Mom, the recipe worked. I commissioned a crack team of apple peelers (my girlfriend) and crust rollers (Mike from next door). We used only “the best Aomori apples”.  I put the crust together the night before, and everything seemed to be going OK; I didn’t have any problem getting the shortening into “pea sized” pieces.  But we had a bit of a snag when we tried to roll out the crust.  Mom, you never mentioned the words “wax paper” anywhere in your instructions, and that crust is way too flaky to roll out with just flour.  We improvised with a piece of cloth, but its area was too small, and we couldn’t get the crust quite large enough to lay out over the edge of the pie pan.  And time was not on our side.  Eventually I just gave up on the second crust and did an open pie (which dried out a bit in the oven).

I think they turned out pretty well.  People favored the “proper” pie but I got a lot of good feedback.  I guess even a culinary dunce like me can make a decent apple pie, with enough help.

I was reading through a slew of responses on Slashdot in response to what some see as problems in the U.S. education system, and I came across this interesting (and very insightful) comment.  From everything I’ve seen on the Japan side, it’s absolutely true.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207654&cid=16944936

Eleven days and I’m STILL waiting for that guy with the video to bring a firewire cable to work so I can sync it to my audio recording and post it here. Geez, this is getting ridiculous.

In other news, I dropped off my motorbike at the Red Baron shop for winter storage last Saturday, while the weather was still decent.  Good thing too, because as soon as I dropped off the bike and hopped in my car (thanks for driving along, Ken) the weather took a turn from happy sunny fluffy bunnies to the floodgates of Hell.  The riding season is over here, as the snow and ice will start falling within a week or so.

Well, my school had its culture festival again, and this time I remembered to bring along my audio recorder.  The sad thing is, many of the recordings are badly clipped, so I’m trying to fix them up, and that takes a bit of time.  Also, a few people took video, so I’m going to sync up their video and my audio so you get a better picture of what actually happened.  Stay tuned, and I’ll have some goodies up in a couple days.