I finally guzzled down the last of the lifetime supply of bourbon purchased some time back at Costco. Nice bottle…why throw it out? Decided to fill it with Listerine and use it to decorate the bathroom.
Heckuva lot better than this ugly plastic thing sitting on the bathroom counter advertising its glories, eh?
Ill-advisedly, I bought the mint-flavored version of the mouthwash. Don’t like mint—but that was all that Costco carried—and in any event, the mint does nothing to disguise the nasty taste of Listerine. So as soon as I get through the lifetime supply of the blue stuff, I’ll replace it with the regular variety, which looks…alarmingly like bourbon!
{chortle!}
Reminds me of my misspent youth.
The dockhouse on the pier where my father spent 10 years working
Then as now, when I grew up in Saudi Arabia all types of alcohol were strictly contraband. Americans were not allowed to bring their favorite potables out there, and so supposedly the camp was dry.
Supposedly.
In those days, though, Americans still lived up to their reputation for ingenuity. Down at the machine shop, there was a guy who was a real, live Kentucky bootlegger. He built several stills and taught people how to use them. These contraptions would be quietly passed from household to household, where amateur distillers would percolate their own high-test on the kitchen stove.
My father fermented his mash in a big closet in the service porch at the back of our house, using either raisins or orange-juice condensate. The product was clear and, when tested by setting a spoonful alight, burned with a purely invisible flame.
Well, as you can imagine, this booze wasn’t especially tasty. It would be, I suppose, much like high-proof vodka.
Meanwhile, back in New York, the pharmacy at the Barbizon Plaza, where the Company put up its employees when they returned to the States, learned about this burgeoning custom. Some bright fellow had the idea of marketing flavorings for the bootleg grog.
Fortunately, the Arabs who manned Customs at Dhahran were a bit naive on this subject. So the pharmacists tricked out a “First Aid Kit” that could be carried through Customs without attracting attention. It contained, in pharmacy bottles, the Eau de Bourbono Cough Medicine, the Crème de Menthe Nose Drops, the Amaretto Headache Tonic, and so on.
Who knows? Maybe one of them was billed as a mouthwash!
The Wednesday afternoon class let out a little early, giving time to race by the Safeway to pick up a celebratory bottle of wine and the pool store to pick up some chemicals. Then raced home to discover M’hijito had not come by over the lunch hour, and that left Charley caged and unfed for five hours. Opened the crate door, released a nuclear explosion. Fed the explosion some dog food. Chased around. Ran a second hose from the westside bibcock to the empty pool, turned it on full-blast to supplement the full-blast flow from the bibcock on the north wall. Chased around some more. Locked Cassie in a bedroom to protect her from pup’s turbocharged maleness. And on it went.
Still have choir tonight, tho’ I don’t consider that the least bit Hellish.
Most of what has sent this semester’s Wednesdays blowing in from the subterranean regions has originated in my own quirks.
The insomnia: Until the nights get cold (as in the house is around 60 degrees), I wake up sometime between 2 and 5 a.m. By mid-autumn it’s dark outside at that hour, and anyway when you get waked up by insomnia you feel terrible and the last thing you want to do is walk the dog (which is what you should do) even if it were safe at that hour. And so invariably I park myself in front of the computer and start working. So my work day normally begins around 5:00 a.m. That’s after a good night’s sleep…
The ad-hoc organization: On Wednesdays from Hell, it’s meant two hours of work before I notice the time and jump up and race around to feed Cassie and myself before M’hijito shows up with the Animated Rocket (i.e., Charlie the Golden Retriever Pup). Bolt breakfast. Receive pup. Go back to work, interrupted repeatedly and frequently. About 10 a.m., race to bathe and get dressed, fly out the door, teach until almost 5:00 p.m., fly back to the house.
The inability to bring a stop to work: Fix dinner. Bolt down dinner. Shovel Charley out of the house. Feed Cassie. Race out the door to choir. Practice till 9:00 p.m. Race home. Finish whatever I was working on in the few minutes of peace between end of choir and start of unconsciousness. Hit the sack about 10 or 11 p.m. Read ARCs until I fall asleep, which is usually pretty quick. Next morning, Thursday, I have to be in Scottsdale by 7:00 a.m.
A workday that runs from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning to 10:00 or 11:00 at night, all of it filled with one kind of labor or another, is not a day. It’s flickin’ torture.
Today, lhudly sing huzzah, it ends!
A mountain of stoont papers sits on the server, waiting to be read, but we have a week and a half to get through that stuff. Next Wednesday the once-a-week class meets for a Fake Final (extra-credit quiz for those whose grades are on the borderline, by way of getting them to show up for the required finals week meeting, without which I will not get paid). But only the Wednesday afternoon class meets that day; the two earlier classes’ finals happen on Monday. So that exempts next Wednesday from the Hellish category.
Next semester my schedule exceeds ideal. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30–1:45 and 2:00–3:15. Only two days a week. Time enough to get lunch (or at least a snack) before running to campus. Enough class time to get something accomplished. (I just loathe the damnable, useless 50-minute class meetings! Why bother to meet them at all???) Then out of there before the worst of the afternoon rush hour starts to roar. And classes do not fall on a choir day!
And it means I’ll be able to sing at the noon service on Good Friday. Just simply too good to be true.
As soon as the student papers are shoveled off the desk and grades are filed, all I’ll have left is a week of free labor to rewrite next semester’s courses, and then…F.R.E.E.D.O.M!!!
Just two projects are on the table (just two!) for winter break: kick the marketing plan for The Copyeditor’s Desk into gear, and create a test e-book by way of learning how to make and market e-books.
Funny about Money has almost 1700 posts. From what I can see, there’s enough material there for at least three short books of the size that lends itself to the e-book genre. One of them, actually, will be long enough and substantial enough to qualify as a real book—I may offer that to one of my erstwhile publishers. But at least two of them are going online to be marketed through FaM and Amazon.
The first, which I hope to have ready before Christmas, will be a collection of FaM recipes, supplemented by some of the best from lifetime favorite recipes. That is, the FaM recipe book will contain more cookery than appears on the website.
Quite a few of its recipes will lend themselves to holiday meals. That’s why I’d like to get it together in time for Christmas. That may be asking too much, though.
At any rate, it’s an hour and a half until choir. Charley is quiet. Cassie is lobbying to get out of the back bedroom. Maybe I can sneak a bite to eat and a glass of wine before it’s time to get going again.
We’re told that the U.S. Postal Service is taking another step down the road to extinction: not only will they raise the price of a first-class stamp to 45 cents, they’ll no longer even try to deliver first-class mail in a timely way.
But never fear: all that junk mail they chuff into your mailbox for you to haul straight to the recycling bin will get to you on time!
{sigh} I’d like to say this is a real loss to America. And over time, the slow degradation of the USPS certainly has been a loss. I can remember when I used to wait with bated breath for the postman to show up. Now I just groan every afternoon at the prospect of having to retrieve and throw out another big wad of trash.
Does anybody other than junk mailers still do business with the USPS on purpose? I have only one client who persists in sending hard-copy checks. Not that I don’t appreciate the payment ( 🙂 ), but it’s a a bit of a nuisance, forcing me to waste time either scanning the check to e-deposit it or traipsing across the city to drop it off at the credit union.
Granted, I still get paper statements from the credit union, AMEX, and MasterCard. But none of those is necessary. I check my credit union statements online a lot more often than once a month, and if the credit-card issuers sent me statements by e-mail, I would bestir myself to hassle with their online sites to check charges. Truth to tell, there’s really no need to have that data printed out and mailed to me.
Now, I do love getting The Economist, Sunset, and The New York Review of Books in the mail. There are some circumstances in which little glowing letters on a screen just do not substitute for the real thing. But…as a practical matter, these days I get most of my news online. You’ll note that today’s news flash came from Bloomberg’s website, which I read three hours before the Times showed up with the same story on the front page of its business section.
The big, genuine regret here will be the loss of our postal carriers. Having these cheerful and friendly workers tooling through the neighborhood adds to the quality of our lives, at least in big cities…it’s one of the few pleasant traditions that have survived the gritty dystopianism we’ve seen over the past 50 years. Me, I haven’t been inside a post office in years—the service is so slow and the overworked staff are so unhappy, I’ll pay a little more to ship a package through UPS or FedEx. But when the day comes for the postal service to close down, I sure will miss the mail carriers.
Shortly before Thanksgiving the choir had its annual silent auction. This rather swell event is the big fund-raiser of the year, and people go all out to make it fancy and fun. It includes a very nice catered dinner.
Well, among other amazing things, the decorating committee adorned the dinner tables with a fantastic array of beautiful and colorful fresh fall produce. Mile on mile of dinner tables…
After the event ended, guests were invited to take the veggies home with them. So much free food!
I grabbed an armful of gorgeous Brussels sprouts on their stalks. On the stalk is absolutely the best way to get them: they stay fresh forever and are soooo succulent!
Day after Thanksgiving, M’hijito and I had some of them with a lamb dinner I cooked up—at that time, we tried a recipe I’d spun off a magazine article, and it worked incredibly well. This, to be described later as part of this year’s not-a-turkey holiday meal plan.
The rest of them…a lot of them…sat in the produce drawer until I realized I’d better cook them before they spoiled. In the meantime, I came across a giant bottle of roasted red peppers at Costco, the Home of the Lifetime Supply of Everything. So here’s what became of the sprouts and the peppers.
This combination is incredibly delicious!
Brussels Sprouts that Taste Great
• fresh brussels sprouts, cleaned and quartered
• a handful of pecans (more than one handful, if desired)
• sprinkling of herbes de Provence (or other herbs, as available or desired)
• one or more large canned roasted red peppers
• dollop of olive oil
• a little butter, if desired
• salt and pepper to taste
If the sprouts come on a stalk, pop each one off the stem, wash them and as necessary discard any wilted outer leaves. Cut each sprout in quarters. Cut the pepper(s) into bite-size pieces.
Skim the bottom of a frying pan with some olive oil and heat gently over medium to medium-high heat. If you’re using butter, add this, too, so it will melt into the olive oil. Add the pecans and stir them around for a few minutes to begin browning (don’t overdo this step). Then add the sprouts and herbs, stir well to coat with cooking oil and distribute herbs, and cook over medium-high heat until the veggies are nearing the “done” stage to your taste. IMHO, they’re best served al dente—still a little crisp. Shortly before you’re ready to serve, add the peppers and stir around so they will be warm and will add their flavor to the dish. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
This is so incredibly simple and so incredibly delicious!
Not only that, but once cooked, the sprouts seem to last forever in the fridge. I used them in three or four more meals, occasionally adding more of the yummy roasted peppers. One particularly handy variant is to reheat a bunch of them and serve them over a little pasta, sprinkled with Parmesan.
Oh…and there’s more. It turns out dogs like Brussels sprouts. Not only will certain golden retriever puppies scarf up pieces you carelessly drop on the floor, the stem makes an awesome chew stick for your pup! Charley, who’s now verging on 50 pounds and is sprouting (heh) all his adult teeth, made off with the thing and chewed at it for quite a while, until his attention wandered. He came back to it several times—never was able to pull it apart, and unlike other chew toys, it did not splinter or peel off pieces that might choke him.
Every time it rains in the low desert and snows in the high country, we know it’s gonna freeze come the first clear, cloudless night.
Welp, as we scribble we are enjoying that first clear, cloudless night. It as, as my daddy used to say, colder’n a bygod out there! I just spent a chunk of time covering stationary plants and hauling movable pots into the house.
Exactly what a bygod is, I never could figure out. His rustic turn of phrase (he had many, because by birth and temperament he was pretty rustic) always conjured up that metal idol the raging pagans used to incinerate infant sacrifices to their gods. You know…from Sunday School?
Okay, maybe your Sunday School was somewhat less rustic.
More recently I’ve come to think it’s a variant of bigod or by God, as in “by God, it’s cold out there!”
So as we sit in front of the cozy little space heater, let us count our bloggish blessings:
One of our favorite bloggers posts, on Facebook, that she’s in far colder climes than lovely uptown Phoenix, which will only reach about 32 degrees tonite: Talkeetna, Alaska, where she’s watching a competition of wilderness women. Somehow she’s managed to fill the pages on Surviving and Thriving, though (the woman must do nothing but travel and write!). Presently she’s offering a TSA-friendly travel bag as a giveaway and reporting entertainingly on her Black Friday adventures (oh god, am I glad I’m too broke to do that!).
Belatedly I’ve managed to get around to adding Frau Tech’s site to the blogroll. She gnashes her teeth about many of the same things that make my teeth grind: the state of American education, the inanity of the American workplace, the status of women in any place… Not only that, but my friend KJG’s daughter is a fine young engineer, requiring me not only to acknowledge FT’s site but to forward the link to her.
Over at Budgets are Sexy, J. Money has about had it with Black Friday, and so he offers a much more interesting topic for the day. Heh heh heh heh heh….
Take a look at the “Reader Story” guest post buy one Joe Z, at Get Rich Slowly. Joe addresses the issue of moving your family overseas for work, something that the current generation is calling “geographic arbitrage.” My seagoing father called it “taking a shore job for Standard Oil in Saudi Arabia,” but the effect was about the same as it is for young people today. And IMHO, it’s something every young American with a marketable skill should consider.
What with the current enthusiasm for raising your own chickens (La Maya and La Bethulia have got a clutch of chicks nesting in a back room!), Mrs. Accountability tells the tale of the time she and Mr. A decided to raise their own Thanksgiving turkeys. Pretty amazing!
At My Journey to Millions, Evan writes a letter to his son, celebrating son’s first birthday. Cute photos, too! LOL! The old man has to allow that all those smug friends and relatives who used to cluck “you’ll understand when you have kids” may have been right.
Money Beagle advises on things to consider before buying a condo—thoughts that could apply to any HOA that’s in a position to charge an assessment.
Well, the pork roast is cooked and I hunger. Later!
Only four more sets of papers to grade! Then, thank God, this semester will be over.
I was amazed to see that Mr. Boxankle’s final paper is something of a tour de force. Holy macquerel! He must have gone to the writing center. It’s totally reorganized, plumped up with new cited and documented sources, and decently edited. Whatever his strategy, let’s hope he can transfer it to his other courses. 🙂
The gent who’s already writing at the publishable level was not content to let good enough be. He also has produced a new, edited version, which I haven’t read yet because at two this morning I was busy plodding through his colleagues’ drafts.
Fell asleep around 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. last night and so naturally awoke in the wee hours. Finished the last set of drafts. Fell back in bed around 6:30. Slept until 8:30.
LOL! Maybe that’s the trick to getting a decent night’s sleep: go to bed at dusk!
Today I need to read the 101 students’ papers. Have to get through that by 2:00 p.m. so I can go to La Maya’s art exhibition in Scottsdale along about 3:00 p.m. That will leave only two sets of 2,500-word monstrosities from the 102 students, plus a set of brites from the magazine writers.
The brites should only take an hour or so. A brite by its nature is very short, and the feature-writing students are in that class because they want to be there. Although a few are a bit tone-deaf, by and large they all can write with some competence. And as for the endless 102 papers: final grades aren’t due until the 16th, so we have some time.
Making them turn their final monster papers in a week before the end of the semester, while it leaves me having to occupy them with busywork for three days, was a stroke of genius. It means we don’t have to do the marathon horror show on an impossibly tight deadline.
Well, having heard nothing from the church, I assume the hiring committee figured out that I was not the job candidate of their dreams. No doubt the line formed at the left, with hordes of unemployed accountants muscling each other aside to get in the door. Our pastor remarked that he’d like to get someone in place by the middle of this month, which would be…yes. A week and a half from today. So, by now if they haven’t made their choice, they must at least have lined up interviews for everyone on their short list.
My application for the f/t job at Paradise Valley is still in the hopper. That closes on January 15, so it will be mid-semester (at best) before they’re interviewing. Realistically, there’s no way they’re going to hire anyone past retirement age into one of their plummiest jobs. But nothing ventured…
And I have one other scheme, besides the effort to hustle $60/hour business for the Copyeditor’s Desk: get a Realtor’s license, which will make it possible to get a scutwork assistant’s job in a real estate agency. Like the church admin job, pay would be poor and the job would be mostly clerical and bookkeeping, but at least it would be year-round.
Well, speaking of bookkeeping, in addition to a raft of papers to read, I have bills to pay and Quicken to update. And so, to work…
I finally guzzled down the last of the lifetime supply of bourbon purchased some time back at Costco. Nice bottle…why throw it out? Decided to fill it with Listerine and use it to decorate the bathroom.
Ill-advisedly, I bought the mint-flavored version of the mouthwash. Don’t like mint—but that was all that Costco carried—and in any event, the mint does nothing to disguise the nasty taste of Listerine. So as soon as I get through the lifetime supply of the blue stuff, I’ll replace it with the regular variety, which looks…alarmingly like bourbon!
