Friday is Nuts

I used the new “hour” glasses, specifically, the 30 minute glass, to give A. a sense of time passing as she moves through her morning routine. Wow, did this make a huge difference. I have no idea whether this will help over time (har de har har) but for right now, it’s fantastic.

Siena Farms box arrived and I handed the beets off to my neighbors who love beets. Woot! There were a bunch of parsnips in the box so I am quite excited about that.

I also ordered from Nuts.com. I wanted more lentils, and I thought, hey, let’s explore the Artisan, Lentil space. Unexpectedly, nuts.com sells lentils, so I got some red and some black (both organic). A while back, I was experimenting with 3 ingredient cookies and looking for bulk organic valencias. The pricing at that time was basically exactly the same or higher than the Trader Joe’s organic no salt added creamy valencia peanut butter so it seemed somewhat pointless. However, now nuts.com has $25 pounds of organic valencias raw, not in shell for $125, which I think is ever so slightly less than Trader Joe’s pricing for peanut butter. And I do like having the peanuts for stir fries; I also think they make a better cookie than the pre-made peanut butter.

In any event, I now have a lot of peanuts. It’s nuts. LOL. Of course, it’s technically not nuts, but whatever.

I forgot I had a 10 am meeting, but they called and we got through it in 20 minutes, which was nice. It was supposed to be a followup on the blocking meeting from Monday, but we finished up the blocking on Tuesday in person, so we repurposed this meeting to strategize presentation / walk through for the metal artist who is going to visit the site in a couple weeks. I had put together a list and shared it with JB already, but then I said hang on before you put a presentation together, because I want to prioritize this. I also gave some thought to how I wanted a presentation structured and I shared those ideas with JB and E and they were quite stunningly supportive of the plan. Like, I think that’s the most supportive of my thinking that E has ever been. He’s always very willing to do what I want (this is my house after all), but he often does not explicitly endorse it. This time was very different. He’s in a really tough spot, given that N and I are often in disagreement, and while it’s my house, he works for N, so he’s got to be very careful and I do understand that. OTOH, I want to impose some pretty hard control over the initial presentation of the house to the metal artist, and it’s extremely nice to have full support from key people. (I got a phone call in the middle of this and learned that E and N had a heart to heart about the division of responsibilities going forward from this point, and apparently E now has a much freer hand. Wow! Sooooo good.)

The idea I had was to present the highest priority components as existing along a path that starts at the driveway gate, and then goes to the front door, turns right into my side of the house, passes the bar and enters the living room where the balcony on the second floor is visible and the alternate path that goes to door 10, sees the railing around the garage roof deck and the finial on top of the turret and then enters, goes into the music room and to the turret stairs. JB is hyper focused on getting the kitchen finished, so she’s thinking in terms of stainless steel countertops, but those are comparatively low on my priority list from this particular supplier. Art countertops could be very cool, but meh.

Lower priority sections include the pool room, other railings in the house, etc.

Friday is also spicy

I’m trying to fit the 25 lb bag of nuts in the pantry, and doing some rearranging in there. I was reminded of the brown mustard seeds, so I got them out, found a recipe for making mustard — which was why I bought the mustard seed bag — and then found the coffee, er, spice grinder. I cleaned the coffee grinder thoroughly (lots of cinnamon in there last time apparently) and then ground the mustard seed and added water from the fridge filter and stirred. It was a little thin, so I added a bunch more mustard seed powder it’s now hanging out in the fridge developing. I put a tiny amount of vinegar in, but I’m mostly waiting to see just how powerful this stuff is first.

Also, if it really is this ridiculously easy, I really am never going to buy mustard for myself again. Finding no salt mustard is a pain, and then there’s the plastic containers, and this would appear to be a way around that. I expected it to be hard, and it may yet be difficult getting the flavor right, but I’m actually not that picky about mustard. I like all of it.

ETA: FF was fun, altho it ended early.

I picked up A. from school and chatted with H. on the drive home.

I made a chocolate cake. Einkorn is really odd in general, and while the cake turned out fine, I think I would use the Frederick white now that I have it. I made a frosting using cocoa butter, caster sugar (both of those nearly used up now) vanilla and orange juice. It tasted like a white chocolate bar, which I never have because there’s usually milk products in that.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I worked some more on the tour / presentation for the metal artist. As I was looking at pages in Procore, I finally realized the proposal for the ramp in the pool area: wood frame, wood surface, SlipDoctor coating. No. My first choice would be Forbo Coral in almost any of its variations. (Which I should also plan on putting by the stairs down to the pool deck.) That would ensure that water from the pool would mostly be collected before getting out to the stair / elevator lobby and anyone arriving at the pool deck would have anything stuck on their wheels or feet removed. We’ve had a forbo coral mat by the front door for several months now and it’s fine on bare feet and cleans up great and is fantastic at grabbing dirt. If someone gives me too much trouble about that, I suppose we could lay down some RubberCal Ramp Cleat. I could threaten people with that.