Book and TV Show

 I've read the book and I made it halfway through the first episode of the TV Series.  Then I got company and never got back to the show.  I am visiting tomorrow but Sunday looks good and most of Monday.  With that storm coming in, this will be a good time to watch the show.  It is a bit different than the book (of course) so I am trying to keep up.  I am plodding through the biography of Tim Curry.  Meh.

 A lot of businesses and other establishments have closed for Sunday and Monday.  At least we are not scheduled to get the ice.  I remember driving two times during an ice storm.  Not a very good time.

I did some grocery shopping yesterday.  It was quite busy for a Thursday morning. I chatted with the cashier a bit about panic shopping.  I try not to engage too much with the cashier, I read the people behind me and if I see any irritation I stop chatting and get the heck out of the way.

My cat Moses goes to the vet on Monday.  He does not like that particular event at all.  I had let sister 1956 borrow my cat carrier and I thought yesterday, I'd better get that thing out, clean it up and have it ready to go.  Then I remembered.  She is over an hour away.  It's cold.  We're old.  So, what do we Americans do?  Amazon said it will deliver my new one tomorrow (hopefully the storm won't interfere).  She can keep my old carrier since she now has 3 kittens.

I found and made a recipe for a lemon cake.  One box of yellow cake mix and one box of lemon jell-o instant pudding.  Add 1/2 cup oil and 1/2 cup water and 4 eggs. Bake for 30 minutes at 350º.  For the glaze, 2 1/4 cups powdered sugar, 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice, 2 Tbsp water and 2 Tbsp melted butter.  Poke holes in the cake after it cools and pour the glaze over the top of the cake making sure some goes into the holes that you poked.  I use the handle end of a wooden spoon to poke the holes (I  used to make a pineapple poke cake all the time for events).  Anyway, the lemon cake stays very moist and the sweetness of the glaze compliments the lemon flavor.

I remember my friend and I ( in the mid 70's) wanted to make a cake for our bus driver's birthday.  We had a spice cake. My mom told me how to make the orange glaze to pour over the top.  I don't recall how I made it (I do know I used an orange) but I think it must be the same as the lemon glaze.

This bus driver used to put chains on his bus tires.  We could hear him coming as the chains made a certain noise.  After I graduated high school I worked at an auto shop where we would put studs in car tires. (I didn't do it, I worked in the office, but the shop did). The studs had to be removed by April 15th (tax day!).  I never hear about anybody getting studs put in their tires now. In fact I never hear about anybody getting snow tires put on their cars any longer. I guess it's because they came out with front wheel drive?  

I also remember cutting keys at this auto store.  That was a heck of a process. The machine had two identical parts, one on the left and one on the right where  you would clamp the original key on one side and the blank on the other.  You would  turn the machine on and the two sides would work in tandem. The left part of the machine would copy how the original key was cut and make the identical cuts in the blank on the right side.  I  used to make these very carefully as I didn't want the customer to have to come back because the key wouldn't work.  At first we had to manually move the cutter over the keys ourselves and later we got a device that did it automatically.  I was in awe when a few years later (okay 45 years) I needed a couple of house keys made.  You just dropped the key into a slot in this box (that looked like a big space invader game machine) and out came your original key and the copy.  All those years of cutting keys by hand!  Now I'm trying to remember if we had to choose the blank and drop it in with the original or if the machine magically knew which blank to use?