08:54 – It was 60.7F (16C) when I took Colin out at about 0645 this morning, sunny and calm.
Barbara is headed off to the gym this morning while I await the insurance adjuster and contractor. She’s going to stop at the supermarket on her way home. The Lowes where she formerly shopped closed down a few weeks ago. Another regional supermarket chain, Grant’s, took over the location and opened for business Saturday. Since Lowes closed, Barbara had been picking up milk and bread at the local Food Lion (hawk, spit), so she’s looking forward to having a decent supermarket to shop at again.
This afternoon and the rest of the week we’ll be doing science kit stuff. I’m not sure when the contractor will be starting work downstairs, but no doubt we’ll have at least several days’ worth of chaos when that happens.
We had a frozen pizza for dinner last night, and the chocolate cake we made yesterday afternoon for our evening snack. The chocolate cake was from the modified King Arthur Flour recipe I posted previously. It takes about five minutes to mix from scratch.
One of the things I really like about the King Arthur recipes is that they list ingredient amounts three ways: by traditional cup/fluid-ounce/tablespoon measure; by traditional weight; and by metric weight. North America is about the only place traditional volume measures are still used in recipes. The rest of the world generally uses weight, which is a lot more precise and reproducible.
As a scientist, I’ve always cooked/baked using weights rather than volumes for just that reason. Doing that obviously requires a scale. The one we use and recommend is actually a shipping scale. We actually have two of them that we’ve been using for years, one of them in the kitchen and the other in the downstairs work area. They cost under $30, weigh in pounds and ounces or metric, have a capacity of 110 pounds (50 kg), a resolution of 1 g at weights up to 20 kg and 2 g up to 50 kg, and operate on AC power or three AAA cells. I periodically verify them against standard weights, and they’ve remained spot-on since we bought them.
In addition to using them in the kitchen and for their intended purpose weighing shipping boxes, we also use them for repackaging LTS food, doing weigh-counts on bulk items, and so on. Highly recommended.