It is currently 35F, and the grounds crew are mowing.
That is all. As you were, comrades.
Category: Uncategorized
A Few Things
I’ve been enjoying the 30 Bucks a Week blog. It’s made me more mindful of what I buy, and more careful about using up all my fresh food, instead of wasting half of it. I went hunting and gathering yesterday. I’ve been on a citrus kick, so I bought more grapefruit and splurged on some blood oranges, to go with it. I think the two together will make a tasty and pretty snack.
The other thing I picked up was a new litter box for Pandora. She’s gotten so wobbly that it was becoming hard for her to get in and out of the old one. This one has super low walls, which should help. The up side, if there is one, to her increased unsteadiness is that I no longer have to worry about her climbing up on the kitchen cabinets. She can’t even jump onto the dining room chairs, so the cabinets are out of the question, which means that food left on the counters and stove is once more safe from thieving wee kitties.
Speaking of the kitchen, I did some more rearranging, and I think it’s almost the way I want it. Still searching for a rug for the hideous floor, though. Urban Outfitters has a cotton one the right size, in a dark blue, that looks light-weight enough to stuff in a washing machine. It’s cheap, too, which is a plus.
In book news, I’m reading Inkheart. I got it through ILL a month ago, and it sat on the coffee table until last week. Once I had it in my hands, I wasn’t motivated to read it, and even after I finally picked it up, it took me awhile to get into it. The writing seemed uneven, which I found distracting. My mom pointed out (duh!) that it’s a translation, so the fault likely lies in that direction. Some of the passages are absolutely gorgeous, but others seem clumsy. I’m trying to ignore the clumsy ones, and the story itself has become so engaging that I think I’m over that mental hurdle.
Title of the Day
Porcine meat: carcases and cuts. I swear, no work day is complete without a UN or EU document on the handling of meat.
In other news, the neighbors upstairs and across the hall (the ones who took the place of the Stompy Girls), are moving out. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since they moved in. I watched both their puppies grow up! It’ll be nice not to have to worry about them not cleaning up after their dogs, but other than that, they’ve been awesome neighbors, and I’ll miss them. Hopefully, the new people will be quiet.
Before they left, they brought me two bookcases (yay!), a really nice tea kettle, some stainless steel pots and pans, mixing bowls, some odds and ends of food, and the remains from their liquor cabinet. w00t! I never turn down free booze! They would have given me their almost new gas grill, too, except I don’t cook out and really don’t have anywhere to put it on my patio.
In other other news, there was a hard, heavy frost last night. It took me forever to scrape my car windows. I hope the sprouting plants in my garden are okay.
Instant Review: Universal Wish List
Amazon now has an “Add to Wish List” button for your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. I tried it out this morning, and I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up. No more bookmarking vendors’ pages, because they don’t have a wish list option. Or hoping that the page I bookmarked will still be there when I finally get around to purchasing what I want. Or having to clean out a folder full of year-old links to God only knows what. Added bonus, Amazon gives you a space to add notes for each item, which is handy.
You can make a separate wish list at Amazon for each vendor (assuming you buy from them frequently enough to warrant it), or a single separate list for all your non-Amazon items, or you can do what I did, and just save them to your default Amazon wish list. That way, you can prioritize and inter-sort them with all your other items.
I’m not a big fan of lots of extra browser toolbar add-ons, but this one is extremely helpful to me.
Instant Review: Track Pad
When I first got Cracktop, I wasn’t so happy about using a track pad with applications like Photoshop. I’ve used track pads before, but they never worked very well for me. Trying to use one in Photoshop was just a royal pain in my ass. But, I told myself that I’d use this one for awhile, to give it a thorough test drive. If I sill hated it after a couple of months, I’d get a USB mouse. Well, it’s been almost two months, and I’m finding that I rarely wish I had a mouse. In fact, I find myself wishing my work computer had a track pad.
Part of it is that my laptop’s track pad is much more customizable than other tracking devides I’ve had in the past. I’ve been able to teach it to do what I want, instead of having to train myself. It also helps that I’ve made myself take long enough to get used to it. I was really frustrated with it on several occasions (yelling at your computer is not very effective, apparently), but since I didn’t have another alternative on hand, I was forced to work through it. And now, I’m quite happy with Mr. Track Pad.
Teh enb.
Weird Cookie
The department secretary brought treats to work, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Yum. Only, I took one of the chocolate chip cookies, and it tastes distinctly like ginger bread. With chocolate chips. I’m half-way through the cookie, and I still can’t decide if I love it or hate it.
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’m making boxty tonight. I’ll probably have stir-fried cabbage, scallions, peppers, carrots, and whatever else is in my fridge, with it. The stir-fry isn’t especially Irish (especially not if I put Szechuan sauce on it!), but it will make a nice, bright complement to the potato pancakes.
Shimmy-shake
I just felt the whole building move. Don’t know if it was an earthquake or blasting at a quarry. We get a fair number of tremors here, but there’s nothing currently listed at USGS for the midwest. Whatever it was, it was a little disturbing, though!
Irio
I mentioned that I have a serious love for both broccoli and green beans? And mashed potatoes? Despite the fact that I normally have a food taboo against mixing ingredients, one of my most favorite comfort dishes is mashed potatoes mixed with green beans and/or broccoli (spinach and corn are good additions, too). I especially like it served with a side of stir fried cabbage, onions, and shredded carrots.
Come to find out, as I was trawling Apartment Therapy’s Kitchn blog, there was a link to a recipe for Irio.
Irio is a Kenyan dish made of mashed potatoes and green veggies that’s a lot like Colcannon, which is a lot like my favorite mashed potatoes. I think most cultures that eat potatoes probably have a similar dish, because it’s quick, easy, filling, and emotionally satisfying.
Tech Tip o’ the Day
As I’ve decided to embrace the evil that is MS Outlook 2007, in no small part because I need a good, functional calendar, I decided to look around for calendar add-ons. Specifically, I wanted a moon phase calendar. There are a couple of websites selling them, but I found iCalShare, which has free calendars. Obviously, these are only as good as the folks who created them, but you cannot beat the price.
I snagged a moon phase calendar, a Mercury retrograde calendar, a Roman Catholic feasts-n-saints calendar, and wonder of wonders, an academic calendar for IU Bloomington. The last is perplexingly missing from our work calendars. You’d think that official university events would be part of the standard Outlook install for our campus, but I guess not.
I think you can also file this under “spring cleaning.” I’m having some sort of OCD fit and am apparently needing to create order out of chaos.
Instant Review: Freecycle
Although the brazillions of emails from people who ignored or didn’t see my “taken” posts was starting to drive me a little nuts (Reading is Fundamental, people!), the woman who received my two lots of stuff showed up when she said she would, and everything went smoothly.
So, all in all, as a way to get rid of crap you no longer want, I give it two thumbs up.
red paper boat 