Hallelujah

My mother likes to say that Good Friday is always stormy and dark, but then the sun comes out for Easter. Well, she didn’t say it this year, because Friday and Saturday were absolutely beautiful, and then the clouds rolled in just in time for church Sunday (although they did go away for most of the afternoon). But I bet she’s right back to saying it next Lent. I guess Good Friday being gloomy is one of those larger, metaphorical truths, like how it never rains in Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night.

This is from the blog of a nice girl named Shoshanah. It was pretty wet. Geaux Tigers!

So I spent a lot of Saturday’s glorious weather struggling with Excel, or rather struggling to import an Excel file into Word in order to make some mailing labels. This is supposed to be easy-peasy. Well, I struggled in between taking the puppy in and out to pee, and enjoy the glorious weather while I was there. I had to check on the cucumber plants. They take a lot of checking.

We think he’s going to have prick ears.

Actually the day after I took that picture his ears went in two different directions. I’ll try to capture that for next week. It’s cute now, sort of, but we’re hoping it doesn’t last. Anyway, so the mail merge. It wouldn’t do, and it wouldn’t do. I googled for reasons why not. One Official Microsoft Support site said I should try to “repair” Office, so when the quick repair didn’t work I did the big online repair. Almost immediately a little window popped up to tell me “Sorry, it looks like you’re on a slow connection, so this might take a while.”

I feel certain AT&T, who has been contacting us weekly to offer a generous $20 monthly discount *for a limited time* if we will only allow them to come hook up U-verse, arranged for this message to appear. We’ll probably start seeing it regularly. “Gee, we wish we could deliver your email faster, but you’ll just have to wait longer!” “This page has lots of high-res photos, so it’s probably not the best site you could have clicked on with your sorry-ass DSL!”

Seriously, have you noticed how jaunty all these little messages are these days, with their “oops” and their “nopes”? I downloaded an update to our banking app a few months back and they were getting all chatty and slangy about how they’d updated the app. That is not the language I want from the people who keep our money, or who pretend to keep it while they lend it out to other people. Anyway.

So the repair didn’t work. Here is the picture I texted my husband at ten minutes to eleven when he wanted to know if I was ever coming upstairs.

That pinging sound you hear is the nails I was spitting at the monitor.

So finally I gave up and went to bed. The next day Allen got a little further along, mostly because he had not had the advantage of reading the instructions that said you should identify the data source as an Excel file but went with the default OLE, whatever the hell that stands for. But still no joy. So he went for a run and while he was gone I somehow stumbled on a wonderful, wonderful “Microsoft Community” discussion thread by which I was able to learn that this is a known issue with “desktops with tablet properties.” Which is exactly what this Christmas gift from us to us, on sale at Amazon at the time, has. A touchscreen monitor! Lucy’s boyfriend Spencer told us it was kind of a gimmick, I freely admit. I don’t mind owning a gimmick, but I do mind owning a gimmick that CAUSES ORDINARY OFFICE SOFTWARE NOT TO FUNCTION PROPERLY and yes I am yelling.

But on this wonderful discussion thread there was a macro all written out for us way back in 2010 by a “Microsoft MVP,” who got a little huffy when somebody else (who had the touchscreen problem so no wonder they were a little cranky) said that did him no good at all because he had no idea what to do with it. “Simply save it in the Word StartUp folder!” huffed the MVP guy. Oh thanks, that clears things right up, dude. But another wonderful person on this wonderful website soothed him, and me five years in the future, down with a screenshot-by-screenshot guide to installing the macro. Remember that scene in Watership Down, when the one really smart rabbit got the other rabbits to float across the stream on an old board, and none of them had any idea what was going on because the technology of “raft” was way beyond them? Well, that was me with the macro.

But lo, after that the Mail was Merged! It may not compare with an empty tomb but let me tell you, I was feeling pretty joyful. So happy Easter to all of you, Christians and everybody else too. It lasts fifty days, well at least the liturgical version does and I think we should follow their lead, and it involves types of candy which are unavailable the rest of the year, except for the Peeps people who frankly are sellouts. All this candy will be on sale tomorrow, so stock up. Fifty days is a long time.

Recipe: Our joy was dampened somewhat by finding out that Callaghan’s was closed, but I certainly hope the employees enjoyed a well-deserved day of rest and egg hunting. So with what was in the fridge I was able to make an old favorite for brunch, minus (sadly) the mushrooms. (Well, and with kale instead of spinach but I don’t recommend that either.) The recipe I use is from Barbara Swain’s Cookery for 1 or 2, which my dear mother-in-law gave me early in our marriage and which is now falling apart. It’s the book I learned to cook from. Ms. Swain calls this dish “Hamburger Spinach Scramble” and says it’s adapted from a specialty served in one of her favorite restaurants, but it’s apparently a San Francisco thing called Joe’s Special. There are a lot of versions of it on the internets, but here’s this one:

JOE’S SPECIAL HAMBURGER SPINACH SCRAMBLE

This recipe serves one but double or triple away. Saute a minced garlic clove, 1/4 cup minced onion, and 1/2 cup sliced mushrooms in a tablespoon of oil, then add 1/4 pound lean ground beef and saute till cooked through, breaking it up as you go. Add 1 teaspoon flour and stir till you can’t see flour any more. Next she says to add “1/4 cup drained, cooked and chopped spinach, or 1/3 cup leftover creamed spinach.” I don’t know who has leftover creamed spinach sitting around, but I suppose you might someday.  I either use fresh or cook frozen in the microwave and press the water out of it. So add whatever spinach you have, 1/4 teaspoon dried basil, chervil or marjoram (I used basil) and a little Worcestershire sauce. She says a quarter-teaspoon of Worcestershire but that seems ridiculous to me. I honor you for teaching me so much, Ms. Swain, but we’re gonna put a couple good shakes of that bottle in. Then break an egg in the middle of all this and scramble it up real quick, the way you do with fried rice. Add salt to taste and serve it up. It looks horrible—I mean it absolutely looks like dog food with mushrooms in it—but it tastes wonderful.