Just the Ticket

This rainy day seemed to give us permission to relax in our pajamas this morning, go to the gym after lunch, and grab a movie this afternoon. With all our errands run yesterday, what a relief it was not to worry about watering the plants or the garden or taking a long, hot walk with the dog. Oh, the heatwave will be back in a day or two, but until then? We'll enjoy this respite.

A Paucity of Pandan Paste

The photo in the food section made me do it.

The crisp Bundt cake with a bright green interior caught my eye. Then the recipe featuring tapioca starch, rice flour, and pandan paste, an ingredient I had never heard of before that not only made the cake green but reportedly tasted like jasmine, vanilla, citrus, and toasted rice, sealed the deal. 

I've been cooking for a long time, and it's not often anymore that I encounter unfamiliar ingredients or techniques. So, a trip to the Asian market was added to our list of errands, and off we went.

But this pandan paste turned out to be somewhat elusive. Knowing the market is always helpful when shopping for atypical ingredients, but since my usual Asian market closed a few years ago, I haven't found a regular replacement. It also didn't help that I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. Even so, I was sure someone in the huge specialty grocery store would help me. 

Upon investigation, I discovered that most of the employees were not Asian and were as unfamiliar with the layout as I was. Eventually, I found a can of pandam leaf extract, which sounded pretty liquid and not pasty at all when I gave it a shake. I added it to my handbasket anyhow, along with my starches and coconut milk. 

At home, I enjoyed the novel mixing technique of sifting and sieving all the ingredients back and forth between two bowls several times, although I was disappointed by the lack of flavor and color of my pandan juice. My cake looked as vanilla and tasted as coconut as could be.

No worries, though. I modified the recipe to make a tiny cake, one-third the size of the one that caught my eye, and when my mail-order pandan paste arrives? 

I will give it another go.

(Not my cake. Yet!)

Uncool

A couple friends stopped by to check in on Lucy after her surgery. The excision of the nasty cyst on her back had gone very well, and she groggily accepted their concern and promptly fell asleep. The four of us sat around chatting, which seemed an odd thing to do on a Wednesday afternoon, but hello summer, and hello retirement; I guess I could get used to such things.

Of course, our conversation turned to the weather, what with this punishing, interminable heatwave. I wished aloud that the possible thunderstorms that were predicted would bucket down, and sooner rather than later. Someone else mentioned the rain that *could* fall on Friday and perhaps cool us down a bit. "Then it might be, what? In the 80s?" she sighed and rolled her eyes.. "And we'll probably feel like it's fall or something."

I didn't even tell her what I had noticed yesterday when I stopped into one of those bargain clothes and home goods places.

What Are the Options?

"You're so weird," Heidi sighed as I raised my arms and did a little victory jig. I was celebrating the fact that my badge still worked to open the doors at school. "Why do you even care?"

"I just don't like the feeling of being excluded," I said as we walked into the office and waved at the principal. "You can't get rid of me!" I laughed when she waved back.

"We don't want to!" she said. "You're always welcome! 

That made me feel even better.

"But I'm sure you're going to have better things to do than hang around here," she continued.

I know she's right, but I'm just not quite certain about those better things yet.

Point Taken

"How about a movie?" I asked Heidi.

It was noon, and it felt like we were well into the day. Both of us had risen at 5:30, Heidi to go with Lucy and their walking buddies, and I to do my yoga and meditation live at 6 am. Then Heidi met her personal trainer at 7:15, and I pumped up the flat tire and took the Subaru to the body shop to have the dented door repaired. After those appointments, we met our friend Mary for breakfast.

Back at home, we agreed to see Inside Out 2 and walked down to our local theater for a 12:45 show. If you've read anything about the film, then you know there is literally a lot of Anxiety in it, perhaps more Anxiety than Joy, and I found it a stressful story to watch. 

Which was totally the point, I know.

Radiant Energy

The water at the pool was not quite as refreshing today as it has been the last few days. "I felt like I needed a bar of soap in there," one neighbor told us as he toweled off. We nodded and sighed in solidarity.

It looks like the heatwave has finally caught up with our 15,000 gallons, and it's going to be a long summer.

Hot and Sticky

Then there was that time your a/c stopped working in the middle of a terrible heatwave. You did your best not to panic, even though it was Saturday of a holiday weekend, and your HVAC guy, a nice fellow with a small business, was closed until Monday and wasn't answering his emergency line either. 

So you left a message and went to the pool, hoping that shutting the cooling system off for a while and then flipping the circuit breaker (like your HVAC guy always suggests) would do the trick when you got back. But upon your return, the indoor temperature was climbing, and no amount of flipping or button-pushing seemed to work. 

So, you went out to examine the recalcitrant unit yourself. It was silent, but then you heard that click and whine that usually means the fan is going to start spinning-- only it didn't. And you looked around frantically for a stick, miraculously finding one (the only stick out there) of the perfect length and diameter. Then you stuck it through the grate and gave those blades a little push, like an old aviator cranking the propeller on her plane. 

And lo! It worked. And the unit began to run.

For now.