Sitting Around
Today has involved a lot of sitting around. I didn't even go back to my house for lunch, instead choosing to go and sit around the cafe across the road from my office and have lunch there (lunch was a chicken salad with fruit for dessert, so no loss of goodwill on the diet plan, then). And I suppose that crossing the street to get to the cafe was a sort of non-sitting-around. Mainly, however, I've sat in this seat and done very little.

I've been trying to do work. We're in what's called "wash-up week" at the moment, which involves taking the work we did in the last four weeks and tying up any loose ends, tidying up anything which, with hindsight, looks a bit messy and generally ensuring that nothing got forgotten. As such, I've been unable to shirk a few tasks which were on my "oh, but surely it doesn't really matter that much" list. At the end of the day, a tidy workplace is a happy workplace, so sorting out these small things is good for everyone concerned.

However, progress has been very slow. This is largely because of factors external to the work that happens in the few cubic feet between my brain and the CPU of the computer, via fingers hitting keys in occasionally beautiful rhythms. So, lots of waiting around for things to resolve themselves, test themselves or otherwise prove themselves worthy of something.

Cooking Around
The plan for tonight is to get something to eat here in Farnborough and then head to the girlfriend's place in order to bake her an Apple Crumble. I can't really eat much of this dessert myself, as it involves things like sugar, which I should probably not be eating too much of, in my condition. That's the condition of being several stone overweight. Anyway, I like cooking and hadn't operated any form of cooking appliance in months until a couple of days ago when I made an Apple Crumble. It was such a success that I've got leave to do it again. This is good. I used oats last time. I also think I solved a mystery from the previous times I'd made crumble.

I like oats in my crumble. Fair enough, right? Everyone's entitled to their own preferences. However, on a previous occasion when I made crumble, which was when I had rhubarb from my own garden. I just looked this up and it's quite surprisingly something I did back in September 2003! I hadn't realised how much the last 3 years had flown by. Anyway, the cookie dough problem, as I may as well cause it, seemed to happen why my crumble didn't crumble. I now believe this to be caused by premature oat adding. If the oats are added to the crumble mix before it's crumbled together, then the oats seem to make it into a dough. Adding them afterwards to the crumbly stuff and mixing it dry, would appear to be the answer. I know this because I made two batches of crumble mix the other night, the first had the oats in and went all gooey, the second, a supplementary mix, as I didn't have full coverage, had no oats and crumbled quite sensibly.

Blog this!
What an odd blog. Sometimes it's software, sometimes stand-up comedy and sometimes it's about bakery. Oh, and musicals.