Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

You know you slept through the end of the Pleistocene when…

by
Apatosaurus

…you ask a young woman in the glassware department of Gargantuan Booze Warehouse if they have any highball glasses and she doesn’t know what a “highball” is.

…you’re glad to see the latest shades of green, brown, gold, and orange back in style, because now you can haul out the old 1970s knick-knacks you stashed in the back of the closet because you could never bring yourself to throw them way.

…the piece of junk you gave to the Salvation Army last year is going for $500 at Snooty Antiquities.

…you think capris are just as unflattering now as they were back when you wore them and called them “pedal-pushers.”

…a front-loading washer brings to mind all those sudsy overflows and all those back-aches from bending over to unload and reload the darn thing.

…you find yourself instructing young women about how to hang their laundry out on a line.

…young girls tell you that women in the 50s dressed elegantly to do housework, and then say they know that’s so because they saw it on I Love Lucy reruns. 🙄

…you still have an Encyclopaedia Britannica in your bookcase.

…you know how to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica.

…you have a smallpox vaccination scar.

…you can remember when all women were SAHMs—or 99.8 percent of them, anyway.

…you think that holidays once came on specific days of the year, not on Monday. Come to think of it, school’s not supposed to start till after Labor Day, is it?

…you know how to use a typewriter.

…the last time you worked as a secretary you were called a “secretary,” not an “administrative assistant.”

…cheap tumblers remind you of the glasses and mugs gas stations used to give away.

…you miss having a gas station attendant fill your car, check the oil, and wash the windshield.

…you still use a lamp, tableware, wicker hamper, or other valuable purchased with S & H Green Stamps.

😀 Are you a survivor of some prior geologic age? What memories do you own to prove it?

Image: © S&H Green Stamps, date unknown. The fair use rationale for this use, educationally illustrating an article mentioning the depicted subject, is that the reduced size image of a trading stamp has no substantial impact on the commercial value of the original, and cannot replace it in the marketplace or diminish its value there (which is in any event negligible).

w00t! School’s out!!!

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Heaven has arrived.

Just climbed out of the pool—the first dip in the water of the season. Soooo heavenly! It’s still a little on the brisk side, this spring having been unusually temperate. Even today, it’s not hot enough outdoors to turn on the air conditioning. Weather has been mixed: a day or two of 90-ish temperatures will warm the water almost to the tolerable range, and then the temps will drop back into the 60s and 70s.

With the afternoon at a balmy 92 degrees, cleaning the pump pot and fiddling with the plants left me warm enough to think…oh, what the hell. Into the drink it was!

What a splendid, refreshing experience is that first dive into the water! I love it. The injured arm was not pleased at pulling through anything thicker than helium, but the rest of the body really enjoyed it.

Speaking of bodies that are happy to be alive, SDXB called this afternoon sounding like his old self. Barely two weeks out of major cardiovascular surgery, the man is walking 30 to 45 minutes around his neighborhood fairly briskly (for him, that means none of us could keep up with him). He’s already lobbying to be allowed back behind the steering wheel and planning this summer’s trips to see his daughter in Texas, New Girlfriend at her Colorado digs, and Sister in Oregon.

It’s such a joy to hear that he’s OK. We were all very alarmed when NG spread the word of the scary condition he was in. His medicos (according to His Nibs) seem to concur that, since he sustained no damage to his heart, he should recover fully and expect to live at least another 15 or 20 years. One of his doctors said he should be able to do “more” than he has… Heh heh heh… But does the guy know what SDXB has been doing? “More” would be on the order of superpowers.

So I told him I expect to go along on his next hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And well, yes…he’s already planning that, too.

Godlmighty. I’d better start getting into shape.

At last, all of my final grades are filed in the college’s system. Except for one change-of-grade form, which I’ll do next week when I get around to it, the semester is now officially over.

And even though I won’t get the three-month totally work-free vacation I coveted, things will slow down enough to allow some substantial loafing. Maybe I’ll take the Cassowary up to Sedona or Payson for some walks in the forest—that should be kind of fun. Dogs like walks in the forest.

First, though, it’s off to finish a book for one of the clients, and then back to work on the young psychologist’s dissertation.

Enjoy!

View from the Mogollon Rim near Payson

Image: Doug Dolde. Public Domain

The Cat’s-claw That Ate Philadelphia

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Good grief! This winter’s El Niño rains have so over-excited the cat’s claw that it’s decided to take over the swimming pool.

The hanging garden that inhabits the back wall and adds about three feet to its height—quite spectacular at certain times of the year—has sent out a battalion of tendrils, which are marching steadily toward the pool. This one is especially bodacious. It’s grown about an inch a day, and today it made it into the water.

Amazingly, the chlorine doesn’t seem to be harming its growing end. It has a certain weird charm, but it can’t be allowed to keep that up. Besides not being very good for the pool’s chemical balance, cat’s claw is named for its sharp claw-like appendages with which it grips rock and masonry. It can do a fair amount of damage to masonry, and so one would not like to have it residing on the CoolDeck, which is porous, fragile, and prone to staining. As soon as I crawl out from under the avalanche of work that’s landed on my head, I’ll have to get out there with a pair of scissors and cut the plant back.

Meanwhile, it’s mildly entertaining just to let it grow and see what it’ll do.

Uh-oh…

Gimme that ole-time real food…

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The other day when I was over at M’hijito’s house, he served up a couple of artichokes with some Trader Joe’s organic mayonnaise. Out of curiosity, I read the label. And to my amazement: no sugar!

Hallelujah! Next time I was in the vicinity of TJ’s, I ran in and bought a jar for myself. It’s the first time in years I’ve seen real mayonnaise come out of a bottle. And the flavor? Exactly like mayo used to taste, back in the Pleistocene when men were men, dinosaurs were dinosaurs, and food was really food.

Yeah. I know. Best Foods—Hellman’s in the East—claims to dish up “real mayonnaise.” And once they did make real mayo. But…read the label. It’s full of sugar. Has been for decades; even more so since 2006, when they changed the recipe.

What happened was Miracle Whip. This vile concoction, a hangover from the Great Depression, was peddled during the 1950s with a great flurry of publicity and perky new-fangled TV advertising. Yum yum! I remember the girlish excitement around the stuff. All of a sudden, everyone was dolloping it onto their Jell-O salads. Next thing you knew, you couldn’t find a sandwich with a schmear of genuine mayonnaise on it. Everyone wanted the sweet, gunky Miracle Whip. To compete, Best Foods was forced to sweeten its own mayonnaise. That’s my theory, anyway.

Mayo is supposed to be a savory condiment, not sweet goop.

Consequently, I haven’t bought mayo in years. If I need it, I make it. But it’s a hassle, so most of the time I do without. So I was pleased to find some real mayo in a jar.

What is it about Corporate Foodarama that it’s so determined to cram sugar down our throats? Have you noticed how many things that aren’t sweet and aren’t supposed to be sweet are doped with sugar or corn syrup? Things like rye bread, for example. Rye bread doesn’t need sugar to rise, and it doesn’t need sugar to taste like rye bread. There’s absolutely zero point in dosing a loaf of rye bread with high-fructose corn syrup.

The other day, preparatory to starting back on Atkins, I bought a package of tasty-looking bratwurst at Costco. Naively, I failed to read the ingredients until after I got home and busted open the plastic wrap, tossed a couple in a frying pan, and watched caramel form on the bottom of the hot pan as the brats cooked. Grab the package, read. Less than halfway down the list: corn syrup. So all those things had to go into the freezer until after the ten pounds are gone from the belly.

Corn syrup. In the brats. Eeeew! Why??? Brats don’t contain sugar. Or honey. Or corn syrup. What makes them taste sweetish is mace, allspice, and marjoram. Actually, the predominant flavor in Costco’s brats was salt. Lots of salt.

Are we really so divorced from our food that we don’t even know what food is supposed to taste like? Does Big Food really have to dose every bite we eat with sugar to get us to swallow it? Well…probably, given what’s in some of that stuff.

I was entertained to discover this morning that my fellow food cranks and I have made the Big Time: Nicholas Kristof reports that the President’s Cancer Panel, “the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream,” is about to issue a report urging Americans to seek out organic foods and avoid the pollutants that are ubiquitous in everything we eat and drink. Contemplating the 300 chemicals that have been found in the umbilical cord blood of newborn infants, the panel’s members remark that “to a disturbing extent, babies are born pre-polluted.”

No kidding?

The panel recommends that you and I practice caution about what we ingest and rub on our skin. They suggest filtering water and storing it in glass, not plastic, containers; buying organic foods when possible; avoiding meats that are cooked well-done; and checking radon levels in our homes.

Okay, we don’t eat radon.

But we do eat sugar. To my mind it’s just one of a whole passel of undesirable chemicals that pollute our food and our beverages.

What a Day!

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Endless. It’s ten to eleven, and I’m finally coming in for a landing.

• Up at 5:30: take the dog for an hour-long walk.
• Feed dog.
• Feed human, along the way cooking a bunch of sugary bratwursts to store in the freezer.
• Water plants.
• Write blog post.
• Upload completed grade rubrics and comments to BlackBoard (online course software).
• Enter grades for Eng. 101 portfolios in BlackBoard; mark attendance.
• Figure out which Eng. 102 students’ grades will be changed if they score high on the final paper; prioritize these in rushed last-minute grading frenzy.
• Realize this scheme will not work.
• Write a blog post.
• Calculate, record, and store 101 students’ grades, so they can be entered in the District’s online grading system quickly on Monday.
• Start the laundry.
• Read the client’s urgently needed copy.
• Wash the dog after brain goes numb reading technical copy.
• Read more of the client’s urgently needed copy.
• Call the mechanic to make appointment for oil change; leave word on his machine.
• Edit and reformat client’s complicated, highly technical table, the first of many to come.

Stopped around 5:30, truly brain-paralyzed after having sent the edited copy and table back to Author. At that point I decided I’d better wash the car before the sun goes down. This was a nice break—washing the van is easier than one would think, and now I’ll be able to see through the windshield again. It’s been a while since the road and I have caught sight of each other.

It occurred to me why it is that posting grades and all other activities that involve use of the Internet seem to take so damned long: one thing leads to another. No such task is ever straightforward and simple. Working with computers and the Net is a convoluted process.

Today, for example, two English 101 classmates, brothers who are both “A” students, dropped off the roster. Check the District’s system: they’ve been dropped for nonpayment of fees.

Say what? The college drops them for nonpayment of tuition three days before the final exam????

This eventuates a flurry of e-mails to the department, whose avatars know nothing, and then to the kids. Before long, a flurry of incoming e-mails hits: an outsourced contractor has screwed up an accounting update and accidentally expelled something over 400 students. They’re working on it. They promise they’re working on it!!! Please, please, please don’t send your students to Admissions and Records!

Dropping the brothers—plus a young woman from one of the 102 sections—causes BlackBoard to erase the entire semester’s grading record for the three students. It’s been a couple of weeks (mmmm…maybe more…) since I downloaded a BlackBoard backup, so if the morons don’t get this fixed by next Monday, and we do mean completely fixed, I am screwed.

At any rate…this is how entering 20 grades and 20 attendance points morphed into a two-hour adventure.

Moving on:

• Wash car.
• Discover dryer is dangerously hot. Haul blanket and towels to clothesline.
• Squirt dryer with water from spray bottle to jump-start cool-down process.
• Google “overheated electric dryer” to try to figure out what might be wrong with the thing.
• Examine vents; see nothing wrong with them.
• Brush and comb still damp dog.
• Start dinner: set artichokes to cook.
• Feed dog.
• Figure out where on earth the money is going to come from to pay the $1,089.60 owed for Medigap insurance.
• Calculate out a year and a half in advance to be sure removal of $1,089.60 from tax & insurance account will not break the bank.
• Finish fixing dinner.
• Write a blog post while food is cooking.
• Eat dinner.
• Clean up kitchen.
• Finish, proofread, and publish blog post.
• Take dog for walk.
• Write this blog post.

And so, to bed… there to copyedit the other client’s latest crime novel before falling asleep.

Health and Dollars: A challenge

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche notes that Fabulous Financials‘ Single Ma is ramping up her dieting and exercise program in honor of National Fitness Month. In addition to all her other health and wealth strategies (she’s already lost 32 pounds!), she’s signing up for the Susan G. Komen 5K Race for the Cure, her first marathon. Revanche announces that she will “pace” Single Ma, but in dollars rather than kilometers: she’s set herself a challenge to save $5,000 between May 2 and June 5.

Holy mackerel, what ambitious women!

Well, not in honor of much but because I see I now officially look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I’m willing to join the challenge, but in a much lower-key way.

About a week or ten days ago I decided I need to lose about ten to fifteen pounds. And more to the point, I need to get enough exercise to tone up the belly, which is beginning to look pretty paunchy. A little earlier than this, I’d decided to get off all forms of caffeine, since the episodes of heart palpitations and light-headedness had come back in a busy swarm. The taste for high-test coffee does get out of control every now and again. 😉

Since I was kicking caffeine (it worked, BTW: the anxiety attack-like episodes immediately disappeared), I considered going back on the Atkins Diet, which worked effectively five years ago, when I lost 20 pounds or so in under three months. The weight stayed off for about a year, until I started drinking beer and wine again and, about the same time, succumbed to my lifelong love for pasta. As soon as the job pressures drove me back to indulging my favorite sins, I quickly bloated right back up to where I was before. {sigh}

This time I’d like to drop a more reasonable 10 pounds, which would take me down to a weight I consider more normal for a woman my age, who after all will never be her sylph-like self again. On reflection, Atkins is pretty extreme—reviewing the chapters on gearing up reminded me that I really don’t want to be gulping vitamins or, for that matter, weighing the amount of lettuce I eat every day.

So instead I decided to revert to a kind of ur-Atkins that my father used to invoke, way back in the 1950s and 60s, when he wanted to lose a few pounds: cut out all the alcohol, avoid sugar, and never touch any bread, rice, potatoes, or pasta.

This experiment started on the 24th; ten days later I’ve already lost three or four pounds (depending on the time of day). This weekend I wore a black J. Jill skirt purchased in the recent spending spree. In the store it fit just all right, but it tended to ride up on the paunch, climbing toward the rib cage. Saturday evening it actually fit around my waist properly—and stayed there! It looks a lot better.

Three of the new dresses have empire lines or fall unshaped from the shoulder. While they look a lot better than anything else I tried on, it’s pretty easy to guess I bought them to cover the bulk, not because I so love outfits that drop loosely from the bra line. Those will look a great deal better when they’re less generously filled out.

So. My challenge is to lose 10 pounds by the end of May, and also to firm up the flab.

What’s your challenge?