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First bread baked in the barge oven last night.

Overall, it came out fairly well -- good spring, nice texture. The crust was a little lighter in colour and crunchier than I would have preferred, so I'm thinking I should bump the temperature up another 50 degrees or so -- but pretty minor nit picking, really. I do need to find a better place to attach the mill. (The table works, but it's light enough to cut into my efficiency.)

This also gave me an excuse to put butter in the butter bell that Lauren gave me. What a dilemma! I love the idea of a butter bell, and I'm happy to have one... but left to my own devices, I almost never use butter. (I'm an olive oil person, rather than a butter person, and found this wonderful vegetable shortening that has almost the exact same texture as suet, so I mostly bake with that...)

Perhaps I will have to bake a lot of bread, just so I have an excuse to use the marvellous butter bell... or maybe I should make a lot of bread and then invite people over who like butter!

Or better yet, maybe I should invite over people to make a lot of bread, and then to eat said bread with butter from the marvellous butter bell. Hmm...

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And CWTA is back in session. Better yet, after being on hiatus for a quarter, the advanced sword class has started up again -- which not only great fun in terms of it being sword class, but I got to see a bunch of people who I hadn't been in class with for a bit. (I suspect they've been hiding out in those Yang classes I don't attend.)

And then Chen. So with sword, it'll be the 3.5 hours of classes each Wednesday again, and now we'll get two weapons forms right on top of eachother. (Okay, only sort of on top of eachother -- after jian, dao is one of the forms we're working on in Chen.)

I feel good.