This is the lady who made the spicy shrimp Dalton brought to the Christmas brunch last year. I did the math and figured that if those shrimp were made by a Chinese neighbor, there must be a recipe for it in a Chinese cookbook. I looked, and in my book there is a Schezwanese recipe for Chunking Style Shrimp. I'm going to give it a try. The recipe doesn't look like it calls for enough red pepper, but I betcha we can fix that! I bought a pound of shrimp, never dreaming what a big pile a pound would be. I'll try half the recipe. The other half pound, I quickly made up into a batch of scampi for lunch. Gretel had fun while I was peeling and deveining the shrimps because I have a couple of bandaids on fingers and am a little awkward, so every once in a while one got dropped on the floor. It didn't seem to matter to Gretel whether the shell was on or not. While I was peeling shrimp, I remembered when Grandpa Call died. Robert was living in Houston, and he brought a big cooler full of Gulf shrimp when he came to Utah for the funeral. We cooked them in lemon, garlic, and olive oil and had a big family shrimp-stuffing feast. The butcher at Albertson's asked me if I was having a good day so far. I said, "I'm starting the morning at Albertson's; life doesn't get much better than that!" He grinned and agreed. I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to get a new soap dispenser for the kitchen because they sent a discount coupon in the mail. Whooooeeee, there are some UGLY soap dispensers out there nowadays. I finally chose one that is sort of Italian-looking, a golden yellow. I wanted another blue one, but they all were the wrong shade of blue. I'm a little bothered about that because I'm thinking of redoing my kitchen in red and blue (instead of yellow and blue) and my new soap dispenser might not match. I hope the dispenser will last a long time because it has a metal cap and spout, so we (knock on wood) won't have the cracking spout problem rampant with the ones from Tarjiay. Oh well, that's a long way off. I have to redo my bathroom first. Heck, I have to FINISH the first redo of the bathroom before I start the second! Then I went to Home Depot to get more sprinkler parts. This makes three stores I have gone to, and still don't have everything I need. Today I stooped to sorting through all the other boxes to see if what I wanted had been misplaced. Not a lot of luck--only one part. Everyone was there buying PVC pipe. I think having an automatic sprinkler system is like owning a British sports car. As Jon says, only a machochist would do so. There is a certain amount of OCD behavior that is called for--or perhaps triggered--by sprinkler ownership. I saw a former student there; he is spending his spring break doing honeydos. I also continued my search for dill. No dill. No dill seeds. What is up with this? There was fresh dill at Albertson's but it was the kind without roots. If Youngs would get in some of their usual brand, I could plant it in the yard, but nooooooo.
![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "4 comments")
(4) Tue Apr 06 2004 14:10:
I was talking to Dalton about his neighbors. We sat in the driveway and he pointed out each house and told me who lived there and all about them. (I can't do that with my neighbors!) The lady across the street is Chinese, and she has a business selling wholesale to Chinese restaurants.
I think the Scandinavian royalty is probably messed up just as badly, but it's not as noticible because of the use of patronymic names. (1) Tue Apr 06 2004 21:17:
Well, I started working on my thirteen pages of tangled mess French royalty. It's going to take me a while. Most of them have to be looked up in history because they are linked to several different pairs of parents, and a lot of them are married to the wrong spouses. I don't know how it could have ended up as bad as it did except for sloppiness, but we'll fix it. I just have to plow patiently through, one name at a time. Say three or four generations a century, and the line goes back past year 200, and all the people they married--that's a lot of folks. I just want to make sure nobody got forgotten.