Blain Nelson's Blog (not!)

Today is Payday, which is very nice. But it was also a payday of another kind, which was very nice.  I don’t know when, but I decided at some point in the weekend that I would be going by the Seattle Temple this morning after work. I knew it would be closed (being Monday), but I thought I’d check out the Distribution Center next door if it was open or the Deseret Bookstore down in the mall below it. The Distribution Center, it turns out, is also closed Monday, so I took a walk around the Temple, and got some pictures with my phone.

Then, I went down to Deseret Book. By this time, it was about 9:20, and the sign on the door said DB opens at 10:00. Great! I’d really like to head home and get some sleep, but I also wanted a chance to see if they had what I came to look for (a little empty bottle with an eye-dropper top, useful for filling a key-chain vial of consecrated oil) (I want to use it for vanilla extract in my kitchen). So I parked, and went around the corner of the little mall to the Tullys. I’ve learned my way around a Starbucks, but this was my first time at a Tullys. I like Starbucks better — more non-coffee options — but Tullys had enough options to get my take-my-meds breakfast taken care of (not-too-hot hot chocolate and a white chocolate macadamia cookie bar). I tried their free wifi, but couldn’t get it to connect right, so I used the cellular modem to get online and check my FB until it was 10:00.  I packed up and headed over.

I looked around the store at what was there, and got an idea of what they had and what I might want to get at some time.  They didn’t have the little bottles I wanted, and I wasn’t really ready to get a new set of scriptures at the price they had.  I was just getting ready to walk out the door, disappointed that I had spent that time and had nothing to show for it, with my hand on the door, when I gave one last look back, and noticed the word “WARD” on the cover of a book on a shelf I hadn’t looked at.  It was the “Bestsellers” section.  So I thought I’d look at that shelf, and found that the book that got my attention was the Worldwide Ward Cookbook:  Mom’s Best Recipes. The name meant something to me.  Some months ago, I had been pointed to a website for the Worldwide Ward Cookbook that was accepting recipes for this particular volume.  I’d submitted my mom’s fruit cobbler recipe to it, altering the recipe as she’d written it to make it more like a cook book recipe, and then I’d heard nothing more about it.  I’d been thinking about that, not too long ago, in fact, since the rhubarb is up and it’s getting to be cobbler season. I was pretty certain that I would have heard something if it was going to be included, so I doubted it was in there, but thought it wouldn’t hurt to look.

So I grabbed the book, and looked to the index, finding a recipe for fruit cobbler listed.  I flipped to the page (243), and that particular page was a little bit stuck together, so it took a little doing to get it to come open.  And there was my picture, and the recipe I’d submitted, complete with the little note I’d written for it!  They spelled my name right, even!  The recipe was altered just a little bit from what I’d submitted, but it was essentially what I put down, so that was cool.  The best part was having this little remembrance of Mom in print.  Here’s the blurb I wrote:

This recipe is named for my mother, Della Carnefix Nelson, who adapted it from a recipe given to her by her sister.  Mom almost always cooked from scratch, and usually by “touch,” rather than from a recipe; she never felt comfortable preparing a meal out of a bix with instructions to “add water and stir.”  She liked this recipe because it’s so easy and because the batter starts out underneath the fruit and cooks through it, picking up flavor from the fruit on the way through.  It was one of two recipes we had her dictate while she was in hospice care, shortly before her death from cancer in July 2006.

And so now I knew what I was there for.  I bought the book, showing the clerk that this was me, but not because it was me, but because it was about Mom.  And it was payday again.

I’ve been finding people online that I haven’t seen or spoken to in several decades.  I don’t know of a real way to catch up from all of that other than lengthy conversations in-person, but those aren’t practical in the short-term, so I adapted this from something I put together for my high school reunion last Summer to be better than nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a stray thought that struck me the other day, and I wanted to bring it up to see if anybody happens to know how to answer this:

Much of the current focus on addressing climate change has to do with reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.  However, burning fossil fuels also involves the release of hydrogen compounds, most particularly, of water.  Water vapor, aka steam, to be more precise.  Iirc, water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and its release raises humidity in the locations it has been released.  It contributes to more cloud cover, and could reasonably be expected to result in increased rainfall/snowfall and raising ocean levels (although, admittedly, a lot of tons can be added to oceans without raising sea level by a millimeter).

Now, it’s good to have water, because we are mostly water, but I’m just wondering aloud in print if this has received sufficient attention.  Anybody?