Worst Shipper in the World!

DHL is still the Worst Shipper in the World!

Today, which is Sunday, I went upstairs to get dressed to leave for Albany (where I am now sitting in the parking lot of the hotel while R. unloads the van and T. sleeps in his carseat. Predictably, he zonked out literally five minutes prior to our arrival). I glanced out the bedroom window and saw an Amazon box sitting next to our mailbox. It was not there last night.

Yes, DHL strikes again! They were late (it was supposed to be second day from Amazon arriving on Saturday) AND not only could they not deliver it to our door, they didn't even bother to go down the driveway. I should add that you can actually see bare pavement on almost the entire driveway at this point.

DHL is still the Worst Shipper in the World! But at least R. got his coffeemaker delivered before we had to leave. For which, yay.

about that hotel

I will leave the hotel nameless, at least for now. Maybe when we leave (which could conceivably be soon), I'll let it drop, or if we have a good stay, I'll put in a word for them. Upon arriving in our room, I noticed there were no baseboards and of course the paint etc. is crummy where baseboards are supposed to cover them up. Then I noticed _wire hanging out along where the baseboards belonged_ by the door. That seemed very toddler unfriendly (to say the least), so I requested and got a different room which also had new carpet but also had baseboards. No wire hanging out.

I'll keep you posted as to developments. This is another suites hotel with full kitchen, but not one of our usual brands (Marriott or Hilton). It is cheap ($129/night for a one bedroom) and actually has an oven, which is pretty cool. Often the full kitchen extends to a cooktop but not a full range.

Update: no toilet paper! Okay, like, 12 or so squares. No spare roll! Anywhere! But there was a box of tissue. A call to the front desk produced a very nice woman with two rolls.

R. says he needs to take a screw driver to one of the doors here. I think that means it sticks.

Actually, we're really okay with it. It's a comfortable place with what we need. And we're not questioning the wiring the same way we were at the last hotel we stayed at.

bread!

Bread v. 1 was an attempt to make my rolls which was problematic for a variety of reasons, not least of which I used the soft white and ground it too fine.

Bread v. 2 was the batter bread with the air pocket down the middle that became croutons for people with good jaw strength and solid teeth.

Bread v. 3 was from Laurel's Bread Book, and let me just say, all right, Laurel! She is some crunchy, and I did not get as much oven spring as I had hoped. I still am having trouble getting a stable, appropriate temperature for the proof (better luck next time; I have a cunning plan). But this time I used a correct sized loaf pan, got really awesome structure, even crumb and it is _not dense_. Nor does it fall apart. Very happy that it turned out despite a slight error in technique during mixing (mixed the yeast with all the fluid/sweetener/oil and it was a bit too warm, too), the aforementioned proofing error, and probably leaving the batter a little too wet as overcompensation for a long bread making history in which my doughs were always too dry.

I cut the salt to 1 1/4 tsp from 2 1/2 and I used sea salt; this got the sodium down into my target range.