Category House and Home

Euphemistically Yours

Michael 2 Comments

I was going to write a light, breezy post about something humorous that happened to me. But all of that changed when I saw what was on my coffee table. Let me start in the middle. (The beginning would make this just WAAAAYYYYYYYY too long.) A couple of weeks ago I bought a new television. Sometime over the weekend I read the instruction manual. At least I got around to it eventually. Actually I didn’t get around to it. It somehow ended up on the table instead of the recycling bin and as I was walking it over to said bin it fell out of my hands and broke open. And that’s when I started reading.

At first I wasn’t sure I was really reading it. I thought that maybe I was having a dream but one of those dreams that is so lifelike that you wake up thinking that you really did just have lunch with Aunt Ella even though she died 12 years ago and even more that you don’t have an Aunt Ella. Now that’s a dream. But I thought that maybe that’s exactly what I was having because no company on Earth could actually put into writing what I was reading right there in black and white.

About halfway through the “IMPORTANT NOTICES” was, in bold letters, “End of Life Directives.” This is why I at first thought that I was having and/or had had a dream. And probably a bad dream. To someone who spent 40 years in health care, “End of Life” has a very specific meaning. Usually, no, always, end of life means someone’s life has ended. Died. Checked out. Kicked the bucket. 86’d on out of here. Gone. Never to return. Dead.

On top of it, I’ve spent the last few years in and out of hospitals where the first thing anybody asks (after “are you bleeding?”) is, “Do you have a living will or advance directives?” And just last week the dialysis clinic social worker brought to me a stack of papers to be signed for this year and at the top of the stack was a pre-formatted form labeled “End of Life Directives.”

So you can see why when I saw that associated with an Open Box Internet Special yet still over-priced television set I thought I was hallucinating. Or at the very least way past my bedtime. We have enough things that are challenged, sufficient opportunities, plenty of stuff that is deprived, depressed or disadvantaged, that we don’t need to borrow an actual sentiment to be euphemistic for something that really doesn’t need to be spoken of gently.

Exactly what is this “end of life” that the manufacturers of electronic components are afraid to call a spade? Apparently, as I learned upon further reading, it’s when the TV has reached the end of its usefulness to me and the manufacturer wants to make me aware that there are environmentally responsible means of disposal that are at my umm, disposal.

I know it’s terribly politically incorrect to call a shovel a shovel but hasn’t the need to call everything anything but whatever thing it is gone too far now? We can’t even put in an instruction manual that this thing you just bought might break, fail, quit, or stop working. We have to speak gently so that if you actually paid full price for the item you won’t file an wrongful breakdown suit against the manufacturer. Bull shit. It will break and when it does either recycle it or throw it away. Those are your choices. Directives or not.

But if I should happen to outlive the newest electronic member of my family I will be certain to dispose of it in a responsible and thoughtful manner. I’ll hold a respectful gathering of its friends, we’ll have a non-denominational service with a few of the other appliances offering their thoughts and best wishes for the survivors and afterwards some light refreshments and fellowship. We will then gently load the life-challenged inanimate object into the back of my pre-hybrid automobile, drive several times around the county looking for a recycling center that accepts electronics, pay $1 per pound or $45 per dropoff whichever is less, and then hightail it back home. In air-conditioned comfort.

California will be proud.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Half-Baked

Michael 2 Comments

I baked cookies yesterday. Hold your applause. They were just oatmeal cookies. Oatmeal cookies are like the Blue Apron of the baking world. No thought required. The most difficult step is finding the measuring cups.

You all already know I enjoy my time in the kitchen but it’s almost always cooking. Baking is a whole different animal. It requires measuring stuff, preheating the oven, using the timer even. As a person who spent his whole career in a regimented, scientific occupation you’d think the most comfortable thing I could do in the kitchen is fall into the baking regimen. Nope, I prefer the loosey-goosey world of cooking.

Maybe that’s because I enjoy the freedom of modifying the dish I’m working on based on what’s fresh, what’s handy, what’s tasting good. Maybe it’s because most of the dishes I started out cooking were family recipes which changed as the family moved from Italy to America and ingredients changed based on what was available. Or maybe it was because some of those recipes were written in a combination of Italian and English and we weren’t always sure what was supposed to go into that pot so we improvised.

Or maybe that’s because it’s just the way I’m wired.

While I was deciding if I wanted to weigh or measure my dry ingredients I did some thinking about just that. Does our personality reflect our cooking style – and shouldn’t it also compare to our chosen lifestyle? Here’s what I came up with.  . . .  Maybe.

Take me for the first example. Even though I decided on keeping the wolves from my door in the highly regulated, policed, and exacting world of health care I tend to keep most of the rest of my life in the “let’s see what’s up” end of the spectrum. Back in the day when I actually made plans my idea of making plans (unless it involved non-refundable air fare), was “hey I heard about blah-blah-blah on the radio this morning, let’s go!” Thus my life in the kitchen is more a matter of “hmm, I wonder what’s in the refrigerator that hasn’t changed color yet, let’s eat!” And 9,999 times out of 10,000 it will be good.

Consider the ex. I’ll not be bad-mouthing anybody here. I’m just using her as an example. Her idea of spontaneous was using only two sources of information for research on a place, restaurant, movie, or wall-covering. But boy could she bake. Pies, cakes, breads, cookies. If it involved a rolling pin (no, I won’t go there), she had it mastered.

Now, let’s look at the daughter. The mix of the aforementioned Thing One and Thing Two. On one hand she’s creative enough to have selected one of the most imaginative fields you can imagine to make a living at and is making a living at it. On the other, she’s making a living at it by working for herself and manages to handle all the requirements of self-employment successfully enough to still make a living at it. Her style in the kitchen? She can bake a mall-worthy cinnamon roll in the morning and finesse her way through a dinner for four with whatever might be in the pantry after not shopping for two weeks in the evening.  Living at both poles and baking and cooking with aplomb.

I guess that’s make her sort of a hybrid.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Once and For All

Michael Leave a comment

Yesterday’s mail included a post card with large letters screaming to me “Quit smoking now…for once and for all!” Once and for all is a strange sentiment. I remember that phrase from my mother using it mostly when talking about things that happen more than once because they don’t last for all. Typically something like “I’m telling you for once and for all to get in there and clean up your room.”

That post card didn’t encourage me to clean my room. But that probably wasn’t its intention. It didn’t encourage me to stop smoking either, nor to sign up for the very successful (in its words) smoking cessation program it was hawking. Why not? Because I don’t smoke. A run of the mill solicitation for behavior modification may not know that but my own insurance company should, especially since every time I fill out one of their health questionaires I check “no ” where they ask about smoking.

Last week I got an email from my cable company encouraging me to consider paying my bill electronically. I can save time and money it explained if I would pay my monthly fees using a computer instead of a checkbook. I’m not convinced that it takes less time to open a browser than to open a checbook or if the saving money refers to the one postage stamp a month I can rescue from the clutches of the mailman that comes to a whopping 4 bucks a year is worth the effort. Butler  I am convinced that I already pay them using a monthly auto draft that takes me no time (and saves me at least 4 dollars a year (woohoo)) and they should know that.

About a month ago I was multitasking by watching TV, reading emails and intermittently dozing in my recliner. I opened an email asking me to complete a survey on new trends in technology. Since I was in one of my non-dozing periods I thought I would and clicked on the link in the email – on my tablet. It directed me to a page that read “Were sorry, this survey does not support mobile devices.” Hmm, the survey on new trends in technology doesn’t support the old tablet technology.

It seems to me that there is a lot of information about us that “service” providers have that they must not realize what they have. Or don’t care. Could it be that exemplifies the rest of their service also? Maybe they should reconsider that. For once and for all.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

What Gimbels Didn’t Tell Macy

Michael Leave a comment

Last weekend I had the occasion to hold a credit card in my hand. It was my own. No need to call out the diversion police. And indeed I’ve held it once or twice before. Usually the only time we hold a card is when we swipe it through or slot it into a card reader. But this time I had to actually pay some attention to it. I was ordering something on line and, no matter how politely they ask, I won’t allow a merchant or browser to store my card information. Call me old fashioned. Anyway, it was while I reading it, or I should say struggling to read it, that I thought how little these little chunks of plastic have changed in the 40ish years that I’ve been carrying one.

The first card I carried was for Gimbels department stores. You might remember Gimbels
from the movie “Miracle on 34th Street” as the main competitor to R. H. Macy and his juggernaut of an outlet that doubled as a destination to New York’s second oldest gimbelsThanksgiving Day parade. Gimbels beat him by four years on that one. Again anyway, my Gimbels card had none of the modern improvements like the RFID chip and magnetic strip, the issuer ID and hologram, the CVV (that three or f
our digit number on the back that is supposed to mean you have the card in your possession but everybody wants when you aren’t in their company), or even a signature strip and expiration date. Nope, all it had was my account number and name. In that same embossed type that today’s “modern” cards use.

That’s why I was struggling so hard to read that credit card this weekend. It was those silly embossed characters. They start out in a different color than the body of the card but after a while (like a few hours) of being carried around in a wallet, that color wears off and all you are left with are the raised ghosts of the numbers identifying your account number and expiration date. Fortunately I know my name. With all the advancements made on that little piece of plastic why are they still using raised letters for the most important characters on the card? Well, it seems they are still about, and still being used I would imagine if they are about. And the it are credit card machines. Not the reader thingies you slide your magnetic stripped equipped card through. The imprinter thingies that run an ink-covered roller over the card.

If you are old enough you might remember one like  this:

imprinter2

But I remember one like his:

imprinter1

From where do I remember such a dinosaur? From Gimbels, of course. The only reason I had that early card was because that was my in-the-summer-and-on-breaks-and-vacation job during college. You don’t think they’d give a 20 year old a credit card unless they were controlling his income, do you? Back then, twienty wasn’t even old enough to vote. No, I’m not kidding all you 18 to 20 year olds out there. But for a third time anyway, while I was struggling trying to read those horrible raised numbers I suddenly remembered those old imprinters. And that got me wondering if they were still out there. That was the only reason anyone could imagine still embossing the name and number on a modern credit card. Since I have that kind of time, I checked. Indeed you can still buy a credit card imprinter (both styles even) if you were in I would imagine a rather vintage retail business and really wanted to carry on the nostalgic feeling.

For the zillions of us who really don’t care about nostalgia carried to that extreme perhaps the next time I’m due for a new card, Capital One will issue me one with a printed number that I can actually read.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Brutalbee Honest

Michael 2 Comments

Don’t be shocked. I may get a little ranty here. I try to be fair and respectful to everybody regardless of their views. But things I’ve heard in the media lately have gotten me over my edge. One thing I insist on is honesty. At lest from my food.  Apparently food feels it no longer feels it has to hold up its end of the deal.

Once upon a time, honesty in food was a given. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” took honest to the brutal level. (And now that I think about it, I can’t begin to count the number of women who I’ve tried to tell that honesty doesn’t have to be brutal.) (But I digress.)  But at least the Not Butter people were honest enough so that if you did pick up a stick or two of the stuff you didn’t expect it to be butter. After all, Not Butter is right in the name.

honeybeeOk, food hasn’t always been honest. Sweetbreads don’t come from the bakery. Head cheese doesn’t start out as milk. Neither does soy milk. And don’t bother to bring up lady fingers. But for the most part when you  see something that isn’t it usually says so, like salt substitute or butter flavor popcorn.

However, this latest aberration in food dishonesty has gone too far. Apparently the latest craze is beeless honey. Not only are the proponents of this deviation from good taste (and from good tasting food) dishonest, they claim that this, this, this stuff is protecting the bees. And what are they making this misrepresentation from? Apples. Bananas. Dates. Flax seed oil. All good stuff (well, three out of four) but nothing that could keep a bee buzzing for very long. If you want to sell fruit paste than make it the best tasting fruit paste you can and give it a catchy name like Kit Kat, A1, V8, New Coke. But please, leave the honey business to the experts. Honestly.

No, honesty.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

PS: Happy Groundhog Day!

You Can’t Fool Mother Nature

Michael Leave a comment

I’m sure wherever you are you are having a more traditional winter than I am where I are – err, am. (Southern hemisphere residents please just bear with me here for this post.) (Thank you.)

We started out the season with a bang and a 5 to 6 inch snowfall. In November. Then even though the temps got colder and colder, cold enough you really didn’t need a refrigerator to keep your holiday leftovers provided you had an animal-proof deck or back porch, the only other thing that fell were some flurries and one wicked ice storm. Then the calendar turned to January and the weather turned spring like.

Now you have to understand that the Farmers’ Almanac did not prepare me for this. There the experts predicted an average winter. Nor were the local weather forecast bumblers any more accurate also claiming this season was going to be typical. And less than 60 miles from here at the local ski resorts there is an abundance of snow and not all of it is man made – although they are about a half mile closer to the clouds.

Normally I would be grateful for a few weeks of warmth in January even if it did mean rain instead of snow, especially now that the car has to sit outside and would require cleaning off every time I wanted to go somewhere like another doctor appointment. But this year I’m feeling somewhat guilty basking in all this overcast while so much of the rest of the country and the world is having a greater than typical winter for their locales.

Not to be completely spared closed roads, downed trees, flooding, and rockslides, the averages caught up with us here this week. Rivers spilled over their banks on the weekend, hillsides loosened their rocks in three seperate slides on three separate days, and stores and highways are as jammed as on those days that snow falls faster than the plows can pick it up.

Fortunately there hadn’t been any injuries, the only damage being property. I guess someone looked at us and wondered why we were out and about in windbreakers and sunglasses. Hopefully next month we can get back to average.

And God bless everybody around the world who has been subjected to winter’s rath. May next month defy your weather experts. In a good way.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

Buffets Make Strange Plate Fellows

Michael Leave a comment

Yesterday I went to brunch at a local family restaurant. Not a fancy Sunday Brunch at a high end establishment. Not a how-much-can-you-pack-on-this-here-plate carnival at a big national chain. A nice, tasty brunch buffet with soups, salads, breakfast regulars, lunch goodies, baked goods, fruit, and desserts at a place you’d not be ashamed to bring your mother to. And while I was there I had one of those “did your mother teach you to do that?” moment. Several, actually.buffet

I suppose I have made some unusual looking plates at a buffet. No matter how structured you might plan your how ever many trips to those tables something in the organization inevitably disappears. Oh but yesterday’s observations took the cake. Or pancake. Or waffle. As in waffles with pierogis? Or fried chicken and sausage gravy with biscuits? Or how about mashed potatoes and scramble eggs all covered with thick, rich brown gravy?

Mind you, I‘m not saying any of those are wrong. Unusual? Yes. Unconventional? Yes.  Unexpected? Certainly to me. But then I did walk away with a plate featuring French toast, sausage patty, eggs, and a selection of olives. I wasn’t going to but I just love those briny, little fruit and it had been so long since I had any. When I heard the containers calling my name I was certain they’d be offended if I asked them to wait until my next trip when their presence on my plate might not raise eyebrows. So I succumbed.

At least I was somewhat original in my combination platter. Not like the guy who ran around from end to end selecting chicken and green beans from the lunch offerings and the waffle and bacon at the breakfast side. Where’s the dare in that? No, my vote for most unusual (at least among those on the same replenishment schedule that I was on) was the lady with a bowl of chili topped with pierogis, bacon, and pine nuts. Now there was a lady who understood the challenge of the buffet!

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Oil’s Well that Ends Well

Michael Leave a comment

There’s a new ad on TV for Country Crock margarine that makes note of that it is made from plants. I never thought about it that way but, yes, margarine is made from plants in that it is made from some vegetable oil and indeed, vegetables are plants.

Now this revelation didn’t have much of an impact on my life. (And to be honest, neither did the ad but I really can’t bad mouth ads much more in these posts as most of you know that advertising is my daughter’s bread and butter and that it’s probably ad money that will determine if my retirement village (and/or nursing home) will have an all-season pool and hot tub. (Probably not the nursing home.) In fact, I basically put it out of my mind as soon as that ad gave way to the next ad when uppermost in my mind was how many ads until the show comes back on.) (But, as so often, I digress.)

I really hadn’t thought at all about margarines and oils coming from plants until I was cleaning the kitchen counters and took a good look at the array of oils hanging out next to the stove. A couple of olives, a corn, a canola, a nondescript vegetable, a few favored with basil, thyme or some other herb, and one in an unlabeled bottle that I didn’t even remember pouring or flavoring. (Tasting it didn’t help much so it became the one eventually discarded making me feel good about having undertaken that whole particular chore.) But all that did make me think about where all these oils come from.

Olive and corn are pretty self-explanatory. But what is a canola? And just what vegetables are in vegetable oil? Since I also as so often have that kind of time, I looked them up. Canola is kind of scary in that it’s a genetic manipulation of rapeseed and those aren’t the kind of words you want in a sentence describing what ingredients you used in supper. Vegetable oil has no standard makeup but most have palm oil. Coconuts come from palm trees so where does palm oil come from? Apparently from a palm tree that doesn’t grow from a coconut which technical grows up to be a coconut tree.

Once I was done with the oils and moved onto the spices it didn’t get any better starting with old fashioned pepper. I have black, pink, and white. It seems that two of the three, black and white, come from the same plant which also gives us green and red (but not the red pepper that ends up as crushed red pepper – that’s a chilI which are the source of the peppers you slice, stuff, or otherwise turn into or in to tasty meals). The pink is some other plant all together. I got pretty confused by then and forgot what plant but I figured I really didn’t need to know.

Seeds opened up a whole new can of confusion. For instance, did you know about the caraway seed? It’s also know as Meridian Fennel and Persian Cumin, two spices that taste nothing alike. And it’s a relative of parsley even though they don’t look alike. But cilantro which grows from coriander seed does look like parsley but they aren’t related. Who know?

The whole thing made me happy I mostly stay out of that corner of the kitchen when I’m not cooking.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

Can You Heat It Now?

Michael Leave a comment

I was working on a household budget for this year over the weekend (so I’m a little late – things happen), when I had to make the decision of whether to renew the car’s satellite radio subscription. That got me thinking about all the iterations of mobile music over the years.

The first car radio I remember was in my father’s 57 Chevy. Of course that was in ’61 long before it would become a classic but that’s a story for another post. That radio was a simple AM job that got music, news, and sports from a handful stations that were within 20 or so miles of the read mounted, stainless steel antenna. It came as a package option that included the radio, an under-dash heater, and cigarette lighter. Talk about luxury!

Sometime in the mid-60s I remember friends’ parents with cars that had AM-FM radios. Now that was something. None of us knew exactly what FM was although a few years later in high school physics they talked about the different types of sound waves and that had something to do with the difference between AM and FM but by then we were too concerned with the music coming from the radio than how it worked. But back in the 60s all we knew about FM radio was that was where the classical music stations lived and that one station that played what they called “album tracks” that our parents wouldn’t let us listen too.

radioAnd that was it for car radio until those high school years. Then the changes came fast and furious. Nobody’s factory model was good enough. The aftermarket offerings included AM, AM-FM, 8-Track, and that newest alternative, the cassette player. Cassettes were cool. They let you listen to “your music” instead of relying on the DJ choices on the radio, they didn’t skip when you couldn’t dodge the potholes fast enough like the 8-track players, and the really good ones include auto-reverse so you could listen to the same album over and over without even having to pull the cassette out and flip it over.

Fast forward (no pun intended but now that I think about it not a bad segue) through college and young adulthood when nothing much new happened other than the ubiquity of CD players in addition to or in place of the cassette to the 1990s and the advent of MP3 players, Bluetooth, and satellite radio. Suddenly deciding on a source of music while riding down the road brought back memories of debating the merits of cassette versus 8 track.

After a few years you didn’t have to make a choice which one to get as much as which one to use since every car seemed to offer every option. Even in my modest family sedan I can choose between AM, FM and satellite radio, an auxiliary jack into which I can plug an MP3 player (or a portable cassette or even 8-track player if I could find one, or the other, or both), or anything that can transmit Bluetooth such as my phone that could play music from memory or stream music from an outside source. With all that decision making to do it’s no wonder only 85% of people decide to buckle up before pulling out.

Now that I’ve put this all down in writing I can see I have plenty of options even if I don’t opt to renew the satellite subscription. That saves me a couple hundred dollars for this year that I can use on 5 or 6 weeks of cable. Hmm, I think it might be decision time again.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Flavor of the Month

Michael Leave a comment

“Orange or grape?”

It was a simple enough question given the context. Where my mind went added a level of complexity three words had rarely seen. Orange or grape? Well, some orange stuff actually tastes like orange. Orange juice (the good stuff.) Orange marmalade. Chili orange stir fry sauce. They taste like orange because they come from oranges. Then there are orange popsicles, orange jello, orange baby aspirin. Hardly orange.

But at least orange has some orange tasting progeny. Grape. Poor grape. I have eaten thousands of grapes over the years. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. And I have had many grape things: juice, jam, gum drops. Some are good. Some are questionable. Some just suck. But none taste like the grapes that I chow down in when I’m looking for a tasty snack. Just what are those things flavored with? I don’t understand.

And while we’re at it, another food thing I don’t understand is why crackers are perforated. Go on. Check out your graham crackers and saltines in your cupboards. They’re not like the Townhouse Crackers are they? No, those got cut all the way through at the cracker factory. If you want two Townhouses you take out two. If you want two grahams you have to snap them apart yourself. And douse your counter/table/lap with graham crumbs.

But the question is “orange or grape?” What was it? A shot of a protein drink. I figured neither was going to taste like the real thing. In fact, they probably taste the same.

There are all kinds of flavors that when you have them the first thing you say to yourself is “yum, grape.” Unfortunately, none of them are grape flavored.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?