I was on my way to becoming a domestic goddess, then I set the oven on fire

This weekend found me organizing, cooking and cleaning around the house and garage. Here's the list of accomplishments:

- Cooked Saturday breakfast of eggs, biscuits and homemade apple butter
- Finished (and folded!) the laundry
- Made a batch of tomato sauce from our Roma tomatoes
- Cleaned bathrooms
- Cleared out garage (almost) before the new garage-door installers arrive
- Sewed on missing button
- Assembled and baked three delicious tomato pies

I was feeling pretty good about myself until it was time to take the tomato pies out of the oven. They were in aluminum pie plates for freezing. I don't know what happened, but one pie decided to flip nearly upside down before I knew it. Tomatoes, cheese and stuff landed inside the oven. I turned the oven off and with my spatula I lifted the largest pieces off the oven floor and threw them in the sink. Half the pie was gone. The rest became lunch.

Sunday morning I started making blueberry muffins. I turned the oven on to pre-heat and headed to the basement to grab blueberries out of the freezer. I'd forgotten that, while I'd cleaned up SOME of the spilled pie, I hadn't gotten all of it.

The oven started to smoke but I thought "It'll burn off and be fine." It was NOT fine. Not at all. The smoke got worse so I turned on the vent fan. It got worse. Finally I opened the oven to see flames, big ones.

Not to worry dear readers: We put the fire out safely and no real damage was done.

Domestic Goddess? A girl can dream, can't she?

Hipster blogs and faux journalism

I get nearly 99% of my news and information online. I stopped subscribing to the local paper (sorry to the folks who recently lost jobs) and I don't have TV anymore. I don't have enough free time to loll about in coffeeshops (though I wish I did) so I don't see those free weeklies.

I do, however, subscribe to about 40 feeds and I typically catch up on my reading during lunchtime in my office. I am annoyed.

More and more I'm seeing self-indulgent rants and egregious errors in grammar (or more often, word choice) on what I've begun calling "hipster blogs." The writers there seem to believe that they invented the green movement, and that no one ever wrote about music before 2005. According to some of them cooking at home, urban gardening and riding a bicycle to work NEVER EXISTED until they became adults last year a decade ago.

Now I know why many of them hate us Baby Boomers for our self-righteous attitudes and confidence that we are the coolest generation.

Among the worst offenders, however, are the ones who see political corruption everywhere and choose to be snarky about it. It's as if they believe that power corrupts and that any elected official or anyone who heads a public agency must be, without question, dishonest, unethical or worse -- doing their job. These writers stand in the shadows and snipe about what should have happened when the water main broke or how animal services should be run.

Today I'm annoyed by those who are self-appointed community boosters. In their cheerleader tones they tout food trucks and film festivals, art fairs and farmers markets, gelato and small batch bourbon. Their attitude seems to be THE MEDIA WILL NEVER TELL YOU ABOUT THESE COOL THINGS SO IT'S UP TO ME TO KEEP YOU INFORMED.

Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. I'd be willing to admit that.

Let's see how long this effort lasts

Okay, I need to be positive.

I'm feeling the urge to blog again but I know how that goes.

The children are all grown up

See? Adorable!