The woman must be using the new diet plan known as: “Get Rid of Food Temptations by Giving Them to Teenage Boys Walking Home From the Bus Stop.”

(I did let M eat the candy. These neighbors aren’t total strangers, and their own teenage sons are away at college, so the gift didn’t seem as weird as it might have.)

I smile every time I see them. There is something so very Zen about the idea that we may as well all slow down, because whatever meeting we’re rushing off to, everyone is going to be late anyway.

1) If you’re watching results come in for a state primary, you still have to go to bed at the regular time. If you’re good, we’ll make an exception on Super Tuesday.

2) For the presidential election in November, you can stay up until there’s an obvious winner or until the 11 pm post-poll-closing news report, whichever comes first.

3) You can watch the acceptance speeches while you eat breakfast the next morning.

4) You can read political satire from the Onion if we find an article that we think is hysterically funny. But you’re not allowed to repeat any of the crude language in it at school.

5) If someone calls doing a poll, you are free to claim you are a registered voter and answer based on how you think we’ll vote, or on how you would want to vote, whichever you prefer.

6) Don’t ever marry into a family of rabid Republicans.

–My mom: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
–My dad: Never bet unless you have inside information.
–E’s mom: Treat other people with respect.
–E’s dad: You should look nice and wear lipstick, because you never know when you’re going to meet Prince Charming.

I’m not sure what M would say if we asked him what lessons we’ve been conveying lately, but here’s what it feels like we say to him the most often these days.

–Chew with your mouth closed.
–Acknowledge me when I’m talking to you.
–What do you think you should do?

But I can’t totally control who M’s friends are, and certainly he could be hanging out with a worse crowd. So I figured I could let M go for a few hours, and even if he didn’t study, he’s still got plenty of other time to study at home. About 5 minutes before I was supposed to give him a ride to his friend’s house, I suggested M go round up his stuff. He put on his coat, picked up a fiction book, and started fiddling with his shoelaces. Two minutes later, I told him again to round up his stuff. He put down the book and finished with his shoes.

I finally laughed and told him that if he wanted to pretend he was going there to study, he at least ought to round us his history notes or his textbook. Busted! He laughed and rounded up his notes.

The kid’s dad later reported he did hear them mention the French Revolution at some point. However, they spent much of their time on the computer visiting the alternate history sites they enjoy so much. So for all I know, they were studying some version of the French Revolution in which King Louis XVI thrived and Marie Antoinette lived out her old age running a bakery.

The long answer is that it turned out so heavy that it was chewy and lumpy on the inside, and rock-hard and nearly black on the outside. It could probably have made an effective weapon if you needed to bludgeon someone with it. Even M didn’t want more than 1 slice of it — and when a teenage boy won’t eat it , you know it’s bad. Then one day while we were all at work and school, the cat assaulted the challah while it sat on the counter in a plastic bag. We came home to discover the plastic bag pierced with dozens of claw marks, and the challah slightly shredded. The cat seldom gets on the counters and has never attacked any other food item we’ve left out, but clearly he saw this challah as a threat.

So… if you have a good recipe for challah, please let us know. I had used the recipe from the latest issue of Yankee magazine, but I think they must have printed it wrong, because the dough felt wrong from the start.

In other bread-related news, E and I have a problem that is probably fairly common to women who coupled up in their 30s: we each brought a full set of kitchenware to the partnership, and yet much of it is in rather poor condition. I still have the pans that I bought at Salvation Army for 25 cents each when I was in college. E has a miscellaneous collection of a few good things that were gifts from her parents, and then other items accumulated from former roommates. The end result is that our cabinets are overflowing, and yet when you actually look for a matching pair of bread pans, you find 4 different pans that could be nicknamed Rusty, Sticky, Scratchy, and Scary.

We’ve recently started an effort to replace our terrible baking pans with good ones, now that we’re grown-ups who can afford more than 25 cents per pan. So I just bought 2 new bread pans. And Rusty, Sticky, Scratchy, and Scary will go join my old muffin tin Blotchy in the metal recycling bin at the town dump. Because they’re not even worth donating at this point.

We didn’t do great, especially in terms of Perry. But I had noted at the time that I was skeptical of the Perry numbers, since the sign placement had looked suspiciously like there had been just one Perry supporter who started off with a car full of signs and left them every mile or so, since they were almost all in a 10-mile stretch of the same road — as contrasted with the fairly random scattering of the other candidates’ signs.

So let’s drop Perry out of the analysis entirely. (Why not; the rate he’s going, he may as well drop out of the race, too.) Here are the graphed results, with best-fit lines drawn in for how well the % of total signs and the % of distinct sign locations matched up with the % of actual votes.

R² for the correlation between total signs and actual vote is 0.89, and R² for the correlation between distinct sign locations and actual vote is 0.77.    I’m a little surprised; I would have expected the results would correlate more closely with number of locations, since there’s more effort involved by supporters to put 2 signs in 2 different places then 2 signs in the same place.  However, if you’re trying to conduct a similar poll of your own — and especially if you have 2 teenagers to keep occupied on a long car drive while you do it — it’s probably worth collecting data both ways.

We continued along the trail, winding around a marsh, until we came to this spot where the trail headed along the edge of the marsh on a raised boardwalk.

Clearly the boardwalk wasn’t raised enough, since it disappeared into the water. In similar situations — hiking a short stretch of flooded trail with a thin skim of ice on it it in the middle of winter — my friend CrankyOtter and I have been known to take off our shoes and wade through it. I even recall doing it with a toddler M riding piggyback. But I was so unfamiliar with this tract of land that it didn’t seem prudent, and I probably couldn’t have talked a teenage M into wading. So we backtracked all the way around the beautiful marsh.

And we found the other end of the flooded stretch of trail, at which point I was glad we hadn’t waded. The arrow indicates where a stretch of boardwalk had been flooded enough that it floated into a position perpendicular to the path, before icing itself back into position. Goodness knows where some of the other boardwalk sections might be.

We continued along another trail, and this time found another bridge with several feet of water, mud, and sticks in the gap between the bridge and the land. I’m especially amused that this bridge was clearly built higher to accommodate occasional high water, without anyone also correcting for the fact high water would need a wider span, too.

We stepped on the sticks and reached the bridge and crossed it, but a few feet further along came to this section of trail, which was flooded so widely we couldn’t even see where the trail continued on the other side.

We turned around at that point and found enough trails on higher ground to make our way back to the starting point. It was such a pretty tract of land that I look forward to hiking it again sometime… but maybe not until everything is frozen under several inches of ice, or else not until water levels are way down in summer!

But after a few months we realized that the stairs never got noticeably filthy, and yet the leaves were still there. We investigated a bit more, and discovered these weren’t loose leaves. There was actually ivy growing up the outside of the building which had managed to grow in between the bricks all the way to the interior of the building! How strange that ivy would go to all this effort to live inside a building, only to be tromped on by sullen teenagers with sore teeth.

But I was recently inspired to try baking bread again, partly because I accidentally bought 5 pounds of bread flour instead of regular flour, and partly because I read an article in one of E’s cooking magazines about a different technique to get bread dough to rise. You boil a pot of water on the stove, and then when you put the dough into the oven, you put the pot of boiling water (without a lid) into the oven with it. The warm steam fills the oven and helps the bread rise.

I was a little skeptical, but figured it was worth a try. And wow, did it work! That dough puffed up more and faster than any bread I have ever baked before! It was truly amazing. I reboiled the water while I kneaded the dough after the first rise, and the second rise was just as phenomenal as the first. The bread turned out beautifully.

Two tips worth noting: first, to help keep the steam in even better, I used the pot lid to cover the vent of the oven. (My oven vents out through one of the stove burners.) Second, the warm steam was highly effective at softening up random encrusted spooge inside the oven. Steam condensing on the ceiling of the oven eventually led to droplets of wet spooge dripping down onto the bread pans below. It’s a very good thing I had covered the bread loosely with plastic wrap, and not the clean dish towel I typically use.

Those of you who are frequent bread bakers were probably already aware of this technique, as I see many mentions of it now that I look around the internet. But for any of you who are infrequent bread bakers and haven’t tried it before, I highly recommend it. And now, I’m off to check my ingredient supplies, because E has put in a request for challah.