On New Years Day Barb and I went to see Saving Mr. Banks. It is a Disney movie which IMDB.com describes as:

Author P. L. Travers reflects on her difficult childhood while meeting with filmmaker Walt Disney during production for the adaptation of her novel, Mary Poppins.

That doesn’t begin to do the movie justice.

I never really cared for Mary Poppins. For one thing I almost never like musicals. And Mary Poppins just seemed to be a bunch of pointless skits strung together. But Barb and I saw a trailer for Saving Mr. Banks a few weeks ago and it looked like it might have some promise.

The major plot line of the movie was that Travers needs the money but is exceedingly reluctant to allow Disney to change her vision of the characters and story. She holds back on signing the rights while simultaneously “working” with the screenwriter and music composers. It’s a contentious relationship with Travers pitted against everyone she meets at Disney who do their best to understand her and accommodate her outrageous demands. The demands include changing the grammar of lines in the script which describe a scene and banning of the use of the color red in the entire movie.

Scenes from Travers childhood in Australia are intertwined with scenes from Disney Studios in 1961. As the exceedingly personal and troubling origins of the Mary Poppins characters are revealed Travers becomes more a sympathetic person rather than just a grumpy old lady. I sometimes thought the world would have been a better place if the adult version of Travers had been dropped off in the middle of the Outback and forgotten.

Even though you know how the essence of how the movie has to end it has a tremendous amount of stress as it reaches its climax and then resolves the conflicts.

Barb wasn’t affected nearly as much as I was, so it probably is something about my abnormal empathy for females, but I found it emotionally overwhelming and draining.

That said, it was a very good movie. I liked it much better than Mary Poppins.

So rather than try to talk about it; here’s a pickled egg.

The color comes from beet juice in the pickling solution. The eggs are boiled and peeled, and after a few weeks in the fridge in the solution, the color permeates the white, and you can see that it’s already started into the yoke.

Here’s the beet prep from last October;

We use the greens in salad and whatnot all summer. In the fall they get kinda tough, but I keep them, either blanched and frozen, or pickled, as a green for use all winter.

Here’s a 19th century cider mill I rebuilt in the 1970s and again just a few years ago;

We make between around 90 and 150 gallons per year all told, using apples I pick at a local orchard. McIntosh and Liberty apples make my favorite sweet (as opposed to hard) cider. The real serious producers will blend juices from different varieties, including crab apples, to get the flavor they want, but straight Mac is usually just right as it is. You can’t find cider like this in stores, but rarely, and then it costs eight or nine dollars a gallon. I don’t get it. But it doesn’t matter if you make your own.

Here’s some square dowel joinery I was doing for another antique cider mill I have in process;

I won’t discuss how it’s done because I don’t know how. I just had to improvise using the limited tools on hand at the time.

And last, here’s a tomato from my garden;

They call it the “Taxi” for the obvious reason. They’re delicious too, and I suppose any ripe tomato right off the vine is vastly superior to any tomato that’s been picked for shipping. The deer got most of my tomatoes this year, but I got revenge this hunting season. Now I have vegetables and venison in the freezer. Life is good

I’ve been hanging out with my great-nephew Jared (nicknamed Jar Head) who has recently mastered the word, “No!”.

I am tempted to believe that if the word meaning “no” were three symbols long the parenting of children would be dramatically different.

On Saturday night Barb and watched the movie Enders Game. We had both read the book and enjoyed it but had a minor conflict about watching the movie.

I kind of wanted to watch it. I had skimmed through a lot of the physical description of the zero-G games and was never really able to visualize the setting very well. If nothing else I wanted to see what that was like.

Barb was concerned the movie would spoil the book.

I agreed that movies are seldom as good as the book but they can be good even if they aren’t as good as the book. We agreed to see it anyway.

I enjoyed it. Barb was disappointed because a lot of the team building was left out but she thought they did a great job on the special effects.

Update: After reading this post last night Barb mildly protested that we didn’t really have a conflict about going to the movie. It was a very short polite discussion about whether we wanted to see this movie or something else. And we came to the same conclusion without any flaring of emotions. I agree with this but I didn’t, and don’t, have a single word or short phrase to describe that conversation. “Minor conflict” is prone to misinterpretation of the reality of discussion but with a strong emphasis on “minor” it does describe it.

Barb: I got all the kinks out.

Joe:  When you went to the gym?

Barb: Yes.

Joe: What did you do with them when you got them out?

Barb (after no more than a half-second pause): I put them in the corner for later when I want to get kinky.

Barb and I went to Idaho this weekend and as we were leaving the area on Sunday we had brunch at Tam’s Place in Pullman (Washington) with daughter Kim and Jacob.

I had a bacon and cheese omelet. I was impressed. The inside was mostly bacon with only enough cheese to fill in the gaps. I opted for the French toast on the side. I could have had hash browns or regular toast. I really liked the meal.

Kim and Jacob seemed to enjoy their meals:

Barb had eggs benedict and said it was marginal.

* No. Not that Tam. But that is what I wanted you to think with the title.

You often hear the phrase “rotate your supplies” from experienced preppers. You have to use what you store, store what you use, and check things regularly to that you know you really do have what you think you have. Great idea, doesn’t always work exactly as planned. I came across a couple of these the other day.

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