Notes from Maine - 2025/09/28
My oven thinks it’s 65°F outside (18°C). I was just out there. It’s wrong. It feels like a summer morning, heavy and thick with impending heat. The colorful leaves are liars. We can’t possibly be rushing towards winter.
I put Maybelle and Lilly (horses) outside while I cleaned up the barn. A moment later I heard the rattle of chains and banging metal. Maybelle was knocking at the gate, trying to get around to the side door that leads back into her stall. I can’t blame her. The barn offers shade, water, and there’s often hay in there. Once the stalls were cleaned, they had everything they needed inside. I bet they won’t wander out again until this afternoon.
The winter hay has all been tossed into the loft. Gary brought by a few more loads this week and I managed to get it all stacked away before the rain came. We had a decent downpour on Thursday. It was the first real rain we’ve had in a long while. Gary says we’re going to have a major hay shortage this winter. He has decent sources, but I need to be careful. I’ll hoard what I have and keep going to the feed store each week for our daily needs. Hay isn’t the only thing the horses eat. They have pasture, soaked alfalfa cubes, and pelleted grains. But hay is crucial during the cold winter months when there’s nothing but snow outside. Snug in the barn, chewing on hay, the horses can easily withstand the winter up here. The hay offers them an activity and it fuels the heat they generate.
The display on my oven just updated. Now it says that it’s 70°F outside (21°C). It also says, “Bananas are berries. Strawberries are not.” A couple of months ago I turned on the “trivia” option in the settings. It would be fun if you could load in your own trivia. I’d like to load in true crime trivia. Wouldn’t it be fun if the oven could inform you of things like, “Pee Wee Gaskins claimed to have killed 110 victims, but police believe the number is only 15.”
Another one could be, “H.H. Holmes designed his ‘Murder Castle’ with chutes to the basement where he had a dissection table, a crematorium, and a lime pit.” I’m not saying that true crime trivia is “fun” or anything, but it’s evocative and thought-provoking. It’s more interesting to me than whether or not a banana is a berry.
Maybe the trivia could combine food facts with murder facts: “Bananas and Avocados are both berries, and the state of Michoacán, Mexico has seen widespread murder, kidnapping, and extortion as cartels fight for control of the avocado trade.”
I’ve looked for ways to control what’s on the oven’s display. So far, nobody has hacked it. When I picked out the oven, it was only based on features and reviews. Last year, Mom stood in the kitchen, watching for smoke or sparks, as I flipped on the breaker in the cellar for the first time. When I came upstairs, I asked, “Does everything look okay?”
She said, “It wants to know your email address.”
That was a surprise. I knew the thing didn’t have any physical dials so I figured it was a touch screen, but I had no idea that it would want to send me emails. So far, it’s a lovely oven. The only thing it lacks is engaging trivia.
“It can take 7 to 21 days to make a single jelly bean,” is the current offering. I hope they work on more than one at a time. We could add to that trivia and say, “In March of 1987, outside an Orlando cabaret, a man flicked a jelly bean at another man’s brother. A fight broke out and the aggressor was fatally stabbed 13 times.”
How about, “Almond extract mixed with the egg whites gives angel food cake a wonderful almond flavor. A bitter almond flavor is the flavor of cyanide, which Belle Gunness (nicknamed Hell’s Belle) used to poison her victims.”
I’m not good at writing trivia. Belle Gunness (also known as The Indiana Ogress) killed at least a dozen people, but she was not known to use cyanide. I couldn’t think of a good cyanide killer. Kuklinski fed someone a cyanide hamburger once, but it didn’t work, so his accomplice strangled the guy with a lamp cord. There was an early Jodie Foster movie (The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane) where she poisoned someone with cyanide. I remember seeing that in the 70s when it came on TV. It might be fun to watch that again. Maybe I’ll see if I can get it to show on the oven’s display.
