Thanks to a "floating holiday" that I needed to spend, I was able to enjoy a 3-day weekend! Yay!
As you saw in my last post, I spent Tuesday evening baking a loaf of wheat bread.
This recipe from Jenny Can Cook bakes up in about two hours, so it's great when you want a nice sandwich bread in half the usual time. I remembered enjoying this recipe from when I first started learning to bake bread, and wanted to give it another try now that I know what I'm doing. I also wanted to try the Tangzhong method on it!
The math involved in calculating how much flour/milk/water was needed for the Tangzhong roux was very annoying, as I'm bad at math. But honestly I think as long as I keep the ratio of flour to liquids for the roux at 1:5 and use 10% or less of the bread's ingredients, it should turn out fine.
And it DID turn out fine. Looking back on my earliest bread posts, I can definitely appreciate the progress I've made.
Anyway, once that was done it was 10pm, so I got to enjoy a whole eight hours of sleep.
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Wednesday morning was nice because I didn't have to bake bread. Not that I dislike doing that, it's just nice to have nothing pending first thing in the a.m. sometimes. I enjoyed some fancy siphon coffee with breakfast, then got to work cleaning up the garage. Our garage isn't all that bad, but we've lately been just kinda throwing things against the walls to get them out of the way. I wanted to store my big planter, and needed to ensure that there'd be room for it. I moved everything away from the walls and swept dust and dead leaves out the door, then sorted things according to use and ownership, i.e. Jameson's keyboard and guitar cases and amps and other music stuff went to the corner where his storage closet is, while my gardening stuff and bike and bags of dirt and fertilizer went to the opposite wall where they'll be out of the way while I'm gone.
The planter ended up against a wall and on top of the pool cover, I took the legs off for easier storage and so that we can store stuff inside the planter too. It all looked very nice when I was done, and got the Jameson Seal of Approval.
After lunch I went back out again to weed around the house, especially the front and the pool deck.
I did my best using the leaf blower to clear off the deck, but the extension cord kept dipping in the pool and it was freaking me out so I'll have to go back out again one more time with a broom. Just as well because I still need to scrub the lanai screens.
That was most of my day, it was pretty time-consuming stuff.
In the afternoon I had a snack and practiced trombone. Soon it was time for steno school.
I did end up passing the most recent test that I took (yay!) so now I just need two more to move on to the 120wpm class. It's taking all my self control not to attempt both tests right this minute, but I need to pace myself because with only a limited number of tests available any more than 1-2 failures is NOT an option.
After steno class was GLAAD training for Troika Entertainment.
I learned some things I hadn't known, and had some small realizations that will mean more independent research to ensure that I understand the many terminologies out there. The last thing I want is to offend someone, especially when we're about to do a show about a man dressing as a woman.
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