Tag Fun

All Washed Up

Michael 1 Comment

I have an absolutely, completely, positively, almost surgically clean apartment. Vacuuming, dusting, mopping, disinfecting, and laundering (yuck) are all done at the same time. Actually these were done all at the same time yesterday. Today I went to the hospital to have that pesky fistula declared kaput and a new one fashioned in my “other” arm. But wait! This is NOT a depressing “oh I’m so sick” post. If you want to read about my latest medical escapades, go read the kidney transplant journey posts. This post is about lint.

Right. Lint. I’m sorry, I’m starting in the middle again. Let me back up a few steps. You see, because I have an embarrassment of available time I spread housework out over the whole week. Typically each day has its own domestic torture. Oh I will wash, dry, iron, and put away the laundry all in one day, but usually it’s one day, one job. But because of this morning’s procedure I can’t lift or carry anything heavier than say, oh, a toilet brush. But I can’t really reach or swing with either arm so even if I wanted to pick up that toilet brush, the most I could do with it is gesture with it. So this place is so spotless today because for the next week the most strenuous activity I can pull off (like that word choice?) is manipulating the lever that raises the footrest on the recliner. So if I didn’t want to live in progressively slovenly environs, I did the next week’s work all in one day.

I know for many, because of work and family obligations every week’s household chores get done in one day but I’m old and feeble not to mention lazy by nature and as I said, with a lot of time in my hands. Being faced with a week’s worth of cleaning in just a few hours significantly challenged my efficiency. A big loser to my running around with my head threatening to be cut off was the dryer lint trap. Thus, today’s post about lint.

Right. Lint. (Sorry for repeating myself but the post really cried out for a couple extra and those fit the bill nicely.) (Speaking of words, I was thinking of you Angela when I worked “fistula” into a post about lint. Not bad, huh?)

You see, I have this love/hate relationship with fall/winter laundry. I hate how cold weather increases the volume of dirty clothes but I hate doing laundry in general. Hmm. I guess you could say I have a hate/hate relationship with fall/winter laundry. (Go back and check out “Visions of Fall” for more on that.) Regardless if I hate it or hate it, I had a lot of laundry to do. In a typical week laundry actually gets two days so yesterday I not only doubled my laundry activities, I did that on the day I was doing everything else.

So in order to get all the laundry plus everything else done I spent the day multitasking. I’m not a fan of multitasking. To me, multitasking is akin to compromise which to me is just another way of saying “nobody wins.” (If you are wondering, even though I don’t care much for compromise, I am a huge fan of collaboration. Someday I’ll do a post on that. Stay tuned.) (If you don’t understand “stay tuned,” find an old person to explain it along with “broken record” and “let’s go to the tape.”)

Well, to make a long story short (but then if I ever really did that all my posts would be just shy of 10 words), early in the laundry portion of our domestic extravaganza, I missed a tissue in a pocket. Ugh.

Launderers know the significance of that. If you don’t, go ask your mom!

LintTrap

A Clear Failure

Michael Leave a comment

I have to buy a new car. I don’t want to. Well, that’s not really true. I always want to buy a new car. Actually I always want to buy something. I get great comfort from buying things. Fortunately I have a dollar store within walking distance so I can satisfy the buying urge fairly economically but this particular buying urge isn’t just a plain, old fashioned, garden variety shopping binge. This urge, the “I want to buy a new car urge,” is strictly due to windshield streaks. I tried to clean the inside of my windshield yesterday. That was when I decided it would be easier to just buy a new car than to de-streak (un-streak?) the inside of the car windshield.

I don’t understand it. I have the patience, skill, or both to clean almost anything else from the car side windows to the refrigerator door shelves. If it’s dirty I’ll clean it. I know it’s not the most fun activity, it’s not the first thing I think of when I’m deciding what to do for a day, but cleaning is a necessary evil and is a chore I generally manage to accomplish successfully and with a minimum of drama. Except for that miserable, no good, filthy, — um, except for the inside of the car windshield. As a result, it becomes a chore I usually put off for months. Not days. Not weeks. Months.

TheSneezeI don’t understand how it gets so dirty anyway. It’s not like I walk across it. I don’t sneeze my latte foam on it like in that commercial for allergy medicine. Where does windshield grime come from? No, that’s not the question. Dirt just happens. Ask Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen. The real question is what do they put on windshields that prevent the grime from being wiped off.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve used ammonia based window cleaner, vinegar based window cleaner, plain vinegar, diluted vinegar, plain water, soapy water, foamy window cleaner, even pre-soaked cleaning towelettes. I’ve wiped with cotton rags, paper towels, rubber squeegees, microfiber towels, old newspaper, blank newsprint paper, even tissue paper. Nothing works. Everything works on ever other window in the car, just not on the windshield. But why would you want that window clean anyway. It’s much more challenging to drive through bright sun or oncoming lights while looking through streaks and blotches of yuck.

Sigh. I need a new car.

Worth The Squeeze?

Michael 4 Comments

Last week had me scratching my head a bit and not due to dandruff or tiny livestock. Maybe you can help explain this.

Full pulp, some pulp, no pulp. Typically I drink Florida orange juice, not from concentrate, because I like the taste. I really mean Florida orange juice or at least juices labeled as a product of the USA and hopefully that doesn’t include California. (But that’s a different post.)

Many orange juice products also include juice from Mexico and Argentina and although I like am not anti-immigrant, I prefer those immigrants not show up in my breakfast juice glass. Really, I can pick up a difference in taste. It might not be the juice. It could other things added to it because we all know that anything that says it’s 100% of something really means “all of it give or take a little.” Anyway, my go to OJ is with the Florida labeled variety with added calcium because I can use all the help I can get and no pulp because … why. Well, what I grabbed was a carton of juice with added calcium and some pulp. Oops!

OJ.pngWhat’s the deal with pulp? Is it to make you believe you are actually sitting on a patio in Florida under the orange trees with the juicer nearby on the table still wet from a fresh squeezing? And why the different levels of pulp in the juice. Full? Some? Extra? How much is some? How much more is full? Is extra more than full? What about just “with pulp” not further specified? Is full really full if it still pours? Can I get a carton of just pulp and eat my juice in the morning? Or would that involve a trip to the produce section? Help!!!

Only orange juice puts the consumer through this selection process. Apple juice is apple juice and there’s a lot more pulp involved with those little orbs. Cranberry juice bottlers don’t ask if you want it skin or skinless. Pineapple juicers don’t give you the option of with or without core. Grapefruits are pretty much like big, tart oranges and that juice is offered as just grapefruit juice options not available.

Maybe orange juice has something to hide behind those strands of what I guess are supposed to be the stuff left over from the pressing. I’d think if there is a ounce of pulp to every glass of juice then my glass just shrunk to 7 ounces. Not cool.  How about the bottlers of my favorite breakfast juice just stick to putting juice in those bottles before I start to question whether that juice is worth that squeeze.

Thank you reading. I needed to get that off my chest. And my back teeth, too. Yuck!

 

 

Who Said So?

Michael 2 Comments

This Saturday is National Coffee Day. It might have been the brain child of somebody at Maxwell House but since it seems to have been celebrated only since 2005 or so, chances are better it was the work of those Starbucks people.  Or maybe not.

Did you know you can find a food to celebrate every day of the year? Some days two or three! Did you ever wonder where they all come from? Cynically, I used to think they are all promotional activities of a company that produces the particular celebrant. But I recently discovered that’s not always the case. In fact it seems to be not often the case.

CuppaThe key that this might be true is is the description of those many heralded food stuffs’ celebratory dates. Quite often they read “probably first observed in…” or “not much is known about the origins of…”. Really? We can pinpoint the day and time Dunkin’ Donuts becomes Dunkin’ (Start of Business, Jan. 1, 2019; parent company will continue to be known as Dunkin’ Brands (in case you really needed to know)) but not when Coffee Day became a day when all those chains that push coffee will push free coffee (probably with an additional purchase) that day. But if it was one of those, would they (it?) not have registered or trademarked or whatevered “Coffee Day” so all caffeine addicts would have to beat paths to their doors and thus take full and sole (or sole and full, even) advantage of those additional purchases?

Maybe they didn’t. Um, they being them, those companies, or associations or user groups or other sort of official folk. Maybe it was John-Bryan Hopkins, founder of the Foodimentary website. In a 2004 interview with Money, he said he created hundreds of such “holidays.” When Foodimentary.com went live in 2006, “there were already around 175 food-related holidays. ‘I filled in the rest,’ he said, to ensure there was at least one food holiday for every day of the year.”

So do we thank Mr. Hopkins for Coffee Day, or International Tea Day (December 15) for non-coffee-drinkers (coffee non-drinkers?)? I don’t know, but thanks to him, if it wasn’t before it is now possible to wake up any day of the year and say to yourself “Self, what makes today unlike any other day, food wise that is?” and have an answer.

By the way, if you can’t wait for Saturday to guzzle a mug full of your favorite stimulant, Friday is Drink a Beer Day.🍺

Cold Comfort (Food)

Michael 4 Comments

We are moving toward the end of summer and harvest time seems to be in full swing at the local farmers’ markets. A modest investment in fresh produce turned into a couple days spinning circles in my tiny kitchen meal prepping for the next few weeks.

I always try to have something ready to eat on the days when I get home from dialysis. My scheduled time at the clinic is 11:30 which puts me back home around 5 in the afternoon. That’s the perfect time to start dinner except the last thing I want to do after dialysis is … well, anything.

During the summer I spend most of my cooking time in front of the grill on the patio. There it is easy to throw on extra of whatever I’m cooking and pack up a second meal that I would heat up for a future dialysis day dinner (DDD). In the winter, not unlike so many kitchens, mine plays host to casseroles, stews, and chilies. All yield multiple meals that can be refrigerated or frozen for use on those days when the thought of actually preparing a meal is more exhausting that actually preparing a meal.

But now we’ve entered that in between season. Eventually even I tire of my fabulous smoked chicken thighs with grilled zucchini planks and I’m not ready for Italian sausage and acorn squash casserole. What to do? Take some of that farmers’ market bounty and turn it into frozen dinners or sides. So yesterday I did just that, blanching beans, stuffing peppers, rolling cabbage leaves, and more. Now I have a freezer full of DDDs.

TVDinner

The Original

What makes any of this blog worthy? Because today celebrates the birthday of the classic American frozen dinner, Swanson TV Dinner. Yep, Sept 10, 1953 the frozen turkey dinner hit the markets and Swanson figured they’d sell maybe 5,000 of them. The first year they sold over 10 million dinners and created a new market niche.

In 1962 Swanson stopped labeling them as the “TV Dinner” but the term stuck and anybody who ever adjusted a pair of rabbit ears (go ask your grandfather) still calls any frozen meal a TV dinner.

So I’m happy to say I have celebrated National TV Dinner Day with gusto and with gustatory appropriateness (or appropriate gustatoriness).

And it’s been a pleasure to post about anything actually older than me!

Just Because You Can

Michael 5 Comments

This morning Best Buy announced they will no longer sell CDs in their stores. Vinyl yes, polycarbonate no. Apparently those who had normally opted for the shiny discs are now more likely to download or stream music to their hand held devices.

Last week the local paper announced that in August they will be dropping the print version of the paper from seven days a week to five. Apparently everybody wants their news electronically. This particular paper has not only its news website but two different apps for reading on mobile devices.

When Apple told us they had just the thing for that (with their trademarked and copywrited slogan (copywrit? copywrote?)), did they know they would release an app to reduce mobile dependency 9 years later? In fact, their app for that is only the latest in a string of such aids to reduce our electronic jonesing.

No, I’m not going to embark on a rampage decrying the ever presence of mobile devices in people’s hands. For the most part, I personally would rather hold a paper in my hands for perusal, especially now that they’ve resolved the inky finger problem, and though I never really got the hang of transferring a song from “somewhere out there” to what I still call “the phone,” I think we’ve done well in miniaturizing and availing technology to the masses. Even I am more likely to read the morning paper on my tablet out on the patio and I actually have a collection of favorites in my music folder in “the phone” (thanks to the daughter’s doing). Still, there are some things that shouldn’t completely replace the older hard copy iterations.

TriptikFor example, if you have a cell phone any less than say six years old you likely have a GPS mapping program at your fingertips. When I was traveling for work I appreciated my locating and traffic apps. I’d step out of an airport that looked quite like the airport I departed from, got into a rental car that look quite like the one I returned in a city earlier, and navigate to a hospital that looked suspiciously like one I visited the previous day on roads that held no resemblance to anywhere I’d even been. Yet I never got lost. My “phone” always knew where I was and which way to go.

But even knowing exactly where I was I never had a sense of roughly where I was. Years ago I’d use AAA “Triptiks” to navigate to a specific place. They were flip chart looking collections of mini-maps that specified your travel along highlighted roads. But I also always had my guidebooks and atlas so that at stops I could get a feel for what lay beyond the margins of the designated route. How else could you know that the world’s largest ball of twine was just 50 miles around the next bend, a drop in the mileage bucket when you’re already 1800 miles from home? You don’t get that from GPS.

So although I hope atlases never go away and that I’ll always have a CD player in my car so I have something to listen to while I search for the second largest cactus shaped like a tea pot, I can still appreciate the electronic versions. Now if only the proponents of those would please leave my paper and plastic alone we can live together in peace.

 

Nay Nee, I Say

Michael 4 Comments

I once toyed with the idea of changing the blog name to better represent who I am. But I was concerned how some to whose blogs I subscribe would take receiving an email from WordPress saying “Congratulations, A Single White Male is now following you.” And then there’s that whole “weren’t you something else before” thing to deal with.

Myanmar doesn’t have that problem. In fact, it is because of that country that I thought of this at all. One scarcely ever hears reference to Myanmar that it isn’t immediately followed by “formerly known as Burma.” Indeed it is. And indeed even WordPress refers to it as “Myanmar (Burma)” in its statistics reports. It’s been a fairly recent change but not much more recent than Bangladesh, Belize, or Zimbabwe and not as recent as Cambodia and Somalia yet you never hear their “formerly known as” designations.

MyanmarIt all came to my attention as I was reading a book. A minor character working as a data miner (legally and legitimately) had completed a project. As he submitted it he told the recipient to be sure to call him, don’t email him, with any questions because he will be leaving for vacation to Southeast Asia in the morning and won’t be bringing his laptop. He explains that it is very difficult to bring electronics into Myanmar “which you may know as Burma.” First of all, who talks that way? And secondly, for a character appearing on only seven pages of a 460 page novel, he’s being pretty cheeky taking that tone, wouldn’t you say?

It seems that we’ve been double designating Myanmar as that place formerly known as Burma since it barely stopped being known as Burma. I refer you to the 1996 episode of Seinfeld when J. Peterman escapes his world to, in his words (word?) “Burma.” He tells Elaine “You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.” Admittedly, this makes finding Myanmar on a map easier if you haven’t updated your Google Maps since 1989. By that same token though, it would be handy if we started calling Mumbai formerly known as Bombay or St. Petersburg formerly known as Leningrad formerly known as Petrograd formerly known as St. Petersburg. Ok, maybe that one might not be so easy.

I think if you’re going to change your name, just do it and let every else figure out who or what you were before.

If you have an opinion I’d love to hear it in the comments. If I don’t respond right away, don’t fret over that. I might take a few days off and see a play or two and maybe do some shopping in New York City.

Formerly known as New Amsterdam.

 

Summer, Santa, and Selfies

Michael 2 Comments

MeWelcome to Selfie Day 2018. I’m not sure if it’s a National or International Selfie Day. I guess wherever there are cameras, err phones, and selfie worthy backgrounds, err phones, people can celebrate.

Personally I think we would be better off celebrating Half Christmas than Selfie Day. Even though marketing people are very up on doing Christmas in July specials that’s only because nothing else is happening in late July. But if you really wanted a hot celebration (Southern Hemisphere inhabitants understandably forgiven for minimal enthusiasm over the summer Christmas thing in general), now is the time, well, in 4 days is the time for summer Christmas. That’s when it’s really halfway betwixt last Christmas and next. Just because American mattress sellers and used car dealers are wrapping up the Banner Flag Day Specials and putting their Hot Fourth of July Sales on deck is no reason to ignore a natural not made up reason to celebrate.

But since we do relish made up reasons to be as selfish as we can, we instead have Selfie Day 2018. When you can mug for all the world and make it look like an almost natural thing to do.

Happy You! And did I mention Happy Summer?

No Bones About It

Michael 7 Comments

Last week at the deli I finally took the time to actually read the little tags in front of the rows of meats waiting to be sliced to your favorite thickness, or thinness, to your preferred weight. Actually to the weight you want the meat. Probably if you were looking to get to your preferred weight you wouldn’t be at the deli.

Anyway, I was reading the tags and I kept noticing a theme with the ham selections. They were all “off the bone.” I didn’t understand. Isn’t ham supposed to be off the bone? If I wanted ham on the bone I’d go buy the big chunk of pig leg and bake my own ham to ultimately slice as thick, or as thin, as I’d like. I know on those occasions I have done just that, step number one to slicing ham however thick, or thin, you like it is cut the ham off the bone.

HamHam has always had something of an image problem. Years ago there were basically two kinds of ham you could get. Cooked or not cooked. You had to cook both but the not cooked took more steps and more hours than the cooked to cook. Then someone decided that was too confusing so they started calling them city hams and country hams. It only took a few times to the store to figure out which was the cooked ham that didn’t require as much cooking as the not cooked ham. That’s the one I wanted. Maybe because I was from the city. Or maybe it was because I liked the idea of someone starting the cooking for me. I don’t know. But I figured out which was which and which to take home and cook. Or finish cooking.

And then those same theys (I think it was the same theys but it could have been a new group of theys) started fooling around with the pig anatomy and came up with a semi boneless ham. I never knew which part of the bone, or the leg, was halved but the ones I got always still had a bone in them. But that was a good thing because how are you going to make the bean soup when you’re all done slicing the ham off the bone as thick, or as thin, as you want it if you don’t have the bone to start the soup with. I have read several recipes for bean soup and they all start with “put a ham bone in a big pot.” Not “put half a ham bone in a big pot.”

Now the latest thing they (the original theys, the second wave of theys if there was even was a second wave, or a whole new they group) came up with is the spiral sliced ham. Oh sure, you can say that’s not new, those have been around a long time. But in the past to get a spiral sliced ham you had to go to a special store and they were all the way cooked and they cost about as much as filet mignon instead of your basic pig leg. But now you can walk into any grocery store and pick up a spiral sliced ham as long as you want the cooked version and don’t mind relinquishing the how thick, or how thin, the slicing to an anonymous spiraler.

But to get back to the short story, no matter what kind, how cooked, in the city or out in the country, with or without half a bone, or presumed pre-sliced spirally speaking, you have to get the ham off the bone. So what’s the big deal with this “off the bone” label?

And don’t even get me started on the salami!

 

 

 

 

Tactical Sandals and Assault CEOs

Michael 2 Comments

I don’t know what it is about weekends but I get the strangest emails and see the oddest posts between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.

For example, an email from Friday touted this season’s best hiking sandals. I don’t know why I was getting an email encouraging me to buy women’s clothes but after I got over that bit of incredulity I was left wondering if the purveyors were actually serious about encouraging anybody with the intent of setting off on say the Appalachian Trail to do it in sandals. Or were they using term “hiking” in a more poetic sense as in trekking from Sak’s to Nordstrom.

If you’ve watched any cable channel in the last month you’ve seen a spate of advertising for “tactical” sunglasses. “Tactical” must mean something new and different for the 21st century. I learned that it meant something used to gain a desired advantage or outcome particularly in military applications. Recalling my own years in the military (admittedly in that other century that brought me those vocabulary lessons which included my working definition of tactical) I know I never had a briefing on the correct eyewear for a particular campaign, drill, or exercise. Yet it was just last Saturday that I saw a banner ad march across my screen warning me not to be taken in by imposters, these are the tactical sunglasses our heroes are wearing. Oh, and if I act now I would get a free tactical flashlight. Just pay a separate fee.

This one isn’t so care free. If you didn’t see it, the weekend news included an article about a Chicago firefighter who was cited for not securing a firearm and having an assault type rifle within the city limits when his 14 year old daughter posted a picture of herself holding the weapon on Snapchat captioned “Don’t worry, I won’t shoot up Lane,” referring to Chicago’s Lane Tech College Prep High School. It seemed a straightforward enough news story until America got hold of it. Comments to the online article ran from “they have nothing better to do than arrest 14 year olds,” and “all your cities are cesspools,” to “it’s not illegal for a child to hold a gun,” and “in all fairness the firefighter is probably white.” I’m sure none of that was what I had envisioned as protecting either our First and Second Amendments or any other rights when I volunteered for the military back in that different century. But then, I didn’t get the class on the tactical sunglasses either so what do I know.  By the way, none of the commenters questioned why the young lady was either threatening a high school or who misled her about what constitutes online humor.

I guess this was news earlier in the week but I didn’t see it until Saturday. Apparently there is a regulation that requires CEOs to declare their salaries in terms of percentage of the average worker of their company. Without going into all the details, the average CEO makes about 17 times what the average worker does. We know some CEOs make millions of dollars but the average CEO salary is $730,000. We also know that hundreds of thousands of people make minimum wage but the average salary in the US is around $43,000. We further know the average company president (there are a lot more of them than CEOs) is making $147,000 a year. Now nobody asked me but I got curious. How much does the average union president make compared to his or her rank and file. A 2017 survey of union presidents revealed 22 of them made over $400,000 in 2016 with an average salary of slightly more than $300,000. Oddly enough it was difficult to find an accurate average salary of American union laborers. The most recent number I found was from 2014 and that was $950 a week or about $49,400 per year. Like I said, nobody asked but I was interested.

This is a good one. It’s always challenging when I get to talk with my cable and Internet provider. Sunday my service went out. It was working fine until … well, let me start at the beginning. In Saturday’s paper (you do still read your local paper, don’t you?) I read an article about a widespread computer virus that was discovered and neutralized by whomever (whoever?) tracks these sorts of things. This particular thing was affecting not computers but modems and routers. Apparently a simple reset of your modem is enough to protect or free your equipment from this virus. I read this at dialysis and was a few miles away from my modem but I made that mental note to do just that when I got home. Of course I forgot. When I finally remembered on Sunday, I managed to reset my modem just as a major system outage was occurring. When my modem did not go back on line I panicked thinking I activated the virus and would never be able to go on line again and would never be able to buy those hiking sandals that would best show off my calves or those tactical sunglasses with free bonus tactical flashlight. To make a long story short (I know, too late), I called my provider and got a recorded message describing the extent of the outage and that service would be restored in a few hours. If I wanted to follow the progress I could do so at their website. Hmmm.

I don’t know what it is about weekends.