I Miss My Kids
Phone home.
Merry Christmas!
Klosterneuburg Saturday
Photographs from two weeks ago. I’ll be posting more from the trip for the next several weeks as I work to reclaim the house. 28 days, 11 hours, and 45 minutes’ worth of dust is really something to see!
The Farmers’ Market 
“Main Street” 
Our destination | The bells begin to ring every day at 7am 
There were a lot of steps 
No photos allowed inside 
The Klosterneuburg Monastery 
Founded in 1111 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klosterneuburg_Monastery 
Impressive 
Saturday Supper 
Beef stew with spinach kno[e]del 
See below
The apartment’s kitchenette was pretty well equipped. There was no potato masher, though, so I had to go to the local discount store and buy a kartofflestomper. There were no potholders, either. So we improvised.
TWiP Gallery
What a tremendous week at Powerline’s The Week in Pictures
Latin
FYI. Powerline’s The Week in Pictures is a bonanza! Here’s one that came in before the coffee refill. For Miss M.
Worth its own post
Does anyone remember how this goes?
See also, how much wood would a wood chuci…
28 days, 11 hours, 45 minutes
The dogs were happy to see us, as were little kitten and Tiger.
The joint is none the worse for wear, though high on my list is vacuuming.
There’s a deer shoulder in one of the freezers!
Percolator coffee. And lots of it.
Five days until Christmas! I’ve decided to get the Spode out.
Signing off at 6:42am central. That’s +/- 0 in real life.
I don’t really care what’s happening in the world
I’m just trying to make my way back to the Farm.
Two days with Phen an Miss M.
Coffee with Daughter C and the J man.
Will miss Kat and Tony.
A few hours with Mom.
And then back to the Farm!!
Americano, please
TWiP @12:40a Sunday, or if you prefer 6:40p Saturday— either way I missed posting this in a timely fashion
but that’s what happens when you spend most of your day over the Atlantic Ocean.
So long, farewell, auf wiederseine, adieu (sp?)
Packing up and saying good bye to Burgerhaus-Salmeyer.
I will miss Franz’ overpriced breakfasts. (The Institute paid for Mr. Big Food’s, not mine. I went up to Franz’ office to pay. A cool 124e for nine breakfasts. That’s like almost $140 in real money.) Best eggs ever. Croissants were flakey good. The apricot infused honey was worth every penny. And that little cheese roll thing… . I will miss that.
Oh. And Franz always put a little plate of two slices of “cake” on the table. It was understood that we would take the plate back to the apartment and have cake later. Jelly roll. Kutchen.
I will miss the butter.
And the nice fellow at the Spar who helped me sort through my change to minimize excess change. Today he spotted me a euro penny. I said “Danke.”
Mr. Big Food and I just agreed that we are ready to be home.
So 24 hours of hell await us. Welcome home to Newark.
Oh Geeze! I have to go cancel ESPN Player before it’s too late. TTYL.
“Strong language warning”
via American Digest, Online Punctuation and Usage Guide: Strong Language Warning.
He says, “I said…‘STRONG LANGUAGE WARNING,'” and he’s not kidding.
Putting the Punctuation and Usage Guide below the fold on account of, U No, strong language warning.
Continue readingAnd speaking of pour-over coffee
This is from weeks ago— our first morning in Budapest, 11/24/2019. Let me define the problem space. Despite spending about three weeks in early November (after Mr. Big Food semi-recovered from being a Hip Crip— remember that?) preparing to travel, I failed to pack a pour-over cone in the checked bags. Recall that we *always* travel with our own mini-electric kettle, filters, coffee, and cone so as 1) to be able to have morning coffee in our hotel room, 2) without having to shell out good money for bad hotel lobby coffee, and 3) thus ease into the day as normally as possible— which means Mr. Big Food can bring me coffee.
In my pre-travel preps, I even went so far as to investigate whether a 110V electric mini-kettle was compatible with 223V Euro electricity if I just had a simple plug adapter, and having determined that it was not, ordered an appropriately adaptable Euro kettle. (See above. It’s collapsible, so perfect for checked bags. Plus it came with some totally cool adapters which I later put to good use in service of connecting lights and computers of both USA & Euro needs. More on this American Prepper Ingenuity coming.)
Just imagine my utter embarrassment upon realizing, as I was setting up the coffee station on the little table (see above) in our room (see below), that I’d forgotten to pack the pour-over cone! (The USA pour-over cone is safely in the truck with the USA mini-kettle. But as the truck is in the USA, and we were in Budapest, lotta good that did.)
What is a pour-over cone? A pour over cone is a rigid thing that holds a #2 coffee filter (with ground coffee) and channels boiling water poured from a mini-electric kettle over the ground coffee in the filter into a cup and … MORNING COFFEE!!
How hard could it be to construct a pour over cone?
Turns out, not that hard at all. All you need is some flimsy plastic plates picked up at the local Spar*, a pocket knife, a rudimentary understanding of how circular things are converted to conical things in virtue of one simple cut, and something to hold together the two cut edges of your 2-D circle to form a 3-D cone.
It came as quite a surprise to learn that Mr. Big Food had managed to travel from Mississippi all the way across The Pond without a paper clip or two.
Fortunately my buds at the Prepper Forum had alerted me to the fact that there is nothing paracord cannot do. So the paracord was cut into an 8” piece, disassembled, and the fine cord used to loosely tie the two sides together (leaving a nice small opening at the bottom through which the coffee could flow). A pour over cone!
*Comments on Spar in a separate post. Suffice it to say the Spar around the corner from the Lemon Bicycles was not of the same calibre as the Gourmet Spar across the street.
A Trip to the Market
We were out of coffee and coffee filters, and we cannot have that. So I made a trip to the market.
I picked up my bag, because bags costs money at the market. Fortunately (we are ever so worldly and know these things) we packed a bag from home. Thanks to Whole Foods for giving me, a Prime Member, this bag.
If you zoom in through the archway. you will see that I am headed for the Spar Gourmet, our local market.
Let me digress and say a word about coffee filters.
In the good old US of A we have two sorts of filters, basket filters that go in drip coffee makers, and pour over cones. Pour over cones come in two sizes, #2 and #4. Interestingly, Melitta seems to have a strangle hold on both the US and European markets in terms of brand-name coffee filters. So I felt quite at home when I saw the classic Melitta packaging.
WTH? How many different 100, 100+A, !200! sizes of filters are there? A quick google search squatting in front of the vast array turned up an item titled, “Why don’t Europeans do pour over?” Good question.
I went for the 100+A which turned out to be a bit on the small side for the drip pot in our apartment, but, as I said, WTH? That size will be close to what I need to do pour over when we get back to the hotels in the States.
Moving on.
Crossed the street and headed home.
As you are well aware, I am a BIG fan of The United States of America. But to be fair, the eggs and butter in Austria are far superior to those in the US. Not that I’d trade eggs and butter for guns… .
Chronical: The First Romania School
A New Perspective on Crappy Old Books
1577 
1575 
1568
From the collection at The First Romanian School in Brasov.
Interestingly, books and pamphlets were printed as single (double sided) pages, and not in quarto format.
A quarto (from Latin quartō, ablative form of quartus, fourth [2]) is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper on which 8 pages of text were printed, which were then folded two times to produce four leaves. Each leaf of a quarto book thus represents one fourth the size of the original sheet. Each group of 4 leaves (called a “gathering” or “quire”) could be sewn through the central fold to attach it to the other gatherings to form a book. Sometimes, additional leaves would be inserted within another group to form, for example gatherings of 8 leaves, which similarly would be sewn through the central fold. Generally, quartos have more squarish proportions than folios or octavos.[3]
That Infallible Source
According to our informal guide– a retired Romania judge and friend of our host– this guy has been in the business, by himself, of preserving the school, the press, and thousands of old Romanian books for about 40 years or so. It’s impressive.
Note the lack of climate control. Most of the books are in glass cabinets, but not all.
In news of other crappy old books…
That’s it for now. Enjoy today!
Christmas! Time for strudel!
Pancakes with apricot jam
Let’s set aside content for a moment
and consider structure, shall we?
We recognize you are attempting to… and therefore access cannot be granted… .
Note the shift in voice. We recognize. Active. Therefore, access cannot be granted. Passive.
Why not say, “and therefore, we cannot grant access?”
Of course, there is the question of “we,” but we set aside content. Remember?
What a swarmy shift. We should try to diagram that sentence, shouldn’t we?
SueK– you’re up!