Looking Stuff Up

Ben told me the other day that he could survive without the internet but what he would find really hard to give up would be just instantly looking up information.

I agree.

Recipes, for instance. So I'm hungry for the bread pudding they used to serve at the restaurant I waitressed at. I know they used old cinnamon rolls and doctored it up. So I can wade through all my cookbooks and call a friend or two who might know. Or I can Google "recipe bread pudding cinnamon roll" and find something similar in seconds.

Last night I was going to make my old standby--tuna cheeseball and crackers--for a social event but discovered I was almost out of crackers. But I had tortilla chips. Off to Google I went and in 3 minutes had jotted down a recipe for that layered beany sour creamy dip that you put in a glass pie pan. It all got eaten up so I felt successful.

Today I was finishing an article and since I have a horror of using the same words too often on one page I clicked over to Thesaurus.com at least three times and there were lists of equivalents for "contented," "knowledgeable," and "orange*," all of which, believe it or not had to do with watching a Beaver football game.

*"apricot, bittersweet, cantaloupe, carrot, coral, peach, red-yellow, salmon, tangerine, titian"

Jenny loves to hear stories from my childhood and a while back I was telling her how we would play with handkerchiefs in church, turning them into twin babies in a cradle, mice, and other amazing things.

I still remembered how to do the babies, but for the life of me I couldn't remember how to do a mouse. First you fold it into a triangle, then....roll in the two ends? No, that was the babies. I knew you had to somehow roll it onto itself, but how? and then gently pull out the tail, but where?

Yesterday Jenny's friend Kaelin was over and happened to have a handkerchief in her purse. It turned out to be an heirloom from her grandma, possibly one that her mom and aunt played with in church. So I learned two things--some modern little girls actually carry handkerchiefs, and Amish girls weren't the only ones who played with them in church.

Kaelin knew how to do the twin babies, but she had no idea about the mouse. And I had a sudden inspiration--I could Google it! So today I did, not expecting much, and there it was, step by step, just exactly like we used to do it on our aproned laps in the Amish "gma," sitting beside Mom, and on the other side, if we were really lucky, our friend Priscilla.

So I'm with Ben on this--I really like to be able to instantly look stuff up.

Quote of the Day:
Kids, fighting loudly over Cleo: Hey, she's my kitty! No, she's mine! No, mine! Let me have her! Ooooh kitty kitty come to me!
Me, muttering in background: Did I sign up for this? I don't think so. This is not what I ordered at all.
Ben: What? I was a mail-order baby?
Jenny: And I was a female-order baby?!