Making Bagels?

Not that we’ve made them yet, we are just talking about it. I find that one of the things I miss about life before quarantine is a good bagel. Will we be able to make an acceptable substitute? Not sure, because the bagels where we live are pretty darn good. There are tons of bagel recipes online, and lots of different options that don’t require any special equipment or ingredients (other than you have to have bread flour, not just regular flour – which we do). We will see, we talked about doing it Sunday but ended up doing a bunch of other stuff around the house.

Also, missing pizza. Two things that are very good around where I live are pizza and bagels. Not to start any fights with any other part of the country – but other places I travel to, the pizza especially can be very sad 🙂 (and those of you in Chicago don’t come out me about your deep-dish pizza – I’ve had it and it’s wonderful, but it’s not “pizza” to me).

I see lots of commercials from pizza chains that are saying how their pizza is cooked to 450 degrees and I can get contact-less delivery and so on – but chain store pizza is not the pizza I love, it’s from the pizza place down the street, and they are not open even if I wanted to risk getting delivery.

These are strange times indeed.

I did get through the big pile of stuff that was in my office for selling or donating, and took almost six hundred pictures and boxed it all with labels so we can find it all again – so when the world does ever go back to normal, we will be able to just go through the pictures and say “today’s the day we sell that Lord of the Rings 12″ Legolas figurine”. To be clear, the LOTR paraphernalia that was in the pile all came from one of my son’s ex-almost-girlfriends, who had given them all to him because she knew he liked that kind of stuff (as do I, but not enough to buy them).

I will say, I’m keeping the One Ring that I found mixed in with all the action figures, commemorative New Zealand Post coins, and LOTR goblets (pictured above). Of all the things, I can’t let that one go 🙂 It’s now hanging from my desk lamp so that I can use it to control any Nazgul that come by.

Speaking of nerdy, we discovered the other day that Audible is hosting Harry Potter (at least the first book) for free listening during this crisis – we listened to the first chapter the other day. It’s the version that was read by the amazing Jim Dale (I just found out that Stephen Fry did the version that was sold in the UK). If you haven’t ever listened to it, this very blurry video from thirteen years ago gives you a flavor of it:

My kids grew up listening to these audiobooks, having first read them – and Jim Dale did a wondrous job of bringing all the characters to life.

In any case, you can listen to it through Audible or by asking Alexa to read it, if you have them.

I forget how much more detail there was in the books, having gotten used to watching the movies over the years. The fact that Mr. Dursley works for a company that manufactures drills, for example – just so perfect for describing his character, I think. I’ve said this before, but I credit the Harry Potter books with being the entire reason why one of my three children fell in love with reading.

Just to prove I wasn’t kidding about twelve-inch Legolas:

Doesn’t really look much like Orlando Bloom though. Which reminds me, one of the many reasons I really, really, really disliked the three Hobbit films was because it was so obvious that Orlando-Legolas was older than he was when he appeared in the LOTR films. Which one, the Hobbit obviously happens before the LOTR stories, and two, even if it was the other way around, elves age over thousands of years so any aging that Legolas would have gone through in the Hobbit-LOTR expanse of time would have been unnoticeable.

And don’t even start with me on what they did with the character of Radagast. I don’t care how eccentric he was, he never would have worn a hat encrusted with bird poop.

Well, this entry just turned into a long fall down a deep nerdy hole HA.

Hope you are all staying safe and well!