Kudos to Stroller Girl

I drive about 26 miles every morning to get to work. My alarm goes off at 5am so I can be on the road by about 0540 or so. By that time Rita has usually made me lunch and some tea to drink on my way in, plus a bit more in a small flask to take the edge off of the early morning arrival at work. I'm definitely not a morning person, give me a few days off, and I'm up till 2-3am, and getting out of bed around 10-12am or so. What does all this have to do with Stroller Girl? In reality, not much, I just wanted to give you a sense of how early this takes place.

Who is Stroller Girl you say? I really have no idea who she is, but nearly every morning as I'm driving to work, almost in the exact place every time (underneath the 522 bridge where it crosses SR2 if you really want to know), I see Stroller Girl. She's in her early to mid 20's, the baby she's pushing along is probably less than a year old, and I think she's trying to get back in shape after having the baby. Rita thinks there's more to the story than that, but I think it might just be that simple, she's out exercising. She's obviously NOT enjoying herself, her face is generally in a not-quite-grimace, her cheeks are bright red from the exertion, she's staring straight ahead, intent on whatever her goal is, and the baby is usually lolled over in the stroller, sound asleep. She probably wishes she were anywhere else but there, but she's there...every morning. That impresses me, and I just wanted to say kudos to you Stroller Girl.

Rave: Banana bread!

A couple of months ago we used some of our award points from a credit card since they were about to expire. We rarely use this card anymore because they refuse to lower the interest rate on it, we keep it around mostly because we had something like 70,000 points on it, and didn't want to lose them by canceling the card or having them expire.

Anyway, one of the things we bought was a bright red mixer because Rita thought she'd like to learn how to do some baking. She has a friend in Pennsylvania who does a fair amount of baking, so she wanted to try some of her recipes. She knows that banana bread is one of my favorites, so she tried that first, you can read about it here. Her first couple of tries were less than spectacular, but still resulted in pretty edible banana bread. She was disheartened, especially with the first one which we nicknamed "the banana brick", but it still tasted pretty good. For her next effort, she talked to her friend Gertrude who advised her on how to improve her process, and she ended up with an extremely moist loaf which tasted really good, but was sort of messy to eat. After consulting with Gertrude again, she figured out that she'd left out a cup of flour from the recipe, which would explain the moistness. So yesterday, she made a couple of loaves which turned out perfectly. She gave me one to bring into the office, and it's more than half way gone, and I don't expect it to last, especially since the chainmen have discovered it. If it does make it through the day, it's coming home with me. The other loaf is safe at home, where it should be.

Oh, remember the mixer? Turns out the the best way to mix the batter is by hand, not with the mixer.