Lee ness

Here is a way to save wilted Asparagus by trimming quarter off the bottom of the stalks and immerse them in a large glass filled with two inches of ice water. Cover the tips with a plastic bag and secure with a rubber band. Submerging the ends replenishes water loss, shocking the veggies back into shape, while the plastic bag limits the supply of wilt promoting oxygen.

Here is a way to never tear delicate chicken skin again. When seasoning a bird and your nails often poke through in the skin as you lift it. In order to avoid this is by grabbing a wooden spoon with a long thin handle. The handle will slide under the skin to easily reach all around the bird and its blunt end will not leave a hole.

                                       Lee ness 

Here are the best oven fries ever! In an effort to cook healthier you are baking potato wedges instead of frying them. But your oven fries often develop thick, chewy crusts. The fix is soaking them the potato pieces in hot water for 10 minutes before baking. Dry, and then bake as usual. Water removes some of the spuds surface sugars to ensure a crispy texture.

Here is a quick way to separate eggs. Separating a large quantity of eggs for angel food cake or meringue can take up precious prep time. Speed the up the process by pouring the eggs into a slotted spoon or colander set over a bowl. The whites will fall through the holes and leaving the yolks intact on the utensil.

Do you have oil overflow? An accidental slip of the wrist resulted in a pool of olive oil in your skillet. No surprise since the liquids glugs out of the container at a rate of 1 tablespoon per second. Next time you open a new bottle of oil use a fork to pierce a few holes in the foil seal. The oil will flow slowly out of the holes, therefore helping to control the amount that ends up in your pan and on your hands.

Have a hard time opening corked bottles of Wine or Champagne?  The pals you invited over for dinner are waiting for you to dislodge the cork from the wine bottle and you are having performance anxiety! Run a tea towel under the hottest tap water and wrap it around the neck of the glass to expand but not the cork so the stopper will slide out in one motion.

                                            Lee ness 

Here are other tips you may find helpful around the house. All text, descriptions, and pictures used here by Lee Ness are owned and copywrited by Lee Ness and may not be used without the express written permission of Lee Ness!

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Have a wonderful day.

Lee Ness

Thus began an extraordinary year in which religious icons all over Ireland reputedly exhibited varying degrees of unexpected mobility. The site of the greatest fervor, however, was the shrine at Ballinspittle, County Cork, whose 152 kg statue of the Virgin Mary was claimed by 17-year-old Clare O’Mahoney and her mother to have rocked backwards and forwards as they walked by its grotto on the evening of 22 July. This initiated a flurry of interest, which led to great numbers of people visiting the shrine during the next four months and numerous allegations that the statue was indeed rocking on its heels, sometimes moving its head and shoulders too. Two days after the O’Mahoneys’ sighting, it was watched with some alarm by Sergeant John Murray of the Garda Siochana, who stated that it was vibrating from side to side to such an extent that he had wondered if it was going to fall over.

Happily it did not, but events at Ballinspittle nonetheless reached a dramatically violent climax when, during the early evening of 31 October, two men attacked the Madonna with a hammer and an axe, badly damaging its head, hands and the illuminated halo around its head. After jeering the horrified crowd for being “stupid fools, worshipping a plaster statue”, the two men and a colleague who had been photographing their vandalism jumped in their car and drove off. Although soon caught, they were acquitted at their trial on a legal technicality.

In The Moving Statue of Ballinspittle, Lionel Beer listed 47 locations in Ireland that experienced reports of moving statues or other phenomena connected with the Virgin Mary during 1985, and a collection of journalistic accounts concerning these remarkable incidents featured in Seeing Is Believing: Moving Statue in Ireland, edited by Colm Toibin.

If they did not compromise authentic miracles, the sightings were presumably due to various optical effects. Investigators of the Asdee reports have shown that an illusion of movement can be effected with the two tall statues in St Mary’s church merely by staring for a short time at the small round window between the statues and then gazing at either one of them.

Similarly, the glare of lights illuminating various statues in dark conditions might well have stimulated unconscious eye movements in the observers, thereby eliciting illusory movement by the statues. This is a likely explanation for the many claimed sightings that occurred outdoors at night, or inside churches with subdued lighting.

Another illusion is the autokinetic effect, often experienced by mountaineers, in which stationary objects seen at a distance and lacking a detailed background can appear to move. Perhaps, this couple with the power of suggestion, always a potent force, was responsible for some reports too. After all, the Ballinspittle Madonna stands over 6 metres away from the viewing area, in a dark alcove on a hillside, from where it would surely be difficult for even the keenest-eyed observers to state categorically that they had detected genuine movement.

Last, but certainly not least, while stopping short of citing mass hallucination, it is evident that if there is a sufficient desire to see something, people will see it, whether it is real or not – a psychological situation arising time and time again with mysterious phenomena.