I was out and about yesterday – a whole bunch of quick errands. Enough errands that I wrote them down and numbered them. Then, of course, I went in a different order, based on how fast I could get from one to the next. Typical.
This strategy led me on some back streets that while not foreign to me are not my usual routes around town. As I was coming up to a stop sign, the bicyclist ahead of me stuck out his left arm, but instead of straight to the side or straight down, sort of mid-way between. He did slow down a bit but then turned left onto another street. For a minute I thought maybe it was a “I’m slowing down before I turn left” arm signal but then just dismissed it as a lazy turn signal. But it stayed with me so you know I eventually looked it up on the computer and while there are several more than I was ever taught, there isn’t one for slowing on a left turn.
It also occurred to me that these days I don’t actually see many bicyclists using arm signals when they are in traffic. Are these not a thing any longer? Then I started a mental list of some of the things that have disappeared from the world during my lifetime: pay phones, rotary dial phones, maybe typewriters, encyclopedias, busy signals. There are probably a lot more that I’m either not remembering or still around but getting rarer as the days go by (typewriters should probably be in this category).
Things changing/evolving doesn’t bother me too much but I do think bicyclists would be safer if they kept up the arm signals when they are on streets with cars/trucks?
Are you still holding onto anything that is starting to disappear?
I’ve done the math before about how many cards I send out so I won ‘t bore you with the numbers again. The biggest category is birthday cards – that averages to about 14 cards per month.
For quite a few years, all birthday cards got the same postage stamp:
The post office also did a “Celebrate” stamp but I used those for anniversary cards and other momentous occasion cards. Then five years ago, the postal service broke my heart when they announced they were discontinuing both those stamps. Aarrgghhhh.
I had a nice supply on hand and I bought a bunch of the Happy Birthday before USPS ran out. A close friend of mine also gifted me with three sheets of them as well. I began to use them a little more sparingly. Six cards a month go to folks in one of my stamping groups – they got moved to the non-HB stamps right away. Then “outer-ring” folks stopped getting my special stash. Then the next ring in went to “regular” postage. I limped along like this for FIVE YEARS. I used the last one the first week in May.
So I was ripe for the on-line voting that USPS instituted last fall. They said they were going to bring back some older stamps and let the general public vote. The site did not have any limits about how many votes you got… .not even any limits on how many times a day you could vote; you gotta love a good loophole. I spent the entire month of September going online every morning and voting for the Happy Birthday option 20-30 times; it only took about 10 minutes a day.
My persistence paid off. They made the announcement the first of the year that my favorite stamp would be returning. They released it on April 18 although the pre-sale went up in March. The big surprise is that they did a completely new design – it’s in the header photo. I’m not sure why – it probably cost them more, first for the design itself and then for whatever it takes to produce a new stamp. Maybe after five years, the old design specs didn’t work anymore. Who knows. But no matter – the new design is fine by me. Technically I like the old look better but I’ll take what I can get.
We won’t talk about how many of them I’ve already purchased.
When was the last time you actually went to a post office?
I think it’s really interesting that aluminum foil in the oven doesn’t get very hot. I can pull it out with my fingers. So I googled it. And learned this:
Extreme Thinness (Low Mass):Standard foil is incredibly thin (about 16 micrometers). Because there is so little metal, there isn’t enough total heat energy to warm up your thick, water-filled skin. The instant you touch it, your cooler fingers absorb the tiny amount of energy, dropping the foil’s temperature immediately.
High Conductivity:Aluminum is an excellent heat conductor. Heat passes through it and dissipates into the cooler room air almost instantly.
Isn’t that interesting!
Wednesday was my first day of half summer vacation. I work half time at the college until June, then I’m off for a couple months. I worked at home ALL DAY Wednesday.
I had my annual performance review at the college the other day. As I prepared for that and looked for a paper copy of last year’s review I found a phone book on my desk. I guess I kinda knew it was there. I haven’t opened it in a while. It was from 2014. I put it in the round file finally.
This is a phone book, kids!
I finished planting soybeans last Saturday.
Sunday I drove over it all with the drag. The fields look great! Smooth and even. Hopefully they get lush and green soon.
It was sprinkling late Sunday evening when I was out with an old hand cranked seeder spreading grass seed on one of my new field boundaries.
This thing has hung in the basement as long as I can remember. Asking my siblings, we all played with it but no one remembers seeing anyone actually use it. I’m thinking dad used it to seed grass around the house after it was built. But I’m sure I’m just making that up.
The directions are on the bottom:
I have a few thoughts. I don’t know what 2.5 MPH is when walking, and a spread of 18 feet?? You gotta really be cranking that thing to get 18 feet! Man, I don’t know how the old guys did it back in the day seeding acres and acres with this thing.
I am planting ‘BLM #4’. It’s a quick growing pasture mix commonly containing ryegrass, tall fescue, and Kentucky bluegrass.
At home Padawan and I got a lot done this week. Cleaned out the seed and power washed the corn planter. Parked it outside for the moment and pulled out the seed wagon. Cleaned that off and parked it away. As we were rounding up flowerpots for Kelly, we got sidetracked by crap in a corner of the old shed and ended up hauling out a gator load of scrap iron and a gator load of garbage.
Tired
I’ve wanted to clean up that corner, just didn’t intend to do it then. It was clean back in 1968 when we were living in the machine shed, then it turned into the tire storage corner. I’m down to about 5 old tires to get rid of, and 3 good spares I store there. And once you start a spare tire corner, it becomes a junk corner real quick. Padawan cut the top off a tote while I was cleaning the planter so we can use a second tote for scrap iron. I forgot about a zoom meeting on Wednesday. Had it on my calender… even knew about it in the morning. Then got a text from someone asking if I was coming to the meeting. I joined from the tractor.
Padawan and I made a fence and got the adolescent chicks out.
We put mulch around the seedling trees and starting making a, sort of, ‘tent-fence’ to keep the deer from eating the tree’s and peeling bark off the tiny little things. Stupid deer! These little tree’s are costing us a lot of money! Water totes, pump, hose, fencing, Mulch was free, then more fencing and more posts… jeepers. And who knows how they’ll survive next winter. I don’t have high hopes.
I need to clean out the grain drill yet.
Oops. Forgot to turn on the drill in time there.
Right up at the end of our driveway there’s this gap in the oats field.
It’s the first thing you see driving in. I’ve seen it coming all spring, I need to get out there and replant that. Course it will always be a month behind. But a bare spot allows weeds to grow. And I have several bushels left in the drill to clean out so I may as well go plant that and fill in a few light spots in another field.
Padawan has gotten a new job. He’ll be working 11:00 AM – 8:00PM Tuesday – Saturday. I’m gonna miss him. He and I have really connected the last few months. I enjoy having him around and he kinda likes having us as his surrogate family. In fact, he listed me as “Family Friend / Dad” on the job application. Awwwww…
There’s never any warning. Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer doesn’t have a set schedule – without any notice it shows up in my Inbox. In the olden days (back when the dinosaurs roamed the planet) it would appear in the snail mail box. It’s the same document these days but I have to admit that I enjoyed relaxing with a cup of coffee or tea and leafing through the hard copy.
But this is not a rant about the death of print. I swear. It’s more a rant about how YA and I are completely helpless in the face of this flyer. It’s unbelievable; we are both completely drawn to the new (and probably never-to-be-seen-again) products that are featured. A little bit like the seasonally colored items that I can’t stay away from.
The theme of the flyer and the seasonal items this time is “strawberry”. While I love fresh strawberries and I practically live on my strawberry jam, I’m not otherwise a massive strawberry fan. But YA is. And there are certainly lots more items featured in addition to the strawberry-laden stuff. We made a list and I headed out. Managed to find everything on the list with the assistance of a customer service gentleman who went to the back and found two items that were out on the shelves. Here is a partial list of what I came home with:
Pickle Potato Chips: these were primarily for YA – she’s also a fan of Pickle Pizza at the fair.
Parmesan Tapenade: I love all kinds of tapenade, so this looked promising. It made a great pizza topping on Tuesday.
Potato Cheese Stix: like it says. Cubed potatoes, mixed with cheese, frozen on a stick. YA says they’re pretty good.
Spicy Taco Sauce: This turned out to be a great sauce for the afore-mentioned potato-cheese stix.
Strawberry Gummy Bears. Completely for YA. I never even liked jujubes when I was a kid, so no gummies for me now.
Turkish flatbread with cheeses, spinach and onion. In the freezer section – can’t wait.
Spicy Spuds. Another freezer options – spicy roasted potatoes.
Oat Bites. There are two kids – PB&J and Raspberry. Bitty little muffins with filling.
Strawberry Snickerdoodles. I might try this although YA will probably eat most of them
Garlic Salted Mixed Nuts. They also have little garlic toasted chips in the can. Quite nice.
There were several other things, including a six-pack of San Pellegrino; we splurge on this a couple of times a year. None of these items were necessary and neither of us had a plan for any of it, although I did get a pizza dough while I was there, thinking about the tapenade. I’m of two minds about this silliness. One the one hand, it was a lot of money for nothing that we had a plan for. On the other hand, it’s food; we have to eat regardless of the absurdity of the food items.
Tried anything new (food or otherwise) the past couple of weeks?
Muscle memory is an amazing thing. On Saturday, YA and I had our next-door neighbors over for lunch. Just veggie burgers and corn on the grill. At the last minute, we decided it was a little too chilly to eat outside, so I set the table inside.
I set out seven little bowls in the kitchen. Onion slices, tomato slices, pickles and Boston lettuce to get started. Just as I started to squirt ketchup into the fifth bowl, YA walked in and immediately said “what are you DOING?” I told her I was putting the condiments in bowls and she pushed back with “WHY?” It took me a few minutes of standing at the counter, looking at the bowls before I realized why I was about to put ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in little bowls.
When I was growing up, condiments went into little bowls. Not just for when we had company, but all the time. Even when we had dinner at my Nana and Pappy’s on Saturday nights, condiments went into little bowls. In fact, if condiments ever went on the table in their bottles, it was called “pinkert style”. It wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom told me why. When she was growing up, they lived a few houses down from the Pinkerts. Apparently the Pinkerts never put their condiments into little dishes… they always just set the bottles out willy nilly. So it turns out that my grandparents calling that “pinkert style” was actually quite pejorative – I never knew.
While I almost automatically put out little bowls when company comes over, YA and I do not do this when it’s just the two of us. Of course, YA and I eating a meal that requires condiments on the table is fairly rare.
On Saturday I put out the bottles; I really don’t need to be the third generation getting little bowls dirty in the name of shaming some family up the block from my grandparents!!
Any habits that have come down the generations in your family?
Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, hydrophobia, hemophobia, acrophobia, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. There are a LOT of phobias out there. Luckily I’m only stuck with two that occasionally bug me.
Acrophobia bugs me the most. I don’t like to take the escalators at the Mall of America. I don’t like to stand near the edge of anything and a couple of those tall tall buildings in London did throw me for a loop. Three weeks ago, my next-door neighbors got a new roof and after a couple of hours, I had to take my book and move downstairs because watching them work out of my bedroom window was giving me the heebie jeebies.
My claustrophobia is milder and mostly manifests in my deep desire to not be underground or in a cave. Oh, and I don’t care much for curtains – give me a good valance any time. I’ve passed twice on the underground river at Xcaret in Mexico and doing the big cave on Gibraltar really got my heart going. I even stopped reading the Anna Pigeon series after a book set in a cave. Ish.
YA doesn’t have a titch of claustrophobia and years ago hung curtains in her room in addition to window shades (I am NOT a window shade kind of gal). Yesterday a package got delivered and she swooped on it immediately. Curtains. When I asked why she needed new curtains she said that her shades had started to curl on the edges and she decided black out curtains would be better. Black out curtains. I’m not making this up. If she only pulled these curtains during the night, when we have a lot of ambient light from living on a county street, I could kind of understand, but like her previous curtains, these have been pulled shut 24/7. It’s dark in there.
I’ve never wanted a cave of my own so it’s hard for me to get her desire for one, but it’s her room so if she feels the need to have a grotto of her own, so be it!
Any fears you’ll cop to? Do you like serious darkness for sleeping?
For quite some time, I avoided Hudson & Rex, a Canadian tv show about a cop and his partner, a beautiful German Shepherd Dog. But I’ve gotten hooked; it shows on a couple of different cable stations so when I find it showing, I’m all in.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one of those two stations plays a few ads A LOT. One of those is about a power washer. You know the kind where some guy says “after using this, I threw out my old power washer”. Blah blah blah. I mute it a fair amount.
Imagine my surprise when a box was delivered yesterday and I came downstairs to find YA assembling a little power washer. It isn’t the power washer from tv (thank goodness); she bought it with award credits from the merchandise side of her company’s business. No money actually changed hands.
She had it out yesterday afternoon, doing the side of the garage and the driveway where we had all the mulch piled up for the last couple of weeks. I guess it works pretty well; she informed me of a couple of other projects she is thinking about.
I’m glad she likes to take on these kinds of projects because it would never have occurred to me but I am a little spooked that the tv seemed to predict the power washer entering our lives.
On the way home from St. Louis, YA were debating about what we should pick up for lunch and she told me that she had noticed a sign (when we were still in St. Louis) that Steak `n Shake was offering an Orange Dreamsicle Freeze. I don’t know if I’ve whined about S`nS dumping their original Orange Freeze – but they let go of it at the same time they dropped the grilled cheese. I haven’t been there since then – about 6 years.
But the new offering sounded good so we decided that fries and a freeze would be an ok lunch. YA found the closest S`nS and we let GPS get us there. As we were waiting in the drive-thru line, we noticed several posters in the windows of the eatery touting their all new beef-tallow. These are their exact words “return to tallow is part of a broader trend to revive traditional cooking methods and highlight authentic flavors.” Snort. I asked the person taking the order if it were true that the fries were now being fried in beef tallow. When he said yes, we cancelled the fries and just got the Freezes.
When I became a vegetarian in the early 70s, it was the end of French fries for me as all the fast-food places used animal fats for frying. Burger King was the first to switch over; for many years I got a whooper with no meat (yes, that’s just a glorified cheese sandwich) and fries. Then Wendys switched, then S`nS, and eventually even McDonalds gave it up and moved to vegetable oils. So this move back to beef tallow doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t know the science about the health benefits (although RFK touting beef tallow makes me wonder…) but from a planetary point of view, I don’t think we need more cows eating way more grains than it takes to feed humans. My cynical side says S`nS is grasping at straws trying to deal with their currently financial struggles and think this might be a way to differentiate themselves from the pack.
Regardless, YA and I ended up at Subway for our lunch to go with our Orange Dreamsicle Freezes, which unfortunately weren’t all that great. I can’t imagine I’ll ever go back to a Steak `n Shake again.
Fries? Shoestring, curly, seasoned, sweet potato? Or just pass the tater tots?
Prologue. Before YA and I went to St. Louis for my mom’s service and to clean out her condo, my middle sister mentioned that we should keep an eye out for Nonny’s wedding ring. She had stopped wearing it a few years back (due to her arthritis) and apparently it was now missing. When we arrived and stopped at my sister’s house, she talked about it again. Over the course of the next 24 hours, it was clear that she has also told everyone else in the family about the ring being missing.
Everybody looked all over the “normal” places and one of the funnier parts of the week was all of us, one by one, discovering the plastic bag in the closet labeled “Wedding Ring”. Unfortunately we all had our hopes dashed one at a time as it was discovered over and over again that it was an old quilt in the wedding ring pattern. Shoot.
On Tuesday, in the back corner of a closet, we found “the box”. It was a security box – a little surprising since it probably cost more than we figured Nonny would spend. We were pretty sure we had all of Nonny’s important papers so were a little perplexed as to why she had a high-level security box. It took us quite a while to find the keys as we had made quite a mess of her condo, emptying out drawers and closets to start sorting into piles of “toss, keep, donate”, and in that time, we had a whole lot of wild speculation going. Were we all adopted and the papers were in there? Witness protection proof? Secret bank accounts? All most all of us (there were ten of us in the condo at that point) were thinking we would find her wedding ring.
This is what we found when we opened the box:
As a non-believer, I was a little hesitant to unseal this envelope so my nephew pulled it out of the box. He was a little wary as well. There was one piece of paper in the envelope:
What? Wars, Vaccumn (sic), David Surgery, Dorothy, Sunday School. What? Two hours of discussion. The list was obviously made two and a half years ago. That’s when David’s first surgery happened and was when Dorothy, her neighbor across the hall passed away; we think that wars, David and Dorothy were ideal candidates for God to keep an eye on. But vacuum and the Sunday School class? And why this single sheet in this single envelope labeled God and locked by itself in a very secure box? I mean, Nonny was an inveterate list-maker. We found several of them while we were cleaning but none of the others made the box.
During our talks, we came up with more wild ideas about why, why, why. I won’t go into all of them here but I’ll tell you mine, simply because it got the most laughs.
Sometime in the future, 10 people (all strangers) will be staying at a fancy spa on a little island in the Caribbean. Beginning the first night of their stay, two of these folks have envelopes delivered to their room. In each envelope is a notecard with the word “wars”. At breakfast, they all scratch their heads about it, but then later in the day, both folks are found murdered. And of course, the only boat has been disabled and no one’s phones can get a connection off the island. Too far to swim to the nearest island. One the second night, two more folks get an envelope with a card waying “vacuum”. You guessed it… both those folks are found dead during the next day. The remaining six folks have one day to figure out the clues before the next deaths….
Any better thoughts? Do you have a lock-box? Will it be a mystery to your heirs?
Gravity, the 5-second rule, Murphys Law, chocolate is a food group, the toast will always land buttered-side down, oatmeal raisin cookies masquerading as chocolate chip cookies are sent by evil entities to usurp happiness. These are givens. In addition YA doesn’t like farm eggs and YA doesn’t like my recipe for deviled eggs.
Farm eggs. I adore Ben’s farm eggs. Rich, full flavor and then there are those deep golden yolks. Bring them on! Unfortunately YA isn’t always sure about “new” things and the farm eggs fall into this category. She hasn’t said exactly but I think it’s the color of the yolks.
Deviled eggs. While in theory YA likes deviled eggs, she doesn’t like my preferred recipe. I’ve mentioned before that I am a Miracle Whip gal. YA has grown up into a mayonnaise gal. It I make the eggs with some Miracle Whip and some mayonnaise and give it a good dose of mustard, she will sometimes have one, but not always.
So after Ben delivered eggs on Sunday, I immediately boiled up a few and made deviled eggs. When I asked YA if she was interested, she said no, so I made them my favorite way – Miracle Whip, mustard, pickle relish, salt, pepper. And because they were farm eggs, they were stunning looking – more golden and orangish even than the header photo. I ate some immediately, had some for breakfast on Monday (they were marvelous on toast with strawberry jam) and was looking forward to the last of the batch of breakfast yesterday.
Lo and behold – when I came downstairs, the container that had held the remaining four halves was empty and sitting in the sink. SHE ATE MY DEVILED EGGS! Even though I had made her least favorite version.
So now what? I feel like I need to re-write all my life expectations. What’s next… will the toast fall butter side up?
Trail Baboon 