Home of the Snarkmaiden

Today I'm trying to salvage some more of this year's apple crop and so I hauled out the juicer extractor and am making apple juice with some of the windfalls. It's a bit dismaying how little juice and how much discarded pulp the extractor produces, so I'm also using some of that leftover pulp for another go at apple spice cake with a box mix. In hopes of being able to reproduce it later if it works well, here's this week's recipe

1 stick butter softened
1/4 cup sugar

cream these together in the mixer

3 eggs
1.5 cups apple sludge from the extractor (presumably apple sauce can be substituted)

add these to the mixer and blend in until smooth-ish (within reason, given apple chunks)

1 box yellow cake mix
A goodly amount of cinnamon
A lesser amount of nutmeg (ground)
A comparable (lesser) amount clove (also ground)

add dry ingredients to wet and mix until integrated

A sploosh of milk to get batter-like consistency - oh I dunno 1/2 a cup or so? Use judgment.

mix on medium high until more-or-less homogeneous batter-like consistency achieved

Spoon out into 24 cupcake papers and bake in muffin tins at 350F for 20 minutes

Find some way to keep the hell away from Kaylee until cool enough to frost.

Contemplate making a pie with the quart and a half of blackberries gleaned from the weedy bit on the slope. Or crisp? Should I make crisp instead?

Note to self: Apartment Therapy post on restoring wood furniture finishes suggests Howard Restor-a-Finish is well worth trying out. Also, more ideas on freshening up wood furniture and filling scratches in this post.

Yesterday was a big day for Spike. In the morning, in the usual pre-tuna truce, she managed to get fully nose-to-nose with Tinka and hold for several beats before freaking out and hissing and squalling. Then all was chaos, of course, but before that, there was a full heart-beat, maybe two, when they were a whisker apart and simply regarding each other. This is progress.

Then last night, while I was putting away some dishes, Spike finally decided that yes, she was brave enough to go outside. She went out in that very low-hunkered way she has when trying anything new -- Spike is not a bold cat by nature -- with her tail lashing to beat hell. But out she went and stayed out for several hours. I have come to the conclusion that Spike is the sort of cat who easily gets overstimulated, so anything new must be approached very slowly indeed. There's been a lot of new in her life since she came to us, so I am very pleased that this putatively "mostly outdoor cat" has finally begun making her first tentative explorations out again.

Meanwhile, I love the way our neighborhood smells. Our own tiny lilac is only just starting to bloom, very tentatively. But every time I step out in our drive I am awash in the scent of lilac. The whole street is perfumed. Next door has two tall blooming lilac strubs shading the porch, and across the street has a little one snaggling its way through the arbor. There are spikes of purple and lavender visible in every block, usually on big, established trees. There is something wonderfully solid and bucolic about a big 19th century house with a lilac blooming beside it. It feels so gosh-darned Our Town, it makes a person wanna say Gee, Whiz.

Gee, Whiz.

Spike, sweet as always, but demonstrably a) extant b) upstairs and c) not in the ceiling above the toilet. So, progress.

For those vicariously following the progress of the house, here's another shot of the living room before the arbor vitae got yanked. Dark. Dark, dark, dark.

While they also have more expensive covered pavilions ("gazebos," so-called), Target's Home Tivoli model seems in keeping with the lines of the front of the house, and at $150, is possibly half as much as the other models we were contemplating. The question is, do they have it in store? Hmm.

Perhaps the most wearing, and wearying, aspect of househunting is the cycle of hope, disappointment, and having to start all over again.

So, we made an offer on the house. The sellers made a counter -- too high for the area, we thought. We pondered our finances and the alternatives and decided to make a counter to the counter offer. And then we waited for another response. Which came, last Tuesday. They sold the house to someone else. We were apparently being used as leverage against another bid, one we were never told was out there. Arguably, we were never in the running at all, unless we were willing to pay over market.

We were not willing to pay over market -- we can't swing the loan if the appraisal comes in under selling price, which it well might. So we wouldn't have bid much higher anyhow. Still it's disappointing.

It's not as disappointing as it could be, because disappointment appears to be the primary feature of the househunting process, and so I've gotten a bit used to it. There's a larger pattern to it -- start with what you feel are modest goals, discover your error, recalibrate and diminish expectations, wrestle with trade-offs, decide you can live with the trade-offs, wait, hope, wait, and finally get the bad news. Then you recalibrate your expectations downwards, broaden your search criteria again, and start all over. Repeat when necessary.

Happily, just after I got the news I had a birthday lunch date with marykaykare who swept me off to the Salmon House in her jaunty new yellow convertible. There we had a grilled salmon lunch that couldn't be beat, enjoying the sunshine and the views across the water and a very nice chat. Just the thing for househunter's blues. Especially with the ginger spice birthday cupcake reserved for mid-afternoon dessert.

Later in the week, once Hal and I had pulled ourselves up off the emotional floor, we went out and looked at a couple of other houses in the same Kentish neighborhood. One shows very well -- it's been redone out from the studs, and the fit-and-finish is all good -- but it's tiny, and the space is laid out badly. Pity. The west-facing kitchen gets wonderful light, and the garden is well kept. But it's the sort of house that's ideal for the seller -- a single woman with not very much stuff. That would not be us. Wonderful light though. Still, crossed that off the list.

Now we're gearing up to maybe put in an offer on the other place we saw.

It is not the house of my dreams. It's post war, and very boxy, with a crying need for new paint, new kitchen linoleum, new appliances, and a ton of work on the garden. But because it's post war, it's built like a tank. And because it's boxy, every single major room on the main level has natural light on two sides. And because the garden has been allowed to do its own thing for years and years, it also has two mature apple trees and a mature pear, in among the dandelions. A person could do worse.

And whatever you say against it -- it's not very photogenic at the moment, for instance -- at least the house is not Yet Another Gottverdamter Mid-level Entry Ranch-style Rambler. Hates them, we does.

And, for a wonder, most everything about the house is original -- original scuffed and mellowed hardwood floors; weird, original metal-frame windows, original cedar lining on the linen closet, original weird, radiant heat furnace thingy. Yeah, okay, original is not always a plus.

In all, it's in an area we like, "well-priced" as the phrase goes, and a house we can live with. So we'll try again, put in an offer, and see what happens. What's the worst that could happen?

We repeat this cycle of diminished expectations until we wind up buying a cinderblock doghouse in Tacoma, that's what.