🙂 Back on the diet means back to depriving myself of the Beloved Pasta, alas. This noon I wanted to finish off the last of the frozen scallops residing in the freezer, but because a workman was on his way I didn’t want to dirty up the kitchen or stink up the house with Eau de Fishie.
As I gazed into the depths of the freezer, it occurred to me that I could substitute spinach for the salad greens in the late, great, hopelessly dietetic Saint-Jacques à la Funny and come up with something that would at least give the illusion of more substance. Naturally, the preferred presentation would involve a mountain of spaghetti or noodles, but…well, some things are not to be.
And to keep the smell and the spattering butter out of the kitchen? Ah, there’s nothing like a propane grill.
Did you know you can cook in a pan atop a propane grill? You have to get used to the difference in heat intensity, which of course depends on the construction of your burners and their distance from the grills. But it’s a very easy conversion.
In fact, this whole meal was absurdly easy, and pretty darned good.
First: the spinach. Tear off a sheet of tinfoil and lay it flat upon the counter. Open the bag of frozen greens, if it’s not already open, and deposit as much as you please in the center of the tinfoil. Top with butter, cut into several small chunks. Sprinkle your flavoring du jour. Nutmeg is always nice on spinach. So is tarragon. Today I chose some powdered cumin.
Wrap the tinfoil tightly around the spinach, so it won’t leak.
Preheat the grill for a few minutes. Place the package of frozen spinach on the grill directly over a burner set on medium high heat.
Meanwhile, chop some garlic and a couple of tomatoes. Pour some wine. Defrost the scallops by letting them soak in some cold water. Drink some of the wine.
Go outside and flip the package of spinach over.
Come back inside. Remove the scallops from the water, spread them over a couple of paper towels, and dry well.
Place a chunk of butter in a small frying pan. Take the frying pan outdoors and place it on the grill. REMEMBER THAT YOU’LL NEED A HOT PAD TO TOUCH THE HANDLE!
Come back in. Drink some wine. Carry the chopped garlic outdoors and add it to the melting butter. Push the spinach package back off the very hottest part of the grill, so it will stay warm but not scorch while the scallops cook.
When the butter starts to bubble, add the scallops to the frying pan. Stir. Add a pinch or two or three of dried tarragon, to taste.
Allow the scallops to cook through, without overcooking (this does not take long). If desired, add a little wine to the scallops about the time they appear to be done. If not desired, drink some more wine.
Bring the chopped tomatoes out and add them to the just-about-cooked scallops. Stir briefly.
While the tomatoes cook, bring the spinach inside. Unwrap it and place it on a plate. Bring the pan inside and spread the scallops and tomatoes over the spinach. Top with some Parmesan.
Wow! I’ve gained over two pounds in two days! And over the same period, the blood pressure shot up from 124/80 to 135/75.
And what might be the cause of this development? Salt.
Saturday at Whole Foods I picked up an impulse buy: “sea salt and olive oil sourdough crackers.” They’re pretty good — not great, but interesting — and very salty. Also grabbed some buffalo cheese stuff from the low-cost “experiment” basket at the deli counter. Pretty good, but salty.
Also at Whole Foods that day, I bought a package of (very nice!) sushi, which I consumed with copious amounts of tamari and a beer. Salty, salty, and salty.
That afternoon I went to a friend’s party. Snacked on popcorn and chips and dip. Salty.
Sunday was the one day a month when the choir has to show up at the 8 a.m. service. This is a bit of a hassle since I don’t get moving very fast in the mornings anymore, especially when the back hurts a lot, which it certainly does after I tripped over the shop-vac cord and nearly hit the floor. In a hurry to get out of the house, I grabbed a handful of those oversalted crackers and a couple of pieces of cheese.
Bad idea.
Sunday noon I went to lunch with M’hijito at a gourmetified sort of Mexican-food place. Carne asade soft tacos, beans, rice. Restaurant food is by its nature oversalted; add “Mexican” to the mix and you get mega-oversalted. Add one of this outfit’s incredibly delicious Margaritas and you’re off the scale.
Salt always raises my weight. Conversely, though, not eating salted foods (restaurant food, bread, sushi, beer, Mexican food, chips, dips, you name it) always drops the weight off. Fast. A great cheat on your diet is simply to stop adding salt to your food — and stay away from processed and restaurant foods, both of which are famously oversalted. Do this and your weight will magically drop within days.
Stick with that routine and your blood pressure will drop, too. Sometimes quite dramatically.
Didn’t eat much more food yesterday but did swallow a generic Flexiril, such was the incredible back pain. This stuff can make your blood pressure go either way: it can either depress b.p. or elevate it.
Whether it was the salt, the drug, or both, I don’t know: all I know is my b.p. has jumped over 11 points(!!) and the weight is up over two pounds. And I hurt too much to exercise today, so that’s going to put the eefus on using a brisk jog around the block to push the figures down.
So the only thing I’m going to be able to do today is to refrain from eating salty food. That will cut the weight gain by about a pound over the course of a day. And I guess I’d better refrain from the Flexiril, too. Damn it.
Years ago, when dear SDXB was living with me — or maybe shortly after he moved into his own palace — I took it into my pretty little head that I must have a shop vac. “Oh, no no no, little woman,” said he. “You don’t need a shop vac.”
Well, of course forthwith I flew to Home Depot and bought myself a fine shop vac.
And…it was one of the best buys ever for the Happy Homeowner. I can’t even count the amazing messes it’s cleaned up, from leveling Himalayan mounds of leaves to cleaning up after various repairmen to inhaling broken glass out of the garbage disposal. Today it pretty much outdid itself.
Yesh. This morning was going pretty well until I had the temerity to fix breakfast (of all the nerve!). I don’t even remember what I reached for, but whatever, when my hand moved across the countertop it brushed against a wine bottle, which toppled over and exploded all over the kitchen floor!
Holy MACKEREL! I’d only used the wine with a couple of meals, and so the bottle was about 3/4 full. A lake of red wine sprouted rivers and flowed under the kitchen cabinets, under the dishwasher, under the refrigerator…and the glass! You never SAW so much broken glass!
Had to haul the dogs outside before they cut up their feet. They didn’t want to go and so ran around and shot back in the dog door. Had to close that and drag them out again.
Fortunately, I had something on my feet — a pair of Tevas. Now their squishy rubber tread is full of glass shards — I have NO idea how to get that stuff out of them, but there was not a thing I could do about it at the time.
After picking up as much of the glass as I could and mopping up wine with paper towels to some extent, I dragged the shop vac in and tried to get as much of the tiny, sharp pieces of glass and the puddles of wine up off the floor.
M’hijito borrowed the crevice tool several years ago and, alas, disappeared it. Last time I tried to replace it, I bought the wrong size, returned it to HD, and shortly lost interest in that mission.
So I couldn’t do a very good job at trying to suck the wine out from under the cabinets (the previous owner, lovingly known as Satan, installed them but OF COURSE did not caulk along the bottom).
In the process, I tripped over the cord, which was hanging knee-high because it was plugged into one of the countertop outlets, and almost fell on the floor, knocking over the machine and busting the attachment connection apart. Fortunately it went back together. Scrubbed up as much of the wine as I could, on hands and knees, with a strong, hot solution of Simple Green. Hauled out the wet mop and scrubbed the floor again with clean water.
Realized sucking wine into the shop vac was going to ruin the filter at best (shop vac filters: not cheap!) and possibly the machine itself, since this was very, very, VERY cheap wine and had a bouquet best described as “Early Flophouse.” Carried my food and coffee out to the backyard, dodging Cassie as she flew inside. Chased Cassie down, picked her up, and carried her back outside.
All of this before I’d had so much as a sip of coffee. Luvleee.
The kitchen no longer stinks like a winery. Despite being crevice-tool-impaired, the shop vac seems to have sucked up most of the wine.
But the vacuum itself? Phewie!!
It’s dry on the inside — full of broken glass, of course, but dry. So I figure it absorbed the wine into its filter. This has been an exceptionally long day, and it’s threatening to rain, neither of which circumstances incline me to clean out the shop-vac. So it’s stinking up the garage, which already reeks of gag-me-with-a-fork “essential oils” from the “organic” (snark!) insecticide used to kill off a new hive of Africanized bees that took up residence under the deck.
At first I was afraid vacuuming wine into the thing would wreck it. But on inspection, I think it’s OK — just smelly. So I guess when I get a minute — which probably will happen next Monday — I’ll dump the glass into the garbage, hose out the interior, and then buy a new filter and, with any luck, maybe find a new crevice tool that fits.
Much better than having to buy a new one! Wouldn’t be without it.
Dick Tracy’s wrist radiois here! You’d think we’d all be thrilled. The future has arrived.
Back in the day, when men were men and, every morning, they competed with the kids to read the comic strips over breakfast before they went off to their mill jobs, we all thought the intrepid detective’s trademark two-way-wrist radio was the ultimate promise of the future. This was the way “progress” was taking us!
By golly!
And, by golly, so it came to pass.
Now we have, among many other improvements, a handy-dandy two-way wrist radio that will convert your job from 40 hours a week to a 168-hour-a-week arrangement. No increase in pay, of course (don’t be silly!)…and by the way, your health insurance premiums will consume half your salary unless you select the $1,000 deductible.
We’re told, according to Moore’s Law, that computing technology capabilities double about every two years. And that may be so, at least for the era we live in. Over the past hundred or hundred and fifty years, a Big Bang in technologies — not just electronic, but let’s include internal combustion, nuclear power, plastics, agriculture, building, medicine, communication, transportation, and just about anything else we can think of — has transformed the daily lives of people who live in developed countries.
The other day I was thinking about that, and it struck me that most of the real, fundamental, meaningful improvement — things that made our lives more comfortable, less grindingly drudging, safer, and healthier — happened early in the twentieth century, before about 1970. Between 1900 and the last quarter of the century, people’s lives actually did improve, get longer, get healthier, get easier, and overall get happier.
But since then? I wonder. Does computer technology really make our lives better? Or just more…cluttered?
Consider, as a case in point, my father. He was born in 1909. As a young man, he drove a milk wagon behind a horse. Earned $10 a month. That, he said, was enough for a young fellow to live on comfortably.
At the age of 60, he sat in his living room and, watching his television, saw men walk on the moon.
That was a huge technological leap, of course. But it didn’t make any difference to his life, any more than it makes any real difference to our lives.
But in the interim between 1909 and 1969, technological and social changes occurred that did change the way he lived his life, much for the better. I would argue, though, that most of those changes happened by about 1950, and that most of what came afterward has been on a par with men walking on the moon, in terms of the extent to which they have changed our lives for the better.
By 1950, my father drove a car to get around. He was sailing tankers and earning a good wage at it — without so much as a high-school diploma. He earned enough to support his family and to send his kid to college without have to take out a loan. His daughter’s free grade-school and high-school education was excellent and turned her out of the 11th grade fully ready for college-level work.
He and my mother lived in modest but safe and sturdy housing. They had a machine to wash their clothes…a gas or electric stove inside the house to cook their food…an electric refrigerator with a freezer to store fresh foods…supermarkets in which to buy those foods…electric lights to navigate the night-time darkness…a vacuum cleaner…a television…a radio…a record player…a telephone…electric hand tools…antibiotics to fight off potentially fatal or crippling infections…central heating…air conditioning (of a sort)…clean, safe running water flowing from taps in the kitchen in bathroom…indoor bathrooms…an airplane to bear them across the Atlantic to a job overseas…
In 1909, none of those things existed. In 1929, not very many of them did. Between the time my father was a young man and the time he was fully settled in a new job after the war, the physical improvement in day to day life was SO vast as to make it seem that his generation had been transplanted to another world.
To what extent has the explosion in electronic technology actually made our lives betterin the sense that we are more comfortable, that our work is physically easier, that we are really healthier and better off than we were in, say, the 1950s?
Not much, that’s what I think.
It’s given us a lot of eye-goggling stuff, but most of that stuff makes no real difference in our comfort and happiness. It doesn’t add very much of real significance to our lives.
Consider: Do you really need a smartphone on your wrist to communicate with your family, your friends, and your boss? Does it really help your life to be interrupted everywhere you go by whoever thinks they need your attention right this second — while you’re driving, while you’re eating dinner, while you’re at the movies, while you’re walking the dog, while you’re shopping for a new shirt, while you’re sitting in church?
Does your car really need a cockpit full of confusing electronic equipment to get you from here to work or from work to the grocery store? Do you really need a talking GPS to tell you how to get around town? Can’t you read a map? Do you really need a phone conversation right this instant while you’re dodging traffic on a busy highway? Can you seriously not find a restaurant without Siri telling you where it is?
Does any of that gadgetry relieve you of hard labor? Make your health better? Light your way at night? Free your time to spend with your family? Give you time to go fishing?
No.
In fact, you could argue that, in a backhanded way, the exponential growth of computerized technology is dragging us backward, in terms of quality of life.
In 1950, my father could be pretty sure that what he said over the telephone, what he did inside his home, where he went when he walked down the street or drove his car from point A to point B, what he wrote in letters to friends and family was observed and noted only by those around him. Today we know that everything we do and say is being tracked. Big Brother is watching us, and there’s no such thing as privacy.
In 1950, my father made a good wage at a blue-collar job that allowed him to work up into the equivalent of management — he became a sea captain. That happened because he belonged to a mariner’s union. Today he couldn’t hope to support a family on what he could have earned without a high-school diploma…or even with one. Many young people can’t earn a living wage with college diploma, and most couples have to warehouse the kids in day care and send their mother to work, just to keep a roof over a family’s heads.
In 1950, the physical labor required to maintain a home for several people was a fraction of what it would have been in 1909: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, lawn mowers, electric lights, indoor plumbing, indoor stoves and ovens were just a few of the technological gadgets that truly did make life easier, cleaner, safer, and more comfortable. Scarlet fever, a disease that nearly killed my grandmother, was a thing of the past, as were smallpox, typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, cholera, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria…things we all got shots for.
Commercial airplanes made it possible for him to fly himself and his family back and forth across the Atlantic and Europe to his jobsite in the Middle East. Automobiles and interstate highways allowed him to drive us, once every two years when the company sent us home for a long leave, from New York City to his brother’s home in Texas and then to San Francisco, where my mother’s family lived, and then like a shot back across the country to La Guardia International Airport.
Radio, television, newspapers, and magazines kept us fully informed of current events and of the culture around us. Can you say the same for Google News, which adjusts itself according to your browsing history so as to show you mostly what it “thinks” you want to see and to shield you from anything that might impinge upon your comfortable bubble of semiconsciousness?
Google News is convenient, you can say that for it. But conveniences don’t make our lives objectively better; they don’t improve our knowledge or understanding or lead to world peace or feed the hungry or get us decent jobs that pay an honest wage for an honest day’s work. Something that allows you — or forces you — to work more hours for less pay does not make your life better.
To the contrary, I suggest the ubiquitous noise, the attention-grabbing, privacy-busting clutter of The Device makes our lives worse. You can’t walk through a mall, down a sidewalk, or through a mountain park without listening to someone yakking on the phone at the top of his voice and without knowing you are probably being watched and recorded. You can’t drive a modern car without knowing your movements can be tracked. Jobs that used to be done by a secretary or an assistant are now done by you. If you would have been a secretary or an assistant in 1950, today you’re waiting tables or stocking shelves — working harder for less relative pay and no benefits. Unless you’re among the top 10 percent of earners, you work more, you work harder, and you get paid less — because The Device makes all those wonders possible.
We have less time to ourselves; we work harder and longer for less disposable income; devoting one parent’s time to raising the children has become a prerogative of the wealthy, as has access to really good education. We have less privacy and more noise…
None of these improve the base quality of our lives, what my father would have called our “standard of living.” They don’t make day-to-day life significantly easier. They don’t make us more comfortable. They don’t help us to earn a better living. They don’t make us healthier or put better food on our table. Other than sometimes amusing us and filling our lives with noise and clutter, they do surprisingly little for us.
The base quality of our lives — the fundamental things that are important, such as freedom from crushing labor and a decent income and good education and good sanitation and sound homes with indoor plumbing and easy communication and nationwide highways — I don’t think those things have changed much since about 1960. None of the gadgetry we’ve developed since about 1970 has really made our lives objectively better. It’s illuminated our lives with lights and mirrors and filled our minds with noise and clutter, but it hasn’t done much for our fundamental comfort and contentment.
Image: Chester Gould, Dick Tracy. This image is from a comic strip; the copyright for the image is probably owned by either the publisher of the comic or the writer and artist who produced the comic in question. It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of the cover of a comic book to illustrate the scene or storyline depicted and the copyrighted character depicted on the excerpted panel in question, where no free alternative exists or can be created, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.
So after the old Thesis theme got reinstated with a plug-in to make it mobile-friendly, a couple of readers emailed to say they couldn’t post comments. The problem doesn’t seem to be the plug-in…and Thesis is pretty far over my furry little head. It looks like changing the theme back to Twenty-Fourteen may bring back the comments function.
She took my silver spurs, a dollar and a dime,
And left me cravin’ for
More summer wine…
Something weird is going on here. Yesterday I ran up to the Costco to pick up a month’s supply of dog meat and other Beloved Costco Necessaries. This is normally a $300 to $350 venture.
But…in spite of buying two pairs of camis ($20 + 10% sales tax) and a lifetime supply of electric toothbrush heads ($30 + etc.), and a bottle of wine ($9 + etc. + some other gouge), I only spent $202!
If I took the camis back this afternoon, we could claim I spent only $180.
But I’m not gunna. They fit and the new version, lacking the formerly much desired and now redundant shelf bra, is very comfortable. And the colors…mmmm-mmm! Summer wine!
The set of 8 electric toothbrush thingies will last me about a year. So that ain’t goin’ back, either.
Two hundred dollah and out the door! That is ay-mazing.
What’s most ay-mazing, though, is the realization that nothing in the place called out to me to take it home!
Costco is normally Impulse Buy Hell for me. But as I strolled up and down the aisle, I didn’t see a single thing that I absolutely positively just HAD to have because the next time I get there it’ll be gone, ohhh eeek!
Odd.
Each month since I started the “go there only once a month” scheme, the tab has dropped by fifty to a hundred dollars.
First it was four hundred. Then three hundred. Now two hundred?!? And no craving for more summer wine????
Seriously: I wonder if returning regularly to a place like Costco — a huge, bazaar-like place whose aisles are lined with temptations — somehow keeps you coming back for more, and if you stay away from it, maybe the desire for more goes away. And if that’s so…
Wrap the tinfoil tightly around the spinach, so it won’t leak.
While the tomatoes cook, bring the spinach inside. Unwrap it and place it on a plate. Bring the pan inside and spread the scallops and tomatoes over the spinach. Top with some Parmesan.
