three not-successes for wednesday

Today's baking was a mixed bag. The lemon muffins I mentioned in the last post are good but the recipe is a huge pain and it only made 12 muffins, so they're almost gone. If I'd tripled it I think it'd still have fit in the bowl... although we only have 2 metal muffin trays and I can't find the silicone one... and it still seems like a bit too much work for 24 muffins (I had to beat things in THREE SEPARATE BOWLS before gently folding meringues into the batter... seriously what... I'm not a fucking pastry chef). And the Toll House cookies fell in the oven which eh, happens, but we tried to cook two trays at once (because convection oven) but one had a silicone mat and one had a silpat and the silpat was slightly too big for the tray so some of the cookies came out undercooked as well as fallen and squished together because I didn't leave enough space between them... next time I'll make a Toll House cookie cake instead and just cut it with a knife, save a lot of trouble.

Our floor installation stuff went beautifully in our future bedroom, but we are planning to have the floor run seamlessly out into the adjoining room and it was full of stuff. Even after we finished taking the stuff out yesterday, there's a tiny dingy kitchen made of 1950s cabinets and a tiny sink that is for some reason at knee height, and there are backsplash tiles on one of the walls. So we're gonna have to unhook the sink somehow as well as prying the cabinets all out before any floor can be put in there, and sure, the water is turned off to that side of the house, but maybe the plumbers need access to where the pipe goes into the floor to seal it off? I don't know how that works. So we can't actually continue with flooring yet. And we have the hallway to do too but I don't think we can install the floor there without installing it in the spare room first. So that only leaves the less pleasant tasks of prepping and painting the walls that are in awkward places like the stairwell.

Yesterday I tried to get a bit further with tree trimming by climbing an apple tree, but I couldn't reach very many of the branches that needed pruned. We're going to have to fetch a ladder. And also a rake.

Wha'll be King but Charlie

I mentioned the jigs, reels, and country dances in a previous post. This is an engaging little melody (that fits on only two lines of the book!) and the title stuck in my head because lol bonny prince Charlie and also because of the "Wha'll", so I looked it up today and learned:

• It's also (originally? more commonly?) known as "The News from Moidart"



• The tune is an Irish jig called "Tidy Woman", so in the absence of the lyrics, which my songbook did not provide, there's no particular reason to say it even was about Charlie except I presume it was better known in its Jacobite form in 1950s NYC



• The lyrics were written by a Scottish baroness named Caroline Nairn and it was popular from the late 18th century and remained so into the 20th



• The lyrics are in Scots, nobody has seen the need to translate them into regular English in a prominent search result, and the online Scots to English translators don't work. Google translate does not acknowledge Scots, only Scots Gaelic, which this isn't.