h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

But I don't really *use* it otherwise. Maybe to melt butter if I'm making a pie crust... otherwise it just sits there begging me to put it to use...

Hi Y'all. That's funny, I use my microwave almost constantly. And not just for storing bread...

I don't have a microwave. People tend to look at me strangely when I say that.

I don't think it's strange. I didn't even own one (or an auto drip coffee maker) before K and Herman moved in and brought theirs along.

And I've only just bought a real blender (with smoothie and food processor attachments, ooh) and a convection toaster oven within the last year. Before that I used my hand mixer and a lot of muscle. I've always thought of cooking with these devices as "cheating". I'm getting over that somewhat, but I still can't see what use, other than melting blender, a microwave has?

In my opinion:

Microwaves are the fastest, most energy efficient & easiest way of reheating/preheating food, indispensible when cooking for "the masses" I freeze stuff, then create a "real meal" using the cooker, then dump it into microwaveable container, then can wait until they've all stopped yakking away for the 5 second gap when i can announce "Anyone who is hungry: hands up!" and with luck i can get hot food on the table for the hordes before they have time to start discussing Life, Universe & vegetarianism. They tend to go silent whilst munching, which gives me a break and then they start on about "wow, what's this recipe?" & restart the veg vs carnivore debate; i've seen it all before...

The soup got changed to & ; all proniounced it wonderful, apart from Dubman, who produced chicken stuff & proceed ded to make his own thing in the carnivore pans provided, they seemed to like that too. Anyway, i have a house full of sleeping people with full tummies & all the washing dishes stuff is sorted "Merci Clemens"....who is not French as i thought, but American living in Paris...don't mention werewolves!

What's really great about this Hospitality Club thing is it dissolves peoples preconceptions of other cultures & types; i have a lesbienne French couple in bedroom, A yankee in the attic with the & an Algerian who decided This Yanqui is different, he is !

Lots of stuff, from Marvin Gaye to Celtic to Flamenco, to Leonard Cohen..."Suzanne" sung in 3 part harmony in French, English & Spanish is really quite mind blowing!

My little nestlings are all sleeping soundly, me & Dubman continiued (of course!) to debate the meaning of 42 till just now, tomorrow we have Jerome arriving (french but multilingual, also a musico!) & maybe Alicia (English; not responded to my last ansafone message. The Belgian guys are probably wandering around somewhere wishing they had replied more quickly!

But a good & noisy multilingual time has been had by all & so far no sound from Le Ghost, reckon he is waiting to see what appens next!

Yoda has flirted shamelessly with the guys & snuggled up to the girls, Dubman tried flirting with a girl until he realised i was right & there is NO way, very funny to watch realisation dawn!

Sorry to Snaily, Seraphina, Milla, Val, MSN was being a pig, plus i didn't have time to respond whilst feeding the 5000 etc! Tomorrow may be calmer...unless 4500 homeless frozen people get wind of the place to stay in town during the festival!!!

zdt

Who knows? But then, I've never tried to melt a blender.

Frankly, I wonder why I have an egg-whisk. I tend to use a fork instead.

That may very well be the most surreal non-sequitur of a simulpost I've ever committed.

Oh, nearly forgot, what blew them all away was when i announced "You do realise you are sitting in top of a volcano?" (obviously me, Dub & P live here & know this!)

It's true, geography seach will prove it, my house it tiptoed on the very peak of the volcano which is Angloulême Centre Ville! Nostradamus perdicted "the world will end when Anglouême blows, the French fight the Americans, but the Celts & Arabs defeat them, then World War 3 begins."

"Id at Doinamight in ya pocket or arr ya just pleased ter see me?"

zdt

...at least you should be the first to know

The in the staircase:

In my grandparents house, they had a stair with 13 steps to the 'upstairs' (I will not even try to remember if first floor and ground floor is the same!)

It was old and needed replacing. The new stair had 12 steps.

Every night for several weeks after that, the family would hear someone walking up the stairs, and stumble on the top step, the way you do, when you expect one more step and step into thin air. Eventually the must have gotten used to the new stairs and stopped walking and stumbling.

Melting blender? What was I typing? Yesterday was a looooooooooooooooong day...

I think it's ironic, though, that some people prefer the microwave as more energy efficient? I *don't* use one partly because exactly the opposite is true here- they guzzle electricity, whereas cooking on my stove, daily, uses less than $10 a month worth of gas. And they don't heat evenly. They must make them quite differently in Europe!

Glad you had a good time with your visitors, Terri!

Here is a small but perfectly formed selection of some of my visitors; most of whom "quelle surprise!" know the answer is 42, can give the formula & some are "quelle even surpriser" some are acyually already on h2 g2

i m pretty sure by the time they compile enough evidence to incriminate me i ll be looooooonnnnnnggggg gone. you better f ***asterisked out so as not to offend the PY kin believe it.


OK, I am Jerome. I am Hitchiker of the world and terri bring me inside her boat......
Thank to her...
Anyway, angouleme is great. Nice authors and everything. I am daydreaming !!!

I'm Alicia the Canadian -- "the sensible one" Terri just said...got here this afternoon and am wandering around in bandes dessinées elysium. Staying in comfortable chaos. And now about to fall asleep. Damn this azerty keyboqrd:

ZDT back! That lot, plus "the unexpected Jerome" (yeah, i managed to get TWO Jeromes!) have gone to bed in their respective spaces, no idea where Cyn & So are, it's 3am...but they are Big Grown Up Girls. Dubman hes been firmly booted out for Bad Behaviour (classic zdt phrase": "I have had Enough. I want My Personal Space. Go Home please. I will say please once only, after that you get the Irish Madwoman."

Bliss. me & David Bowie & Yoda. And a G& T!

*no Government Health Warnings in this house: each to his own & if you can't take the crap, dump the liver or get out of the kitchen!

zdt

Oh and obviously i also have Nico:

"These days"

<<>>

zdt

PC - We have a pretty ancient microwave, and I have to say that for some things it is immensly convenient. Especially for warming small portions (e.g. if I want to heat a plate with some rice, green beans, and a peace of chicken; doing that on the stove will be much more of a hassle than just sticking as much as I want to eat on a plate and popping it in the micro for 1:30 minutes or so), or warming leftovers that are in plastic boxes without having to dirty a pot, or warming a little bit of milk in the cups for our morning coffee (I'm not a big fan of black coffee, unless it's the Arabic type), and so on and so forth.
Actually cooking in it is usually quite useless, but for thawing and warming it's a quick and easy solution.
And personally, as a person who loves to cook, I never had any problem with any time-saving machines, like mixers and food-processors and pressure cookers - they aren't any more 'cheating' than cooking on a gas stove (instead of an outdoor bonfire) is 'cheating'.


Terri - Your guests sound lovely! Hope you have a good time.

Maybe that is where the difference (timewise, I mean) comes in- I don't "do" leftovers often. And when I have, I've never had anything in the freezer that needed to be thawed before cooking. Makes sense now!

I just bought myself my first pressure cooker yesterday.



The guests do sound like they'd be nice to have around. I hope everyone is helping with the dishes and the tidying up?

Have fun!

They did, mutual respect all round. More gory details later, i'm absolutely shattered & need to sleep. Only Clem is still here, he's away tomorrow, he just got back from a little stroll "to see what the real sleepy Angoulême is like"...verdict "It is sure as hell sleepy, i'm gonna take its advice!"

Me too.

Squeak amongst yourselves my fiends, i shall return, re-charged in around a thousand light years (or one heavy one!)

zdt

Sleep well

I've slept most of today as much as i can. it's "backlash" time: i can keep going seemingly relentlessly when i 'have to' but once the pressure is off....i've had it! Nasty body stuff kicks in: this time it's been squidgy tummy, feeling freezing cold, evil muscle pains.

All i wanted to do was hibernate very quietly & read the papers, not even have music on, not even go on internet. Turned my phone off. Then "ding dong": Dubman arrives; initially iwas not well pleased, but when he offered to go out & get paper & cigs & bread for me, plus massaged my shoulders & didn't stick around too long; i reckoned "OK"

However, the little bugger has just turned up again as i started to write this "i saw your light on , have you got a couple of cigs please?"...he's been given 3 & told to sod off & never bloody do this again "I am Not Oxfam!" But at least he accepted this & went off home, he's got various unpleasant rendezvous tomorrow, so with luck, he will stick to the agreed rules of I phone him if/when i feel like company.

Les girls have contacted me to say they arrived home safe & sound & thanked me once again for their stay.Les hommes left notes as they laft saying , since i was asleep! It's been fun but frenetic. The only pain is that the girly couple didn't bring sleeping bags, so i have to either trudge out & spend half my profit on laundry or try & wash sheets, duvet covers etc in the bath, which really does me in. Personally, if i was staying at someone's place on this sort of "Youth Hostel" type basis, i wouldn't dream of turning up without my own bedding. Obviously, it's totally different for a fiend who is a good enough fiend to sleep with, but not someone you've never actually met before, or a guest or two who is a close fiend, when you prepare clean bedding for them & take into account it will be washed afterwards...maybe i'mm just pernickety, but i just wouldn't feel comfortable sleeping in the same sheets without washing them.

But i'm not doing all that tomorrow, so if Dubman wants to stay over: tough, i'm afraid. Tomorrow i plan to soak in a long, hot bath & may even get round to washing the dishes.

What do the rest of you feel on the "who's been sleeping in My Bed?" issue? I remember ages back, some sort of questionnaire about attitudes to race which asked "Assuming you are a white person, if you were desperate for a hotel bed & the only one available had been slept in the previous night by a black person, no laundry left, would you take the bed?"

For me, it's certainly not a question of race; obviously, since i've shared the bed with Dubman, who is of Arabian origins or doubt as to the cleanliness of the previous occupant (the girlies spent ages in the bathroom!!!)...it's just i am funny about such things

zdt

"who's been sleeping in My bed?"...and it was just right! No I'd definitely bring either a sleeping bag or my own bedding. And as for the hotel bed, it's quite irrelevant I suppose & if I'm tired enough...then again if I was tired enough I'd sleep on the floor if I had to!

Re: hotel beds- since they're laundered in between visits anyway, it wouldn't matter to me who slept in it before. Though I do always inspect the mattresses for bedbugs before sleeping in any hotel bed.

I've never stayed in a hostel type environment, nor would I expect any guests of mine to provide their own bedding. We only have one bedroom used as such right now, so overnight guests sleep on the couch using our spare sheets, pillows and blankets. I usually wash the sheets after- who cares about the blankets? But then again, I never have strangers in my home- nor would I consider putting a total stranger up for a night.

When we finally save enough to apply for a mortgage and buy a place, we'll hopefully wind up with a third bedroom suitable for overnight guests, and will just wash sheets after they're used, as needed.

Missed a sentence in that second paragraph... the advantage to putting up someone we *know* for a night, is there's no icky feeling of using the same pillow or blanket afterward.