What’s up? … a public service announcement!

If you’re Bob, what’s up is a bird.

Here at “we work at home”, what’s up is computer problems. Probably problem.

Suddenly, yesterday, everything slowed to a crawl. Cutting to the chase, the most likely suspect for a sudden slowdown is a hard drive problem.

All here is backed up and we limp along until first thing Monday morning when the laptop has an appointment with the local laptop doctor.

Meanwhile, all computer time, slow as it is, will be devoted to getting as much billable work done as possible seeing as how the tool for billable work will be unavailable for the better part of Monday…at least.

The public service announcement(s):
BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER – on a schedule!!! As in back up anything that would make you cry if you lost it forever. External hard drives are cheap – get one if you don’t have one. Actually get 2 and keep important stuff on them and keep 1 somewhere the other one isn’t….in case your house burns down, floats away, goes to Kansas in a tornado or some other catastrophic thing. And don’t think I don’t do what I say. One of my externals is in the motorhome, one is in the house. My work is backed up to a client server in California. Other items are on a server in Michigan.

The (s) is for me. I have always in the past kept my second oldest computer as a backup. This year, extenuating circumstances and all, I’ve been working with just 1 computer and no backup…

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…..sometime…next week probably. I’ll take photos. So far, nothing wrong with the camera…

Chickpea Frittata with tomatoes, goat cheese and olives

I can’t remember how I happened on this recipe, but I found not only the chickpea frittata that was my breakfast this morning, but also recipes for chickpea flatbread – a soft flatbread.

By different names, these are sold fresh off or out of cast iron in at least Italy and France. There is a bit of variation in seasoning and how they are served and what they are called.

I am not found of the bean flours in gluten free baking mixes – they seem to impart an odd flavor to baked goods. But I love all kinds of beans, chickpea in particular so when I saw this recipe with only chickpea flour, I was gung-ho to try it. Since this is savory, a bean taste would be ok…but it did not taste “beany” to me.

Just out of the oven.

No egg or dairy in the recipe: chickpea flour, olive oil, salt, seasonings and water. But it bakes up with a custard-like consistency. I added cumin, black pepper and a bit of italian seasoning to my mix….

And topped with fresh tomatoes, goat cheese and kalamata olives. I liked!

The link to the recipe I started with: My Recession Kitchen’s Tuscan Chickpea Frittata

Kalyn’s Kitchen recipe for Socca has more info as well as a flatbread variation…my next try.

A sunshiny day

Moonshadows, moonset and sunrise…not a cloud in the sky…

Cold, but clear making a nice change from the gray, drippy days of the past week – a sunshiny day.

Moonset

This is what it looked like this morning – incredibly beautiful! I sat in the Jeep with Karl and watched for a bit.

However, for full disclosure… to get the above, I did more than my usual minor-tweaking in Photoshop.

Moon shadows

Yesterday evening, the temperature dropped and the sky began to clear. Karl’s and my last walk was my moonlight, albeit still cloudy moonlight.

I woke in the night to a moonlit house.

This morning, a moon so bright that even filtered through the trees in the woods, we walked over now crunchy snow and ground without house or flash light.

I took my first cup of coffee out to the chair and sat with Karl watching and listening to morning sounds. On moonlit nights, the wildlife feed all night. There is more movement, more sound, more life in the night and very early morning. The crack of a tree limb as the deer moved below us made Karl huff and briefly bark but then seeing that they were moving on and not across his yard, he quieted. A gust of wind rose in the pines and faded away. The air smelled clean – too cold to smell of pine, no smell of snow yet – just clean.

As I sat in the quiet, several decisions were made…or rather they “occurred”. Nothing monumental, just a few things that have been rolling around in my head with no resolution for some days. It was as if I tossed all of the pieces of a puzzle into the air and they fell to the ground all in their proper places. Inside, warming up with a second cup of coffee, I sat with Bob at my feet and felt great peace.

It is a new day, with new possibilities – started in the clear light of moon shadows.