Thread 18 - TalkLair: "That's no moon. It's a space station!"

[RasaSayangEh]

(Previous thread 17)

We've had our heatwave - is this it for the summer? All is lush and green in our LairGarden, flowers are blooming, berries are ripening...

In the TalkLair, all the windows are open, the Pimms is chilled, the MN massive salad is ready to serve. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

I'm a marzipan fan, all types! I like the trad german stuff, the bits that lurk in mozartkugeln, the uk trad glow in the dark yellow for cake wrapping and date stuffing and the logs of mad flavoured ones (rum and raising anyone?) you get in Lidl in the run up to Christmas.

It is the butyric acid, which is used to prolong the shelf-life of the chocolate.

Additionally, US chocolate has (by law) to contain much less actual chocolate than European chocolate. So it is mostly extra sugar and waxy fillers, plus vomit flavouring.

They process the milk in a way that creates butyric acid - also found in vomit.

It's a way of making the milk slightly 'off' but more stable (like cheese) so it doesn't go properly bad in the chocolate. European chocolate uses a different process to stabilise the milk; one that gives a flavour closer to caramel than vomit.

God, that is just so, so disgusting. I mean, the idea of adding something that tastes of sick to make the product last longer. Who the hell came up with that?

I love the marzipan I make for Xmas using Jane Grigson’s recipe- twice as much almonds as sugar, and that icing sugar, plus egg and a slosh of brandy. It’s not as good as the Lübeck stuff but it’s still very nice indeed. I must go to Lübeck to that shop. My idea of heaven.

DH is very partial to Reese’s peanut butter cups, but he is American.

I knew about the butyric process and the reason for it, but not that the cocoa content was mandated legally to be low!

I like Reese’s peanut butter cups but have mostly stopped eating rubbish chocolate so I haven’t had one in ages. Maybe one of these days I will make my own (although probably with almond butter rather than peanut butter).

I dont think it is legally mandated to be low; but it's permitted to be low enough that here you couldn't legally call it chocolate.

I only like the larger Reeses peanut butter cups - the ones where the 'peanut butter' is dominant by volume. Do not like the little dinky ones because far too much american chocolate 'flavour'

Help me untangle this thought process.

MrBint is an intelligent man, with the certificates to prove it. He is reasonably domesticated - he cooks, he cleans, he does laundry with minimal reminders of which powder to use for what, if he makes a.mess he cleans up after himself immediately and unprompted.

Our bathroom contains a sink, bath, and freestanding shower, all with working drains.

It also contains.an airing cupboard brimming with towels and bathmats. There are bath towels, hand towels, swimmg towels, ancient holey towels.for defrosting the freezer and giving to any workmen who need something to clean up messes, there are face flanels and cleaning cloths, there are weird microfibre travel towels. You cannot open it without something absorbent falling on your head.

The bathroom.is upstairs at the back of the house. The kitchen and utility room are downstairs at the back of the house, the stairs are at the front of the house, so the kitchen is about as long a walk from the bathroom as it's possible to get without going outside.

MrBint spilled some clean, cold water in the bathroom.

He walked down to the kitchen to get some kitchen roll to mop it up.

This was insufficient, so he came back down to the utility room to get a mop (microfiber approx 10" x 3", not especially absorbent compared with a towel but has built in wringer).

Having soaked the mop, he then propped it, unwrung and head side up, by the door (right next to the wooden strip separating the bathroom lino from the landing carpet) and.left it while he had a shower.

I could hear the dripping from downstairs.

I am baffled.

What you have there, @NoBinturongsHereMate, is a case of MIS - male incompetence syndrome. The only solution is to ask him to dig a large-ish hole in some remote part of the garden - about 2m x 1m, and perhaps 1.5m deep. Then, before he climbs out, get him to hand you up the spade. You;ll find that filling it in again is much easier than digging it. And come early Spring, you'll have a lovely potato patch.

The one thing I do not need is more potatos!

I'll keep him.for now - the entertainment value is high. (And he is lovely, really, just sometime has weird logic glitches).

Fair enough ... I was just channelling my own fantasies there.

Hilarious and baffling @NoBinturongsHereMate

I'm reluctant to say that it's a particularly male logic glitch because everybody has brain farts.

But! I can absolutely imagine MrK doing similar and in fact he did so, last week.

We were painting the kitchen ceiling with white paint, so I covered the new counters and the new (black) sink with newspaper to protect them, plus a sort of "umbrella" of foil balanced over the (black) tap.

In addition to the kitchen, we can also access water at the outside tap (right outside the kitchen), downstairs cloakroom (right next to the kitchen), the family bathroom (straight up the stairs) and finally our master en-suite (upstairs, along the corridor then through our bedroom).

As it is very painful on necks, the whole family were taking turns with the painting doing 15 minutes or so each.

While I was doing a turn, DH watched me accidentally drip a spot of paint on the floor, pivot to the kitchen tap which was still perfectly useable under its foil umbrella, wet a scrap of kitchen roll, wipe up the drip.

Then he took over for his turn, I sat down for my weekly FaceTime with my parents. Suddenly I heard a distressed raised voice, followed by DH thundering up the stairs, along the corridor, through our bedroom into our en suite. Turned out he had rolled paint on the window. And decided to go to the least convenient tap in the entire house to wet his bit of kitchen roll 🤦‍♀️

Those do sound sadly familiar. Many years ago, Mr Veg's friend came to stay and managed to flood the bathroom floor. Rather than grab an already used towel from the towel rail, he went to the airing cupboard and got out two freshly laundered, white bath towels and mopped up with those instead, making an extra load of washing in the process.

I laughed so much at this I read it to DH and he said “the expectation of perfection by the female is unreal. Men don’t sit around watching little failures by females and recording them.” But he was making me a cup of tea so I will keep him anyway.

It's not so much that I record them, more that I never forget

Heh!

I have a similar thing - MrPSB is very fond of risotto. When we have roast chicken I make stock from the carcass and he uses that stock for risotto. It is good. I make sure to reduce it well to concentrate the flavour. But when he comes to use the stock he waters it down and sometimes has quite a bit of stock left over.

I would use all the reduced stock first and if/when that was all used up, I’d use water, thereby using all the flavour and diluting as little as possible. I have subtly suggested it, but he’s happy with his method. He makes nice risotto now that he’s seasoning it more generously but I’m sure it would be really good if he’d follow my advice. But it’s not worth falling out about.

Aw, bless him PSB! They do know best, don't they? But they all have their funny little ways, and at least he makes risotto.

I wonder if Mr. Bint and Mrs. Sinner are related, because she's done exactly the same. Only she also damaged the emulsion by putting the wet mop against the wall. She was a paediatric neurology consultant in her home country!

Very clever people can also be bafflingly stupid about some things (as I guess we all can).

Hah, yes, that's why I reckoned this sort of baffling logic fail stuff isn't sex-based - must be something in some personalities!

A bit of a WWYD (or rather, is there any point)...

To set the scene - Yesterday morning, I was brushing my teeth and wandering around the upstairs as I did so. This being my normal habit. I heard a large vehicle driving up our road then some beeping, glanced out the front window and saw a scaffolding lorry apparently reversing into our next-door neighbour's drive, thought vaguely "Hmm, wonder what work they're doing." Went back to the bathroom to complete tooth-brushing. Glanced out the window again, saw no lorry, realised it must have been doing a 3-point turn and not delivering to neighbours. Forgot all about it.

This afternoon, coming back from an afternoon out, we then realised that the neighbour's pillar and wall (next to ours) is quite badly damaged. At which point I remembered the scaffolding lorry.

Also then we realised we hadn't seen the neighbour's car all weekend, so they must have been away. In fact, they've just arrived home a few minutes ago and it is already dark. So they won't have seen the damage.

Annoyingly, my Ring camera hasn't picked up the lorry incident - which I suppose is "by design" because the detection area has been carefully set to not intrude on the neighbour's property!

So the WWYD is whether there is any point me telling the neighbour about the lorry, since I didn't catch the company name and there's no other evidence?

I suppose they may have a Ring camera, or another neighbour's may have picked it up?