Monthly Archives: October 2013

Making Chili (click to show labels)

A year ago tomorrow I posted pictures of making chili and described the process. Today I made chili again but didn’t take pictures of the whole process. Here are the ingredients, though, and as far as a recipe goes, “chop everything up and cook it until it’s done” just about covers it. I cut the meat into larger pieces this year and that made a difference to the finished product, in terms of it being chunkier, which I think was good. I also added three cayenne peppers and increased the spices a bit. I doubled the powdered pepper, although part of that is paprika because I ran out of ground cayenne. I thought I had dried habanero peppers and would have added one or two of those but I’m out. I also used meat from the other end of the animal, round instead of chuck, but I don’t think that made much difference (except it was on sale for about 60% of the cost of chuck).

Bob’s Scraped Face

In my mom’s basement, we found a large pad of paper that had writing on it saying it was art done with Stephen and Iris (my nephew and neice, respectively). We were looking through that this evening and towards the end came across this sketch.

It’s an interesting sketch for a few reasons. First of all, it is both a profile and a front view of a face, sort of like what Pablo Picasso did in Girl Before A Mirror and The Dream.

Second, there are those odd red marks on the nose, upper lip, and chin. Those, it turns out, are fairly easily explained. There is some writing ont he page, not included in this photograph. It says (in mom’s handwriting), “Bob after he fell + scraped his face – Feb. 7, 1990.” For some reason, and this is a little unclear, mom decided to sketch dad after he had fallen and scraped his face. I suppose I would have taken a picture.

Hazmat

We continued working on mom’s basement. Rather than showing a picture of the basement itself, here is a photo of mom’s van with a load of hazardous materials, bound for the county transfer station. There were cans of paint, stain, and ink. There were solvents and some pesticides. Of course, this load was a mix of things, including electrical parts and wire, scraps of wood, and quite a few bags of rubbish. This was one of four loads that we took over two days.

Assorted Coins

We started working on the basement in my mom’s house today and will continue for the next few days. Don’t worry, I’m not going to show anyone “before” or even “after” pictures of the basement. No one wants that. These are some coins that were in one of the drawers in my dad’s desk. They vary considerably in age and are mostly English and French, although I see a few Austrian and one Finnish 10 markkaa piece from 1958 and two Belgian 5 franc pieces. There is also a medallion with a Delta Sigma (ΔΣ).