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Burglars

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The guy who’s taken the lead in our local homeowner’s association is having a frenzy over a rash of break-ins and burglaries we’ve been enjoying around here. He’s been e-mailing “Safety Alert” bulletins filled with neighbors’ reports on the latest happenings.

Surprisingly, he missed the shooting, though, which did make the local Play-Nooz. Over in the ritzier section, several armed neighbors have formed an impromptu posse. They actually caught an SOB breaking in to one of the million-dollar homes, and so one of them broke out his blunderbuss and blasted the guy’s tires. The cops were not amused. But the homeowners looked pretty smug. “We’re armed,” one of them growled, glaring into the camera. “Don’t come around here!”

He did send us this great story:

. . . watch out for a window washer. We live on E. Orangewood Ave. My husband was out mowing the lawn about 10:30 May 7th when a white, long bed Chevrolet truck between 1998-2000 drove up to the house. Driver was an African-American man over 6′ tall and 220 lbs. in his late 30’s-early 40’s. He said he was supposed to wash the windows of the house. He said “The homeowners want me to wash them.” My husband said he didn’t have any tools in the back of his truck.He must have thought my husband was a yard worker because when my husband told him he was the homeowner and asked for his business card he sped off very quickly.

That address is a ways from here. Pretty funny, though. Poor guy was too dumb to tell the difference between a homeowner and a yard dude. Ohh well.

Closer to home, we have the following entertainment:

Three weeks ago at about 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, we had an incident near 15th Avenue and west Golden Lane. A man and woman in a car were being followed by PD. They parked in our driveway and told the officers that they lived here at our home. (Both my husband and I were at work at the time.) We are so thankful that a vigilant neighbor (who is in law enforcement) saw what was happening, came over and told the police officer that the people did not live at our house. A quick background check revealed the car was not registered, the driver’s license was suspended and who knows what else. The driver was arrested.

Heh heh heh heh heh!

Yesterday morning while I was breakfasting on the patio, the neighbor’s alarm went off. Sounds like she has the same squeally little Costco stick-on alarms pasted to her windows that I’ve installed. Darn things are ear-splitting, and they can be heard across the street. I walked over to look down the alley-Manny caught some perps by spotting their car parked outside another neighbor’s back gate-but couldn’t see anything. By the time I got there, the alarm had given up the ghost. Forty-five minutes later, the cops pulled up and I heard her talking with them; she’d apparently come home and found a window open.

It’s not much help to call the police. They don’t show up in time to do any good. Last time I called 911 when some guy was outside a bedroom window, the dispatcher said (I kid you not!), “Well, if he tries to get in, call us back.”

Uhm…and why would I have dialled 911 if I didn’t think he was trying to get in? The only way you can get the cops here promptly is to tell them you have a shotgun and are prepared to shoot an intruder. Then they show up instantly.

Frankly, I don’t think dwelling on these matters does much good. Broadcasting alarms at every little incident just frightens people. Other than locking up the house and sticking alarms on the windows, there’s not a thing we can do about prowlers. You can’t stay home guarding the palace every minute: sooner or later, you have to go to work or at least out to the grocery store. Nor is it healthy to live behind bars, glaring security lights, and alarm systems. The bad buys belong in jail, not us!

During the vandalism episode, when my lawyers were urging me to take a $100,000 bath and sell the house for my own safety, I installed a fancy burglar alarm system, which is wired to the cops and the alarm company. Never turned the darn thing on, and after the contract lapsed, I quit paying the recurring fees. The main reason, above and beyond the hassle factor and the costs (you get a fine for a false alarm, which is easy to set off), is the feeling that I’m not the one who should be living in prison and I’m not going to make my home into a prison. Eventually I put a few of those stick-on battery-run alarms on the windows and the only easily opened door, so that I’ll know if someone tries to get in while I’m here.

One of the advantages of simple living is that I don’t own a lot of stuff worth stealing, and so I don’t feel very concerned about burglary. The only thing I’d really prefer not to lose is the computer. Otherwise, I own practically nothing of significant value, and the only negotiable instruments in the house are hidden in some very unlikely places (no, not the freezer).

The only possibility that concerns me is home invasion, which is pretty commonplace around here. I keep the security door in front locked, never answer the door to strangers, and have alarms on the windows. And, decrepit as she is, Anna can still emit a fierce-sounding bark. So I don’t worry much that anyone will get in while I’m home. Matter of fact, I’ve made a conscious decision to reject worrying about the bogeyman.

Maybe if we all got rid of the stuff, burglars would have to find another line of work!

Get a job Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Every morning about this time
she get me out of my bed
a-crying get a job.
After breakfast, everyday,
she throws the want ads right my way
And never fails to say,
Get a job Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Get a job Sha na na na, sha na na na na

—The Silhouettes

Cheap Eats: Six meals in one

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Last week I made a pork roast—mighty good—and still am enjoying meals from it. Videlicet:

Pork Roast

  • a pork roast
  • onion, cut up
  • 1 or 2 cloves garlic, slivered
  • 1 to 3 Tbsp fennel seed
  • 1 tsp thyme
  • 1 carrot, cleaned and cut up
  • ½ bottle dry white wine
  • 1 large can tomatoes
  • beef or chicken broth
  • 1 portabella mushroom, washed and sliced, or a handful white button mushrooms, washed and cut in quarters
  • olive oil
  • butter

Peel the garlic cloves and cut them lengthwise to make slivers. With a sharp knife, poke holes in the meat and push the garlic slivers into the holes.

Skim the bottom of a Dutch oven with olive oil and heat the pan over a medium-high flame. Brown the meat on all sides in hot olive oil. As you turn the meat to the last side, add the onion and carrot. Stir around to sauté the vegetables while the meat finishes browning. Add the wine, fennel seed, thyme, and canned tomatoes with juice. Break up the tomatoes a bit. Add enough beef broth to about cover the meat.

Bring to a slow boil and immediately turn down the heat to a simmer. Cover the pan and allow to cook until done, two or three hours.

When the meat is almost cooked, heat a couple of tablespoons of butter in a frying pan and cook the mushrooms over medium-high heat. When nicely done, set aside.

Remove the cooked roast from the cooking liquids and set on a plate. Pour the liquids through a strainer into a bowl. With the back of a spoon, squeeze the liquids out of the vegetables. Discard the spent vegetables and return the broth to the Dutch oven.

Take two tablespoons of room-temperature butter and two tablespoons white flour and mash them together.

Cook the broth over medium-high heat until it boils about a third- to a half-way down. Then, while the broth is still seething, stir the flour-butter mixture (this is called beurre manié) in the liquid, a little at a time. Allow to cook for a few minutes to blend and thicken.

Turn down the temperature and add the mushrooms to the sauce. Allow a few minutes to blend flavors.

Then slice the meat and serve with the sauce. Excellent with potatoes, noodles, or rice.

Leftover Pork

Cook some noodles or polenta. Slice or shred some of the leftover pork roast and heat it in leftover pork sauce. Add some frozen peas or fresh broccoli and heat with the meat and sauce. Serve with a salad on the side for a complete meal.

Pork Sandwiches

Slice some good bread, the leftover pork, and a decent cheese. Generously slather one side of a bread slice with room-temperature butter. Rub the pork slices with mustard or horseradish sauce.

Heat a frying pan over medium to medium-high heat.

Place one slice of bread, butter-side down, in the pan. Place a piece of cheese on it, then place a pork slice on that. Cover with the another slice of bread, butter-side up. Allow to cook until the bottom slice of bread browns and the cheese is starting to melt. Turn and brown on the other side. Serve with a small salad or fruit.

Spaghetti with Pork Sauce

Dice a fresh tomato. Chop one or two cloves of garlic. Chop some parsley.

Cook some spaghetti al dente. Drain the spaghetti in a colander; reserve.

Skim the pan with a small amount of olive oil. Add the chopped garlic and stir around over medium-high heat for a minute or two. Place some of the leftover pork sauce in the pan and allow to heat. Then add tomato; stir to soften and blend, but don’t overcook.

Dish up the spaghetti and serve the pork-tomato sauce over it. Top with chopped parsley.

Pork Tacos

Shred some pork. Cut up some little green onions. Chop some cilantro or parsley. If you can get a decent avocado, peel that and chop it; sprinkle some lemon or lime juice over it to prevent browning in the air. Slice up some lettuce. Heat a can of pinto beans or refried beans. Get a bottle or deli package of good salsa.

If you still have some of the pork sauce, spoon a little over the shredded pork. Cover and heat in the microwave. If you don’t have the sauce, that’s OK-just heat the shredded meat in the micro.

Prepare some corn tortillas by heating a frying pan or a pancake griddle and flipping each tortilla back and forth on the hot surface until warmed through. Stack on a plate and cover.

Serve the meat, the beans, and the tortillas at table, with the chopped onions, lettuce, cilantro (or parsley), avocado, and salsa as condiments.

Diners make their own tacos by placing a little meat on a tortilla and doctoring it as desired with the condiments. Wrap and eat. Beans can be added to the taco or eaten on the side, according to individual preference.

Pork Provençal

Cut up leftover pork into ¼-inch or ½-inch cubes.

Get some packaged bread crumbs or (preferably!) zap a slice or two of bread in the blender to make crumbs.

Chop some parsley and garlic.

Raid the pantry or garden for spices and herbs, such as thyme, marjoram, tarragon, cumin, chili powder-whatever comes to hand. Get some leftover cheap white wine.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan. Stir the pork, spices or herbs, and garlic over high heat until the meat is nicely browned. Add bread crumbs; stir some more to brown those. Stir in the chopped parsley.

Moisten with white wine and place, uncovered, in the oven for 20 minutes or half an hour.

While the meat dish is finishing, prepare some vegetables, rice or potatoes (if desired), and a small salad.
3 Comments left at iWeb site:

Joanna

hey!I found you on the MIFS carnival this morning!great idea, I stretch my meals too.I do it mostly with chicken though.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 07:48 AM

Stephanie

I love stretching meat like this! I use leftover meat in stir fry frequently!

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 – 08:21 AM

Tia

Found you on the MIFS carnival.These are wonderful ideas!I can’t wait to try several of your recipes.Thank you so much!

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 – 05:39 PM

Graduation Day

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Today the Great Desert University will confer degrees on an astonishing EIGHT THOUSAND students, enough men and women to populate a small town. GDU is a learning factory and most of these degrees rolled off the assembly line, one of the few remaining products stamped Made in America.

Even so, many of our finest faculty were not. Made in America, that is. Nor were quite a few of our students.

Many of today’s graduating seniors, master’s degree holders, and Ph.D.’s are first-generation college students, often children of immigrants-especially those who attend the westside campus, which serves a large working-class population. With just a slightly stronger recruitment effort and some credible support from the throne, the West campus could be a Hispanic-serving institution, a status that opens doors for grants, scholarships, internship, and employment opportunities for all its students. But Hispanics make up only one contributor to the cosmopolitan nature of the enormity that is the four combined campuses: walk across the main campus and you will hear languages from all around the globe.

It’s an exciting polyglot campus whose intellectual and cultural diversity build sophistication for every student who attends classes there. That’s quite a remarkable thing, considering that just a decade or two ago, the place was something of a backwater.

For a first-generation college student, graduation marks a truly huge milestone, not only for the individual but for her or his family. These young (and sometimes not-so-young) people, many of whom have worked their way through school, have achieved a tremendous accomplishment, often against tall odds.

When you’re in the trenches, it’s easy to generalize from evidence of plagiarism and near-illiteracy that all U.S. college students are desperately wanting in every way and to conclude that the next generation is racing to Hell on a skateboard. That’s because the worst episodes and the most recalcitrant students take center stage in your consciousness. The ones who don’t give you trouble tend to fade into the background. But in contrast to the plagiarized paper and the incompetent efforts turned in this semester, I also saw one paper whose quality was on the professional level-a proposal that a charitable foundation support a program for blind children-and in fact, its authors intend to present it to the foundation’s board. Two or three other papers were excellent, and the rest were adequate.

No doubt among those 8,000 new graduates, the proportion of the competent and the truly excellent is the same as it is in any upper-division course.

There’s still hope for America.

1 Comment left at iWeb site

Mrs. Micah

Yay, a hopeful post. 🙂 Sometimes the people who come to the library really get me down about the country. But many are reading and plenty are quite fun, so it’s not as bad as all that.

Thursday, May 8, 2008 – 11:36 AM

Business Humor…

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So I’m cruising down the highway and here comes a truck emblazoned with a landscaper’s business name, motto, and phone number. The company motto:

We actually finish the job!

You’re hired, pal!

1 Comment left at iWeb site

BeThisWay

LOL!

Isn’t it sad?

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 – 06:21 PM

Bombs Away: Academic trench warfare revisited

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A query from one of my honored students:

I am wondering why the rough draft for the proposals are being graded on grammar content. I was always under the impression rough drafts do not worry about grammar content and areforgathering your thoughts together for the final draft.

Nowhere in the course materials does the slightest suggestion appear that any of the six writing assignments are “rough drafts.” Could there be a reason that I wrote and posted not one, not two, not three, but four reviews of basic grammar and style matters, and that I gave not one, not two, but three exams on that material? Might there be some reason that I posted rubrics explaining how papers would be graded on basic grammar and style, among several standards? Could there be a reason that I posted an example of copy graded in that way and told students to look at it so they would know what was expected? And might I have had some motive for putting this passage into the syllabus?

For writing assignments, writers start with 100 points; points are subtracted for various crimes and misdemeanors. For example, each Basics Review error, redundancy, or verbosity costs 2 points; logical lapses and organizational flaws, 4 points; citation errors, 6 points; and so forth. See the document titled “Essay Scoring List,” posted in Course Documents on our BlackBoard site, for a full description of deductible errors.

Or this, in the assignments handout?

Writing projects start at 100 points and challenge writers to maintain the highest possible score by creating papers that are well written, logically argued, and free of basic grammar, punctuation, and style errors. Points are deducted for specific kinds of errors, described in the Essay Scoring List, posted in “Course Information.”

Naaaahhhh. I must’ve done that just to hear my brains rattle.
“. . . the rough draft are being graded . . .”
“grammar content”
“. . . drafts do not worry about . . .”

What? Me, worry?

Stand by, all you entrepreneurs! This young fellow will soon graduate and show up at your door asking for a job. Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?

Comments from iWeb site:

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Add a Comment

1 Comment

Mrs. Micah

Dear student: Why are you turning in rough drafts?

Micah sometimes runs into that when he assigns a paper and then an expanded version of the same paper. He does it so they will have a better chance of learning from their mistakes…but yeah.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 – 09:15 AM

Monday Household Hint: Make roses last

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RosePerfumedDelightMany schemes to extend the life of cut flowers are out there. One of the most popular is to add Sprite or a similar clear soft drink to the water.

A technique that’s free: put ice in the water.

Using a sharp nipper or knife, trim rose stems on an angle. Place the trimmed flowers in a jar or vase with cold water and ice.

Each day, nip a little off the stem ends—always at an angle—and refresh the vase with more cold water.