bread machine tips

I made bread today.
My Dad gave me my first bread machine. It was a wonder! I had been making homemade bread for 20 years at that point, and either mixing it completely by hand or using a hand crank doo-funny with a hook all that time. The bread machine did all the work, and it made pretty good bread too. I wore that machine out in about 5 years, and the new one I got did not make good bread. It took me a while to come to the conclusion that I should just use it to mix the dough and then take it out, put it in pans, let it rise, and bake it in my oven. Perfect bread, almost every time.
It never occurred to me that I might have some insight into bread making, especially with a bread machine, until my daughter asked me why her bread was not coming out well. She had recently bought at bread machine, and her bread was not that great.
I said, "I will make some, and show you what is important."
It turned out that her dry/moist ratio was a bit off, and the ball of dough was sitting on the hook in the middle of the pan, just going round and round for the whole kneading cycle. I showed her what should be happening, and told her she would need to either add a little liquid or a little flour--liquid for what she had happening, and flour if the dough was too wet.
The dough should go back and forth and around and around and up and down. In other words, the hook should KNEAD the dough.
The moisture in flour varies, and even if you follow the recipe EXACTLY, the dough may not be right.
I just finished looking up "bread machine tips" on the internet, and could find nothing about this. Everyone seems to just assume that one will know what kneading should look like. This must be why I see so many bread machines in the thrift stores.
Chuck says I should make a u-tube video of the way it should look when the bread machine is doing the right thing. we shall see.
I still just let my machine do the kneading--I am not sure what happens when it bakes--maybe the timing is off.

blindness and being blindsided

We got something in the mail today that made me mad. Our high school (which all of our children attended) sent the high school newspaper, and they had a little note on the front page reminding everyone to vote, and alongside the reminder was a photo of John McCain. Just John McCain, no one else. I immediately thought of the time that my oldest daughter came home from school saying that she had learned in SCIENCE CLASS that men had one fewer ribs than women. I did a slow burn that time as well. If we have problems in our educational system, this is truly one of the hotspots. The idea that the information given to impressionable young minds is so limited, so biased, so prejudiced is, to my mind, truly unfortunate and even criminal. I am fully aware that we happen to live in an extremely conservative community, and I freely admit that we have little contact with most of our fellow citizens here, but I do not expect to change anyones mind or way of thinking, but if the public schools are going to do anything less than present all the information available, then we as a progressive society are truly in trouble.

long time no see

we have been busy. you would think with all the bad economic news that our business would be very slow, and it has slowed, but things are still clicking along. of course we were gone for 2 weeks--went out to Lake Powell, one of our all time favorite places to cruise and meet up with other boat people like the Kokopelli crowd and others who come for the messabout there.
No place in the US like Lake Powell (IMHO), and it always surprises me when someone says, "Where is that?" Mostly Utah, in case you were wondering, with a bit in Arizona. I know a lot of people think it was a crime to flood Glen Canyon, but isn't the Grand Canyon enough largely unexplored incredibly deep and hard to get into territory while also being an amazing and beautiful place even if you go there just to look at it? Even the number of lucky people who get to take a raft or drift boat or kayak trip through the Grand Canyon is just a teeny tiny number of people.
Lake Powell means that if you don't mind driving to the middle of nowhere, you can put your boat in the water and enjoy 186 miles of main lake and countless miles of side canyons, plus access to the Escalante and San Juan River arms of the lake. We cursed the speedboats and their wakes from our kayaks and rowing boats and sailboats while there, but hey, they were just doing their thing, just like us.
There will be an article about our trip in Duckworks, so more details there soon.

fear of internet ordering

We have a fair number of customers who ask for our phone number so that they can place their order that way. Most say they do not want to give their credit card number online. This always strikes us as a bit strange, since the only way we have of running the card number for the order is to go online and hook up with our merchant account people. The days of using a mechanical device or filling out a card receipt by hand are long gone, at least for us.

Another thing we notice is that some customers will write and ask us how much the shipping will be for their order. When we designed the website, we chose a shopping cart that would instantly calculate shipping as you add items--you will always know what the shipping will be (unless you are international, but you can choose your region early on). Then if you decide to NOT order, no big deal--just putting items in the cart will not constitute an order. Much easier for us if you check the cost of shipping yourself, and decide about ordering or not.

Just a couple of thoughts.

the shipping department blues

Mail order means shipping. Not necessarily by mail, but for a business like ours, it has been the best overall method. The great majority of the boxes we send out into the world are small to medium size, and the postal service provides boxes for FREE as long as we use them to ship by priority mail. We use the USPS Click and Ship service, which means I make and pay for the labels online, print them myself, apply them to the box and haul everything to the post office. I could have them all picked up at the shop, but by the time I am done picking and packing and labeling, I am ready to get away from the table and the computer and drive the almost 2 miles to town and see what else is going on in the world. Not that there is much in the tiny town of Harper, but there is a new thrift store run by the library, and there is the library if I need something to read, and the bank and the feed store and any local gossip that might be floating around, not that I am interested in anything like that, of course.

WE get suggestions and complaints from time to time about our shipping methods. Our shopping cart is a rather simple affair--we chose it for that reason and also because it was relatively inexpensive, and we always try to keep our overhead down as that means our prices can stay at a reasonable level. Some shopping carts give you a choice between UPS, Fedex, USPS, and all the different speeds of delivery thereof. Ours could give you more choices, but we do not offer them for a very simple reason. Our shipping department is a one person operation and that is me. We have thought about employees, but we have been there done that with previous business ventures, and this time we'd like to keep it just the two of us. There is a comment box in the shopping cart, and when someone wants something fast or shipped by UPS, they usually let us know there and then we do our best to comply.

In fact, doing our best pretty well sums up what we try to do everyday with Duckworks. WE always feel bad when we disappoint, but too much stress is bad for your health, so we try to keep it all in perspective. Sounds like Duckwords, I'd better quit while I am ahead. More about this later.

Cool this morning in Texas--68 degrees. We have a little tropical storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, and we are crossing our fingers that it will stay small so mo damage to the coastal areas, but also that it will head inland pointed just towards our part of the state and bring us some rain.

This is not the time of year to be cruising on the Texas coast without keeping a close eye on the weather. That said, most storms, including hurricanes can be quite specific in the area they impact, but depending on the size of the system the outer edges can be nasty. One nice thing about the coast is that because it is flat, you can see a squall coming from way off. Sometimes they move faster than you would like, but there is usually time to prepare--find an anchorage, or just reef down and ride it out.

Look for a new article on Duckworks in the coming weeks about a new Michalak design, Caroline's boat. Built and sailed by Caroline Gould, it is a beauty. Wonderful paint job IMHO.

Finally Friday

Ah, Friday. It has been a long week. Business has slowed a bit, something we expect in August, when we assume that everyone is frantically trying to get all the things they had planned for the summer done. We are no different, and the projects lined up for August seem to loom larger than the time left. In about 6 weeks, we will be taking off for Lake Powell and a cruise with the wacky Kokopellis, something we look forward to all year. It is an interesting group, and a little different every year. One of the best traditions is the one where one person or group of persons cooks for everyone else one night each. After a long day, everyone except the cook(s) gets to kick back with a glass of wine (or whatever) and wait to be served. It may seem daunting at first, but the benefits become obvious, especially after your turn has passed!

One of the little details you have to figure out with mail order retail is how you are going to ship the items you sell. We used to have a business where all of the items we shipped were large and heavy and were shipped to businesses and we had a UPS daily pickup account for that. Duckwork's packages tend to be much smaller, and most are going to a residence, and a little research indicated that USPS (postal service) would be the best choice--they also provide all the priority mail boxes for FREE and throw in delivery confirmation when I use their online label system. The complications presented themselves almost immediately. Epoxy and fiberglass cloth and large orders of sailcloth are drop shipped for us, and these go by UPS--they are heavy and large and viscous liquid is not something the post office is particularly happy about. So there have to be exceptions to the "most items shipped by USPS. The shopping cart gives us very little "explaining space", and our experience has been that most customers do not read the small print anyway. We feel badly when someone is disappointed with our shipping methods, but to be honest, it happens quite infrequently, and we have not found a good way to make everyone happy.

In fact, that would seem to be a constant theme for a small business like ours, and probably just about every business. Keeping everyone happy is not just next to impossible, it is totally impossible. But we do our level best with the 24 hours a day we have.

Still working on getting all our ducks in a row.

notes on construction

In between all the order filling and website posting, we have been working on our house. Those of you who have been here know we live in a geodesic dome, something we discovered we both wanted to build almost 40 years ago when we first met. I have this vague memory of building a scale model of a dome early on, but it was only after being married for 10 years that we finally got the chance to buy a little piece of the Texas Hill Country and start working on this house, this dome.

It is still not finished, and chances are it never will be, but it is paid for--we have never had a mortgage. It has progressed through various stages, depending largely on the number of people living here. That first winter, we had clear plastic over the 5 window openings and our then two young daughters slept in the "bathroom". We did not have the waterproof coating on the ferrocement that covered the chicken wire (6 to 8 layers) skin of the dome, so we had plastic tents over the bed and the kitchen area, and we had a 50 gallon wood stove for warmth.

A couple of years later, we were weathered in, and we built a "table" with laminated 2 x 4 beams and 6 x 6 legs that became our second floor. There were 6 of us now, 2 daughters, 2 sons, and we divided the upstairs into 3 tiny rooms.

We had promised our oldest daughter her own room when she turned 12, so we hustled up a slab off one of the window openings and built an addition that actually became two rooms, one for each girl. It was one of those things that you suddenly realize your two sons will want as well, but hey, they are young yet, plenty of time. Hah! As it turned out, the shop building got too small, and we moved the patternshop into a bigger place and the boys turned the old shop into a teenager hangout. We did still build another addition, this time for the compu-dobby loom that possessed me for 12 years.

The kids are all grown up and gone, and the place is really too big for us now, but it is where we feel most at home, and we have a wonderful son-in-law (two of them actually) who help us with projects and just generally act like all our ideas are good ones.

There is an amazing cupola rising from the top pentagon of the dome now. We talked about this from the beginning--the project was a daunting one, and without help it might never have happened. The upstairs is now a master bedroom, and will soon be our office as well. The clerestory windows in the cupola have transformed the space into a light and air filled wonder, or will be as soon as the sheetrock and floating and taping and painting are done. We keep reminding ourselves that this (the odd shaped bits and pieces of sheetrock and the sheetrock mud that will fall in our faces) is why people build square and rectangular and straight walls. But never mind, it will be great!

Our son-in-law who is helping with the construction is also a rock mason and is doing a few masonry bits on the dome as well. He is an artist, and we will post some photos when the trim is painted and the dust and rock bits swept up.