*sigh*
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Whatever the reason for the anxiety attacks of the past few days, this morning's church service has resulted in the releasing of the knot of tension in my chest that's been there for at least a week. I don't know what it was or why it was happening, but I feel better.
...the theme of today's service was being made whole by Christ; the pastor referred several times to "Sunday Hospital". Believe me, that's what it's been for me since I lost my shit in May, but never before has it been quite as obvious and immediate as it was today. Praise be to God.
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BTW: DON'T CARE about Super Bowl. The last time I cared was 1986, when the Bears were there. And that was ruined by the Challenger explosion two days later. See what happens when I care about the Super Bowl?
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Dinner tonight will be beef burgundy, and I managed to get the beef browned in bacon grease and into the crock pot without injuring myself, which was a nice bonus.
After getting that going, I loaded up the bread machine with the ingredients for milk bread again.
Milk bread:
From memory because it's a very simple recipe. Put 'em in the bread machine in that order. (I use 1.5 TSP of salt because I like my bread on the salty side. I also tend to put in a bit more butter, because butter is good. AND I use whole milk all the time. Screw that "white water" shit.)
1 TSP dry yeast
2.333 cups flour (that's 2 1/3 cups for those who never mastered the decimal equivalents of fractions)
2 TBSP sugar
1 TSP salt
1 TBSP butter
1 cup (8 oz) milk
I've hardly eaten any store-bought bread since I got on this "let's make a loaf of bread every week!" kick of mine. This milk bread recipe makes a hearty bread with nice flavor, and when I slather a couple slices of it with Smuckers' natural peanut butter it shuts my stomach right the hell up. It goes very well with the beef burgundy, too, and I'd wager it would be good with goulash or chili, or ham and bean soup (all of which I ought to make again soon). (Not at once though.)
Last night someone on WoW was talking about cupcakes and brownies, so I ended up logging off and making a batch of brownies. They came out well and I'm hoping I'll have enough left to take to Bible study on Tuesday, but it's not going to be easy to resist eating them all myself.
All this baking has led to a serious depletion of my flour reserves. I bought a bag in mid-December and it sat in the fridge for more than a month; now suddenly I'm about 2/3 of the way through it (or halfway anyhow) and will have to add it to the shopping list for next week.
On the plus side all of this is cheaper than going out and buying cookies and bread--at least bread that's higher-end than basic white bread. Even the plain old regular store-brand white bread, the cheap stuff, is $1.30 a loaf; and if you want the good stuff, the Ginzo bread, it's $3 plus. In a world where Wonder bread is $2+ for a loaf but "there's no inflation". Yeah.
While I was digging out the canned potatos for the food I'm making, I considered what remarks my brother would make if he were to see all the cans of tomatos and salsa in the cupboard, and I imagined explaining that when you see something like salsa on sale for $0.80 a jar--in this economy--you tend to jump on it if you like salsa. And since I like to make goulash, the diced tomatos will get used sooner or later.
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Commentary from David Morgan-Mar on Star Wars.
Was Darth Vader really Luke's father? Or was he making it up? At the time, in those years before Return of the Jedi, this was perhaps the greatest mystery in the popular consciousness. It may seem difficult to imagine now, but back then, nobody knew for sure. People debated and argued about it. Many people were convinced it just couldn't be true, that it was too horrible to be true. We didn't know. We had to wait.I don't know about "horrible" but I didn't trust Darth Vader's word.
Look: in an issue of Knights of the Dinner Table one character summed it up pretty succinctly after he'd killed another player's character: "What part of 'I'm evil--don't trust me' doesn't he understand?" As far as I knew, Darth Vader was lying, just saying that he was Luke's father in order to convince him to turn to the dark side of the Force. After all, what proof did Vader offer? "Search your feelings! You know it to be true!"
"Feelings" ain't proof. Not even when you have the Force on your side.
...now, when Obi Wan's ghost confirmed it, then I believed it. But as Morgan-Mar points out, that didn't happen until Return of the Jedi.
Unlike him, though, I'm not going to bother with the 3D versions of any of the movies. Are you kidding? I haven't even gotten them on DVD. Eventually I may, especially if I can do a little editing on my computer and splice Han shooting first into the "enhanced" version of Ep 4--that's the only real problem I have with it, and even the scene with Jabba the Hutt was okay. (Esp. since when I read the novelization in 1977, and that scene was in the book.)
Oh--and re-dub the original "Krayat dragon call" so that I don't have to sit through the "Ben Kenobi gets a hummer" version of it.
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Today's homebrew Garfield Minus Garfield or Garfield Without Garfield or WTF-ever:
Because someone's got to do it.