Makes me want a loaf of bread.

BBC Commentator (Breathlessly): ...and now the Master Baker inserts the ceremonial key in the detonator, and the High Exploder raises the plunger. The crowd waits in silence...

This was, after all. A Matter of Loaf and Death.

(There are far worse reasons to invent ancient local traditions.)

I hope this effects a policy that takes local conditions into account better.

That is delightful news!

http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2009/05/21/town_rises_up_for_bakery/

Of course, here's also hoping that in five years we have a saner INS.

You'll get a few photos from Connecticut and Tasmania mixed in with that. I couldn't exclude Connecticut without losing every photo of the Connecticut River.

For the short version of the local tour, add "-beaver" to the list of search terms. This gets rid of most of the duplicate photos of Beaver Brook Falls.

If you get far enough into the sequence, there'll be a run of boring indoor photos taken by one Shansen_81 during a winter trip to the area. Take heart: they do eventually end.

I think I might have to stop in the next time I head up to Montreal from Boston.

From the Union Leader article:

When the state Department of Environmental Services wants to come to town for a meeting, it avoids Mondays, when the bakery is closed, she [Town Manager Donna Caron] said.

'We have *how* many Senators asking why this lady doesn't have her visa renewed? Do it. Now. Before we get our appropriations slashed.'

Pittsburg is the largest town in the state of New Hampshire, and is covered by my ambulance squad.

(I could be biassed)

This story is very much not the way the system is supposed to work. Except in the sense that, when it goes wrong, there is a way in which a last-ditch effort can put things right.

That "abandoned gas station" across the street that Dan Barry talks about in the Times is the very one where Christopher Wilder, the Beauty Queen Killer, shot himself in 1984 to avoid capture.

Do you see the picture of sign for Le Rendez-Vous that appears in my previous post about this story? The one-story gray building (with the "Copy" sign on it) is the News and Sentinel newspaper office. That's where two of the Drega shootings took place. The two windows to the left of the front door were Vicky Bunnell's law office. The small square signs between the front door and the windows are brass, the lower one still carries her name. The low stone wall to the left of the News and Sentinel marks the town park with the Civil War memorial and the old snow roller. The area to the right of that building, all the way to the corner, is the old gas station.

I'm told that in the TV movie about Christopher Wilder, that the gas station is played by a log cabin in the middle of a forest.

Other exciting happenings that took place in the building that now houses Le Rendez-Vous are detailed here.

I learned about the history of the Drega shootings from you (and very interesting/shocking stuff it was), but I know absolutely nothing about this Wilder matter. Time to go tickle a search engine or two ....

What you can see, from left to right:

The white building with the multi-pane windows is now Creative Natives, a gift-and-craft shop. It was formerly the town's hospital, and before that a tavern. During a long period when it was empty, there was a two-headed calf in the left-most ground-floor window. To its right, with the blue false front, is an apartment building. On its ground floor are two storefronts. On the left, vacant, is where First Run Video used to be before it moved across to the Walker House on the east side of Main Street. On the right in that building is another empty storefront, that most recently held Mabel's Kitchen, a lunch counter. Before that it had a consignment store. Before that it had a general store.

To the right of that, in yellow, is Le Rendez-Vous.

Continuing to the right, and partly obscured by a telephone pole, is that abandoned gas station. To the right of that is a house now divided into aparments. To the right of that, dark gray single-story with a maroon awning, is Ducret's Sporting Goods. Then comes the bridge over the Mohawk River. The next house you can see is a private dwelling, with the steeple of the Monadnock Congregational Church visible above it.

The road entering from the right, with a fire hydrant on the corner, is Pleasant Street. The fire house is up that way, as is the Catholic Church (St. Brendan's). The corner of Main and Pleasant, the north side is the new home of First Run Video, and the south side is Hicks' Hardware (both out of sight to the right of frame), which brings us back to where we're standing.

Where in all those shops did the bottle of delicious maple syrup that Patrick and Teresa brought over come from? They said it was the hardware store—was it Hick's?

(Half of it was good. We're hoarding the other half.)

It seems I am always importuning Marna to bring me maple something (in november it was maple sugar, that we might make some cookies we had a recipe for. It was cheaper to wait on her, than it would have been to order it, by a factor of two, or some such).

This time I have Wisconsin Grade B Amber. A wonderful, dark, liquid. French toast rarely has it so good.

Well, not really. Grade B Dark Amber is really strong flavored stuff, good for overwhelming other tastes, or for barbecue sauce. Delicate, fluffy, white flour Poffertjes (little clouds) get Grade A Light Ambber (when I can find it, most of the places I looked said the early run was already darker/stronger than that), Medium Amber for pancakes that have their own flavor (corn, oat, whole wheat), and Dark Amber for buckwheat pancakes (my buckwheat recipe is only 1/2 buckwheat flour — I'm a Yankee. Real all buckwheat flour pancakes need sorghum syrup, but both the cake and the syrup are too strong for my delicate sensibilities taste.

I believe I mentioned earlier elsethread that I've been rather partial to pancakes since before I started school.

Just in case you didn't know the reason for the grading is how white the resultant sugar is going to be if you boil all the water away to granulate it.

White sugar was more sought after, so lighter syrups were considered better. I happen to really like the flavor of maple. If I need less flavor, I can use less syrup.

Jim, there have been times in my life when I knew the sugarbush personally, and not just the small demo operation at Sunday River, where the brand new sugar shack is right next to the bunny slope. I introduced a lot of British schoolchildren to the joys of maple syrup and maple candy this year. There are a few trees with buckets by the road and just off the slope — mostly for show — but I haven't visited the sugarbush with the web of plastic tubing going from trees to the collection tank.

Sugaring has changed since my childhood. No more, or not so much, the rustic shack in the woods with a big flat steel pan over a fire. Few open buckets. Fancy stainless steel evaporators, but still wood fired. Cleaner product is a result. I would joke with the sugarer that he never looked tired enough, since during the run sugaring is frequently an around-the-clock operation, maple sap spoils pretty quickly.

For things in which I want syrup, bold is what I'm looking for.

Reminds me, I need to prep for corn fritters in the morning.

Doyle, Pip, and I were sitting in Le Rendez-Vous eating almond croissants and drinking coffee when he came in with six or eight suit-wearing folks in his wake. After he asked Marc and Verlaine if they needed anything (they didn't), and they gave him a loaf of bread, he came over and sat at our table (since we were colorful locals).

We thanked him for signing the Gay Marriage act. He shook our hands.

Other than that, today was marked by thunderstorms.