Friday, September 30, 2022

Three Beautiful Things 09-29-2022: New Laptop, Diane's Awesome Pasta Sauce!, Debbie's Students Have Some Fun

 1. I was much more comfortable working in a Windows environment with my photographs than I have been in the Mac environment and decided to buy a new HP laptop and try to get back to working with images again. My new computer arrived today and I am now learning some of the ins and outs of Windows 11 and I have some other self-education planned in the near future as far as photo storage and editing. For the first time in months, I got my Nikon out -- this is a good sign! 

2. Wow! That pasta sauce Diane brought for Debbie and me on Wednesday is awesome. I warmed it up, fixed a pot of linguine (thank you Diane), and we loved our dinner. I loved the contrast between Diane's sauce and what I make frequently and I'd like to learn how to made her style to add another option to what I do. 

Over the years, Debbie and I have come to really enjoy Marcella Hazen's tomato sauce. The foundation of the sauce is tomatoes, butter, and an onion cut in half. 

Diane's sauce is thicker than Marcella Hazen's and more complex. It's a meat sauce and I wondered if, in addition to tomatoes, Diane also used tomato sauce and/or tomato paste. It was deliciously sweet to me -- often pasta sauce includes some sugar -- I'll have to ask Diane if her sauce did. It was also deliciously seasoned. 

I'll find out how she makes her sauce and add I'll try to make a similar one some time. 

I loved this sauce on its own, but especially enjoyed that it was different from what I usually do and that it stimulated not only my taste buds, but my imagination. 

3. Debbie tries out fun ideas with her students, including working with painters, I think one a month. September has been Claude Monet month and her students painted pictures of lilies in class (they will hang in a hallway at the school for a while) and today her students each wrote Claude Monet a letter. The students were into it. I'm not sure what they wrote, although Debbie mentioned at least one student asked Monet how his wife was doing. (Sweet!) 

I thought, how ingenious. The children worked on their writing, expanded their imaginations, got outside of themselves and thought about what to say to another person, and, I would think, improved their ability to communicate. 

Debbie was tired when she got home and didn't have a lot to say, but she told me about this part of her day as we enjoyed our dinner, and she relaxed with some wine, watched more episodes of The Wire, and retired to bed fairly early. 

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