Sep 22 - let it rain

It rained most of the day, starting around 10 am vs the noon prediction.  I did get Cassie out fetching beforehand and betweenhand (?) when the rain eased up a bit.  She's an exercise intensive dog.

I spent the better part of 3 hours booking fights and hotels to/from Kilimanjaro.  Just try and do this sort of thing when there are so many, many options, on a slow internet connection made worse by heavy rain !  Many of the flight options from Miami to Kili bounce around in the US before bouncing around in Europe.  Ugh.  Miami to JFK; Miami to Atlanta; Amsterdam; London; etc. etc., many have 3 or 4 legs.

I finally dropped back to what I had been looking at originally -- Qatar Airways -- and a one-stop flight.  Miami - Qatar - Kili.  It's not that simple though, as the layover in Qatar is 15 hours -- from 5pm until 8am -- so I also booked the airport hotel.  This hotel is "in transit", i.e. you never officially enter Qatar, never go through immigration there. 

To book the hotel, you need your flight numbers.  Every time I left the Qatar site for a few minutes, it closed me out and I had to start again with dates and destination.  The Qatar site was producing different prices (better) than Orbitz.  Booking.com didn't show any availability at the hotel, but the hotel website did.  Expedia was producing a similar answer to the Qatar website (Sandy was playing with Expedia). 

The return flight also has a long layover in Qatar's Doha airport -- from midnight to 8am.  Ugh.  So I booked that hotel as well. 

I know that I'm loved.  Top of the list is Amex.  Second on the list is Cassie.  Sandy comes third.  Amex's love is conditional -- just keep spending.  Cassie's love is unconditional -- that's the way dogs are.  Sandy ... well ... that's teamwork, but she threw in the towel on this one and said "you choose". 

So, that's done.

We heard from Jim and Sheryl -- they're in Europe now for their Viking River Cruise.  Hopefully the weather holds for them.  I see that we have a risk of frost tonight, with a prediction of 4C and an even lower prediction tomorrow night -- 2C.

Work continued at the end of the road; I could hear them and I met one of the trucks as I was coming home from Grundy Lake.

I had my first crack at making Mozzarella cheese yesterday, with poor results.  What I ended up with has the consistency of large grain cream cheese.  The rennet didn't completely set the milk.  There are only three ingredients -- citric acid, rennet and milk -- so this is either an issue with the milk or the rennet.

I picked up another 4 liters of whole milk at Grundy Lake -- no one sells whole milk in Loring.  I could also use 2%, but want to get this right with whole milk first.  I'll use more rennet this time -- the recipe called for 1/2 of a tablet but the notes on the back of the package, in Spanish, say that there's enough rennet to set 50 liters of milk -- which, for 10 tablets, would mean a whole tablet.  

I talked to the lady at Grundy Lake -- "so, you're moving ?  This fall?" -- yes, they'll be moving as soon as they close up after Thanksgiving.  She said that it will be "ready enough to move boxes", which would also be my guess.  All that new construction is funded by the MTO ...

I didn't ask but my guess is that they won't sell gas or diesel.  Being off the main road, their traffic would be even less and since Grundy Lake park is a no-motor boating area, demand would be very limited.  I might be wrong; didn't ask.

Today I will take another crack at mozzarella, this time using half of the milk so that I get two tries.  Of course if it's a milk issue, that won't help me !  The potential milk issue is if it's been UHT Pasteurized -- Ultra High Temperature.  One recipe said that many types of organic milk are UHT pasteurized, even if  not stated on the carton.  In other words, you aren't getting any probiotics from that milk.  The notes said that UHT milk would produce cottage cheese like curds, which is where I ended up.   Hopefully Sealtest isn't doing this to me.  We shall see.

I also spent some time fussing with the Cracker Swamp brevet card.  It would have been better to start from scratch.  Back in the "good old days" with WordPerfect, I could look at all the embedded controls and figure out what's going on.  That's not really the case with Microsoft Word.  Embedded in there are so many changes in fonts, linespacing etc. that making small left-to-right to top-to-bottom changes don't produce what you'd expect.  Since something on the back has to end up in a certain place after we do the fold into thirds, that's a problem.  Paul was also using the wrong printing options, complicating things.  Staples will do the final print on card stock but we need to ensure that it's going to work.

Any more of this and I will start from scratch.

Onward !