Silicone baking mat

I was baking baguettes today — still am, actually — but I was doing stretch-and-folds on the old silicone baking mat when it finally came apart. 80% hydration baguette dough was too much for it. In its defense, it has been falling apart for some time now. It all started when I rolled out pasta dough on it and cut it into noodles with a pizza wheel; the wheel was sharper than I realized and left big gashes in the silicone baking mat.
At first it still worked, but eventually silicone fatigue got the better of it and a big piece came out; I had planned for a while to head to the mill to get baking supplies, especially a mat, but today, when I am working from home and the mat fell apart into five or more unusable pieces, I realized it was now or never.
So I went, and noticed right off that, since the last time I had been there, they had expanded the shop by about 100% so now instead of being tiny it is small. And the lovely mill lady was there along with her lovely daughters, which was bad news as I have no sales resistance against them when they are alone and sure enough they ganged up on me today.
Everything unraveled immediately, all of my fiscal resolve, when one of them asked me, Can I help you find anything? And I replied, yes, in fact, I am looking for a silicone baking mat thing, have you got anything like that?
To which she answered, In fact we do. And sure enough, they had silicone baking mats that were far nicer than my old one, with circles of various diameters and in the margins various units of measurement and their conversions, not to mention, haptically, a very sexy texture.
Oh excellent, I said, I ruined my last one cutting noodles on it.
Oh! She said. Then, immediately, by the way we have noodle machines.
Oh, I said. I have always wanted a noodle machine. But I’ll have to think about it.
But of course we all knew by then, I wasn’t leaving that shop without a noodle machine.
I picked out a few flours (all-purpose wheat flour, baguette flour mix, rye and rye whole grain, and what the online dictionary translates as rye scrap, or, in other words, crudely ground rye.
Then the mother explained the differences between three noodle machines they had (price and finish – the stainless-steel was the cheapest, the copper the most expensive, in between they had a red one. Otherwise they are identical, she said. Just pick whatever matches your kitchen best. You don’t put it away, you leave it on the counter.
If you don’t have a cat that pisses on everything you might leave it on the counter, I didn’t reply.
I asked her to explain the stainless steel model to me.
By the way we have a set with additional rollers that make spaghetti and ravioli, she said.
Oh, I absolutely need that, I said.
I looked at spice mixes in between but most of them contained anise, and some of my bread customers hate anise. Then I found the mill’s own spice mix, which costs twice as much but does not contain anise, and added a can of that to my pile.
How do you wash the noodle machine? I asked.
You let it dry out and clean it with a stiff-bristled brush, by no means are you to put it into water, was the answer.
It sounded almost like an admonition in a fairy tale, shortly before the peasant’s son embarks on a heroic journey on account of he put the noodle machine into a sink full of water after slicing the heirloom silicone baking mat into horizontal strips.
Any special brush, I asked.
I use one I found in my husband’s shop, she said.
Ok I have a brush at home.
I sighed, but gee. Hm. Phony reluctance so as not to look too eager.
It’s the Christmas season. It’s a nice present.
Yeah, for myself. I am the noodle maker in my house.
Sure, why not? She said. And your wife will be eating the noodles. It’s a present for both of you.
And we *were* in Piedmont in October and loved it, I said, tipping the scales for her and putting myself out of my misery.
See there you go, she said.
When I got home I carried the flour into the house.
Oh by the way I got *us* a pasta machine, I said.
Hm, said Alpha.
Yeah I’ve really been wanting one since we were in Piedmont, that was such a nice trip.
Hm, she said.
One has to clean them with a stiff-bristled brush; by no means is one to submerge them, or even get them wet.
Hm, my wife said.

PV Technology

So, after hating on technology for a good part of my life, we got photovoltaic panels on the roof and I really like everything about them so far. Even though it is winter they still generate a little power, even on a foggy day. Not much power (on a foggy winter day) but you could power a few lightbulbs or something like that. The system comes with an app, you log in to the website and apparently the system is telling the website how much power it is making etc because there is a neat little graphic that tells you how much you are producing, using, how much is going into the battery (and its level of charge) and how much is going into or coming out of the power grid. It’s very calming to watch.
The battery is nice because, if there is ever a black out we’ll have power for a few hours while society collapses around us.
Another impressive thing about the panels are roof avalanches (Dachlawinen in German). When it snows, like yesterday (doesn’t produce much power when covered in snow) the snow just sits there (if it’s wet snow, like yesterday) until the weather warms up to a little over freezing and then whammo it all slides off onto the sidewalk all at once.
We never had roof avalanches before today, because we have a tile roof that has a rough texture and that holds the snow more, that higher coefficient of friction. Wet glass, on the other hand… I went outside and saw the pile of snow on our sidewalk and was very relieved not to see little kid or old lady feet sticking out of it. We put up warning signs, and took them back down after all the snow had slid off the roof or melted.
Winter is going to be a bigger problem with our PV system than we thought.
(But it’s really cool.)

Big Time

Ever since my COVID-19 booster shot I have been getting these epiphanies when I go near a transformer or an electric car drives past.
Like, listen, just now, recently, we woke up at, say, for example, eight but according to our phones it was only seven.
Our phones determine what time it is.
And our computers. And anything else, any other timepiece, that resets itself automatically. Or, more accurately, is controlled by someone else.
Time used to be a natural thing, man.
Then clock time was introduced, and natural time faded into obscurity except when various scientists would lock themselves into a dark cave and do whatever.
With clock time, clock time was a social construct, but it was something everyone had to agree upon and gave clockmakers a lot of power.
Now clocks, especially in cars and ovens, are at most butts of jokes. They’re always wrong, or they’re wrong half the time and then self-correct six months later.
Nobody cares about clockmakers. And I suppose remote-control clocks are a thing now, right? Never wrong.
All these remote control clocks – time is no longer a social construct, it is in the hands of Big Time. Big Time I will define here as “whoever resets the clocks”-
Daylight Savings, or this regular switching between winter and summer time, is absolutely pointless. When something looks pointless, ask yourself who benefits from it?
Big Time.
Daylight Savings exists to acclimate us to the idea that time is malleable, and not to freak out when it suddenly makes no sense. Indeed, to pay less attention to rubberized time and just… live with it.
Every six months, a big deal is made of this quality of time.
Time is precise, yet random.
You have to be at work by 8 o’clock sharp, and yet sometimes the day goes fast, sometimes it drags on and on and you are exhausted and feel like you have been at your desk or terminal or table or conveyor belt or whatever forever, for ten hours or 12 hours or whatever but you look at your watch and still have hours to go how can that be?
Well this is how it can be: Big Time is messing with your time to make you work longer without collecting overtime.
Eight hour day? Sure you can have an eight hour day. But we define what an hour is, and what eight means.
We used to have internal clocks.
Used to be, if I set an alarm clock I woke up a minute before it went off. That is a precise internal clock. (Maybe my alarm clock made a faint click a minute before it went off, and it was the click that was waking me, I never tested that… but for the sake of argument…)
Same thing – pets. Cats, and perhaps dogs and other species, some days they wake you up an hour, hours early, starvin'; other days you feed them at the agreed-upon time and they just look at it as if they were still full and ignore it until hours later and then refuse it because it isn’t fresh anymore.
At least cats.
Right?
This is because their internal clock is still accurate, and they are still in touch with it, and Big Time hasn’t gotten to them yet the way it has gotten to us.
There is only one way to deal with this and that is to take time back from Big Time. Take time back into our own hands. How do we do that?
You can’t trust anyone. Any central source of time – TV time, Internet – is under control of Big Time, you can assume. Even the dates printed on newspapers and magazines. All the same thing. You have to literally take time back into your own hands.
Physically. Democratic time is only possible when everyone makes their own clocks. This means, immediately, sun dials. Big Time does not control the sun. Astronomy and observing the migration of birds work for seasonal events, but nothing beats a sun dial for telling time. Except a clock you have made yourself. That is the ultimate goal – everyone learns to make their own clocks.
Before the advent of Big Time, one could argue for simply using analogue clocks, but with its tentacles in every pie, you can’t trust any source of time anymore – Big Time has certainly got to clockmakers now.
The only way around that is to make your own clocks. Go to Switzerland, hire on as an apprentice, how hard can it be? And until then, make a sun dial. It is relatively simple. Stick a stick into something, write numbers around it that the shadow of the stick hits, and depending on what number the shadow falls on, that’s what time it is – time is now back in your own hands. Easy peasy. Big Time is defeated, right when they thought they had us.