Coffee heat rising

Another Close Doggy Call

by

Damn! These stupid people who let their dogs run loose off the leash!!!!

You’ll recall that a year or two ago Cassie the Corgi was nearly killed by some moron’s loose German shepherd. Fortunately, the mane around her neck is so thick, the dog got such a mouthful of fur he couldn’t pick her up off the ground to break her back, though he tried valiantly.

Tonight we were headed home the back way from a long stroll around the neighborhood. It was a pink dusk after one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen.

As we came around a corner, I saw one of the neighbor’s sweet little twin daughters playing on the street, riding a cute little scooter. “Where’s her mom?” I wondered. Not an adult in sight.

But…she was not altogether unguarded.

Our young neighbors have acquired a tall, slender, questionably bred German shepherd…and that was who was keeping an eye on the little girl.

When this critter saw me and Cassie coming up the sidewalk, it flew into a full-bore charge, hackles raised and fangs set to go.

I didn’t have time to pick Cassie up, but I did manage to get between her and the shepherd. As it reached us I gave it a quick knee to the ribs and a sharp “NO! BAD DOG” and then yelled to the little girl to get her daddy or mommy. The child hesitated and so I hollered at her to run!

And thank God she took off like a shot on her scooter, out of harm’s way. Once the protective GerShep lost its concentration, it lapsed into normal dog-on-dog investigation and they were OK. Though its hackles never did lay down smooth.

And God was on Cassie’s side tonight. This shepherd was far less aggressive than the last monster, and far less dog-aversive. Or, we might figure, far smarter: it seemed to realize a pint-sized pooch wasn’t much threat, and I think it (mistakenly) believed I was sort of in charge.

The mother eventually materialized out of the house and apologized. I refrained personfully from using the Stupid B- phrase to her face.

Cassie and I retreated back around the corner, where I had to sit down on the curb for awhile, until I stopped shaking.

The older and the crankier I get, the harder it is for me to bite my tongue where stupid people are concerned. Maybe it’s because I’ve run into so damn many stupid people the tongue is getting sore.

But honestly. What gets into people?

Okay, I guess if you haven’t lived with a string of German shepherds, you don’t have a clue. But forgodsake, don’t GET a dog that’s bigger than you and is capable of removing your neighbor’s freaking head until you have some idea what you’re getting into!

A shepherd dog is bred to take care of herds of delicious ruminants. Its JOB is to PROTECT. That’s what it does, sort of like breathing. Take it into your family and present it with a couple of small children, and it will naturally think it’s supposed to protect those children. You, living just down the road from the territory of a menacing street gang and generally feeling a bit under siege, will naturally think that’s cool. You will congratulate the dog for herding up your little sheep and acting as though it would die to keep any harm from coming to them. And that will naturally confirm the dog’s instinct.

So. When you let your little kid play out in the front yard without an adult human watching over her, in an urban neighborhood like this (or probably in any other neighborhood), you signal that you are a moron. When you leave your German shepherd to babysit out there, now socialized to believe its job is to keep the wolves away from the little lamb, you not only signal that you are a moron, you open yourself to a lawsuit whose vastness defies your limited imagination.

I have sooo had it with stupid people.

Anna-in-the-garlic

R.I.P., Anna H. Banana

Happy Thanksgiving!

by

Well, it’s a gray day. I hope you’re not out there driving around or trying to fly around in the snow and ice that seem to have descended on half the country.

Hereabouts, Gerardo, clad in a thick down jacket, is out there shoveling up two months’ worth of mess…he must have noticed at the same time I did yesterday that he didn’t come around last month. He called last night to say he’d be here at 7 a.m.

So. If I were having TG here, the yard would look very nice. 😀

M’hijito and I are going to his buddy’s home for an afternoon of socializing and eating. This has become an annual tradition…getting a bit out of hand, maybe — he says they expect 25 adults and God only knows how many children. So that will be a ton of fun, tho’ how they’re going to fit that crowd into their modest starter house out in the suburbs beats me. But young people have resources and energy that we old folks can only remember vaguely and dream of.

LOL! Some of those dreams are the stuff of nightmares.

Back in the Day, we and the couple who were our best friends each had family to cope with over the holiday, and for both of us it wasn’t all that great an experience.

Barbarella, who was given to even greater crankiness than I — and I’m cranky as a cat under normal circumstances — had to make a vast effort to put up with her hopelessly bourgeois sister-in-law; a brother-in-law who, after, having been thrown out of the state AG’s office for some sort of malfeasance, subsided into quiet sleaziness; a mother-in-law whose life was consumed by supporting the man who married her after she gave birth, illegitimately, to her oldest son (our friend, Barbarella’s husband); and parents who as they aged were slowly sliding into alcoholism.

My then-husband and I had to put up with the woman my father married nine months after my mother died, whom I liked at first but came to loathe for her mind-bending meanness; her proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual, extreme right-wing family and their circle of Ohioan ex-pats; his father, who was simply bat-sh!t rabid; his father’s meek, submissive second wife; and his mother, who was a decent person but whose eccentricities and extreme left-wing opinionation drove me nuts.

Thanksgiving would pass, for each couple, in the company of these worthies. My step-sister, whose idea of cooking involved plenty of boxed items, would prepare what I used to call “flat white food”: a typical feast consisted of steamed turkey with the flavor of sawdust, mashed potatoes, cauliflower…the only color on the table came from the Jell-O salads, usually arsenic green or day-glo orange. Barbarella’s relatives served up similar fare.

Then, after the dust settled and the dishes were washed and the flavorless turkey leftovers were stashed in the freezer (or fed to the dog), we would have our own holiday party:

TGTGIO!

Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over!

Barbarella and I could cook, and I mean really cook. And we liked to work together — we were very good at it. So we would prepare some amazing feast, the centerpiece of which would always be anything but turkey. Leg of lamb, maybe — in those days it was possible to get these marvelous bone-in New Zealand legs of lamb. Haven’t seen them in years…they were so good. But sometimes we might have a real prime rib, or a pork crown roast, or…whatEVER was not turkey. The kids would be fed and relegated to the TV room, which in both houses was far enough from the dining room that the humans could linger forever over their wine and conversation. The dogs would take up residence under the table. And a good time — at last! — would be had by all.

My son’s friends, mercifully, like to cook. So we surely will be served up a meal that does not leave us feeling we need to stage our own to make up for a lost holiday. It’s not easy, though, to turn out enough chow for 25 adults and a passel of children in a tiny modern kitchen with a stupid glass cooktop. So these things are largely a pot-luck kind of thing, with the young people preparing the pièces de résistance and the guests bringing the side dishes and desserts.

We’re bringing fresh cranberry sauce and a carrot dish that I’ve found the young people like a lot.

Whipped Carrots with Apple

You need:

• As many carrots as you figure will feed your guests
• About one fresh apple per package of carrots
• Spices to your taste: a little cinnamon and nutmeg, for sure. If you feel daring, try some cardamom and maybe even some cumin. Take it easy with these — a little goes a long way
• A freaking ton of butter. For one package of raw carrots, about half a cube. Increase according to the size of your carrot output.
• A food processor or blender

Scrub the carrots clean, peeling off any scraped or bruised spots and trimming off the root and the stem ends. Steam or boil the carrots until they’re soft all the way through.

While the carrots cook, peel the apple(s) and cut out the seeds. Cut the carrots coarsely into chunks.

When the carrots are done, drain them and cut them into chunks, too. Place the hot carrots and apple into the food processor, add a chunk of butter, and toss in whatever spices you’ve selected. Process or blend until the mixture is smoothly, gloriously puréed.

You can make this ahead and reheat for dinner. For pot-lucking, we intend to cook up a large amount of this stuff, place it in a crock pot, and haul it to the friends’ place, where it can heat during the pre-dinner festivities and be kept hot and out of the hosts’ way until the feast is served.

There’s really no need to put sugar in this dish, because the apples contribute just the right amount of sweetness. If you’re concerned that it won’t be sweet enough and you’re boiling instead of steaming, add a tablespoon or so of sugar to the cooking water.

wild turkey

Image: Male wild turkey, re-introduced to California. Yathin S Krishnappa. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Farmer’s Marketing and Good Eating

by

So it was still raining Saturday morning.

Among the vendors in the great estate-sale group here in the Valley is an antiques dealer who lives right around the corner. Once a year at the height of the gift-buying season, he throws a big yard sale at his house — it’s a much-coveted event. Well, naturally, my neighbor The Accountant from Heaven and I planned to descend on this the minute it opened, at 7:30 a.m. Spousal Accountant jumped into his truck (he had to work all day and planned to drive from the Event to his office) and Heavenly Accountant and I climbed into the Dog Chariot, which we figured would have plenty of room for whatever crazy things we purchased.

Alas, no: when we cruised around the corner, we were dismayed to find NO long lines of cars illegally parked up and down the street, NO party atmosphere, and no sign of the promised merchandising frenzy. It was just too wet for a yard sale, and so the proprietor had put it off for a week. Spousal Accountant stumbled off to work, and Heavenly Accountant and I looked at each other and wondered what to do next.

“Let’s go to the farmer’s market down at the church!” suggested she. It being almost 8:00 a.m., we figured the thing would be open soon, if it wasn’t already.

Wrong!

They were still setting up. Open at 9:00 a.m.

Welp, there’s another farmer’s market. It’s all the way downtown, and so neither of us frequents it often, because it’s a pain to drive down there around the stupid lightrail and an even bigger pain to park. However…Heavenly Accountant had been there the previous week and found this incredibly NEAT basket imported by a Ghanaian lady, and she recommended the whole shindig highly. Furthermore, because rain was still threatening, maybe there would be fewer people there. So downtown we went.

Was it great! The choice of produce was far superior to what’s offered at our local corner. They had all sorts of wonderful things, amazing varieties of radishes and incredible chard and marvelous lettuces and veggies of all descriptions. In Arizona, prices at farmer’s markets are very high, and so I’ve never bought much at the one in our neighborhood, which offers nothing you can’t get at Sprouts and sells everything at Whole Foods prices. But this stuff was worth an extra buck or two.

I got some lovely, delicate little eggplants, which I intend to cook today, and some amazing long, long, LONG string beans in two colors (very tender and delicious, as it developed), and some beautiful beets with lovely fresh greens, and some stuff called “baked falafel,” which is a sort of legume paste (ingredients say “split peas,” not chickpeas or garbanzos) spread out thin and baked into delicious, IRRESISTIBLE crackers.

Over at the Ghanaian lady’s booth, we found the spectacular baskets. This woman, her son, and her Washington, DC-born daughter-in-law have a nonprofit that creates work and profits for African women by contracting for and importing their really very pretty basketware. I tried to recruit D-i-L as a member for the Scottsdale Business Association (they would LOVE her!), but with a full-time job as a Pottery Barn designer, two kids, full-time college coursework, a husband, and a mother-in-law who’s drafted her to help run this business, getting herself to the east side of town at 7:15 in the morning was asking a bit much.

That notwithstanding, we decided we needed a new basket for the weekly SBA drawing, and so, since most of our membership is male and we wish to frighten them, we naturally picked one that’s mostly pink.

P1020700

Yesterday after some running around, I was starved by mid-day and so broke out a piece of steak and raided the fridge, therein to find those nice beets and exotic beans. Had planned to bake the beets, but really didn’t want to wait an hour or so to eat, and so decided to cook the things on the grill, exactly as I roast potatoes over the grill, only maybe with a little more flavoring. Here’s the trick…

You need:

• A pan for cooking veggies and small foods over the grill (holes or mesh on the bottom)
• A few nice, fresh beets, cleaned, with the coarsest part of the skin peeled off (you don’t have to peel the whole beet)
• Some spices or herbs (I used fennel seeds and cumin seeds in a ratio of 3:1)
• Salt and pepper (easy on the salt!)
• A little olive oil
• Dash or two of lemon juice, lime juice, or wine vinegar

Cut the beets into quarters; if they’re very large, you may want to cut them into smaller chunks. They should be an inch or two across.

Go outside and turn on the grill. Place your grilling pan over the heat, close the lid, and allow the whole lash-up to preheat.

Meanwhile, pour some olive oil into the bottom of a plate. Dry the beets nicely on some paper towels (beet juice stains, so don’t use your kitchen towels unless they’re already red). If your spices aren’t already ground, place the seeds (fennel and cumin were very nice) in a mini-food processor or coffee grinder dedicated to pulverizing spices and whap them into near-powder. Stir this into the olive oil, along with some cracked black pepper and a small amount of salt.

Place the beet pieces into the spiced oil. Turn them over so all sides are coated with oil and spices. Carry this out to the grill, along with a tool that will allow you to touch hot surfaces. Using said tool, push the hot ban over so it’s not directly over a burner. Set the beet pieces, one at a time, onto the pan.

Allow these to cook about six minutes to a side. Go out and turn them over at about that interval 0r sooner, so you can see that they’re not burning and to cook and brown each surface.

While they’re cooking, place a little lemon or lime juice, or if you prefer, a good quality salad vinegar, into the olive oil. Mix these together with a fork just before you take the beets off the heat.

While the beets are cooking, you can use the grill to cook a steak (or other meat) and heat other veggies wrapped in tinfoil.

As soon as you take the beets off the grill, set them back into the olive oil, which you’ve now spiked with juice or vinegar. Roll them around in the oil to coat again, and serve them up. DE-licious!

P1020702

 

 

Is It Time to Close Down the Post Office?

by

First_US_Stamps_1847_IssueSome poor mail carrier in Maryland was murdered while on his rounds last night, working after dark as too many mail carriers do these days. What a thing to die for: stuffing junk mail into people’s mailboxes.

Mail carriers are no longer mail carriers, alas. They’re trash carriers.

Maybe it’s time to think  more seriously about closing the U.S. Postal Service. It’s now performing so poorly that workers are regularly sent out after dark to deliver advertising that no one asks for and few people want.

All the coupons and advertising are freely available on the Internet. There’s no need to pay a staff and put their safety at risk to dump the stuff on our doorsteps and make us haul it to the garbage. No need to chop down more trees, burn more energy processing paper and ink, contaminate more water with ink and other chemical run-off. Why do we continue to do this?

We all enjoy seeing a piece of real correspondence land in the mailbox. But how often does that happen anymore? The only real mail I get consists of bills and bank statements. Those things can be delivered electronically for one heck of a lot less than it costs merchants, utilities, and municipalities to send them by USPS. Documents that are important enough to be physically hand delivered in paper form can be sent by UPS or FedEx — yes, it’s expensive, but there are so few of them these days that the cost should be bearable.

As for the magazines and paper catalogues a few of us still subscribe to, couldn’t those be delivered to a central place — say, at the nearest grocery store or corner shopping mall — for people to pick up in person? If you want The New Yorker delivered, you’ll have to go on down to the local store with your ID and evidence that you subscribe to get the thing. It would be hard on publishers, but since they’re on their way out anyway, the net result would only be to speed the day when these publications appear online, on Kindle, or not at all.

Dunno about you, but I get mighty tired of pulling fistfuls of paper out of the mailbox, having to sift through it — usually fruitlessly — looking for something that matters, and then throwing the whole wad into the recycling bin. I’ve actually thought of rolling the recycling bin out to the curb and sticking a sign on it asking the mail carrier to toss the junk directly in there himself. Why should I have to haul that trash around? At least he’s being paid for the chore.

But paid or no paid, why should anyone have to risk his life to deliver junk advertising to people’s doors?

Image: First U.S. Postage Stamps, 1847. Public Domain.

Gunfire in the Night: Bali Hai Is Calling

by

300px-Ruger_P89_1Out of sorts most of the morning. Between you and me, I just don’t like it when the Cassie and I are waked up in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire. Even when I get back to sleep, it leaves me feeling damn crabby come dawn.

It wasn’t even automatic or semiautomatic gunfire. Sounded like what my Ruger would sound like if I decided to discharge all its ammo in one happy little frenzy. Six (maybe eight — by the time I woke up a couple of shells could already have been fired) rounds:

BANG…BANG…BANG…BANG…BANG-BANG.

Fvck you very much.

It came from the war zone to the north, which is inhabited by a) a dangerous meth-dealing gang and b) a hapless contingent of America’s poverty-stricken underclass. So, the gunfire could as easily come from some happy drunk who, in a moment of inebriated joy, decided to ejaculate a loud noise into the air as from some entrepreneur shooting at his competition. Either way, though: trash. It’s trashy. Trashy. Trashy. Trashy.

Well, I’ve been looking at real estate and found a patio home in Scottsdale, near the border of North Phoenix. Still unfortunately south of the crucial demarcation line for the middle class, the freeway dubbed Arizona Route 101. But nevertheless: bordering a fancy country club to the east and a tract of $600,000 shacks to the south. One could practically walk to the Whole Foods.

But do I really want to move to 56th Street and Cactus? To do so would be to say good-bye to friends, church activities, and son. It’s a LONG way from North Central, longer still when you’re old and it’s after dark. Why? Just so I don’t have to listen to gunfire in the night?

If I’m going to move away from everyone and everything I love, I’d just as soon move to a whole ‘nother town. Prescott, for example.

Which brings us to my neighbors’ activities.

The guy has hooked up his fifth wheel to his truck. The thing’s a VAST living room on wheels that stretches as long as the north side of his house. To frost the cake, he’s now got himself a four-wheel ORV, which he’s stacked on top of the damn thing. LOL!

I waved at him as he was pulling out of the driveway and hollered “HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!”

He emitted a maniacally joyful laugh.

His wife said they’re headed out on Thursday, long to be gone for the holiday.

Smart folks, those.

But…are they smart enough?

Think of how amazing it would be to get yourself a nice, fully self-contained RV — which I could acquire for about half the sale price of my house. Give the furniture to the kid. Donate whatever he won’t take plus all the old-lady clothing to the Salivation Army. Throw the jeans, the T-shirts, a jacket, the dog, and the pending new puppy into the machine, fill it up with diesel, and DRIVE AWAY.

Never to be seen again.

How far could you drive away from the sound of gunfire?

Rv_classaImages:
Standard Ruger P89, DanMP5, public domain.
Class A Motorhome, Claygate. Public Domain.

A Much-belated, Rainy-day Roundup

by

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.

***

{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!