'm the more likely one to figure it out, and it will probably enrage me. Everything enrages me, so I don't know how significant that is. All I can come up with so far is Picasso's blue period, but that seems ridiculous. Any ideas? I hate to get stumped. In fact, it enrages me. 🤬

So it's good to be moderately stupid?

I looked up Nick Walker on IMDb but only found the Annika credit and no other info. You're obviously better at it than I am--thanks!

Definitely. If you have to watch bad, performative reporting, it should at least come with covetable jewelry. (Jeez, how many times have I posted about Andrea's jewelry by now? I may have a problem.)

I'm just jumping into this for the first time with season 2 and really liking it so far. I'll have to go find season 1 and binge it before I get much deeper in. Forgive what may be a dumb question, but is the Nick Walker credited as a creator and a writer actually Nicola? It seems like a weird coincidence if they're two different people, but if they are one and the same, I'm not sure why the name tweak.

Watched last night's episode, "65 Seconds," and was interested to see a new reporter. Found her ultimately pretty disappointing. She seemed from the Andrea Canning school of asking leading questions and telling people how she was sure they felt instead of just letting them speak for themselves, although some of them were not all that compelling. I hope she was a one-and-done rather than a permanent fixture. I felt there was a huge gap in the story itself. Both Nick and Heidi had what seemed like pretty good jobs for a young couple, he running a division of his father's home-improvement company and she working with her father (there's clearly a theme) at a financial firm. So presumably they made decent salaries--enough to buy a house. Then what the hell did he do with the money he wasn't paying taxes and bills with? He must've had some kind of secret life that he was pouring all that cash into, but no one thought to mention the possibility even casually. And nice that he had so many loyal friends who believed in him despite his obvious guilt and were willing to disregard that he was doing the same thing again with wife number two.

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.