27. February 2025 · Comments Off on A Milestone of Sorts · Categories: Domestic

Well, actually two milestones; both just around the corner. One would be the final mortgage payment on Chez Hayes – the little suburban cottage patch of paradise that I bought two years before I retired from the Air Force in 1997. Thirty-year mortgage at an 8-point something rate of interest, but no down payment, because of being under the grace and favor of the VA. Yes, that rate seems high – but as my daughter the real estate agent tells me – historically pretty much the average. I never refinanced, as it seemed to be just too much trouble collecting up the documentation and paying for an appraisal and never took out any equity loans because that never really appealed to me as an option. In a relatively rare moment of economic sanity, I opted on a price for the house and sliver of garden, which gave me a mortgage payment that amounted to one-quarter of my monthly income at the time. This was about the same amount that I had usually paid in rent … so I was pre-programmed for that regular expense. There were times, post-retirement where the wolf lurked at the bottom of the driveway – but I was always able to scrape through.

The assessed value is now a little more than double the original price it went for in 1995. I have since been able to renovate the original back deck into a covered screened porch, renovated both bathrooms, replace the original contractor grade windows, siding, garage door, and the roof – that last, twice over, which is about par for this part of Texas. There are a couple more things I want to do, when there is a bit more money in hand after the mortgage is done: mainly, revamp the kitchen and install nice vinyl flooring in the rest of the house. This waits on my daughter buying her own place for herself and Jamie.

The other milestone is the legal settlement for the auto accident in July, which totaled Thing the Versa has been finalized. A nice check will be coming my way in another week or so. I was comprehensively bruised and badly shaken, besides sustaining some injuries which only became apparent afterwards. A good friend of ours, who is also Wee Jamie’s godfather, insisted that we should get an injury lawyer – a firm which he could personally recommend. So we did; it was a piece of good fortune for me, I suppose, that the other driver was not only clearly at fault (he bombed out of a parking lot and T-boned the Versa, passing by in the inside lane) but was also insured. This isn’t always the case, lately.

The payment won’t be enough for another car, as the injury lawyer assured me – but it will pay down a couple of outstanding accounts, mostly to do with the windows and the siding, and allow us to stay in hotels when we do book events a good bit from home. So, we are very happy with how 2025 is turning out for us, personally.

23. February 2025 · Comments Off on Sourdough Starter Crackers, and Other Kitchen Matters · Categories: Domestic

A couple of weeks ago, I started a sourdough starter, thinking that experimenting with home-baked sourdough bread would be another nice way to ensure good bread at a more bearable price than from the HEB bakery. The starter has developed a very rich, sour flavor on a rate of being fed every other day with half a cup of water and half a cup of flour and kept on the kitchen counter. But I haven’t baked a loaf of bread with it yet … and that was because I found another recipe for home-baked crackers made with sourdough discard starter. Unless you constantly bake with the starter, a certain amount has to be routinely discarded, otherwise it would take over. I ran across the recipe for crackers, tinkered with it … and we like the resulting crackers to much that I haven’t yet done a loaf of bread!

Preheat the oven to 320°. Cover the bottom of a 10×15 sheet pan with a piece of parchment paper and lightly spritz with oil. The parchment paper is absolutely key.

Melt ¼ cup butter and mix with 1 ½ cup of starter discard. The starter should be about the consistency of heavy cream or thin cake batter. The butter and starter mixture will cover the bottom of the sheet pan/oiled parchment in a thin layer. Sprinkle evenly with ¼ to 1/3 of a cup of Everything But the Bagel seasoning mixture. (The original recipe called for Italian seasoning, or Herbs de Provence, and a sprinkle of salt, but we liked the Everything But the Bagel season the absolute best.)

Bake for 10-15 minutes, remove from oven and lightly score with a knife into equal squares. The top of the cracker mixture should look a bit dry and not be liquid. Bake for another 15-20 minutes until lightly browned and beginning to separate along the scored divisions. Turn off the oven and allow to cool and dry-crisp the crackers. Absolutely yummy.

We were finally able to replace the big side-by side GE refrigerator-freezer; an appliance which turned out after half a dozen years of use to be a crashing disappointment. The various plastic bins and drawers inside began disintegrating at a rapidly increasing rate, to the point where one was barely held together with epoxy glue and strips of duct tape. The outside finish on the top was scratched heavily and was so thin that the metal underneath began to rust. Then the ice maker stopped working – followed by the door water dispenser. It wasn’t the top of the line appliance, just one of the more budget-friendly models, but I honestly expected it to function for much longer than it did, and have the plastic drawers and all last at least a decade. Anyway, we went straight to Lowes’ and added a new dishwasher to the shopping list. Both were delivered and installed in recent days, although after seeing the mess underneath and behind the old refrigerator, I am only grateful that I don’t know the installers socially. (My daughter says that they probably see worse … much, much worse.) The dishwasher and refrigerator are both stainless steel finish, and a modest upgrade to what they replaced. The refrigerator is a Frigidaire countertop depth, which gives back a little more space in the kitchen – French doors with the freezer below in a deep drawer. I rather like it, because I can reach inside without bending over or moving a few steps, while cooking at the stove. The dishwasher operates near silently and plays few bars of a pretty little chime when it finishes cycling through. I wish it were possible to program it to play something like the Flower Song from Lakme – likely, the top-of-the-line version offers that version. Anyway, that’s my week on the home front – how was yours?

16. February 2025 · Comments Off on The Spring Literary Offensive · Categories: Book Event, Domestic

So, after nearly four years of being sidelined from matters literary because of Covid, and then by helping to raise Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson, I am making plans for doing events at some local bookstores this year for West Towards the Sunset, and to send that book in for the Giddings World Wrangler. The yearly Giddings event was canceled because of Covid once – maybe twice, and then the book that I sent in last time wasn’t picked. Anyway, I will try again, because we absolutely loved going to Giddings and adored how much everyone in that community and school system turned out in support of Texas authors.

It wasn’t just the covid epidemic and everyone going into a panic over it. I suspect that the association for Texas authors which I was active in for a good few years and which set up a great many events for authors is also collapsing. I blame exhaustion on the part of the organizers, assisted by a good push from the covid lockdowns and the downturn in the economy for the last few years. All that, and perhaps a lack of energy on my part.

Anyway, I am looking at doing something in May or early June at the Twig Bookstore here in San Antonio. The Twig has been around for years – I did a very rewarding signing and launch of the Adelsverein Trilogy there, when they were still on Broadway in Alamo Heights, but then they moved to premises at the Pearl Brewery, and a subsequent signing for Daughter of Texas was so disastrous that I wrote off doing anything else there. I think there were maybe two people walking into the store in two hours, both of whom studiously avoided catching my eye. This was way before the Pearl began expansion; now there is a complex of a boutique hotel, a range of condos, apartments and upscale shops. They also host a huge and very popular farmer’s market on Sundays, so I have hopes for a lot of walk-in shoppers. I’ll also walk around in one of my costumes, handing out my cards and flyers, before and after the signing, so perhaps I did learn something from that disastrous signing. Nothing works as well as Attracting Attention to Yourself! And since the Twig emphasizes appealing to children with a wide range of children’s and YA books … West Towards the Sunset works with that aspect of the book trade.

The other bookstore is the Boerne Bookshop, tucked away at the back of a big new building on Main Street in Boerne. It’s a small place, but I did a very rewarding event there for My Dear Cousin. It was rewarding  for them, as well – because not only did copies of that book and some others sell, but my daughter bought a couple of books from off their shelves which took her eye. They have access there to a covered alley in front of their premises, and make space on Boerne Market days for six authors who bring their own tables and either handle their own sales directly, or  have the Boerne Bookshop process sales for a percentage. They are booked solid until past May, but I have asked for the first available date. Again with the period costume and handing out flyers and cards. I only regret that Wee Jamie is not quite old enough to be dressed up in a period knickerbocker suit, a Little Lord Fauntleroy velveteen suit with a lace collar, or a Tom Sawyer outfit and be initiated into the craft of direct sales…

There was a point a couple of years ago, where I got tired of looking up a recipe in one of my vast collections of cookery books and magazines for something we enjoyed and therefore prepared frequently. I made one large book of the most regularly-used and favorite dishes; printed out pages and xerox copies of various pages in plastic protector sheets, all tidied up in a three ring binder. Some of the recipes were culled from various cooking websites and printed directly from their pages, some were ones that I copied, pasted, adjusted the print size, deleting unnecessary text, and saved them to a file on my own computer.

It all made a pretty thick binder, all told – and at some point, the pages wicked up a large quantity of water from off of the countertop. Because most of the pages were inside plastic protector sheets, they stayed damp and began to get moldy, disgustingly smelly, as well as blurring the lettering on many pages. Anyway, this week I started revamping the binder. Because as it is, the single binder had become so large and unwieldy, I plan breaking it into a pair of slightly more wieldy binders. The chicken, beef and soup recipes are all packed into in one, and the fish, vegetarian, salad and miscellaneous side dishes in the second. The desserts, preserves and sauces are already in a third binder of their own.

This necessitates calling up and reprinting those pages, finding the websites or the issues of various magazines and scanning them afresh: a bit of a chore, but it also gives me an opportunity to consider deleting some recipes entirely; something that we made once, and really didn’t like enough to fix again.  And that’s my housekeeping chore for the week … anything to put off working up the income tax return for 2024…

So, my daughter and I are diverting ourselves on a winter evening by watching yet another reality TV series. This one is a real-estate flip-cum-interior decoration series; it can be construed as a kind of professional education for my daughter, the ambitious real estate agent, and amusement for myself. The series is focused on houses in various bedroom communities in the Seattle area, so the prices are somewhat elevated, in comparison to urban South Texas. There are other differences as well, but the houses themselves are an agreeable mix of older cottages and ten- to fifteen-year-old new-builds. They have also been on the market without selling for weeks and months – to the despair of sellers. The hosts of Unsellable Houses are twin sisters and successful real estate agents in their own right, so the focus of each episode is diagnosing what is wrong with the house which is sending potential purchasers away determined to look at something else and remedying those failings. (Conventional wisdom is that there are only two reasons for a house on the market   not selling: either the condition of the house or the asking price.) In the case of these featured unsellable houses, it’s condition. The solution which the twin sister agents offer is an investment deal to the house owners. They will invest a certain amount in renovations, put the house on the market again for a fairly realistic bid – and they appear to be experienced enough in the local market to accomplish this. When it sells, they get back their investment and split the profit evenly. More profit, if the house sells above asking price, which has happened quite frequently. I would guess that the sisters pick the properties to offer this deal very carefully; the location must be attractive, the house itself structurally sound, and the necessary fixes cosmetic. No tear-downs or junk houses in a bad part of town need apply.

From watching the first season of this series (from 2020) and noting the various renovations performed for the various houses I can make a handful of deductions about current market trends and what buyers were and continue to favor:

A kitchen and dining area combination – an almost guaranteed part of renovation is demolishing any wall between the two, often in favor of an island with bar seating instead.

New kitchen cabinets go all the way to the ceiling.

White subway tile for a kitchen backsplash seems to be a constant design element these days. I can favor that, as it’s an element that doesn’t date. Sometimes jazzy floor tile in kitchens.

If not already-existing hardwood floors (and some of the homes are old enough to have them)  – then high-grade vinyl flooring is installed in areas elsewhere than bathrooms and sometimes kitchens. I rather like the best-grade vinyl flooring, myself.

Tile in bathrooms, sometimes rather nicely pattered. Carpet in bathroom areas is an abomination and was the first thing to be ripped out in my own house. For some reason in the 1980s, builders did this, for which they ought to be sentenced to an eternal afterlife of cleaning commodes. With their tongues.

The same for popcorn ceiling texture: an abomination, which I consider to be the Devil’s solidified sperm.

The on-trend for master bathroom vanities is to put in double sinks, where one had been sufficient before, if the bathroom is large enough.

The one aspect of putting the renovated houses on the  market which the sisters employ for good effect is staging – that is, filling them up with furniture, rugs, and decorative elements, even down to elaborate place settings on the dining tables. I had always preferred that a place that I looked at with the intention of renting or purchase be empty, as I could better visualize it with my own possessions in it. I had read that this was what most house-hunters also preferred, or that staging be minimal, more of a hint at possibilities rather than the full-on set dressing. But perhaps this kind of staging is now the preferred strategy and expected fashion, especially for top-dollar properties.