What a beautiful morning! A lovely, soft feminine rain has been falling all night and is still sprinkling down. Every plant that can be moved has been dragged out under the sky, and now Cassie and I are sitting around doing as little as possible.
When we turned out of the sack around 5:30 the patio was flooded — Richard the Landscaper was supposed to have surfaced by now to realign the grade out there, but nary a word has been heard from the old boy since he came by a couple weeks ago. Cassie hates water, and she certainly is not about to wade through a lake to get to the doggy loo.
Fortunately, the paloverde on the west side filters rain so it never floods out there. She managed to reach her favorite peeing grounds by the side door to the garage. But she still got wet, to her profound disgust.
I’ve had a sinus headache or migraine (not sure which) for the past three days. A soggy doggy and a chilly kitchen were not what I had in mind by way of greeting the day. So toweled the dog off, lifted her back onto her doggy blanket, and crawled back into the sack with her. She crapped right back out (do dogs do ANYTHING other than eat, chase balls, and sleep?) until 8:00. Her Majesty’s second awakening, though, was THE awakening, and so we had to stumble off to the kitchen to find food.
Hey, I came up with a potentially promising ad-hoc food combination. The other day Costco had some nice little Mexican mangos, actually ripe of all things. So of course I had to grab a lifetime supply of those. Wanted to eat one of them for breakfast, but in the cold and damp, also wanted something HOT. So the choices were refried polenta topped with fresh cut-up Campari tomato and some scallion and nuts, or a cut-up mango with nuts and maybe a daub of yogurt. Hm.
While studying these possibilities, the light dawned: why not combine the mango and the tomatoes, hold the onion, herbs, & salt, mix in a little sweet tarragon, and then brown some pecans with the frying polenta? And…oh, why not?…top it with some crumbled feta cheese.
Dang! Sometimes i amaze me.
This combination actually turned out to be quite tasty. The feta added a nice tang, and in fact I ended up adding a little crunchy sea salt, which to my surprise complemented the mango nicely. Next time I think I’d add some cumin.
You could wrap up the mango & tomato combination with, say, half an avocado (cut up) in a nice corn tortilla and end up with a lovely snack or healthful quick lunch.
Now that the day has started…it’s been a LONG time since Funny has run a round-up. They’re very time-consuming. Over the past few months it’s been all I can do to keep up with teaching, scribbling a few posts a week, editing, singing, and serving The Queen of the Universe…really, all of those have been in triage mode. And so, let’s look around and see what other folks have been up to.
Windy City Gal is back from her trip to Scotland! She’s a little under the weather, having been battling a respiratory bug for quite awhile, but nevertheless is working and riding and getting back into normal life.
At Thirty-Six Months, Marissa reflects on the need for freelancers to be discriminating about the clients and jobs they’ll take on. To that I can only add and how!
The Asian Pear has a very funny post on getting back into the online dating game. One of my friends actually started a blog where she intended to relate her hilarious adventures in the meat market, some of which were silly beyond belief. 😀 Hope TAP will keep us up to date with these adventures.
At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche has been coping with what she calls “the week of harrowing” and now (beat me some more!!) is considering adopting another pooch. Well, I can’t call that kettle black, what with the scheme to inflict a brand-new furniture-chewing, floor-pooping, ear-grabbing, dog food-poaching puppy on the Queen of the Universe.
At Afford Anything, Paula hosts a guest post by a friend (apparently a real one: she even knows how tall he is), who provides a really interesting discussion about how he engineered real estate investments to produce a nice passive income…while he was still in his 20s. The caveat is that this guy appears to be smarter than the average snail, and that he evidently learned enough about the business to know what he was doing and to make some good decisions.
Miranda Marquit holds forth at Bargaineering on tax breaks that are about to go away at the end of this year. Some of them…I had NO idea! Better check it out.
Here’s a really cute and also very smart piece at Surviving and Thriving. Your mom or mother-in-law probably thinks your kids have too many expensive toys…but rarely do they model for you exactly what you can do to keep the tykes occupied in the absence of those shiny gadgets.
Streets Ahead Living is calculating how she’s going to get through the holidays successfully in her present state of penury, first by finding good buys and making gifts and then by raising some extra cash.
Along the same lines, Daisy Flower at Prairie Eco-Thrifter suggests some low-stress, high-sensible ways to deal with this year’s Christmas frenzy.
The Empress of the Blog Universe, Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, shares some wisdom with nine excellent, highly doable strategies for growing a blog.
Check out this canny post by Luke Landes at Consumerism Commentary: fast ones to watch out for on Black Friday. Very eye-opening!
Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s three proprietors have held forth on the question of stock market overvaluation longer than Funny held forth on the great dishwasher adventure. Start with the first post, which appeared on November 3, and move forward. I have to say, the supra-16,000 status makes me nervous…maybe it’s time to buy gold. Or bitcoins. Or…or Coleman lanterns and wind-up radios?
Speaking of 16,000, the PoP’s wonder if they made the right move in paying down debt instead of buying stock or more real estate. That’s the thing about this money stuff: there’s always a “GULP!” moment.
Mrs. Accountability brings up an interesting topic at Out of Debt Again when she asks whether insisting on controlling the money in a relationship amounts to a kind of abuse.
At My Journey to Millions, Evan wonders if readers can even imagine what it was like to live during the Great Depression. I sure can: my parents told me all about it. That’s why I neurotically believe you should never buy anything on time that you can’t pay for today.
Think the grass is greener on the other side of that fence? Mebbe not: NZ Muse and her new hubby are back in Auckland and searching for a place to live. The place makes San Francisco look like the land of bargains!
After 14 years, Money Beagle was finally forced to buy a new dishwasher. Amazing track record, I’d say!
Five-Cent Nickel has an insightful rumination on the apparently inflated value of the Dow at 16,000. Interesting point of view!
Free Money Finance is doing a series on people who earn six-figure incomes. The current interviewee offers an interesting suggestion: plan to change jobs every five to seven years.
At Frugal Confessions, Amanda and Paul are bracing for the effects of his layoff and putting their ducks in a row as fast as they can.
Frugal Scholar, with characteristic good sense, explains why she’s not buying a turkey this year.
At Grumpy Rumblings, nicoleandmaggie ruminate on the effects, psychological and other, of DH’s new job in the real world. When academics and self-employed folks land work in private industry, it feels like money is falling out of the sky!
Abigail is back at I Pick Up Pennies, which was briefly down, is back online.
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{grump!} I hit “publish” instead of “save” awhile back, so this thing probably went out on the wire, as it were, in half-baked form. Oh well. Now it’s off to paying work!
