The Extra Hour

The events of the week ahead are such that I could barely tolerate this morning’s extra hour. Here’s what I did with the windfall of minutes courtesy of Daylight Savings Time.

I fried up a breakfast like no other in the history of Sankethi cuisine, installed three remote control mounts around the house, checked on the latest campaign trail blasphemies, and installed anti-squirrel devices on a handful of bird feeders.

To begin with the breakfast, I go back to early Friday and our Diwali celebration, which opened on the auspicious discovery of a flat rear tire. A cynic might call the discovery inauspicious, but I say better to change a tire at my leisure in the driveway than somewhere on the 270-mile stretch between home and my current location, especially the dark narrow shoulder of I-85 between Raleigh and Petersburg, cars whizzing past at 80 mph.

Our Diwali feast on Friday night included about a dozen dishes, from kolkkate and tamarind rice to green beans, okra gojju, coconut chutney, rasam, and sweet paisa. There was so much on the table we even forgot to bring out the kosambari, but enjoyed that the next day with all the leftovers.

As for leftovers, the cooks prepared so much kolkkate dough that on Saturday they turned to making chomai, a thin, fragile, rice-flour spaghetti which can be soaked in tamarind or lemon juice or eaten plain. Somehow the texture was off, a lumpy mess with a chewy consistency that didn’t seem edible. What to do?

We decided to fry it, shaped into cutlets – an unusual word for a vegetarian household, since Merriam-Webster defines cutlet as a small slice of meat, from the French cotelette and the Old French costelette. Anyway, the first part of today’s extra hour went to conserving a ruined dish converted from a holiday feast by frying chomai cutlets and serving it with ketchup.

Next, I tackled the hanging of mounts. This project allowed me to drill holes in a brand new wall, aligning them with a level, the bubble in the liquid clearly between the centering lines, only to wonder why the devices looked cockeyed once they were placed on the wall. This weekend handyman and amateur Sankethi chef deserves better.

So I turned to the news and a pair of findings from the campaign trail that revealed nothing much had changed in the state of our election. One candidate blew out his throat railing against his microphone and suggesting the media should be victims of gun violence, the other enjoyed free media play with a charming appearance on SNL.

Further discussion over brunch highlighted the view from two swing states. One set of friends fretted over a household ballot that might not arrive by election day in Georgia; another recounted an interaction with a political activist at their polling station: asked which candidate on the Republican ballot didn’t advocate execution of U.S. citizens, our friend stood accused of voting with his penis.

Nobody could figure out quite what that meant. Can you?

This evening we took care of a few garden errands, installing squirrel deflectors on two bird-feeder stands and repairing a spring-loaded feeder that would close the seed windows with the weight of a squirrel (average 16-24 ozs).  

The extra hour fed the hungry with a new dish, organized life with wall-mounted remotes, deepened my gloom over the state of our politics, and gave our feathered friends an edge over squirrels as fall moves toward winter amid 70-degree days.

Imagine all the things that won’t get done next spring when the people in charge of clocks remove an hour from our lives.

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