A Few Quick Notes 107

-Today is another rainy day in Newfoundland (or at least St. John’s). The weather managed to change from just about perfect, or even on the hot side of things, to overcast, humid, rainy all in one night. Hopefully things will have dried up a little by the time I have to walk to work tomorrow morning.

-Though I did not have a particularly good reason to do so, I baked my first coffee cake this morning. After a quick search for the recipe card I was able to find what I was looking for. As all of the ingredients are pretty common I did not have to head over to the store before the baking process started. The only problem I encountered, and this hardly counts as a problem, was that about half way through the process I realized that my mother has been baking double batches of this cake for the past twenty-something years. As I had only added enough ingredients for a single batch my cake turned out to be much smaller than I had originally expected. Aside from the size, the cake turned out quite nicely. So far I have managed to finish off about a third of the cake, though I imagine that I probably will have to switch to a slightly more substantive food in the near future.

-Running out of propane is one of the more frustrating summer experiences. Several times this summer I have gone out to start up the barbeque only to find that it would not ignite. After a few minutes of fiddling around with the tank and nozzles it usually becomes apparent what the problem is. In this case I was a little thrown because some gas escaped, giving me the false sense that an empty tank was not the problem. Anyway, after eliminating all other possibilities and lifting what felt like an empty tank, I was pretty sure that that was it for my desire to barbeque last night.

-For the first time in about a year I was able to break out my Pictionary easels. Five of us engaged in a few exciting and vigorous games. In my opinion, Dougal’s drawing of civilian by first drawing a solider and then crossing it out to indicate a ‘not-solider’ stands as one of the better drawing sessions of the night. As usual, there were also a few correct guesses that occurred so quickly and with such sparse drawings that it is hard to believe that anything could have even been realistically guessed.

-While typing that last section I learned that Word does not recognize the name ‘Dougal.’ While I know that this isn’t the world’s most common name, I certainly would have thought that it merited at least a degree of recognition by the Microsoft empire, particularly when they recognize ‘McDougall.’

-This past week was a relatively unsuccessful trivia week. We managed to do quite poorly at the Rose and Thistle. The large number of pop culture questions really did us in. At Bitters I managed to be only 2.5 points out of second place. Unfortunately, we (at my proding) ended up making a few last minute changes that lost us a few points, though not enough to cost us the victory.