New year
Happy New Year to all!
Although I was invited to several New Year’s Eve parties, it’s my custom to stay home and pig out. Which I did—literally.
Tuesday while shopping for my usual New Year’s Eve dinner of steak and lobster tails, I spied a four-pound package of boneless pork ribs. Big-pack price and reduced from that. And they looked just yummy. Into my basket they went and I spent the next several days in mouthwatering expectation.
Friday morning I dumped them in a big bowl with with barbeque sauce and let them sit in the fridge, periodically turning and poking them with a fork to let the sauce inside.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a grill. Well, I have one of those “smokeless” electric ones you put on the counter, but the ribs were just too big for that. I don’t have a proper broiler pan for the oven either and I’ve learned that using a cookie sheet instead results in smokey fat fires. Not good.
I inverted a small plate in a large casserole and cooked the ribs a pound at a time in the microwave, about 20 minutes at half-power. While this doesn’t result in smokey flavor from charcoal or carmelization from heat, it cooks them up just fine and I was in gastronomic ecstacy all night.
Naturally I can’t eat that much all by myself, so I have the same dinner today too. And, having soaked a whole ‘nother day, they taste even better.
Tonight I’m going to the annual candlelight meeting put on by the Sunday night group. I have the day off tomorrow and work a double-shift at the library on Tuesday.
Last Tuesday’s double shift grew to an extra shift on Wednesday, given four days of returns while we were scheduled to be closed. Water main construction closed the library early on the preceding Wednesday and all day Thursday too, so there were 5½ days of materials to shelve. The librarians and clerks were completely, totally freaked-out by the mountains of stuff.
Since nothing had gone out during that time, there wasn’t enough room to shelve it all. VHS, DVDs, new fiction and audiobooks especially, were stacked all over the place. Every cart in the place was full, either with stuff waiting to be discharged or stuff that wouldn’t fit on the shelves.
This left no carts available for stuff to be shelved. I finally just started putting things in the tote boxes used to transfer things between branches, then carried the totes around the place to stack and shelve stuff.
The patrons though, they had a field day. It was like a treasure hunt as they pawed through the piles like they were bargain bins at a flea market.
By Friday, things were back to normal.
In geek news, WordPress 2.0 is out. I’m using it now. The upgrade is easy and the improvements all seem very nice.
I’d planned to use the holiday weekend to migrate my hosting clients to a new, bigger, faster server. But, the data center where I lease the server is both short of staff and of server inventory, so my new server won’t be ready until later this week at the earliest.
I was caught a bit off guard by this bit of news, but clients haven’t objected and I have plenty of reading material. So what was supposed to be a heavy-duty work weekend has turned into a kicking-back weekend. I’m not complaining. And there’s another three-day weekend coming up.
