10-May-99
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I tried baking some biscuits this morning to use up a little sour milk. I substituted baking soda for half the baking powder in the recipe, figuring the acid in the milk would work with the baking soda. Was I wrong! Gaak. Maybe the milk wasn't sour enough, maybe there wasn't enough of it, or maybe it was just a bad idea all around. I ate a couple out of pure stubbornness, but threw most of the batch out.
On the way to work I stopped to check the Rogers Street bridge again. The site boss was there again, and I shouted to ask if they were on schedule. “Well, maybe a week behind,” he called back. “I don't want to yell this,” he said, and came over, “but a woman who lives in one of those houses is giving us a hard time. We built a plywood shield under the bridge to keep things from falling onto the tracks, and when the bridge is done we'll have to take it down. We have to give her two weeks notice before we can do that. She has a real big dime -- her phone calls go right through to the state house. We've already given her two weeks notice, but the time wasn't OK for her. Then besides that, we have to put her up in a hotel while we do it, because the noise disturbs her. It's not always the contractor's fault when things are late.”
This is a little hard for me to imagine; that house backs up against the trolley tracks, so it can't be all that quiet living there. Maybe the extra construction noise is just enough to put her over the edge.
In news that's only related by the theme of sound, a big secret at work is out of the bag. The president of the company announced at Apple's worldwide developers conference today that we are going to port our continuous dictation program to the Mac. She had told the company at a company meeting several weeks ago and begged everyone not to tell anyone, even family members, so it could be real news at the Apple conference. It's been hard keeping the secret, especially when Arlene has asked a couple of times, “So, are you guys ever going to have a program for the Mac?”
I grilled a big swordfish steak for supper and followed a recipe in the Weber advertising newsletter for corn on the cob on the grill. The corn recipe is to mix parsley and oregano in olive oil, peel back the corn husk, remove the silk, paint the corn with the oil and herbs, return the husk to around the corn and tie it together at the end with string or a piece of husk that you've inadvertently torn off, and grill for 14 minutes turning once. It was highly successful (in contrast to the biscuits).
I wound up the day by pasting up an artboard for a new batch of stamps. Stamps start out as any kind of black and white artwork, and for the last couple of years ours have been laser prints from photoshop. We scan our originals into the computer, clean them up (photoshop erasers are lots better than whiteout!), make any adjustments, scale them to a size that we think will make a good stamp, and print 'em out. This evening I arranged the latest bunch of printed-out designs inside a 9 x 6 inch space, leaving as little space between as we need for cutting them apart, and pasted them down. The next step is getting a magnesium photoengraving done, with the stamp designs raised and the background engraved away. A bakelite mold is made from that, with the stamp designs hollow. The semiliquid rubber is pressed into that and heated in a vulcanizer, and we have a 9 x 6 sheet of rubber with all those stamps on it. With any luck, the twenty-five designs will be ready in time for the stamp convention in Marlboro in June.
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