Didn't learn it when I was a little girl

About once every five years, I try again to make biscuits. I don't mean the kind that pops out of a can and I don't mean drop biscuits (the kind I make several times a month). No, for some reason I've got the insane idea that I should be able to learn how to put together ingredients, cut biscuits in circles, and have them come out looking something like the ones at Bob Evans. Or something close.

Apparently, this is a basic skill, so basic that it's assumed of every good cook. The problem is that I was never taught this one when I was a little girl, and apparently my mother doesn't know it either.

So this morning, to make things simpler, I got out the Pioneer Baking Mix and the milk and tried again. And I got the usual result: A big, adhesive, gooey mass that sticks to everything, refuses to stay together, and definitely cannot be cut into circles.

The drop biscuits were delicious.

Late-breaking

Somehow I'm obsessed with this. I watched three or four YouTube videos on making biscuits. None of them showed an adhesive gloppy mess—all of the dough appeared to be fairly smooth, dry, rounded stuff that could be handled. The presenters could actually pick it up off the table.

I'm wondering. Is this one of those recipes that simply cannot be cut in half? Have all of my various attempts (different brands of premix, different cookbook from-scratch recipes) specified far too much liquid?

I did get the idea that, like meringue, the specific requirements are incredibly fussy and precise—and something one only learns by trial-and-error over dozens of tries. Cooks.com, usually a storehouse of reliable, matter-of-fact recipes, launched instead into sort of a mystical essay filled with "perhaps" and "maybe." So here's where I am:

• The temperature of the shortening is extremely important. It should either be very cold or room temperature, depending on the teacher one is following. Apparently this eliminates Pioneer from the race, because the shortening and the rest of the ingredients will always be the same temperature.
• I didn't use a pastry blender, and that's a mistake. Most of the recipes demand one of those.
• I was supposed to have cut the shortening in until it was the size of peas. Or maybe the size of rice. Or maybe smaller. Depends on the recipe. Certainly, the boxed mix won't allow me to do anything like that, so another reason it won't work.
• Apparently it's a big deal to make a cup-shaped depression in the middle of the dry ingredients and put all the liquid in there at once. I simply dumped it in. That's another reason for today's failure. I was only working with a cup and a half of dry ingredients, so I didn't really have room for that cup-shaped hole.
• One thing I did get right was that I avoided handling the sticky, gloppy mess too much. Only the old 1933 Bisquick recipe says to "Beat dough hard for 30 seconds to make it tighten up enough to handle." The rest seem terrified of any excess handling. I didn't twist my cutter either, but I was working with something that resembled a combination of Elmer's glue and white cake frosting.
• It was a little frustrating to see the serene lady picking up the neat rounds from her cutting board and laying them deftly on the cookie sheet. My biscuits were a lot more like yesterday's chocolate chip cookies. When I could get a spatula under them to lift them, they pretty much wadded up.

Tomorrow's another day. I'll measure out some Crisco tonight and put it in the fridge. Tomorrow I'll go with the chilled shortening option. Then the next day I'll try the warm one.

Really cooking

Did cooking marathon today. I promised to take a meal to a church family (recently out of hospital), and it just sort of got away from me. Of course the church family is getting my usual—an enormous pot of fairly mild chili. And that's not much of a meal, so I made some wheat bread to go with it. One loaf is about as much trouble as two, so I made a loaf to take over to Joel and Heidi, just recently back in town from South Carolina. And a meal really needs a dessert, so I threw together some chocolate chip cookies from a mix. Then I realized that I had nothing for my own lunch, so it was time to boil some pasta and throw some basil pesto on top.

The poor stove doesn't know what hit it. It's been working hard from about 9:30 to 2 p.m. And that's not even counting Jared's three loaves of bread and my pan of brownies for the church Christmas party on Saturday.

The Word from USA Today

In case you missed it in either USA Today or reprinted in the Mansfield News Journal, this article about church hospitality suggests that eating at church is the "next big thing," and likely to be a real healing influence.

I'm not sure why, but the coffee-and-cookies after church at GFC really doesn't work quite the way it's supposed to. I doubt if it's bad memories—few of the current members remember the awkward announcements when this idea first surfaced (coffee was free for guests but members were expected to pay). Maybe it's the lack of places to sit? Maybe it's the crowd around the window? For whatever reason, the coffee bar isn't fostering the congregational meeting and mixing that we need so much.

The USA Today article seems to be talking about much more substantial food, too—both quantity and quality. Starbuck's is a hard act to follow.

But that's another subtopic

I've always had a deep love for botany—no doubt beginning back in my Boy Scouting days, and nourished by college professors like Barry Commoner. Aside from my distress at (and, alas, complicity in) environmental destruction, global warming, etc., one thing that always strikes me when I look at a plant in its environment is that this is really good stuff! The way a plant or animal is put together and interacts with its environment is beautifully orchestrated, carefully adjusted, and extremely elegant. As a very minor illustration, the BBC website today had a video of octopus tool-making.

Somehow, though, when we Christians get together, our food, music, and most of our other preparations have to be last-minute, low-quality, unplanned, and slapdash, or they are not "of the Spirit." I'm not convinced.

Late-breaking comment

This morning (Tuesday, December 22) I looked back at this comment and sighed. Sunday morning was supposed to be a big, well-organized Christmas extravaganza. Dozens of people put weeks of work into it. And the worship team, whose job it is to lead the congregational singing, didn't get around to making a list of songs for the PowerPoint team until about 9 a.m. Two of the songs were new ones that nobody knew and nobody had the words. But of course, if you listen to the Christian radio station you know them anyhow, right? But hey, if you play guitar, you can't think things up in advance. It's just not spiritual.

One more snipe at electronic money

I looked at the calendar today and realized that I probably should have a paycheck from Ashland University. Their pay schedule is irregular, and they have been trying unsuccessfully since September to get direct deposit to work for me, so I figured it was about time (again) to do some searching.

I guess I'm obsessive, because I stayed on the project for an hour and a half. After an hour of trying every search term (and search engine) I could think of, I just gave up and sent an e-mail to my secretary. Then I thought of a few more ways to conduct the search—all of which failed. Apparently the schedule just isn't published anywhere except in the paper copy of the adjunct manual, which is only available by request  because of the expense of printing the thing. So now I know that on the 18th I need to drive to Ashland to pick up the check that they won't mail because of the expense.

Ashland isn't alone. NCSC, which also has a very irregular (and late) pay schedule doesn't make it available either. Theirs is easy to remember, though. If I work an 8-week summer session, I get paid in weeks six, eight, and ten. Approximately. If I work there next summer, it's anybody's guess, though, because they have gone to the arcane world of direct deposit too.

The University of Akron seems to have things nailed down better than the others. Direct deposit works flawlessly, and I can even find out online when they have paid me, except, of course, for the last paycheck of the semester. You see, the pay advice is available on a server that's only available to employees, and because I'm an adjunct, my contract terminates about three weeks before the final paycheck is issued, so of course I can't check to find whether (or how much) I got paid. Because I don't work there any more.

And the lady at Chase Bank thought I was silly for wanting the simple days of paper checks and paper check stubs.

Blog Changes

You'll notice the new look, of course. I had several HTML links in my posts, and the old template didn't make them show up too well. I tried a couple of ways to fix it, but ultimately a different template was the best choice.

The most interesting change, though, is that I've enabled comments. I keep seeing readers from interesting places, and I'm curious who they might be. No, your comments won't appear instantly. I've got to approve them (that way I'll cull out all the ads for tooth whiteners and penis expanders—if those overwhelm me, I'll have to enable that irritating thing where you decipher the scrambled word).

Anyhow, I'd love to have conversation here.

Why we don't need men's groups

I had a lot of extra time yesterday, waiting for students to pick up their portfolios, so I did some reading about loneliness in America. One article claims that loneliness is contagious, like the flu. Lonely people, it says, tend to make others feel lonely, then cut ties with the group—and the process continues as the newly "infected" people make others feel lonely, then leave too. It's like a sweater unraveling. Another article points out that one in four American homes is a single-person dwelling, and that over a twenty-year period, the average number of people the average American discusses "important matters" with dropped from three to two, while a quarter of all Americans have nobody at all to discuss "important matters" with.

But what has all this to do with Grace Fellowship Church? Nothing much, I'd say.

We don't see the phenomenon of grumpy people spreading toxic emotions, then dropping off the edge of the group, do we?

Which brings me to men's groups and to social events in general. Years ago, lonely farmers and their wives yearned for social interaction, so they would go to church, organize potluck dinners, get a Grange going, have square dances, and so forth. If you think of 19th century farmers, you frequently come up with group ideas: barn-raisings, quilting bees, and the group of men who gather on the courthouse steps in Millersburg to simply talk. My uncle, who has lived all his long life in a small town near Wooster, gets up every morning to have breakfast at 6 a.m. with the same gang of cronies he's eaten with for four decades.

We do very few of those things (and we always feel awkward when we try) because we simply don't need them. For years, GFC was taught (sort of informally and quietly) that friendship bonds between men were only appropriate for those who weren't married yet; a married man was to shun all of his former connections because his wife needs 100% of his attention. Do you need to talk with someone about your future plans or job fears? You've got a wife. Is sexual temptation an issue? Talk with your wife. Would you like to just kick back and tell a couple of jokes? You've got a wife. Not only does nearly every man over 25 years old have a wife to talk with, but nearly every important person in the church has other peer groupings. The elders have other elders. The music ministry people have other music ministry people. Not only that, but many of the men in the church have started their own businesses and work with other Christian men.

The needs of men in this church—at least the men who count—are already taken care of. No need for men's groups.

Now, I'm somewhat at a loss to explain why women need groups. They always seem to have something going: retreats, prayer groups, worship meetings, and so forth. Maybe the answer to my question is sort of graphical. Imagine an old-fashioned wagon wheel, minus the rim. Just the hub and the spokes. The women are the cohesive hub, tightly bonded together, caring for one another's needs. Each woman has a spoke attached: her husband. There's no rim, so the husbands don't have any natural association with one another, but that's OK because they have their wives. And that's the picture of the church.

I'm having trouble fitting the single men into this model, but maybe that's OK because there aren't many at all (three or four over 25 years old), so the majority of the men's needs in the church really are being met. As I read back over the article by the two psychiatrists in the Utne Reader, though, I keep hitting quotations that resonate and I'm not too sure what to do with them:

We treat socializing as if it’s a frivolous diversion from the tasks at hand rather than an activity that is essential to our well-being as individuals and as a community.

Parents who don’t have relatives or friends to help them gain perspective on their offspring are more likely to over-scrutinize the strange, quirky symptoms that are part of normal childhood development and to start wondering if their child will grow up to be a strange, quirky, and abnormal adult.

Loneliness was never the goal. It’s just the spot where too many people wind up. We get stuck because the world we have wandered away from is so frantic and demanding. We get stuck because we have dreamed about lonesome heroes who stand defiantly apart. We get stuck because we feel left out and stop looking for ways back in. We should remember that the outside was not meant to be our final destination.

Facebook flop

I've been told that Facebook is THE killer application at the moment. NOBODY uses e-mail any more. NOBODY does AIM. NOBODY reads blogs (which makes this an incredibly private exercise here).

So I caved in a few months ago and got an account. It wasn't exactly the hottest experience of my life. There was something like a 25-word limit on posts, so people would say things like "I'm eating popcorn and relaxing." Then the reply "I like this."

Deep, man!

Well I gave up on it for a while. Then today I finally had some time and went back. I read a few posts and tried to post one myself. Well the reading part went OK, but apparently there's a trick or two I don't know when it comes to posting things. My comment disappeared altogether.

I'll keep trying, though I don't think I'll buy Facebook for Dummies. If 100 million of the nation's dimmest citizens can figure out how to say, "I'm drinking Pepsi now," I'm sure I can eventually figure it out too.

And I'll probably follow the strategy I used recently with a friend. I had something to say to him, so I sent an e-mail. Then when I talked with him on the phone, I told him that I'd sent the email and that he should read it.

Late-breaking news

I've had a few extra hours, so I think I finally figured out 80% of Facebook. Their problem, obviously, is that they hired the same guy who designed the Windows desktop—the one who decided that the best way to shut off your computer is to click "Start". It doesn't help, either, that the software has several nearly-identical areas to post in (and the posts sometimes copy between them—and sometimes don't) or that the names of these sub-areas change from time to time. Thus:

• They used to call it "The Wall" but now it's "Profile" and if you post a comment there, it will appear elsewhere, but other people's comments there are not visible elsewhere.
• "Home" has a "News Feed" and a "Live Feed" but they are apparently the same. They seem to have a lot of the same content as the Wall (aka Profile)
• "Status Updates" seems to pick up comments other people put on their Wall, but it doesn't pick up anything I wrote.
• The Mansfield, Ohio group seems to pick up things that local people in my friends group have put in their Wall.

It's all incredibly complicated and redundant. I can't imagine why this Byzantine piece of software has taken the world by storm. Maybe the weirdness is the reason Twitter is so popular.

The end has come

I'm finally done! The grades are posted for both schools, and I am officially unemployed! At least until January 11. Feels pretty good. I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday holed up in my apartment grading portfolios, and (of course) drove to Akron during the first really nasty piece of weather this winter.

The drive was OK, but difficult, with blowing snow, poor visibility, and high winds. I kept snoring along at a mere 65 mph in the 65 zone, while people passed me as if I were standing still. The question ran through my head: why is a snowstorm good for 80 mph? And then I figured out the answer. Between the bitter weather (15 degrees and a high wind) and the dangerous driving, the State Troopers aren't going to do much ticketing for speeding. So of course! We put the hammer down and drive somewhere close to a century.

I'm still working, though. In my mind, anyhow. I'm prepping for the next semester, wondering what to do with my classes. That will wind down, but I probably ought to keep the pressure on anyhow. After January 1, I might be too distracted to do much preparation.

Am I Alone?

I'm sitting in my Akron office, grading papers. It's a tiny room (about 15 by 12 feet) that contains three desks, and I'm supposed to share it with five other people. I'm alone here now, though, and have been since I showed up at 10 a.m.

A student comes tentatively to the door. She asks for one of my office mates. She looks around the empty room and asks, "Is she here?" Yes. She's just invisible at the moment.

Another student comes to the door. He peers around too, then asks if my office mate is in the room. Yep. Hiding in the filing cabinet.